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Miranda Marvin: In the Roman Empire an Aura was a Breeze
In the Roman Empire an Aura was a Breeze
(p. 31 – 58)

Miranda Marvin

In the Roman Empire an Aura was a Breeze

PDF, 28 pages

  • authorship
  • seriality
  • replicas
  • Roman Republic
  • multiples
  • index

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Miranda Marvin

, 1942–2012, was Professor of Art and Classical Studies at Wellesley College. Educated at Bryn Mawr College (B.A.) and Harvard University (Ph.D.), she was twice a visiting professor at Williams College, a Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar, a Visiting Scholar at the Getty Research Institute, and in 2004 Resident in Classics at the American Academy in Rome. The culmination of her scholarly work was her »dazzling« and »magisterial« book, The Language of the Muses.

Walter Cupperi (ed.): Multiples in Pre-Modern Art

Walter Cupperi (ed.)

Multiples in Pre-Modern Art

Hardcover, 304 pages

PDF, 304 pages

In the last years replicated objects have gained an increasingly central position in the discourse about ancient, medieval and early modern art. ›Multiples‹, we are often told, lack uniqueness, invention, autonomy, and sometimes even authorship. Indeed, ›multiples‹ can be powerful multipliers – in that they enhance the ›aura of the originals‹ that they replicate – but they remain secondary indexes pointing to an ›original‹ imbued with significance. Yet, what happens if ›multiples‹ do not refer to other artifacts at all, or if they are associated with other ›multiples‹ rather than with a first version in the mind of their owners? What happened when serially-made ›multiples‹ were not quite identical to each other, as was the rule with pre-modern artifacts? What shaped their identity and the perception of them as identical?
This collection of essays explores different forms of interaction between the making of artifacts in more than one specimen and their reception before the nineteenth century. It addresses media such as metal, wax, plaster, terracotta, textiles, marble, ivory, porcelain, canvases and tables in an attempt to re-assess the current identification of the mediality of prints with that of pre-modern ›multiples‹ in general.