The ancient world
Ancient Rome
c. 509 BCE–476 CE
Art in the service of the state: realistic portraits, engineering on a vast scale and images that carried Rome’s message across an empire.
Overview
Roman artists admired and copied Greek models but put them to different uses. Portrait busts recorded individual faces, wrinkles included, and reliefs on arches and columns narrated military campaigns for a public audience.
Roman builders combined the arch, the vault and concrete to enclose enormous interior spaces. Wall paintings preserved at Pompeii and Herculaneum show a taste for illusionistic architecture, landscape and still life.
What defines it
- Realistic portraiture that records age and character
- Arches, vaults, domes and concrete construction
- Narrative relief sculpture and illusionistic wall painting
Works to know
- Augustus of Prima Porta
- Colosseum
- Trajan’s Column
- Pantheon