Colour and meaning in Roman society, literature and art

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This project attempts to understand how Romans of the early empire categorised, organised and applied colours, and outlines the differences and similarities between ancient and modern concepts of colour. The study of colour has become familiar territory in recent anthropology, linguistics, art history and archaeology. Classicists, however, have traditionally subordinated the study of colour to form (particularly in art and architecture, but also in literary ekphrasis and natural philosophy). By drawing together evidence and ideas floated by contemporary philosophers, elegists, epic writers, historians and satirists, this research reinstates colour as an essential informative unit for the classification and evaluation of the Roman world. It also demonstrates that the questions of what colour is and how it functions - as well as how it could be abused and mislead the senses - were high on the Roman intellectual agenda. The study of colour, and the senses in general, has received sporadic attention from classical linguists and archaeologists since the first half of the nineteenth century. The last few years, however, have seen, for the first time, the development of collaborative interdisciplinary projects on perception in antiquity in the UK and on the continent. My work on concepts of colour in early imperial Rome targets something of an intellectual black hole in classical perception studies, bridging the gap between several important studies of colour in Classical Greece, and E. James's comprehensive study of light and colour in Byzantine art. My monograph opens up a window into the use of and debates about colour and perception in the early Empire, but it also operates as a critical response to other studies of perception in antiquity, and proposes an intellectual alternative to the traditional (and problematic) approach that favours the ancient prioritisation of light and luminosity over hue. My work develops as its central argument the line that Roman uses and discussions of colour were principally concerned with the relationship between categories of visual perception and the inherent nature of the perceived object; thus, uses of colour that seemed abstract, or phenomena that invited abstract categories (such as the rainbow), were treated as philosophical or ethical problems. This basic principle of perception appears to have guided most Roman exploitation and interpretation of colour.The connected article on 'The importance of colour on ancient marble sculpture' brings important art historical research recently pioneered in Munich and Rome on the identification and reconstruction of pigments on ancient marble sculpture to English classical scholarship and, by applying some of the ideas explored in the monograph on concepts of colour in ancient Rome, addresses the significance of colour and colour typologies for understanding and evaluating ancient marble artefacts. This article, in order to address the broader art historical audience of the journal, will also examine evidence for painted sculpture in the Byzantine and Medieval periods and (where appropriate) consider the significance of paint on sculpture in non-Western cultures.