 Good morning, everyone, and welcome to day two of our graduate student symposium in the history of art. The symposium is now in its 25th year, and it's hosted by the Barnes Foundation in partnership with Bryn Mawr College, Temple University and the University of Pennsylvania. This symposium is one of the premier forums for new research and new ideas in the field. Speakers come from nine top PhD programs in the area. The Barnes inherited most of the role from the Welfare Museum of Art four years ago, and we are so glad that we did because it has really become one of our favorite events of the year. For a long time, the Barnes Museum was a single way of looking at art, and that's no longer true. Over the past 15 years, we have become an institution that actively produces new scholarship and new knowledge about art and collections, bringing in contemporary methodologies, and graduate students have been absolutely vital to that effort. Our program this year is a double session. Because of the pandemic, we moved all of the talks that were supposed to happen last year this year, combining them with this year's speakers, which means that we'll have a total of 18 talks between last Friday and today, so you'll hear nine talks today. You can probably imagine how much work went into planning for this, and I really need to thank a few people, especially Aliyah Palumbo, who's our senior coordinator for academic programs and adult education. She has just been absolutely heroic in organizing every single aspect of this, you know, the past couple of weeks, and anybody who is participating in the program knows how central she has been, so thank you so much, Aliyah. Thank you. Huge thanks to our AV team, especially Gillan Riggs, for taking such special care. I'm always amazed at the work that you do, and just how professional it all is. Thank you to the co-organizing institutions, and to Lisa Saltzman at Brynmar, who was our lead partner this year. Thank you to our keynote speaker, Jonathan Katz, who gave a fabulous talk last week, and who chaired a session last week, and who's chairing another session today. Thank you to Carl Walsh, who is a postdoctoral fellow in Egyptian art at the Barnes Foundation, and he's going to be chairing our first session this morning, and of course, thank you to all the presenting students for sharing your work with us. And with that, I will turn it over to Lisa Saltzman. Good morning, everyone. It's my pleasure to introduce day two's proceedings, and I again want to thank Jonathan Katz for opening this year's symposium last Thursday evening with his eloquent and elegiac account of how art and activism came together in the 1980s in an artistic community devastated by AIDS to animate even the most obdurate of abstraction with political purpose and subversive meaning. And I now want to offer apologies to all those among today's audience who heard what will follow last Friday morning, but I did want to offer a little bit of history for those among you who are new to the Philadelphia Graduate Student Symposium at the Barnes. Roughly 25 years ago, at the initiative of Ann Darnancourt, faculty members from Brynmar, Penn, and Temple joined with colleagues at the Philadelphia Museum of Art to plan and launch a graduate student symposium in the history of art for the city of Philadelphia. In so doing, the idea was not simply to mimic those graduate symposia long in existence at the Frick and the National Gallery. Yes, there would be a keynote and a roster of graduate student speakers drawn from regional institutions and as at the National Gallery introduced by their advisors. But built into the very structure of our symposium would be an active forum of intellectual engagement. This would be modeled and facilitated by the keynote speaker who would also serve as the initial respondent during the day of panels and papers to follow, engaging the graduate students as the scholars they are training to be, and then opening that opportunity to the audience. Under the leadership of Tom Collins and his deputy director of research, interpretation and education, Martha Lucy, with whom it is always a real pleasure to collaborate. Since the spring of 2017, we have not only shifted our symposium to a new venue, but with the Barnes as our new institutional partner, we have reconceived the model of the symposium, now explicitly incorporating curators into the program as well. The history of this graduate symposium coincides with my own history in Philadelphia, gives me a special sense of connection to it. With the exception of a sabbatical leave or two, I've heard roughly 25 years of keynotes, and if memory serves, Molly Nesbit was our first, or at least the first one Brynmar was co-hosting, and I've witnessed generations of graduate students debuting their research. And though I don't have a file of those old programs, and I don't know that anyone archived them, I would like to imagine that at least a few of those graduate student presenters are now in the ranks of the faculty of our local and regional partners, faculties that, at least in the case of Brynmar, have almost completely transformed themselves, David Kast and I being the only holdovers from that inaugural moment. All that said, I am not here to reminisce, but to introduce, and so without further ado, it is my great pleasure to welcome you to the second day of the first purely virtual iteration of the Philadelphia graduate symposium on the history of art. And with that, I will turn things over to Carl Walsh, who will introduce this morning's panel and papers. