| Date | 12-13 December 2024 | |
| Time | 9:00-17:00 | |
| Venue | Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters, Copenhagen |
Roman-period statues and busts, both from private, public or tomb contexts, representing individuals — painted or sculpted, figured in relief or in the round — have long been a major focus of interest in Classical Archaeology and Art History. This also extends to numerous examples from the regions beyond the centre of the Roman Empire. However, no synthetic overview, analysis or overview exist of this material from the ‘peripheries’, i.e. places, cities and regions that often did not consider themselves peripheral and which also had been and was in contact with a variety of other cultures, including Greek, Hellenistic, Egyptian and Persian.
This conference will bring together scholars who work on statues and busts – in different materials, produced both inside and outside the Roman Empire, in order to consider new lines of inquiry and new ways of researching the widely disseminated ‘individual-portrait’ as a period-specific cultural product.
The main point of departure for the conference is provided by the decade-long research within and results from the Palmyra Portrait Project, which has collected and documented the largest single corpus of portraits of the Roman period found outside of Rome, approximately 4000 portraits. This dataset now stands alongside several other corpora, all of them more or less contemporary: the countless statues, busts and reliefs from all over the Roman Empire, found on tomb façades and in tombs, on stelai and on sarcophagi; more than a thousand painted mummy portraits from Roman Egypt; the forest of honorific portrait statues that stood in the public spaces of the cities of the Empire; and the authoritative formulaic images of the Roman emperor—large and small, fashioned in a wide range of materials — found just about everywhere, from the sanctuaries, over private houses and public spaces.
Our rapidly increasing knowledge of the visual culture of the Roman provinces and beyond and the economically vibrant border regions raises, now with a slightly different emphasis, a series of questions about the nature and function(s) of the Roman individual-portrait and its proper interpretation. In particular, the issue of local versus imperial (court) portrait styles, and the connections (‘entanglements’) between the different existing traditions of portraying individuals, which vary considerably from city to city, and from region to region.
This conference aims to solicit papers that engage with mainstream portrait styles — as well as significant deviations from those styles: papers that trace the impact of the Roman imperial image on local traditions, or the way that some artistic and production traditions can be seen to persist relatively untouched by external influence. Questions about materials, polychromy, resources, workshops and distribution may also form part of the programme, as well as new work on the reconstruction of noteworthy display contexts on well-attested cases of reworking or reuse of portrait images, or the establishment of particular chronological developments/links in provincial visual culture.
For invited speakers we will cover travel (economy class only) and up to 3 nights of accommodation. Please book your own travel to Copenhagen, and we will reimburse you after your stay (please book your ticket directly through an airline and not via a travel search engine). We would appreciate it, if you could book sooner rather than later in order to get a reasonably priced flight.
You will receive a link to Aarhus University's travel reimbursement form. Please keep your receipts as you will be asked to upload documentation for your expenses.
NOTE: As soon as you have booked your flight, please forward your itinerary to Sine Grove Saxkjær: saxkjaer@cas.au.dk, so that the hotel booking can be finalised.
Bryggen Guldsmeden
Gullfossgade 4
2300 Copenhagen
Website
A speakers’ dinner will be held 12 December, and we will of course cater for you during the conference.
If you have any dietary restrictions (incl. allergies), please let Sine Grove Saxkjær (saxkjaer@cas.au.dk) know no later than 25 November, so that the restaurant/caterers can be notified.
 | Rubina Raja |
