Style and Meaning in Late Antique Art
Ancients and Moderns on Seeing and Thinking

This study invites readers to rethink their assumptions about the late antique visual arts.

Sarah Bassett (Author)

9781009466325, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 8 August 2024

257 pages
26.5 x 18.5 x 1.7 cm, 0.73 kg

'This is a thoughtful and ambitious book - rich, learned, original - revealing of long and serious reflection … a significant achievement.' Elizabeth Sears, George H. Forsyth Junior Collegiate Professor of History of Art, University of Michigan

How do we best see and understand the art of late antiquity? One of the perceived challenges of so doing is that this is a period whose visual production has been defined as stylistically abstract and emotionally spiritual, and therefore elusive. But this is a perception which – in her path-breaking new book – Sarah Bassett boldly challenges, offering two novel lines of interpretative inquiry. She first argues, by focusing on the art of late antiquity in late nineteenth-century Viennese intellectual and artistic circles, that that period's definition of late antique form was in fact a response to contemporaneous political concerns, anticipating modernist thinking and artistic practice. She then suggests that late antique viewers never actually abandoned a sense of those mimetic goals that characterized Greek and Roman habits of representation. This interpretative shift is transformative because it allows us to understand the full range and richness of late antique visual experience.

Introduction
Part I. Moderns: 1. Exploring the 'Dark Continent': Franz Wickhoff, Alois Riegl, and the first definitions of late antiqute art
2. Rome on the Danube: late antique art and Austrian identity
3. East meets West: archaeology, art history, and the crystallization of late antique art
4. Building vocabulary in the 'Epoch of the Great Spiritual'
Part II. Ancients: 5. The styles of mimesis
6. Storytelling and the 'illusive similitude of life'
7. Ceremonial images and the 'amplification of good things'
8. Portraits civic and sacred
9. Conclusion: an art of persuasion.

Subject Areas: The arts: general issues [AB]