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our first session of the day. It's my pleasure to introduce our first panel of speakers who prize all of our ancient art for the day, covering from the first millennium BC to the first millennium AD, and ranging from a variety of materials such as steel and sculpture and architecture from a variety of sites across Egypt, Jordan and Italy. So our first speaker for today is Amy Miranda from Johns Hopkins University, who is going to be presenting her talk, Building Community Through Multicensory Experiences of Architecture in Jarris. And she's going to be introduced by her supervisor, Dr. Marion Felvin, who is the W.H. Collins Vickers Chair in Archaeology and Professor of History of Art and Near Eastern Studies. I'd like to introduce Dr. Amy Miranda. Amy, who was slated to speak last year, received her PhD from Johns Hopkins University in August 2020 with a dissertation entitled, Relational Spaces of the Roman Empire, Spatial Experiences of the Provinces in the Antonine Principle, 138-192 CE. The study offers an innovative approach to analyzing imperial and local community building as brought into being through spatial experiences in three case studies. The urban layouts at Jarris and Jordan and Duga Tunisia, Arches in Desensoins France and Tripoli-Libya, and Mosaic floors in Antioch, Turkey, and Achola Tunisia. Challenging the center periphery model of the Roman Empire, Amy argues that a coherent imperial hole is constituted by a varied weave and highly specific localized senses of belonging, a totality that she describes as an integrated polycentric network. Amy is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Urban Network Evolutions at our house university in Denmark. Her talk today is titled, Building Community Through Multisensory Experiences of Architecture in Jarris. Hi, good morning, and thank you to Marion and Carl for that introduction. This style Corinthian temple on a high platform is a canonical form across Roman temples in the capital and the provinces since the Republican period. Use of such terminology to describe Roman temples implies standardization across the Empire's architectural landscape and emphasizes similarities over differences, painting a picture of a homogeneous architectural community. This language is an established coine among scholars of the classical world, but considering such formal descriptions of architecture comprehensive engenders colonialist views by implying that the provinces drew upon the city of Rome for architectural and spatial forms. I would suggest that despite the prevalence of hexa-style Corinthian temples across the city of Rome and its provinces, the seemingly standard form can develop significant diversity across the imperial community. As such, in my paper, I develop an approach that decolonizes understandings of Roman architecture by highlighting the role of movement in producing space. With movement, architecture and human actors become co-conspirators in building local identities that contribute to a diverse yet empirically coherent Roman community. My focus today is on one of the ancient cities, Gerasa, excuse me, present-day Geras Jordan, which was a major caravan city in the Roman province of Arabia that in the second century CE encompassed Jordan, the Southern Levant, the Northern Arabian Peninsula, and the Sinai Peninsula as a city on the geographical edges of the Empire and a member of the Decapolis, a loose federation of the most Hellenized cities in the Near East, according to Pliny. Geras provides an ideal case study for examining local idiosyncrasy in tension with pan-imperial conformity, as well as the full range of in-betweenness in its monumental Temple of Artemis, a hexa-style Corinthian temple on a high platform. I will first deploy an approach to the Temple of Artemis that draws upon phenomenology, affect, and sensory studies to offer one possible experience of Geras's cityscape. Crucial to my approach is the tension between man-made monumentality and the natural world. I develop a particular focus on sunlight, which generates heat and shadows, thereby shaping an individual's movement and the overall urban spatial experience. Second, I explore how movement through Geras to the Temple of Artemis produced spatial experiences that complicate notions of sameness and differentness within the genre of Roman imperial temple architecture. A decolonized understanding of Geras and its architecture, I suggest, can develop a rich picture of imperial belonging that is heterogeneous and dynamic. During the Antonine Principate 138-192 CE, Geras's cityscape underwent dramatic transformations. The Temple of Artemis was a new construction high up on a hill in the center of the city. The overall complex was vast, spanning both sides of the avenue. Likely the result of local elite patronage rather than imperial sponsorship, the monumentalization that took place changed urban experiences for