Rome Beyond Rome: Roman Art and Architecture in a Global Perspective

This paper will provide an overview and critical discussion of “Rome Beyond Rome,” a lecture course at Columbia University that approaches ancient Roman art and architecture from a perspective that is programmatically not centered on Rome and Italy.

The course adopts two main vantage points. In its first half, it considers the art and architecture produced in the provinces of the Empire roughly between the late third century BCE and the fourth century CE. Through a regional survey, it analyzes the various mechanisms by which local contexts responded to their incorporation in the Roman empire—by maintaining, refashioning, and/or inventing their own visual traditions, by adopting and adapting models emanating from the capital, by interacting with other provincial centers, and so on.

The second half of the course considers the art of the Roman empire from the perspective of its neighbors in Asia and Africa, as well as its self-proclaimed successors and imitators after the end of antiquity. On the one hand, it discusses how ancient states such as the kingdom of Meroë and the Parthian empire, or regions such as the Gandhara, interacted with the visual culture of Rome and its empire. On the other, it explores the degree to which classicizing art and architecture inspired by Roman imperial models worked—or failed to work—in European colonial empires in Asia, Africa, and the Americas.