Research and Innovation

This paper analyzes the lived experience of Roman baths.  At Caerleon, Vindolanda, and elsewhere in Britain, small finds reveal experiences of drinking, dining, or gambling, and provide insights into gender, social status, and the diverse audience who used or worked in those baths.  By combining the archaeological and antiquarian evidence for small finds at the Baths of Caracalla, this paper queries the human dimension of Rome’s imperial baths as a point of comparison.  In so doing, this study restores agency to an understudied class of objects while expanding our understanding of Roman baths’ social life in different (regional, temporal) contexts.

In antiquity, the Villa Arianna at Stabiae was decorated with all art media: wall paintings, mosaics, water features, garden plantings, and minor art objects.  This paper focuses on the paintings to analyze the ways in which decoration engaged the viewer and, ultimately, enlivened the visual experience of the villa.  The case studies and various rooms and spaces examined scrutiny the various techniques through which artists and patrons could engage painted decoration to create a dynamic relationship between the villa and its viewers.  Ultimately, this paper queries the ways in which the colors, composition, iconography, and materiality of the Roman wall paintings at Stabiae speak to the lived experience of a Roman villa.

In the Roman world, public bathing was an important part of daily life.  Since antiquity, Roman baths have been emulated, adapted, and reinterpreted. This paper traces the ways in which Roman baths have had a profound impact on ideas of cleanliness, hygiene, and recreation, and have inspired people from the medieval period to the modern day to adopt both the architectural forms and social routines of Roman bathing.  This paper also examines the ways in which the design and decoration of Roman baths have also had an impact by inspiring entirely new building types and works of civic architecture, particularly railway stations, in Europe and the United States from the late 19th century onward.

This essay introduces a new archaeological research project undertaken jointly by Dr. Maryl Gensheimer (University of Maryland) and Dr. Elizabeth Greene (University of Western Ontario) that analyzes wooden shoes traditionally associated with use in Roman baths to protect the wearer from hot surfaces and slippery floors.  Through examination of the approximately 40 examples preserved at Roman Vindolanda, Drs. Gensheimer and Greene reassess their original forms and functions.

This article offers an analysis of the Feminine Sacrificial Attendant figure type on the Column of Trajan frieze in Rome. We first present a detailed study of the Column of Trajan examples, focusing on both composition and broader narrative context. We argue, based on this methodology, that the traditional identification of these figures as masculine must be abandoned, in favor of a more demonstrable identification as feminine. By analyzing these figures as materializations of a sacrificial role—that both referred to contemporary norms and participated in their construction—this article demonstrates that our feminine identification has wide implications beyond the frieze itself. In particular, this figure type broadens our understanding of the variety of players in the life of the Roman army and the rites of Roman state religion more generally.

Many images of early modern homoeroticism are set around bodies of water. From Domenico Cresti’s Bathers at San Niccolò to Dürer’s Bathhouse, scenes with palpable same-sex attraction are often animated by the movement of water, in ponds, lakes, and brooks. With examples of how homoeroticism took on liquid qualities, this article argues that much more is going on when queer bonds are visualized in the early modern world. With reference to queer philology, i.e., how the histories of both language and sexuality are interconnected and mutually informative, I identify liquid qualities that also characterize homoerotic dynamics, whether they be transparent, tangible, ungraspable, or mobile. I argue that same-sex love happened everywhere and all the time, yet it also remained secretive, transgressive, and beyond definition, so that it is via water that many aspects of queerness were understood and expressed in both words and images. 

https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/1650-1850/9781684485239/

This essential new volume serves as a critical resource and details the richness and complexity of the work of Joyce J. Scott (b. 1948), beginning with an overview of the artist’s 50-year career—an interconnected, community-generating practice that embraces performance art, beaded necklaces and sculptures, wall hangings, and prints. Interviews with the artist by Leslie King Hammond and Valerie Cassel Oliver focus on Scott’s matrilineage and womanist ethos and on the genre-defying choreography of her career across disciplines. Six thematic essays by established and emerging scholars discuss the ancient and global reach of beads, including Yorùbá traditions; consider the utility of satire and performance in connection with the work of emerging Black artists; and explore the significance of geography, history, and place. Excerpts from foundational out-of-print texts and an illustrated chronology annotated by Scott appear alongside contributions by artists Sonya Clark, Oletha DeVane, Jeffrey Gibson, Kay Lawal-Muhammad, Malcolm Peacock, and William C. Rhodes III. Scott makes difficult subjects intimately felt, confronting histories of trauma through wearable art and exquisite sculpture. With humor and pathos, she twists menacing stereotypes into grotesque and tender retorts that spur conversation, making art a vehicle for learning, reflection, and healing.

Distributed for the Seattle Art Museum and Baltimore Museum of Art

Exhibition Schedule:
 
Baltimore Museum of Art
(March 24–July 14, 2024) 
 
Seattle Art Museum
(October 17, 2024–January 20, 2025) 

The Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1690 became the first government in the Western world to print paper money, the imagery for which initiated an indigenous American art form of remarkable dynamism and originality. After the Revolutionary War, disillusioned by how quickly its promiscuous printing of Continental currency had led to hyperinflation, the U.S. government left it to private institutions such as state-chartered banks to carry on this artistic American tradition. Adorned with a vast variety of images, bank notes soon became the fledgling country’s primary currency. With pressures of the Civil War, the federal government in 1861 began taking charge of the paper-money supply by creating a national currency; simultaneously, the Confederate States of America was creating a competing self-image, making heavy use of bank-note vignettes. Later, collaboration between government engravers and well-known artists on the 1896 Silver Certificates marked the apex of U.S. government currency design. For two centuries, American creativity and technical ingenuity resulted in imagery on paper money that helped create and enhance the nation’s imagined self.

Augusta Savage intended to build monuments. In the 1930s and early 1940s, the
Harlem-based sculptor envisioned memorials to Jean Baptiste Point DuSable, the vaudeville star
Florence Mills, the World War I service of the “Harlem Hellfighters,” and the writer and civil

rights leader James Weldon Johnson. None of these proposed works was erected, and they
have not been included in scholarship examining Savage’s work and career. This essay considers
Savage’s thwarted efforts as critical reminders that material absence does not connote a lack of
vision, intention, or labor. I argue that Savage’s unbuilt monuments reveal her ambition to
intervene in the Whiteness and maleness of the American memorial landscape and claim
monuments as sites where Black lives and concerns can be represented. Engaging critical
approaches to archival absence and the power of monuments, I explore the space these unbuilt
monuments would have taken up in the world.

This state-of-the-field article surveys the economic histories of Netherlandish art. Tracing major contributions by scholars following in the footsteps of Michael Montias, we present the developments of art historical econometrics and consider the evolving ways in which economic analyses address topics such as supply, demand, price, labor, and form. We show the various applications of economic methods and pay particular attention to the interrelations between quantitative research and other modes of inquiry: archival, technical, biographical, stylistic, digital, regional, global, and so forth.