The provincial coinage was transformed during the new regime of Augustus and the adoption of his portrait. Roman interventions, however, were rare and localised, except for Nero.

At the heart of Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2021 novel Klara and the Sun is a singular act of imitation, in which Klara, a synthetic human, is asked to take the place of her owner, the sick child Josie.

This essay addresses this moment, in order to ask how far the novel form is able to perform this kind of ventriloquism, to undertake acts of imitation that might replace or supersede those that they imitate.

In order to respond to this question, the essay suggests, we need to put Klara and the Sun in conversation with the rest of Ishiguro’s oeuvre, which is itself in conversation with the longer history of the novel form. From Artist of the Floating World to The Unconsoled to Klara, Ishiguro has been concerned with the capacity of art to become the reality it imitates, and particularly with the capacity of the novel voice to pass through the boundary between original and copy. Klara might suggest that contemporary technologies have made this boundary newly porous; but the essay argues that the novel form has always sat at the difficult junction between voice and its replications. When he makes an artificial being speak in the voice of its owner, Ishiguro does not depart from the protocols of narrative voice, but rather gains access to its interior mechanisms, in a way that is illuminating for the critical power of fiction under contemporary biopolitical conditions.

The chapter explores the anxious cultural construction of women as intergenerational mediators that emerges from several epistles in Pliny’s collection (3.3 and 4.19; 4.2 and 4.7; 2.7 and 3.10). At once expected to be bearers of their father’s imprint and vehicle for the transmission of their husband’s identity, Roman women were the object of a discourse in which notions of biological filiation significantly intersected with issues of artistic reproduction and literary allusion. Building a typology of intra-, inter-, extra-, and alter-textual relations which connect Pliny’s topic and diction to relevant passages in Martial (6.37 and 38) and Tacitus (Dial. 28-29), my argument illuminates some crucial, common semiotic practices in his age.

Although Mongol authority built its empire through military might and administration, the cultural construction of empire happened through artistic exchange. Visions of desire, beauty, and power – as well as the materials that made creativity possible – were essential to the ideological projects of Mongol imperial reach. As governors of a Eurasian-wide commercial empire, Mongol rulers required effective visual representations of their power that could easily be understood by diverse audiences. This could be achieved through widespread dissemination and integration of material culture. Reliance on already recognizable symbols of authority that could be adapted and repurposed for contemporary political goals was both expedient and effective.

Was demythologization a response to the Third-Century Crisis? With the empire reeling from the combined pressures of civil war, barbarian invasion, plague, and economic depression, perhaps Rome’s elite were drawn to bucolic, seasonal, and philosophical scenes for the allegorical tranquility they offered, as a form of refuge from the turmoil of real life? This chapter interrogates this thesis, with far-reaching implications for how we understand similar arguments launched about other periods in world art.

One of the most striking things about myth on Roman sarcophagi is that, after exiting the stage during the second half of the third century, it returns with a vengeance in the fourth – this time in Christian guise. How are we to conceive of the relation between the polytheistic myths that had long adorned Roman coffins and the Christian myths that succeeded them? What was their altered view of temporality, allegory, and the afterlife? And what is the relevance of sculptural technique and tooling to understanding this relationship? Such is the subject of this book’s closing chapter.

This chapter unveils the author’s view of what was at stake in demythologization: the viewer’s attitude to chronology, to temporality, to characters defined by their residence in earlier time. For confirmation of this claim, the chapter studies archaeological evidence from Rome’s suburbium, examining the altered spatial relationships between house and tomb that came to dominate in the Late Empire. This reveals what was at stake in the third-century disappearance of mythic figures from sarcophagi: new demands among the living, manifested in multiple domains of Roman life, for greater proximity to their dead.

The Introduction first sets the stage by inviting the reader to consider a few Roman sarcophagi in depth. Serving as an introduction to these compelling objects, this also reveals just how odd it was that deities and mythic heroes came to be expelled from their surface decoration in the third century. It then contextualizes that oddity through an overview of main developments within Roman sarcophagus production from the second through the fourth centuries. The book’s scope and terms are then addressed, and its structure laid out.

This chapter addresses the question of whether we have drawn too strong a distinction between the mythic and the non-mythic. What happens if we consider not iconographic criteria, but modal ones? Taken from the viewpoint of function rather than subject matter, the distinction between mythic and mythless imagery becomes shaky indeed. This chapter first revisits the relationship between the mythological and the so-called biographical sarcophagi, then shows how close attention to Roman sculptural technique – what we might call “material iconography” – provides traction for understanding how Roman viewers imagined the relationship between these genres.