every community in the city, not only affecting what is seen, but also what is unseen. And as a result, shapes how one moves through the city and understands the environment. Seeing and movement are often dependent upon light, and while there are many factors that shape spatial experience, I suggest that in the Temple of Artemis, the role of sunlight is understudied. A picture of an archaeology of sunlight has been developed for the ancient Near East by Mary Sheperson, who has elegantly shown that it is impossible to study light separate from space. I would suggest that the reverse is also true, that space cannot be discussed separate from light. Without light, forms are imperceptible, but just as light reveals and changes spaces, adding to their dynamics, light can also be transformed and harnessed by architecture, meaning that the study of light is made accessible through elements that can be measured and described. For example, the architecture and decoration of buildings, the urban plan, a city's geographical orientation, and the change of season are just a few ways to assess the effects of light. While particularly associated with vision, sunlight affects all the senses as well as one's movement. Light's heat-giving properties affect the senses of touch, the heat can intensify the smells of the body and the city, the city will sound differently depending on the time of day, and light will affect the tastes in one's mouth as they go throughout their day. Light creates a variety of degrees of visibility and as such restricts or enables movement throughout space. For example, if you cannot see where you are going, then you will often slow down in order to negotiate the space. In this way, light influences one's daily behaviors. When visiting Jerosh from the south, you first encounter Hadrian's Arch. This overwhelming experience of the monument establishes the tenor for a visit to the city as its three bays span the central avenue and tower above visitors. In the summer months, its pale, creamy limestone is a warm tone against a clear blue sky, and its bays offer small pockets of welcome shade from the intense sun. Standing in front of the arch, engaging through its central bay, you can see in the distance the temple of Artemis up on its hill, slightly blue and hazy from the cool tone of the atmospheric light. The archway provides a monumental frame for this temple, which resides in the heart of the city, but it disappears from view as you pass beneath the shadowy central bay and approach the city. The play between seen and unseen sets up a visual tension that is not only caused by Jerosh's architecture and urban plan, and the creation and obstruction of sight lines, but also through the juxtaposition of light and shadow, which contributes to a fully embodied experience of the city through the senses other than sight. Engagements with light and shadow generate the rhythm of the city and set certain spaces apart by developing your journey from a superficial perception of structures to fully embodied experience. While your experience is unique to each city despite shared architectural traits across the buildings of the Roman Empire, the question of the regularity of design is complicated as the buildings stand in distinctive landscapes. The same or similar architecture creates a very different effect depending on the climate and ecology of its setting. The effects of monumentality are also significant to your experience. Monumentality is not mere scale, but as I will demonstrate the culmination of movement throughout the city. This assertion follows Augusta McMahon who has suggested that simple scale is not enough to make a monument. The setting and the journey are vital contributions. And I would argue that the shared aspects of the journey build community. As such, focus on the permanence of monumentality and the ephemeral effects of light on the urban experience is one way to negotiate local and pan-imperial communities while also offering a way forward in studies of Roman urbanism more generally. From Hadrian's Arch, you can then proceed northwards to find yourself flanked by the remains of shops on the left that are built into the structure of Geroche's Circus. You then pass through an archway and a large retaining wall will then rise up to the left. While you are not physically descending in space, the height of the surrounding foundations together with the barrel vault before you builds the sensation of going underground. You must pass through an arched shadowy passageway, this one the stairway that leads to the Temple of Zeus and then, after walking through the darkness of the vault, emerge into the sunlight and must turn right to take either a ramp or staircase upwards towards the so-called Omul Plaza. In both summer and winter, the action of walking through the vaulted passage is a dramatic change from the sunlight above. The summers bring intense dry heat, in which case the shade is cool and very welcome, perhaps enticing you to linger and relish in the shade. In the winters, the temperatures in the shadows are less inviting, creating a tunnel of cool air that you might seek to rush through with your head down. These experiences are the first tastes of the rhythms of the city. You begin to experience