Style and Meaning in Late Antique Art

Ancients and Moderns on Seeing and Thinking

Bassett, Sarah

How do we best see and understand the art of late antiquity? One of the perceived challenges of so doing is that this is a period whose visual production has been defined as stylistically abstract and emotionally spiritual, and therefore elusive. But this is a perception which – in her path-breaking new book – Sarah Bassett boldly challenges, offering two novel lines of interpretative inquiry. She first argues, by focusing on the art of late antiquity in late nineteenth-century Viennese intellectual and artistic circles, that that period's definition of late antique form was in fact a response to contemporaneous political concerns, anticipating modernist thinking and artistic practice. She then suggests that late antique viewers never actually abandoned a sense of those mimetic goals that characterized Greek and Roman habits of representation. This interpretative shift is transformative because it allows us to understand the full range and richness of late antique visual experience.
.- Provides an interdisciplinary overview of late 19th-century art historical developments and the intellectual context in which they developed to describe how the definition of late antique art was develope
.- Explores late ancient rhetorical practice and applies its vocabulary of style to the visual legacy of late antique art
.- Offers a new approach to to the enduring question of how best to see and understand the art of late antiquity