The Art Of The Late Roman Empire

Foundations of Pre-Modern Western European Art History

What you'll learn
Students will learn the key developments, vocabulary terms, and works of art which are associated with Late Roman art
Students will be able to recognize major monuments from the Late Roman period.
Students will gain an appreciation of the themes that defined Late Roman artwork from their predecessors..
A comprehensive vocabulary list is found at the end of the course.
Requirements
An interest in history and a love of art are the only prerequisites for this course.
Description
This course covers the shifts in content and appearance which characterized artworks of the Late Roman Empire. This history sees its share of decline and de-volutions from the former Hellenistic standard of naturalism, and it sets the tone for much of the course of later Latin Christian artwork well through the Renaissance. By the time of the Roman Empire, Hellenistic standards in artwork were fully assimilated: we see the artist concerned with showing the human form, with shading to achieve the illusion of three-dimensionality. We see their forms almost without exception standing in the contrapposto pose we have seen diffused through Western art from the time of Classical Greece onwards; these figures which adorned two-dimensional surfaces- not only walls but also mosaic floors or marble paneling carved in low relief- were depicted with a sense for their real weight and how it would have been naturalistically carried in views of the figures not only from the front, but from 360 degrees and in the wide variety of poses the human body could assume. We'll look in detail at the evolution of the visual arts and the evolving (and in later cases, devolving) solutions artists used to convey meaning and depth on flat, two-dimensional surfaces. The resulting recognizable style spread throughout Rome’s vast empire, and when we talk about the art of late antiquity, we set the stage for the conventional forms of artwork which would endure well through the Medieval period in Western, Latin-speaking Europe. Even the art of distant kingdoms of South Arabia and East Africa will eventually reflect these broad currents of art history, religious conversion, and stylized conventions seen in Roman and what would become Byzantine art. From the foundations we have laid in this lecture, we can now go further afield to appreciate just how influential late Roman artwork truly was, in spite of its “de-sophistication” of forms, perspective, and depth of field.

Overview

Section 1: Introduction

Lecture 1 Conquest and Assimilation

Section 2: Art in Service to Empire

Lecture 2 The Cult of State

Lecture 3 The Decline of Naturalism

Lecture 4 From Revealing to Covering: Clothing in Late Roman Art

Lecture 5 Shift to the East with Course Vocabulary Review

High school, university, and graduate students will find both a review of key pieces and developments as well as original research and connections which are exclusive to this course.