how light and shadow, in addition to the architectural forms, are articulating Geroche's spaces. As you continue to move throughout the city, you will see and feel changes in atmosphere that divide the urban plan. Light and shadow, in addition to providing a rhythm, affects perceptions of scale and your level of intimacy of a space. While familiarity with certain spaces are intimate to you due to previous knowledge, light and shadow still affect behavior and patterns of movement. The journey through the city is full of shifting atmospheres that define social interactions. My use of atmosphere follows Christian Borch, whose definition of atmosphere is too pronged. Atmospheres relate to how we perceive and experience spaces, or immediate appreciation or spontaneous emotion. Encounters with buildings are very much bodily in nature. We innately sense buildings, feel their material haptic qualities, hear their sounds, see their lights, sense their temperature and smells, etc. As such, I consider atmospheres a tool to enter into questions of architecture and how it shapes unique local communities and their architecture. As sending up into the oval plaza, the ground underfoot changes from dirt to white stone, and the ring of ivory-toned ionic columns shining in the sun seemingly appears nowhere and is a rare experience in Roman architecture. The height of the columns and the entablature are effective, but the dramatic shift in atmosphere comes from the seeming openness of this demarcated oval space. After walking a long, narrow, straight path, the warm halo of light the columns produce by reflecting the sunlight immerses you. The sensation of going through the shadows of a short vaulted tunnel and then turning right to step into the sunlight again and climb up a short flight of steps may not necessarily slow you down, but the juxtaposition builds tension and the sensation of traveling up out of darkness, however short, adds to the drama that reaches a denouement with the open expanse of the oval plaza. Continuing north along the path of the avenue, you approach the temple precinct from the colonnaded Cardomaximus. The temple is not visible from the street, but its presence is signaled by the increased height of the Corinthian columns in the colonnade on both sides of the street, indicating an important change in space. All you see from the street is a monumental gateway. You then begin your journey up an imposing stairway that, after many steps, begins to reveal the temple. During most of the day, the approach to the temple of Artemis would be in direct sunlight. While this provides you the ability to see clearly, your straight path up the steps to the temple would be a seemingly quick ascent. However, the long steep climb under the hot sun slows you down on your way to confronting the temple's imposing facade. When you finally encounter the temple of Artemis, it may formally be a hexa-style Corinthian temple on a high platform. However, its atmosphere, shaped by light and monumentality, and your journey are specific to Jerosh and nowhere else. Although Roman cities have the same architecture, the different way that these are combined with local topography, environment, and climate are unique experiences that contribute to local identities. That is, within a certain range of experiences, everyone at Jerosh shares certain experiences of the architecture, which will be different at some other city. Locally, movement ties individuals' experiences together. The journey and all the possibility it offers allows individuals to collaborate with spaces and make monuments meaningful. Movement and architecture work together to build experiences and shape constructions of local identity and community belonging. For example, on the opposite side of the empire in ancient Emerita Augusta, present-day Merida, Spain, stands a hexa-style Corinthian temple dedicated to Diana. Unlike Jerosh, which has an urban plan shaped by a hilly landscape, Merida is flat, allowing the Romans to construct a wholly orthogonal city. In the heart of Merida, on the forum space, the community constructed their temple of Diana. The journey through Merida's different combination of architecture and topography provides a distinct local experience. These two temples are the same architecture and thus participate in the larger pan-imperial community, but the experience of them is unique and locally specific. My study of the movement through Jerosh allows me to suggest that the dynamism of the city generated a suitably unique urban environment that contributes to the variegated weave of local and pan-imperial Roman identity. My approach supplements traditional understandings of ancient cities by asking how they were experienced. I develop certain aspects as pan-imperial while others speak more to the local. So on the one hand, there are features of the Roman city that recur in such a way as to create a Roman community. On the other hand, each city's distinct environment, topography, and climate creates specific idiosyncratic experiences that form local community. Thank you. Thanks so much, Amy. That was fantastic. I have so many questions because this is relatively close to my own area of interest in research as well and looking at architecture as more