x NOTES ON THE ILLUSTRATIONS
f. The iconographic form of the group reused as an image of
Hebrews escaping from Egypt during the crossing of the Red Sea.
Late fourth- century marble sarcophagus probably made in Rome
and now in the Arles Museum. Photo: J. Elsner.- The materials of Roman domestic art, from relatively expensive
(such as silver) to relatively cheap (such as terracotta), were often
richly adorned with a range of relatively standard imagery common
across the empire. Take for instance a red- glazed clay crater without
handles found near Capua and made in Arezzo from a mould in terra
sigillata – that is, a typical piece of Arretine ware, indeed from the
workshop of Gnaeus Ateius, which produced a number of surviving
specimens between the 20s BC and the 20s AD (Figure 4a). All the
aspects of its imagery are common across the empire, from the wreaths,
rosettes and beading that frame the fi gural scene at the top, via the
columns, swags and lamp stands to the female fi gures of the seasons. It
is likely to have been a cheaper and more common kind of item than
the third century silver plate from Chaourse in Gaul, executed in fi ne
repoussé technique and fi nished off with gilding (Figure 4b). Its
iconography shows the god Mercury with a cock and a ram, perhaps
hinting at a sacrifi cial implication, but the piece probably belonged at
an elite dining table where it may well have been an item of display
rather than use. Iconographically, it is no more original than the crater,
and the functions of its imagery in tying the household that used it to
the wider social network may have been similar, but at a higher social
level. By contrast, another piece of domestic ware in a different
medium, the free- blown glass jug found at Bayford in Kent, shows no
iconography but demonstrates the widespread nature of well- made
items in relatively cheap materials, which were nonetheless valued
(Figure 4c). Its fi ndspot in a grave indicates not only a secondary
funerary use, but also its esteem in being chosen for this function and
removed from domestic employment.
Public art – especially honorifi c statuary – defi ned the urban
environment of cities across the empire, as well as temples and private
villas. From the Republican period, from which dates the fi ne statue of
a semi- naked man discovered in the temple of Hercules at Tivoli
(Figure 4d), to the high empire, the production of such statuary peopled
the lived environment of the empire with a series of model citizens of
the past to be emulated in modernity. Generic, even identikit, ideal
bodies – not only the nudity of the Tivoli ‘general’ but the clothed
‘Large Herculaneum Woman’, found in the gardens of Maecenas in
Rome, from the Antonine period – went alongside highly individualized
portrait heads, giving an impression of a specifi c person at a given
moment of her life (Figure 4e). The imperial portrait in particular was
disseminated across the empire as a means of marketing the current