AIA Lecture

Starts: November 17, 2009 at 4:30 PM
Location: Millington Hall, room 150
Event URL: www.wm.edu/aia
Contact: [[jrholm, Joyce Holmes]]

Summary

Archaeological Institure of America, Williamsburg Society, presents "The Cultural Messages of Roman Erotic Sculpture," a lecture by Professor Elizabeth Bartman, VP of AIA. Event is free and open to the public. Sponsored by the Departments of Anthropology, Art & Art History, Classical Studies and the Charles Center.

Full Description

Statues whose subjects are erotic (and even in some cases what we would call pornographic)are found in a variety of respectible, even elite, Roman private contexts. What was their meaning in these Vesuvian villas and urban gardens?  The depiction of sex to ensure fertility and material prosperity is long recognized, while recent studies have connected sex with humor and luxurious pleasure.  This paper will propose an additional reading: that erotic statues had a moralizing component.  By virtue of their three-dimensionality, statues had an obvious analogy with their viewers that erotic scenes in paint or other media lacked; their visual immediacy made them important conveyers of the puritanical ideologies that repeatedly inhabited the Roman state.