Museums are full of Roman sculptures - both portraits of individuals and images of the Roman gods - but these can be difficult to understand. Wandering through a museum, it sometimes seems that there are crowds of marble Romans, all gazing at us with the same blank eyes and the same stoic expression. What can they tell us? How can we get beyond the marble mask to understand who these people were and what they wanted their portraits to communicate to all who saw them?
We need only approach those sculptures in the same way that we size people up today. As we stroll around twenty-first century streets, we make judgments on the basis of clothing, hairstyle, posture, and attitude: he’s a hippie, she’s a preppie, he’s into hip-hop, she’s an intellectual. The Romans, of course, did the same thing, and thus to better understand the images they made of themselves, we need only to learn a bit about the visual language employed in their statuary.
Interested in upping your aptitude for ancient appearances? Click on over to the Institute of Design + Culture in Rome’s website and get started learning. They’ve put together a clever page that makes ancient sculpture seem oh-so-hip. Designed to look like the cover of a fashion magazine, the left side of the page takes you through ten questions you can ask yourself while gazing upon a fashionable ancient Roman (click on the categories above the questions to read the answers). From fitness to fashion and from makeup to bling, these ten queries will help you become a bit more fluent in the language of Roman art. (And, it’s fun too!)
