Roman and Early Christian Painting

Funk & Wagnalls. Very Good/Very Good. 1965. Hard Cover. Slim 4to Dust jacket unclipped, in clear protective sleeve, closed tear. Original cloth boards with bright gilt titling and illustration. No ownership marks. Colour & b/w illustrations. 207 pages clean and tight. The world of the ancients encompassed both the despair of Lucretius and the joyful optimism of the apostles. It was a world of which Flaubert said, "the gods no longer existed, and Christ had not yet arrived. Here, between the period of Cicero and that of Marcus Aurelius, was a unique moment in time, when man existed alone, a greatness unknown before or since..." At the artistic crossroads of this world stood Rome, beneficiary of influences coming from Etruria, Magna Graecia, the Hellenistic centers of the Mediterranean-aesthetically connected in a direct line with Greece. In ROMAN AND EARLY CHRISTIAN PAINTING, Gerald Gassiot-Talabot explores these influences on Roman and Early Christian art, but he also pays special attention to those fundamentals that make it characteristically Roman. Beginning his study with the earliest examples of Roman painting, found in the necropolis of the Vulci and the tombs on the Esquili.ne hill at the beginning of the third century, the author traces the evolution of Roman art through its period of strict allegiance to Greek art to its achievement of an anecdotal, half-pious/halfmocking art peculiarly its own. "On the one hand," he writes, "the Hellenic heritage defined the techniques and pictorial styles, selected the themes, and influenced the taste of the more refined and cultivated strata of Roman society; on the other, a powerful indigenous current gave this art its color and individual flavor. To the portrayal of myths and heroes was added a realism and a sense of history in the portrayal of daily life and domestic scenes." Through detailed examination of the great painting cycles of the Villa Boscoreale and the Villa of the Mysteries, the famed erotic art of Pompeii, great Roman works of architecture, and the less famous but equally revealing art of everyday life, the author makes a persuasive case for a long-overdue recognition of Roman art as an important creative achievement in its own right. Bringing to his discussion of Early Christian painting the same insights into the historical and cultural factors at work, Gassiot-Talabot shows how significant in forming this art were the painters' need to paint for a humbler public and their primary concern with the interior world of faith rather than the world of outward appearance. He discusses the ways in which many of the ancient gods and heroes were adapted to the new religion and its art, and points out the first signs of the great art of the Byzantine mosaic which was to follow. Accompanying and enriching the text is a lavish selection of paintings, a discursive dictionary of all important terms and works referred to, historical chronologies and a dating of archaeological discoveries, plus a special section of Evidence and Documents, in which contemporary writers such as Pliny the Elder and Pliny the Younger, Vitruvius, and Suetonius shed further light on the life of their times. .