The Art of the Roman Empire

Jas Elsner is Professor of Late Antique Art at the University of Oxford, Humfrey Payne Senior Research Fellow at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and Visiting Professor of Art and Religion at the University of Chicago. In 2009 he was elected a foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and since 2013 has been Principal Investigator in the Empires of Faith Project. He is married with four children and lives in Oxford.

• Preface1: IntroductionPart I - Images and Power2: A Visual Culture3: Art and Imperial PowerPart II - Images and Society4: Art and Social Life5: Centre and Periphery6: Art and DeathPart III - Images and Transformation7: Art and the Past: Antiquarian Eclecticism8: Art and Religion9: The Eurasian ContextEpilogue10: Art and Culture: Cost, Value, and the Discourse of ArtAfterword: Some Futures of Christian ArtNotesList of IllustrationsBibliographic EssayTimelineEssay

Jaś Elsner's ground - breaking account discusses both Roman and early Christian art in relation to such issues as power, death, society, acculturation, and religion ... he presents a fresh and challenging interpretation of an extraordinarily rich cultural crucible in which many fundamental developments of later European art had their origins.