Art and Rhetoric in Roman Culture

Jaś Elsner is Humfry Payne Senior Research Fellow at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, Visiting Professor of Art History at the University of Chicago and Senior Research Keeper at the British Museum. His publications include numerous articles and books including Imperial Rome and Christian Triumph: The Art of the Roman Empire AD 100–450 (1998) and Roman Eyes: Visuality and Subjectivity in Art and Text (2007). Michel Meyer is Professor of Rhetoric, Philosophy and Aesthetics at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. He has published many works of philosophy, covering literary criticism, rhetoric, the passions, art, theatre and Roman art. Several of his works have appeared in English. He is known to be the father of a new philosophy based on the priority of questioning in thought, called problematology. Recent books include Rome et la naissance de l'art européen (2006) and Principia Rhetorica (2008).

• Preface Michel Meyer; Introduction Jaś Elsner; Part I. Architecture and Public Space: 1. On the sublime in architecture Edmund Thomas; 2. Sublime histories, exceptional viewers: Trajan's Column and its visibility Francesco de Angelis; 3. Corpore enormi: the rhetoric of physical appearance in Suetonius and imperial portrait statuary Jennifer Trimble; 4. Beauty and the Roman female portrait Eve D'Ambra; Part II. The Domestic Realm: 5. The Casa del Menandro in Pompeii: rhetoric and the topology of Roman wall-painting Katharina Lorenz; 6. Agamemnon's grief: on the limits of expression in Roman rhetoric and painting Verity Platt; Part III. The Funerary: 7. Rhetoric and art in third-century AD Rome Barbara Borg; 8. Poems in stone: reading mythological sarcophagi through Statius' Consolations Zahra Newby; 9. The funerary altar of Pedana and the rhetoric of unreachability Caroline Vout; 10. Rational, passionate and appetitive: the psychology of rhetoric and the transformation of visual culture from non-Christian to Christian sarcophagi in the Roman world Jaś Elsner; Part IV. Rhetoric and the Visual: 11. The ordo of rhetoric and the rhetoric of order Michael Squire; Coda: the rhetoric of Roman painting within the history of culture: a global interpretation Michel Meyer.