Britannia's Bodies: Corporeal Representation in the Art of Roman Britain
This thesis gives some much-needed attention to the art of Rome’s most North-Westerly province, the aim being to bring it into a conversation of equals with that of the rest of the Roman world. There have long been questions about how to deal with the art of Roman Britain and that of other Roman provinces. The focus of this study is the representation of the body, and this means meeting the challenge of this art’s relationship to the Classical head-on. The premium set on classical naturalism, and style more generally, takes a back seat here; instead this study is driven by contextually-guided questions about how represented bodies affect and function. There are three data-sets covered, each with their own chapter. The first to be treated is floor mosaics. After a brief overview of the ways in which geometric mosaics define and manipulate the spaces they adorn, mosaics with figural elements are examined for they perform similar roles. Bodies are re-integrated into their overall compositions, making this chapter a corrective to past approaches that have excerpted primarily mythological scenes from their floors. Next comes a chapter on images of the divine in stone sculpture, with a focus on how these gods’ bodies function in a cultic context. While past studies were often seemingly obsessed with determining the origins, Roman, Greek, or otherwise, of gods and the styles in which they are depicted, the approach here is to examine images of the gods in terms of the visual strategies they deploy to make them powerful and divine images. Finally, we get to tombstones, and the bodies represented in the funerary reliefs of the province. This takes the body in funerary art as a special category, one that straddles an uncomfortable duality of absence and presence, given the represented body’s relationship to the real body of the commemorated. This chapter begins by asking how the basic form of the body in funerary art can help a monument to fulfil its commemorative. It then moves out from the body to its adornment and its frames to consider how the ways in which the body is covered and contextualised in these reliefs help to re-define these represented bodies as commemorative images.
Roman Britain, Art, Body, Mosaics, Tombstones, Gods, Romanisation
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