Affiliation: Northern Illinois University
Sinclair Bell is Professor of Art History; Presidential Research, Scholarship, and Artistry Professor; and Distinguished Teaching Professor at Northern Illinois University. He studied Classical Art & Archaeology at the University of Oxford, the University of Cologne, and the University of Edinburgh, from which he received his Ph.D. in Classics in 2004. His current areas of research are the art and archaeology of the Etruscans; the art and archaeology of the Roman provinces; spectacles in the Roman imperial period; and the visual and material evidence for slaves and foreigners in the Roman Empire, especially Aethiopians (“Black Africans”).
This talk reunites a corpus of material that has never been studied comprehensively together: marble heads identified as portraits of Aethiopians (Black Africans) who lived in the Roman Empire. By collectively studying works within this medium together and by foregrounding core issues (such as scale, materiality, archaeological context) besides iconography alone, this lecture attends to larger issues of how ancient “portraits” can—and cannot—inform us about the representation of ethnicity and social rank in the Roman Empire.
Selected Bibliography
Bell, S.W. (2022) “Images and Interpretation of Africans in Roman Art and Social Practice.” In The Oxford Handbook of Roman Imagery and Iconography, edited by L. Cline and N.T. Elkins, 425–63. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bell, S.W. (2025) “In Living Color? Aethiopians in Roman Sculpture.” In Chroma: Sculpture in Color from Antiquity to Today, edited by S. Hemingway, S. Lepinski, and V. Brinkmann, 139–45. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art/New Haven: Yale University Press.
What did a foreigner look like in Etruscan art, and why did Etruscans represent them? This lecture looks at representations of “Aethiopians” (Black Africans) in a variety of visual media, and explores what these images may have meant in their original settings.
Selected Bibliography
Bell, S.W. (2026) “Etruscan Ethnicity.” In The Etruscans: From the Heart of Ancient Italy, edited by R. Dreyfus and L. Chu, 302–305; 357–58. San Francisco: Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco/New Haven: Yale University Press.
See Sinclair Bell's work in the American Journal of Archaeology.
