Caa.reviews offers a welcome if belated review ($) of Peter Stewart’s 2008 book The Social History of Roman Art. Brenda Longfellow writes:

In an innovative twist, Peter Stewart embeds a summary of social-historical scholarship into his book on the functions and reception of Roman art … Each chapter focuses on a theme that has received much scholarly attention: artists and workshops, domestic and funerary art, portraiture, political and religious art, and art produced in the provinces…. Stewart advocates focusing on the immediate context of art produced in the provinces and points out that imagery does not always travel from the center to the periphery. New styles, whether found in the provinces or introduced during later time periods, indicate different aesthetic tastes, expectations, purposes, and modes of viewing and should be judged on their own terms, not as failures to meet earlier standards or standards in other parts of the empire…. Accessible to advanced students and scholars in related fields, The Social History of Roman Art challenges many long-held assumptions and inspires the reader to consider new avenues of inquiry.

Meanwhile Sheila Dillon has reviewed Jane Fejfer’s Roman Portraits in Context, also from 2008:

[P]ortrait statues and busts were arguably one of the most important and prominent forms of Roman public art and played a crucial role in constructing and communicating Roman social and political identity. Fejfer’s aim is to focus on the reconstruction of the socio-historical and physical contexts of portraits, rather than on more traditional scholarly concerns of portrait typology, chronology, and stylistic development, although these topics are dealt with as well … Fejfer has assimilated and summarizes a tremendous amount of secondary literature; while this avalanche of data can sometimes overwhelm the reader, there is a great deal here that is new and interesting. Even those whose research specialization is Roman portraiture will learn a lot from Fejfer’s book…. The material is endlessly fascinating and visually engaging, and the many new and provocative observations and interpretations contained in this study should provide fruitful avenues for research in Roman—and Greek—portraiture for many years to come.

Read more: http://arthistorynewsletter.com/blog/?p=5400