Egypt in Italy: Visions of Egypt in Roman Imperial Culture
Molly Swetnam-Burland
Language: English
Pages: 261
ISBN: 1107040485
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
This book examines the appetite for Egyptian and Egyptian-looking artwork in Italy during the century following Rome's annexation of Aegyptus as a province. In the early imperial period, Roman interest in Egyptian culture was widespread, as evidenced by works ranging from the monumental obelisks, brought to the capital over the Mediterranean Sea by the emperors, to locally made emulations of Egyptian artifacts found in private homes and in temples to Egyptian gods. Although the foreign appearance of these artworks was central to their appeal, this book situates them within their social, political, and artistic contexts in Roman Italy. Swetnam-Burland focuses on what these works meant to their owners and their viewers in their new settings, by exploring evidence for the artists who produced them and by examining their relationship to the contemporary literature that informed Roman perceptions of Egyptian history, customs, and myths.
Italian Ways: On and Off the Rails from Milan to Palermo
The Story of a New Name (The Neapolitan Novels, Book 2)
tot lumina lumen habebas | exstinctum est centumque oculos nox occupat una. 124 For the wordplay, see Barchiesi 2005, 227. On Ovid’s use of inscriptions, see Ramsby 2007. 125 For the Ptolemaic connections, see Sampaolo 2006, 1.63. As the painting relates to Isiac cult, see Bianchi 2007; Grenier 1994; Balch 2003; Brenk 2007. 126 Grenier 1994. 127 Bianchi 2007. 128 For the iconography of the personified Nile, see Chapter 4. 129 Brenk 2007. 130 Balch 2003; Balch 2008 64–71, 148–56.
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well known in the second century CE. Court poets evoked his legendary skill and compared their art to his own. 150 Later, Dio Chrysotom conjured him and interrogated him in a fictional trial about why he represented the great god Zeus as he did. 151 A series of tituli from imperial Rome proclaim artworks to be those of famous sculptors, including one labeled opus Fidiae. 152 The workshop to which Phidias and Ammonios belonged thus staked a claim to this distinctive artistic genealogy,
or Alexandrian origin, though no visual evidence confirms this hypothesis. 102 [Figure 3.11] On balance, then, the evidence suggests that a number of different painters’ workshops in Pompeii had versions of these myth panels on offer, and the fact that these images appear in so many iterations allows us to state with certainty that they were recognizable. Figure 3.9. Painting of Io and Argus from the House of the Menander, Pompeii (I 10,4), variant with two figures flanking a large rock
and Micon were professionally painted onto a scene of the same figures, along with labels. Like the panels from the Temple of Isis, this painting is known to be a multiple, also attested in a mirror-image version in the triclinium of IX 2,5. In the House of Marcus Lucretius Fronto, the label text was a deliberate addition, intended to enhance the visual story. 105 Yet while poetry may have influenced paintings (and the ways that viewers read them), written work did not dictate painted
