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6 - Seeing the Past

Neo-Attic Reliefs as Sites of Temporal and Spatial Contact

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 October 2025

Jas' Elsner
Affiliation:
University of Oxford
Milette Gaifman
Affiliation:
Yale University, Connecticut
Nathaniel B. Jones
Affiliation:
Washington University, St Louis
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Summary

With their shallow reliefs, depictions of contorted movement, and a historically inflected formal style, first century BCE and CE Neo-Attic reliefs are distinct among Greek and Roman relief sculpture. Primarily made for an elite Roman audience, the reliefs invoke stylistic techniques from different periods of Greek art and creatively combine figural types taken from earlier objects. The scenes are also characterized by a sense of spacelessness, established by the representation of figures, objects, and landscapes in shallow relief and by the frequent distorted play with depth and space. By considering a select number of examples, this chapter argues that the reliefs’ formal elements work together to evoke multiple temporalities and spaces, so that the distinct time and space created by and in these reliefs allowed them to become powerful sites of contact. In connecting their audience with an idealized past that takes place in a generic space, the reliefs offered viewers the opportunity not only to engage visually with the past temporalities of Archaic and Classical Greece, but also to become immersed in them by sharing the same space as the stylized figures, who could slip from their timeless and spaceless background to the Roman world in which they were displayed.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2025

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