Time Schedule:
Margaret L Laird
CL AR 541
Seattle Campus
In-depth study of selected topics and problems of the art of ancient Greece and Rome. Offered: jointly with ART H 541.
Class description
In February, 2008, a major exhibition of Roman art from the Musée du Louvre, Paris, will open at the Seattle Art Museum. Containing nearly 200 objects, the exhibition is unique not only for the extremely high quality and scholarly importance of its pieces, but for the breadth and variety of materials selected: monumental marble sculptures and reliefs, sarcophagi, paintings and mosaics, terracotta statuettes, jewelry, glass and silver implements, and inscriptions. The curators have arranged this material to reflect a top-down portrait of Roman society during the imperial period, opening with the emperor and his family, and progressing down a social ladder to citizens, soldiers, freedmen, and slaves. This model of imperial Rome is only one way of organizing and interpreting the displayed material, and directly results from specific scholarly and curatorial choices that largely overlook recent (primarily American) scholarship in ancient art history, history, and classics. This seminar aims to develop a series of alternate readings of the material based on interdisciplinary research interests. Participants will research and curate mini-exhibitions on some aspect of ancient Roman culture, based on their research interests and fields of specialization. Some of these may be made available to the public as podcasts via SAM’s website, or presented as guided gallery tours while the exhibition is on view. We will consider the theoretical and historiographic bases of the exhibition as curated, current scholarship across different fields (art history, history, classics, museum studies), and the ways in which material culture can be interpreted, explained, and presented to various 21st-century Seattle audiences. The seminar is restricted to graduate students.
Student learning goals
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