Jaś Elsner
Jaś Elsner is professor of late antique art at the University of Oxford and Humfry Payne Senior Research Fellow in Classical Art And Archaeology at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. Since 2003, he has also been a visiting professor in art history at the University of Chicago.
Elsner, Jaś
Elsner, Jaś
United States of America
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Description: Roman Eyes: Visuality and Subjectivity in Art and Text
In Roman Eyes, Jaś Elsner seeks to understand the multiple ways that art in ancient Rome formulated the very conditions for its own viewing, and as a result was complicit in the construction of subjectivity in the Roman Empire. The author draws upon a wide variety of visual material, from sculpture and wall paintings to coins and terra-cotta statuettes. He examines the different contexts in which images were used, from the religious to the voyeuristic, from the domestic to the subversive. He reads images alongside and against the rich literary tradition of the Greco-Roman world, including travel writing, prose fiction, satire, poetry, mythology, and pilgrimage accounts. The astonishing picture that emerges reveals the mindsets Romans had when they viewed art—their preoccupations and theories, their cultural biases and loosely held beliefs.
Print publication date February 2024 (in print)
Print ISBN 9780691096773
EISBN 9780691240244
Print Status in print
Description: Agents of Faith: Votive Objects in Time and Place
A vibrant passage from the French writer Gregory of Tours, written in the second half of the sixth century, tells us—from a very Christianocentric point of view—much about the wide range of votive deposition across the social and economic spectrum at a particular and transformative moment in late antiquity.
Author
Ittai Weinryb (Editor)
PublisherBard Graduate Center
Related print edition pages: pp.3-25
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00203.001