Ancient Roman art for beginners

How to read the labels Historical what the old sources say. Later tradition what later writers added. Modern modern practice and my own notes.

Roman art is sometimes treated as Greek art’s practical younger sibling. That is unfair. The Romans gave us the honest portrait, the painted room you can step into, concrete domes and a public art of messages, on coins, arches and columns, that every later empire copied.

Three layers

Historical What objects and texts show. Later tradition What later Europe made of Rome. Modern How Roman gods and images are used today.

The Etruscans first

Historical Before Rome dominated Italy, the Etruscans flourished in central Italy from about the eighth to the third century BCE. Their language can be read aloud but is only partly understood. Their art is known mainly from tombs: painted chambers with banquets, dancers and musicians, and terracotta sarcophagi with reclining couples on the lid. The Sarcophagus of the Spouses from Cerveteri, about 520 BCE, in the National Etruscan Museum in Rome, shows a husband and wife smiling together at a banquet. The Met’s bronze Monteleone chariot, from the sixth century BCE, is one of the finest pieces of ancient bronze work anywhere.

The honest face and the ageless emperor

Historical Roman Republican portraits show wrinkles, sagging cheeks and receding hair. Scholars call this verism. For a Roman senator, those marks were signs of experience and service to the state.

Marble portrait of the emperor Augustus, about 14 to 37 CE. The Metropolitan Museum of Art (07.286.115). Image: Open Access, public domain (CC0).

Augustus, the first emperor, who ruled from 27 BCE to 14 CE, chose a different message. His portraits show him forever young and calm, with a fringe of locks modeled on Classical Greek sculpture, even when he was in his seventies. Later emperors used style the same way. Caracalla frowns with a soldier’s toughness; Constantine, the first Christian emperor, gazes upward with huge eyes, a sign of spiritual authority that looks forward to Byzantine art.

Rooms you can walk into

Cubiculum (bedroom) from the Villa of P. Fannius Synistor at Boscoreale, about 50 to 40 BCE. The Metropolitan Museum of Art (03.14.13a to g). Image: Open Access, public domain (CC0).

Historical When Vesuvius erupted in 79 CE, it buried Pompeii, Herculaneum and the villas around them, preserving painted walls in remarkable detail. The Met has a whole bedroom, a cubiculum, from a villa at Boscoreale painted about 50 to 40 BCE. Its walls open into painted colonnades, city views and a garden grotto. Scholars group Roman wall painting into four “Pompeian styles”, a nineteenth-century scheme that is a helpful guide rather than a rule the Romans used.

Building and public messages

Historical Roman builders used concrete to make vaults and domes on a new scale. The Pantheon in Rome, rebuilt under Hadrian in the 120s CE, still has the largest unreinforced concrete dome in the world, open to the sky through a central oculus. Public reliefs such as the Ara Pacis, the Altar of Augustan Peace, and Trajan’s Column, which spirals with scenes of war in Dacia, turned politics into pictures for everyone to read.

The esoteric angle

Historical Roman homes had shrines called lararia for the household spirits, the lares, often painted on the wall with a serpent below. People also wore amulets, consulted astrologers and wrote curse tablets on lead. Wall paintings in Pompeii’s Villa of the Mysteries show a ritual sequence, probably connected with Dionysus, whose exact meaning is debated.

Later tradition Many grimoires, festivals and symbols of later Western magic passed through Rome, including much of the Greek magical papyri written in Roman Egypt. My Hekate course explores some of these texts.

Modern Some people today keep a household shrine inspired by the lararium. It is a lovely idea, and honest about being a modern revival.

Try it yourself

Find a black-and-white photo of any Roman marble portrait. Trace its outline and color it, thinking of skin, eyes, hair and clothing. Then look up a scholarly painted reconstruction. How does color change the face, and the message?

Before and after

Before this: Ancient Greek art.

After this: Byzantine art.

See every movement in order on the art movements timeline, or learn to look step by step in the free Art History for Beginners course.