OPEN LECTURE
21/10 at 18.00

Sinclair Bell  – “In Search of Ancient Aethiopians: Roman “Portraits” of Black Africans within the Expanded Field of Art History”

This paper reunites a corpus of material that has never been studied comprehensively together: marble heads identified as portraits of Aethiopians (“Black” Africans) who lived in the Roman empire. The aim of the lecture is three-fold: first, to determine what iconographical characteristics these works share (e.g. physiognomic, painted) that would allow us to securely identify them as ethnically Aethiopian; second, to interrogate their categorization as “portraits” versus generic heads; and third, to investigate their cultural and social significance through the lens of their findspots (where known), scale, and materiality (specifically, the selection of black versus white marble).
By studying works within this medium as a collective and by foregrounding core issues (e.g., scale, materiality, archaeological context) besides iconography alone, this paper attends to larger issues of how ancient “portraits” can – and cannot – inform us about the representation of ethnicity and social rank in the Roman empire.

Sinclair Bell is Professor of Art History at Northern Illinois University School of Art and Design.