Neue Ansätze zur Erforschung spätantiker Ideal- und Portraitplastik: Stilkritik, Kontexte, naturwissenschaftliche Untersuchungen

Short Description

The contributions to a workshop on late antique sculpture, held at Halle University in 2018, discuss new findings and research projects as well as archaeometric analyses of sculpture, with a focus on the 4th to 6th centuries AD, in search of promising approaches for the field and its methodology.

Description

Late antique sculpture has increasingly become an important field of classical studies since the 1970s. There has been a noticeable effort since that time to develop guidelines for the assessment of late antique portrait and ideal sculpture. Ongoing controversies prove that this has remained anything but easy. After numerous important studies on the subject have been published in the last two decades, it seemed useful to take stock. This volume draws on half a century of archaeological research that proposes new perspectives on style and form analysis, as well as on the importance of find contexts, inspired by more recent excavations and the revaluation of well-known contexts. It also brings into focus the scientific analysis of marbles, which provides crucial information on the provenance of workshops and the marble trade across the Mediterranean in general. Answers to these complexes of questions form the basis for an evaluation of the social, political and cultural background of the survival of ancient sculpture in the 4th to 6th century AD, especially with regard to the boom in mythological ideal sculpture. The workshop from which this volume emerged was held in June 2018 in cooperation with the German Archaeological Institute at Halle-Wittenberg University.