Our systems are now restored following recent technical disruption, and we’re working hard to catch up on publishing. We apologise for the inconvenience caused. Find out more

Recommended product

Popular links

Popular links


Family Fictions in Roman Art

Family Fictions in Roman Art

Family Fictions in Roman Art

Essays on the Representation of Powerful People
June 2009
Available
Hardback
9780521584470
£59.99
GBP
Hardback

    In Family Fictions in Roman Art, Natalie Kampen reveals the profoundly de-naturalized ways in which family could be represented in the interests of political power during the Roman Empire. Her study examines a group of splendid objects made over the course of six hundred years, from carved gems to triumphal arches to ivory plaques, and asks how and why artists and their elite patrons chose to depict family to speak of everything from gender to the nature of rulership, from social rank to relationship itself. In the process, artists found new and often strikingly odd ways to give form to families from conquered lands and provinces as well as from the Italian countryside and the court. The book's contribution is in its combination of close attention to the creativity of Roman art and interest in the visual language of social and political relationships in a great Empire.

    • Richly illustrated
    • Clearly and accessibly written
    • Current scholarship using gender theory and models from family history

    Product details

    June 2009
    Hardback
    9780521584470
    226 pages
    260 × 183 × 18 mm
    0.79kg
    39 b/w illus. 33 colour illus.
    Available

    Table of Contents

    • 1. Livia as widow: complicated kinship
    • 2. Trajan as father: depicting the pater patriae
    • 3. Polydeukion as trophimus: domus and emotion among the rich and famous
    • 4. Severan brothers: doubled value
    • 5. Tetrarchs and fictive kinship
    • 6. Stilicho's troubled kinship: late families.
      Author
    • Natalie Boymel Kampen

      Natalie Boymel Kampen is professor of Women's Studies and Barbara Novak '50 Professor of Art History at Barnard College, Columbia University. Recipient of fellowships from the National Endowments for the Humanities and the Fulbright Commission, she has been a visiting Fellow at St Hilda's College, University of Oxford and at the Cornell Society of Fellows in the Humanities. She is the author, most recently, of What is Man? Changing Images of Manliness in Late Antique Art.