Painting, Poetry, and the Invention of Tenderness in the Early Roman Empire

This book connects the emergence of Latin love elegy and a new, tender style in Roman wall painting.

Hérica Valladares (Author)

9781108835411, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 17 December 2020

266 pages
25.9 x 18.2 x 1.9 cm, 0.71 kg

'In this lucidly written, highly engaging book, Valladares traces a Roman evolution of what she perceives to have been an unprecedented kind of desire. This desire looks nothing like the sexually explicit scenes found on Athenian vases or on the walls of Pompeian brothels, imagery that has shocked modern sensibilities and attracted much scholarly attention over the years. Valladares' subject is not sex, but love; not eroticism, but tenderness. Few would describe the Romans, a people whose foundation stories centre on rape, as tender; even fewer would claim that tenderness was a Roman invention. The book's bold premise is backed up by close, comparative and contextual readings of carefully chosen case studies from Latin love elegy and Roman and Campanian wall painting. Valladares situates her findings within the history of scholarship on ancient sexuality, but they should also be seen as an invaluable contribution to the study of ancient emotions.' Charlie Pemberton, Bryn Mawr Classical Review

Tenderness is not a notion commonly associated with the Romans, whose mythical origin was attributed to brutal rape. Yet, as Hérica Valladares argues in this ground-breaking study, in the second half of the first century BCE Roman poets, artists, and their audience became increasingly interested in describing, depicting, and visualizing the more sentimental aspects of amatory experience. During this period, we see two important and simultaneous developments: Latin love elegy crystallizes as a poetic genre, while a new style in Roman wall painting emerges. Valladares' book is the first to correlate these two phenomena properly, showing that they are deeply intertwined. Rather than postulating a direct correspondence between images and texts, she offers a series of mutually reinforcing readings of painting and poetry that ultimately locate the invention of a new romantic ideal within early imperial debates about domesticity and the role of citizens in Roman society.

List of figures
List of plates
Acknowledgments
Introduction. On Roman tenderness
1. The tenderness of lovers
2. The tenderness of monsters
3. The tender interior
Epilogue. Tenderness transformed
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Classical Greek & Roman archaeology [HDDK], Classical history / classical civilisation [HBLA1], Literary studies: classical, early & medieval [DSBB], History of art: ancient & classical art,BCE to c 500 CE [ACG]