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This chapter traces the development of the first hundred years of Pauline iconography in all media (sarcophagi, catacomb frescos, church mosaics, small objets d ’art). Particular attention is paid to the variety of ternary scenes featuring the apostles Peter and Paul flanking Christ. The various depictions of Christ (denominated Christus magister and traditio legis) in the scenes with his chief apostles are correlated to the verbal portraits of Paul, and his relation to Christ evident in the early commentaries on the Pauline epistles. Victorinus presents Paul as a direct recipient of Christ’s revelation, and thus as a prime authority in matter of both doctrine and morals; such an understanding of Paul is also suggested by the depictions of Christ with Paul which become common after the mid-point of the fourth century. The development of both Pauline iconography and commentary on the epistles in Rome are shown to be part of the popular piety arising around the various Roman sites claiming the relics of the chief apostles.

This chapter concerns the intersection of art and power in the Roman world, as well as how we study Roman art. A common emphasis on the formal qualities of so-called Romanized art has created the perception of art as symbolic of the success of Rome and of the acquiescence of indigenous peoples to its rule. From this perspective, provincial art can easily be dismissed as an often inadequate imitation of Roman style and images. In turn, this tendency has also led to greatest emphasis being placed on recording and displaying those works that attained the highest technical and stylistic affinities with examples from Rome or Italy. The chapter suggests an alternative approach to the study of Roman provincial art, one that embraces a series of discreet perspectives and considers different underlying themes in the imperial dialogue (including resistance, imitation, and adoption). In this context, it focuses on ways in which the adoption of so-called Romanized style also facilitated the continuation of indigenous traditions. These and related issues are explored with a case study from the Libyan pre-desert in the fourth century AD.

As sculpture is the classical art par excellence, statues abound in films set in Greek or Roman antiquity. Moreover, many of the mythological tropes involving sculptures that have persisted on the silver screen have their origins in classical antiquity: the Ovidian account of a Cypriot sculptor named Pygmalion who falls in love with his ivory creation and sees it bestowed with life by Venus, Hephaistos’s deadly automatons, the petrifying gaze of the Medusa, and divine sculptural manifestation, or agalmatophany, for instance. This chapter investigates the myths of the living statue as they originated in Greek and Roman literary art histories and found their way to the screen. It will do so by tracing the art-historical form and function of classical statuary to the cinematic representation of living statues in a broad conception of antiquity. The cinematic genre in which mythic sculptures thrive is that of the sword-and-sandal or peplum film, where a Greco-Roman or ersatz classical context provides the perfect backdrop for spectacular special effects, muscular heroes, and fantastic mythological creatures.

Although Nerva’s reign is largely the province of historians, owing to the lack of state-sanctioned art from his short reign, his coinage is very diverse and has been an untapped resource for studying contemporary “self-representation” in this period. It is argued that the emperor did not necessarily formulate coin iconography or messaging, as often assumed, but that it was directed at him, as were contemporary panegyric and poetry. He was, however, not the only audience. Coins were used by people throughout Roman society and so deploying quantitative and finds-based methods informs what images played the biggest role in contemporary praise and rhetoric and, to some degree, at what populations they were targeted.

The Roman engagement with Greek art can be characterized as a momentous and sustained effort of cultural commemoration, whereby the Romans appropriated forms derived from the Greek historical styles to generate a complex and nuanced visual language where each element was associated with a given gamut of connotations and expressive values. The formulae that were thus created worked very much as topoi, and their effectiveness did not depend on the recollection of their specific origins. However, the production of exact copies of past works—a distinctive character of Roman art—shows that on a general level the Greek roots of the Roman system of visual topoi were never forgotten.

This chapter focuses on two marble tauroctony statue groups that are now in the British Museum’s collection. Both are thought to be originally from Rome and date roughly to between the end of the first and the second century AD. In this opening chapter, we look at several of the many interpretations that have been offered for the tauroctony and discuss the image’s development in the Roman world. At the heart of all such interpretations lies the problem of how to reconstruct an ancient reality based on scant remains. These carefully constructed compositions, painstakingly restored in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, simultaneously present us with the characteristic representation of Mithras in the Roman Empire, yet also show the difficulties in reconstructing ancient religion from a fragmented material record.