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The Roman Empire achieved the conquest of virtually all of the Western European continent by the first centuries of the first millennium C.E. Hand-in-hand with their extraordinary military and political history goes the use of images conscripted to serve their larger ambitions. This course takes a look at Roman portrait sculpture, as well as the Four Orders of Roman Wall painting, with the broad arch of Rome's fortunes from birth, to rise, and eventual decline. Roman history is defined by its stages of conquests carried out upon its ever-expanding set of neighbors. However, the Roman culture is marked by a willingness to assimilate the markers- often the architecture, artforms, and even religious cults- of the peoples it conquered into its own conglomeration. The closest, and therefore the earliest, influence which became assimilated to the Roman identity was that of the Etruscans, the neighboring Italic culture concentrated in the northern half of the peninsula in regions comprising primarily Tuscany, Umbria, and Lazio today. The earliest government of the Romans was a monarchy, and periodically, those kings were Etruscans themselves. The Etruscan culture provided a basic framework for the hallmarks of later Roman society and artwork: the Romans cremated their dead, as the Etruscans did, and housed their ashes in cinerary urns along Etruscan lines. We also see the Latin language, distinct from the Etruscan script, incorporated into cut-rock formations characteristic of the Etruscan tradition. The art of ancient Rome spans a spectrum of ability, of naturalism, of iconographical fashions, and of media as vast as Rome itself at the height of empire. The Romans were enthusiastic assimilators of all that their conquered people had to offer them in terms of craftsmanship and artistic expertise; the Etruscan influence is formative, and the Greek influence in the early days of Roman expansion informed a style for far longer than Roman artists remained actually capable of realizing that high standard, particularly in the decay and dissolution of late empire. However, one constant remained at the heart of all art created in the service of empire and its often revolving-door of custodians: art was propaganda, and images were designed to communicate a message of power which could be adapted to the requirements and crises of the age. We see that adaptability of Roman artwork nowhere clearer than in the imperial portrait tradition, as it vacillates between Republican realism and its unflinching, no-nonsense attitude of the elder statesmen to the imperial flights of divine fancy we see in the portraits of the Julio-Claudian line dressed up as every god and goddess in the vast pantheon.

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