Art on Ancient Rome

Half of This Roman Mosaic Glass Bowl Is Plaster, and the Smithsonian Kept It

Fri, 25 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Smithsonian American Art Museum owns a Roman mosaic glass bowl made sometime between the 1st century BCE and the 1st century CE. It’s about 17 centimetres wide, patterned in translucent blue and opaque glass, with a marbled ring for a foot. When conservators studied it closely they found that roughly half of it isn’t glass at all. It’s plaster, painted to look like the missing pieces.

They decided to leave the plaster where it was.

A Freed Slave in Augustan Rome Paid to Have His Wrinkles Carved in Marble

Mon, 21 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The piece is small, about nine and a half inches high, and it is obviously a fragment. A man’s head and shoulders, carved in marble in the late first century BCE, broken out of something considerably larger. The Met’s curators identify what that something was: a funerary relief, the kind set into the outside wall of a family tomb, and they think the man was almost certainly a freedman.

His face is not flattered. The flesh sits heavy around the mouth, the brow is creased, the whole head has the blunt hard-worn quality that art historians call verism. He paid for that. Somebody in Rome, a generation or two out of slavery, commissioned a portrait and specifically did not ask to be made handsome.

The Badminton Sarcophagus Was Carved While the Roman Empire Was Coming Apart

Mon, 21 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Forty human and animal figures, cut in high relief across seven feet of marble, with Dionysos riding a panther at the centre and the four Seasons standing around him as broad-shouldered young men rather than the women Roman art usually used for the job. One rounded end holds Mother Earth reclining with her attendants. The other has a river god and a pair of winged figures. Small Bacchic hangers-on fill every gap between the large figures, carved at reduced scale so the composition never breathes.

The Boscoreale Bedroom at the Met May Be Named for the Wrong Roman

Mon, 21 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Vesuvius buried the villa at Boscoreale in 79 CE, about a kilometre north of Pompeii on the mountain’s lower slopes. By then the room was already old. Its walls had been painted around 50 to 40 BCE, while Caesar was still alive and the Republic still formally existed, so what the eruption sealed was a century-old bedroom whose occupants had chosen not to redecorate.

You can walk into that bedroom today, in Gallery 165 of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

The Met's Augustus Was Carved After He Died, and It Shows Him Half His Age

Mon, 21 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The head is over life-size, twelve inches on its own, and it broke away long ago from what was probably a seated statue of the emperor. The Met dates it to somewhere between 14 and 37 CE, which is the reign of Tiberius. Augustus was already dead when the sculptor started work. He had died in 14 CE at seventy-seven, after fifty-odd years at the centre of Roman public life, and the face on this marble belongs to a man around thirty.

Roman Sarcophagi Spent More Time as Fountains and Church Tombs Than as Graves

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A carved marble box sits in the middle of the antiquities hall at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, roped off, lit from above, with a bust on a pedestal keeping it company. Horses rear across the front panel. Figures fall under them. It reads as sculpture, which is exactly what it isn’t. It’s a coffin, and for most of the seventeen or eighteen centuries since somebody paid for it, it was not treated as art.

Jean-Léon Gérôme: The Victorian Gaze on Rome

Thu, 07 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In the main hall of the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, beneath the vast iron-and-glass vault of the former railway station, stands a bronze that makes explicit what Gérôme’s paintings kept implicit. A man in contemporary nineteenth-century dress — smock, trousers, the clothes of a working artist — stands beside a Roman gladiator. The gladiator is armored, helmeted, standing over a fallen opponent whose arm is raised in the gesture of submission. The contemporary figure reaches toward the gladiator with a sculptor’s tool. This is Jean-Léon Gérôme’s self-portrait with his own creation: the artist inside the ancient world he spent his career constructing, the boundary between the nineteenth century and the Roman arena dissolved by the act of making.

Trajan's Column: Rome's Greatest Comic Strip

Wed, 06 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In the Cast Courts of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, two enormous plaster columns rise through the full height of the room, split at the midpoint because no single gallery space in Victorian London was tall enough to accommodate the complete original. Red walls, a cast-iron skylight, medieval tomb effigies on the floor below, the Column of Marcus Aurelius visible behind — it is one of the stranger and more magnificent rooms in any museum in the world, and the centerpiece is a reproduction. The V&A made these casts of Trajan’s Column in the 1860s at the request of Pope Pius IX and Queen Victoria, who both wanted to study the reliefs without traveling to Rome. The decision proved more consequential than either of them anticipated. The original column, standing since 113 AD in Trajan’s Forum in Rome, has weathered continuously for nineteen centuries. The Victorian plaster casts now preserve detail that the stone in Rome has since lost. The reproduction is, in some respects, more legible than the original.

Contemporary Artists and Ancient Rome: The Ruin That Won't Stay Ruined