Collectors Scholars And Forgers In The Ancient World

Download or read book Collectors, Scholars, and Forgers in the Ancient World written by Carolyn Higbie and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-01-26 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Collectors, Scholars, and Forgers in the Ancient World focuses on the fascination which works of art, texts, and antiquarian objects inspired in Greeks and Romans in antiquity and draws parallels with other cultures and eras to offer contexts for understanding that fascination. Statues, bronze weapons, books, and bones might have been prized for various reasons: because they had religious value, were the work of highly regarded artists and writers, had been possessed by famous mythological figures, or were relics of a long disappeared past. However, attitudes towards these objects also changed over time: sculpture which was originally created for a religious purpose became valuable as art and could be removed from its original setting, while historians discovered value in inscriptions and other texts for supporting historical arguments and literary scholars sought early manuscripts to establish what authors really wrote. As early as the Hellenistic era, some Greeks and Romans began to collect objects and might even display them in palaces, villas, or gardens; as these objects acquired value, a demand was created for more of them, and so copyists and forgers created additional pieces - while copyists imitated existing pieces of art, sometimes adapting to their new settings, forgers created new pieces to complete a collection, fill a gap in historical knowledge, make some money, or to indulge in literary play with knowledgeable readers. The study of forged relics is able to reveal not only what artefacts the Greeks and Romans placed value on, but also what they believed they understood about their past and how they interpreted the evidence for it. Drawing on the latest scholarship on forgery and fakes, as well as a range of examples, this book combines stories about frauds with an analysis of their significance, and illuminates and explores the link between collectors, scholars, and forgers in order to offer us a way to better understand the power that objects held over the ancient Greeks and Romans.

Download or read book Collectors, Scholars, and Forgers in the Ancient World written by Carolyn Higbie and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-01-26 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Collectors, Scholars, and Forgers in the Ancient World focuses on the fascination which works of art, texts, and antiquarian objects inspired in Greeks and Romans in antiquity and draws parallels with other cultures and eras to offer contexts for understanding that fascination. Statues, bronze weapons, books, and bones might have been prized for various reasons: because they had religious value, were the work of highly regarded artists and writers, had been possessed by famous mythological figures, or were relics of a long disappeared past. However, attitudes towards these objects also changed over time: sculpture which was originally created for a religious purpose became valuable as art and could be removed from its original setting, while historians discovered value in inscriptions and other texts for supporting historical arguments and literary scholars sought early manuscripts to establish what authors really wrote. As early as the Hellenistic era, some Greeks and Romans began to collect objects and might even display them in palaces, villas, or gardens; as these objects acquired value, a demand was created for more of them, and so copyists and forgers created additional pieces - while copyists imitated existing pieces of art, sometimes adapting to their new settings, forgers created new pieces to complete a collection, fill a gap in historical knowledge, make some money, or to indulge in literary play with knowledgeable readers. The study of forged relics is able to reveal not only what artefacts the Greeks and Romans placed value on, but also what they believed they understood about their past and how they interpreted the evidence for it. Drawing on the latest scholarship on forgery and fakes, as well as a range of examples, this book combines stories about frauds with an analysis of their significance, and illuminates and explores the link between collectors, scholars, and forgers in order to offer us a way to better understand the power that objects held over the ancient Greeks and Romans.

Download or read book Forgers and Critics, New Edition written by Anthony Grafton and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2019-04-16 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The close links between forgery and criticism throughout history In Forgers and Critics, Anthony Grafton provides a wide-ranging exploration of the links between forgery and scholarship. Labeling forgery the “criminal sibling” of criticism, Grafton describes a panorama of remarkable individuals—forgers from classical Greece through the recent past—who produced a variety of splendid triumphs of learning and style, as well as the scholarly detectives who honed the tools of scholarship in attempts to unmask these skillful fakers. In the process, Grafton discloses the extent, the coherence, and the historical interest of two significant and tightly intertwined strands in the Western intellectual tradition.

Download or read book The Public Lives of Ancient Women (500 BCE-650 CE) written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2023-02-13 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Covering a broad chronological and geographic range and a great variety of source types, this volume examines the presence and activities of ancient women in the public domain, for example as rulers, patrons, priestesses, wives, athletes and pilgrims.

Download or read book Fakes and Forgeries of Written Artefacts from Ancient Mesopotamia to Modern China written by Cécile Michel and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2020-11-23 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fakes and forgeries are objects of fascination. This volume contains a series of thirteen articles devoted to fakes and forgeries of written artefacts from the beginnings of writing in Mesopotamia to modern China. The studies emphasise the subtle distinctions conveyed by an established vocabulary relating to the reproduction of ancient artefacts and production of artefacts claiming to be ancient: from copies, replicas and imitations to fakes and forgeries. Fakes are often a response to a demand from the public or scholarly milieu, or even both. The motives behind their production may be economic, political, religious or personal – aspiring to fame or simply playing a joke. Fakes may be revealed by combining the study of their contents, codicological, epigraphic and palaeographic analyses, and scientific investigations. However, certain famous unsolved cases still continue to defy technology today, no matter how advanced it is. Nowadays, one can find fakes in museums and private collections alike; they abound on the antique market, mixed with real artefacts that have often been looted. The scientific community’s attitude to such objects calls for ethical reflection.

Download or read book Cicero and Roman Education written by Giuseppe La Bua and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-02-07 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cicero saw publication as a means of perpetuating a distinctive image of himself as statesman and orator. He memorialized his spiritual and oratorical self by means of a very solid body of texts. Educationalists and schoolteachers in antiquity relied on Cicero's oratory to supervise the growth of the young into intellectual maturity. By reconstructing the main phases of textual transmission, from the first authorial dissemination of the speeches to the medieval manuscripts, and by re-examining the abundant evidence on Ciceronian scholarship from the first to the sixth century CE, Cicero and Roman Education traces the history of the exegetical tradition on Cicero's oratory and re-assesses the 'didactic' function of the speeches, whose preservation was largely determined by pedagogical factors.

Download or read book Domesticating Empire written by Caitlín Eilís Barrett and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2019-03-29 with total page 451 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Domesticating Empire is the first contextually-oriented monograph on Egyptian imagery in Roman households. Caitlín Barrett draws on case studies from Flavian Pompeii to investigate the close association between representations of Egypt and a particular type of Roman household space: the domestic garden. Through paintings and mosaics portraying the Nile, canals that turned the garden itself into a miniature "Nilescape," and statuary depicting Egyptian themes, many gardens in Pompeii offered ancient visitors evocations of a Roman vision of Egypt. Simultaneously faraway and familiar, these imagined landscapes made the unfathomable breadth of empire compatible with the familiarity of home. In contrast to older interpretations that connect Roman "Aegyptiaca" to the worship of Egyptian gods or the problematic concept of "Egyptomania," a contextual analysis of these garden assemblages suggests new possibilities for meaning. In Pompeian houses, Egyptian and Egyptian-looking objects and images interacted with their settings to construct complex entanglements of "foreign" and "familiar," "self" and "other." Representations of Egyptian landscapes in domestic gardens enabled individuals to present themselves as sophisticated citizens of empire. Yet at the same time, household material culture also exerted an agency of its own: domesticizing, familiarizing, and "Romanizing" once-foreign images and objects. That which was once imagined as alien and potentially dangerous was now part of the domus itself, increasingly incorporated into cultural constructions of what it meant to be "Roman." Featuring brilliant illustrations in both color and black and white, Domesticating Empire reveals the importance of material culture in transforming household space into a microcosm of empire.