2000/11/01 by Jeremy Tanner · 2 citations
Arts and Humanities · Psychology · Social Sciences · #Aesthetics #Ancient Egypt and Archaeology #Antecedent (behavioral psychology) #Art #Art history #Classical Antiquity Studies #Context (archaeology) #Epistemology #Historical, Religious, and Philosophical Studies #History #Law #Linguistics #Literature #Philosophy #Political science #Politics #Portrait #Power (physics) #Psychology #Realism #Social psychology #Sociology #Solidarity #Symbol (formal)
paper · doi:10.2307/300199
openalex publication_date 2000/11/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/21
Recent work in ancient art history has sought to move beyond formalist interpretations of works of art to a concern to understand ancient images in terms of a broader cultural, political, and historical context. In the study of late Republican portraiture, traditional explanations of the origins of verism in terms of antecedent influences — Hellenistic realism, Egyptian realism, ancestral imagines — have been replaced by a concern to interpret portraits as signs functioning in a determinate historical and political context which serves to explain their particular visual patterning. In this paper I argue that, whilst these new perspectives have considerably enhanced our understanding of the forms and meanings of late Republican portraits, they are still flawed by a failure to establish a clear conception of the social functions of art. I develop an account of portraits which shifts the interpretative emphasis from art as object to art as a medium of socio-cultural action. Such a shift in analytic perspective places art firmly at the centre of our understanding of ancient societies, by snowing that art is not merely a social product or a symbol of power relationships, but also serves to construct relationships of power and solidarity in a way in which other cultural forms cannot, and thereby transforms those relationships with determinate consequences.