Amberley Publishing (2017) p/b 240pp £9.99 (ISBN 9781445660288)
Proclaiming itself ‘the first general book to present a coherent, broad analysis’ of the subject, this is both an excellent introduction to, and a relatively in-depth discussion of, images of women in Roman art, covering not only the artefacts themselves but their purpose and meaning. It examines a wealth of evidence from every part of the Roman world (with perhaps a slight bias towards Britannia, F.’s particular area of expertise) from the late Republic to late Empire (though not Christian art), including tombstones, gemstones, silver cistae, mosaics and pin heads, statues of personified provinces and wall-paintings showing exuberant sex.
Arranging his material thematically, F. examines four main types or classes of women: imperial (from Livia to Galla Placidia); upper class and aspirational (for example, Plancia Magna and Aurelia Paulina, both from Perge); working (such as a cobbler from Ostia and a mime artiste from Aquileia); and divine or mythical. Some material, for example how Octavius’ sister and seemingly ageless wife were shown to embody august Roman values to contrast with Cleopatra’s louche exoticism, may be familiar, but much (at least to me) is not—from the ‘Large Herculaneum Woman’ type of statue, 200 examples of which appear in identical form from Gaul to Asia Minor, though mainly in the east, with only their heads individualized, to the custom of attaching realistic portrait heads of elderly women onto the nubile body of Venus.
But what makes this book so intriguing is the way in which F. goes behind the artefacts to unpick their context, especially with regard to their intended viewers. For example, the painting in an inner room of Pompeii’s Villa of the Mysteries—perhaps (referencing Brenda Longfellow) ‘a gendered space, that is more-or-less restricted to female occupants of the house and women visitors’—depicting a female initiate being flagellated might have very different resonances to the public representation of male violence against women on the column of Marcus Aurelius or the Sebasteion at Aphrodisias. The victims on these monuments are, of course, somehow barbarian, and F. discusses, too, the use of ‘the other’, including mythological ‘others’ such as Amazons and gorgons, to define what it was to be Roman, while acknowledging that the meaning of these and other images have ‘most probably shifted and altered over time and in different contexts they can sometimes elude the forensic approach of the archaeologist or art historian’.
It is partly such honesty that makes the book so refreshing, though classicists will note that they do not feature in this quotation, and, indeed, some might feel that greater reference to literary evidence would have enhanced F.’s arguments. There are other minor gripes, too, such as occasional disparities between dates in text and picture captions, the odd inaccuracy (surely Tiberius Gracchus was not killed by ‘a hired mob’), while many of the objects discussed are not illustrated, and those that are cannot be seen to their advantage in the cramped layout of the paperback.
But no-one interested in the Roman world should be deterred from buying this well written and eminently readable book, which casts useful light not just on women in Roman art but on the people who commissioned it and viewed it, and on the changing world in which they lived.
David Stuttard