Lecture Program
Lecturer Information

Elizabeth Bartman
Independent Scholar

Dr. Elizabeth Bartman specializes in Greek and Roman art, with an emphasis on Roman sculpture. This pursuit has taken her to Carthage with the University of Michigan and to the Athenian Agora with the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. Though currently unaffiliated with an academic institution, she previously taught at the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University, Barnard College, and Columbia University, and received her PhD from the latter in 1984. She is the author of 'Ancient Sculptural Copies in Minature and Portraits of Livia: Imaging the Imperial Women in Ancient Rome'. Dr. Bartman is the President of the AIA’s New York Society, one of the largest of the 101 societies across the United States and Canada.

Lecture Abstracts

Henry Blundell and his Classical Marbles: Archaeology in the Era of the Grand Tour
Between 1776 and 1801 Henry Blundell assembled the largest private collection of classical art in England. Today the collection survives essentially intact, in period buildings at Blundell’s estate (Ince Blundell Hall) and the Liverpool Museum. This talk will examine some of the marbles acquired by Blundell and the circumstances of their acquisition. From contemporary accounts we know a great deal about the antiquities market in the late eighteenth century, in particular the nexus of excavators and dealers who serviced buyers such as Blundell. (Blundell’s competition in a cutthroat market included such personages as fellow Englishman Charles Townley, the Swedish King Gustav III, and the Pope.) Because buyers wanted complete statues rather than fragments, restoration played a major role in the market. Some of the finest sculptors working in Rome--among them Cavaceppi and Albacini--restored antiquities, and this talk will draw upon the the technical findings made in the Liverpool Museum’s state-of-the-art stone conservation laboratories to expose their methods. The subjects and styles of the restored statues sold to Grand Tour buyers are a telling index of eighteenth century neo-classical taste; contemporary archaeology cannot be fully understood without an awareness of this episode, the first “modern” investigation of the ancient past.

Portraits of Barbarians in Roman Art
If the essence of the Roman portrait was the depiction of an individual, then the portrait of the barbarian--by definition a category of non-person--would seem to be a contradiction. This lecture will explore a corpus of high-quality portraits of Roman date, style, and conception that depict subjects whose physiognomy and costume define them as non-Roman. Their ethnicity suggests barbarian status, yet they are individuals and lack the stereotypical rendering typical of the barbarians who battle Romans on sarcophagi and historical reliefs. The product of the Empire’s physical growth and social inclusiveness, these portraits raise fundamental questions of Roman identity and self-definition.

The Cultural Messages of Roman Erotic Sculpture
Statues whose subjects are erotic (and even in some cases what we would call pornographic) are found in a variety of respectible, even elite, Roman private contexts. What was their meaning in these Vesuvian villas and urban gardens? The depiction of sex to ensure fertility and material prosperity is long recognized, while recent studies have connected sex with humor and luxurious pleasure. This paper will propose an additional reading: that erotic statues had a moralizing component. By virtue of their three-dimensionality, statues had an obvious analogy with their viewers that erotic scenes in paint or other media lacked; their visual immediacy made them important conveyers of the puritanical ideologies that repeatedly inhabited the Roman state.

Return to previous page

Related Contents

Lecture Schedule

Meet Our Lecturers

Support Our Lectures

Forms for Lecturers and Societies