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43 results

Page 1 of 3

  • Five - The Styles of Mimesis

  • from Part II - Ancients
  • Sarah Bassett, Indiana University, Bloomington
  • Book:
    Style and Meaning in Late Antique Art
    Published online:
    15 August 2024
    Print publication:
    08 August 2024, pp 99-124

  • Summary

    Chapter Five considers the definition of mimesis in the visual arts to argue that ancient ideas of visual imitation encompassed a wide range of styles, among them formal solutions modern observers would consider abstract. It posits that the stylistic language deployed by Hermogenes of Tarsus in his rhetorical treatise Peri Ideon can be applied to the description of late antique visual art.

  • Introduction

  • Sarah Bassett, Indiana University, Bloomington
  • Book:
    Style and Meaning in Late Antique Art
    Published online:
    15 August 2024
    Print publication:
    08 August 2024, pp 1-24

  • Summary

    The introduction argues that the current understanding of late antique style as abstract and spiritual is not supported by the evidence. It surveys the trajectory of this idea in the literature of late antique art and proposes an alternative approach based on concepts of style outlined in late antique rhetorical theory.

Style and Meaning in Late Antique Art
  • Ancients and Moderns on Seeing and Thinking
  • Sarah Bassett
  • Published online:
    15 August 2024
    Print publication:
    08 August 2024
  • How do we best see and understand the art of late antiquity? One of the perceived challenges of so doing is that this is a period whose visual production has been defined as stylistically abstract and emotionally spiritual, and therefore elusive. But this is a perception which – in her path-breaking new book – Sarah Bassett boldly challenges, offering two novel lines of interpretative inquiry. She first argues, by focusing on the art of late antiquity in late nineteenth-century Viennese intellectual and artistic circles, that that period's definition of late antique form was in fact a response to contemporaneous political concerns, anticipating modernist thinking and artistic practice. She then suggests that late antique viewers never actually abandoned a sense of those mimetic goals that characterized Greek and Roman habits of representation. This interpretative shift is transformative because it allows us to understand the full range and richness of late antique visual experience.

Page 1 of 3