Ready for Her Closeup: Producing the Public Image of Ancient Roman Women

Social media feeds reveal content devoted to curating public personas and conceptual analyses of these. Roman antiquity was also filled with visual communication about women’s public identities. Sculpture, painting, and coins illustrated women’s dress, adornment, and coiffure. Building inscriptions immortalized and embedded patronesses in cities. Funerary monuments ensured public memory. As in modern media, the production of public identities in ancient Rome involved complex processes and choices in shaping a public image. Academic interest has focused mainly on the final products of these processes, e.g., the construction of portrait chronologies or the use of images as artifacts in gender theory. In isolation, such approaches risk presuming a “natural” correlation between historical individual and her public presentation and conceal the choices, actions, and agency of producers and viewers.

This session seeks papers that explore why patrons and artists might have made certain choices for their final products, as opposed to how a final image was formally achieved for Roman women. What logistical and ideological choices might have factored into a woman’s representation and why? How might these visual choices reveal women’s agency in the absence of textual evidence for their voices? Submissions may focus on individuals or groups of women from a wide range of social classes–imperial, senatorial, business, freed; a range of cultural and geographic backgrounds– Britain to Syria, Romania to North Africa; and a broad chronological range from 7th c. BCE – 4th c CE.