This chapter looks at what the author calls a “system of visual communication” in the Seleucid and Ptolemaic empires. It focuses on “portrait concepts,” which refers to the double process of inventing an ideological image of the king’s public body, on the one hand, and maintaining the conventions of particular visual media, the interests of the composer, and the expectations of the recipients, on the other. The portrait concept thus encapsulates communication and exchange before it reaches the viewer’s eyes. Von den Hoff identifies three different periods in terms of their visual systems of communication. Between 323 and 280 BCE, during the Wars of Succession, there was close entanglement between Ptolemaic and Seleucid portrait concepts. They drifted apart in the subsequent period (280–160) due to dynamically changing local challenges. In the final period (160/40 to c. 100), there was a renaissance of earlier types of portraiture. The author’s emphasis on imperial entanglement in the first period, diversification in the second, and historicizing endeavors in the final period raises questions about the local background to which the visual representation of the kings responded.

This chapter reassesses characterisations of the long eighteenth century as one devoted to accumulating anatomies and constructing taxonomies. Scholars have traced a broad movement, across the sciences, politics, and wider culture, toward simplification and categorisation – against the threat of ambiguity and complexity. In particular, critics and historians have identified a drive to identify anatomical, physiological explanations for human character and behaviour. Yet, those other eighteenth-century cultural ‘revolutions’ – the culture of sensibility and the emergence of modern selfhood – indicate a growing emphasis on specificity, individuation, and personal identity, which would seem to oppose the trend toward simplification. How do we account, then, for these seemingly contradictory movements towards simplification on the one hand and complexity on the other? I address this question by focusing on the cultural resonances surrounding certain objects, which ‘perform’ identity at the broad and busy intersection of politics, medicine, literature, and visual culture. In doing so, I show how things and words became fused with bodies in the development of anatomical and physiological knowledge throughout the long eighteenth century.

This chapter examines the strategies of producing and reproducing images of African Americans that subverted a culture of racist imagery created between 1810 and 1830. The portraits of four Black ministers – John Gloucester, Jeremiah Gloucester, Absalom Jones, and Richard Allen – provide opportunities to explore political, religious, and cultural debates facing African Americans during these decades. The acts of commissioning and circulating images underscore these leaders’ claims of citizenship and their right to Black religious independence. The chapter situates their portraits within the derisive and much more popular images of African Americans. Two groups of images studied in the chapter – the “bobalition" prints and Edward Williams Clay's "Life in Philadelphia" series – mock Black success, antislavery work, and patriotism. Analyzing the circulation, intended viewership, and medium of the images examined in this chapter enables a richer understanding of how African Americans recognized that, as cultural producers, they held stakes in the portrayals of blackness. Furthermore, their images expanded and refined discourses of race in the first few decades of the nineteenth century.

Focusing on works by two early nineteenth-century African American artists – the Baltimore portrait painter Joshua Johnson and the author of The Blind African Slave (1810) Boyrereau Brinch – this chapter considers the conceptions of racialized selfhood before 1830. What can we learn from the aesthetic surfaces left by a non-white portraitist about whom not much is known, working within the genre of family portraiture? Additionally, this chapter offers a reading of the visual as central to African American textual production in the early nineteenth century. Early Black writers were keen visual theorists. Brinch’s tale “about” memory and blindness has rarely been considered in relation to the critical tradition of visual culture studies; that this has been so has reduced not only our understanding of a specific African American literary text, but also our understanding of the place of the visual in American cultural production full stop. This chapter considers Johnson’s and Brinch’s surfaces and visuality in relation to early nineteenth-century conceptions of selfhood, race, and interior depth.

This chapter explores how Tudor and Stuart families used portraiture to project and record their Protestant identities and reformed lineages over several generations. It asks why portraits as familiar visual sources displayed within a domestic context became important and considers how visual mnemonics were leveraged to secure spiritual status and determine ancestry or broader social status in a rapidly changing social order. The chapter demonstrates how the display of portraiture helped families recall and celebrate the personal narratives of their own Reformation histories in later centuries. It shows how portraiture could provide an assurance of constancy to reformed Christian ideals and a sense of spiritual stability over time, offering evidence of a potential pattern of election to Christian salvation.

Ovid’s Epistulae ex Ponto 2.8 commemorates the exiled poet’s receipt of a gift of silver images of the Caesars from Rome. This paper argues, with reference to Augustan coinage and Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism, that the poem deconstructs Romans’ self-subjugation to imperial iconography and highlights their role in vesting it with power. Through comic deployment of the pathetic fallacy via a naïve narrative persona, Ovid shows how, from a provincial perspective, the emperor's numen might really appear to reside in his image, placing the emperor literally in his subjects’ hands. Pont. 2.8 therefore comments more generally on the interpretive possibilities, social practices, and psychology surrounding Roman imperial images, locating their power in plural, subjective, democratic acts of creative consumption.