Museums are full of Roman sculptures - both
portraits of individuals and images of the Roman gods - but these can be
difficult to understand. Wandering through a museum, it sometimes seems
that there are crowds of marble Romans, all gazing at us with the same blank
eyes and the same stoic expression. What can they tell us? How can
we get beyond the marble mask to understand who these people were and what they
wanted their portraits to communicate to all who saw them?
Today we size people up in a glance:
he's a hippie, she's a preppie, he's into hip-hop, she's an intellectual.
We do this by noting visual clues given by clothing, hairstyle, posture,
and attitude. The Romans, of course, did the same thing. To better
understand the images they made of themselves, we need only to learn a bit about
the visual language employed in their statuary. Here's a list of 10
questions that will help you become a bit more fluent in the language of Roman
art.