than just a series of features and thinking about how humans actually experience the space and how that is really important in considering ancient structures in general. So I have so many questions, but we'll leave that till the end. And I'd also just encourage everyone as well who is watching, if you have any questions for our speakers, please pop it into the chat and we can bring them up in the Q&A session at the end. So we're going to be moving on to our next speaker, who is going to be taking us to Egypt this time. I'd like to introduce Andrea Middleton, who is at Pennsylvania State University. She's going to be talking about Mendes and Arsinoe Philadelphia, and we're going to be introduced to her by her supervisor, Dr. Elizabeth Wolters, who is the associate professor of art history. Hello, I'm Elizabeth Jane Wolters, associate professor of art history at the Pennsylvania State University and director of the Templeton Hierocomplus Project in southern Egypt. Thank you for this opportunity for each of these excellent graduate students to present research. Andrea Middleton is one of our wonderful doctoral candidates. Her dissertation, Worshiping Arsinoe II, Philadelphia's primary field, of course, is ancient Egyptian art and architecture. Andrea, as she prefers to be called, has chosen this queen, Arsinoe II, the heart of her dissertation. Today she'll focus on honor given to that Ptolemaic queen, which, you know, is easier for us to say Greek, and yet you see her as an Egyptian towering queen in granite. And the topic of the presentation today includes and focuses on an Egyptian stela, another traditional monument. A great honor from the site of Mendes in the Delta of Egypt, a trilingual inscription that Andy has translated. Her lectures and publications include collapsing identities of Ptolemaic queens and early modern and Roman culture and the Ptolemaic statue group. That includes, of course, this one of Arsinoe, a part of Egyptian monuments, Roman propaganda and papal intent. So the afterlife, of course, of these monuments and this queen is also intriguing, Andy. So please welcome her and I hope you have questions so that she can enjoy a dialogue today. Thank you very much. Good morning. Thanks to Carl and Dr. Walters for those introductions. Mendes is in the eastern Nile Delta, located along the now silted up Mendesian branch of the Nile. Mendes experienced ebbs and flows in its religious, national and royal import. Its location is prime for trade with Mesopotamia and the city flourished in the first millennium BCE as an international trading port with their chief export bean perfume. And it served as the capital city during the fourth century BCE. Mendes was pillaged and cult statues and sacred texts were destroyed under Artaxerxes during the second Persian period from 343 to 332 BCE. During the early reign of Ptolemy II Philadelphus from 283 to 246, the king took particular steps to connect the royal family with the sacred site of Mendes, specifically through the veneration of Arsinoe II Philadelphus. In this paper, I attempt to understand the deification of Arsinoe, the one who loves her brother, in the Mendesian context. Born about 316 BCE, Arsinoe Philadelphus is the primogenitor of Ptolemy I Soter, the founder of the Ptolemaic dynasty, and his third wife, Berenike I. Arsinoe's life before death is nearly non-existent in Egyptian sources. However, the Mendes stela pastumously records a royal visit to the gnome, includes Arsinoe's appointment as high priestess here, and her eventual death and deification. Based on events in the text, the stelae dates to about 260 BCE. I have studied the stelae extensively and have produced my own translation of the text. The text was translated and published in 1875 by Heinrich Bruch. The German text that was published by Bruch was then translated into English in 1876 by Samuel Birch. Linguistically, there have been changes in our approach to this language since these publications, especially with regard to verbal forms and identification of names with individuals. The Mendes stela was discovered in three pieces in Tel Temay. It is made of limestone and is approximately 77 centimeters wide and 148 centimeters tall. Muiz, or Tel Temay, in Egyptian, is referred to as Tama'ut, the new land, due to its reclamation from the inundation. And it developed in the first half of the first millennium BCE. Tama'ut is south of the main temple site of the Ramgad of Mendes, separated by the Nile, but still connected religiously and economically with the parent temple. Whether or not Tel Temay was the intended space for the stela is questionable, but I believe its fine spot reflects a later move of the object. The fine spot of the stela does not seem to be its original location, since locative hieroglyphs on the monument itself place it in Anpet and Jeddah, not Tama'ut. A figural lunette crowns the stela and 28 lines of texts are recorded below. The lunette is divided into two parts, the winged sun disc above and the offering seen below. Pendent uraei are suspended from the sun disc at the top of the stelae. The wings follow the curved form of the stelae itself, enveloping the offering seen in its protective embrace. The top of this lunette contains an apotropaic suite of imagery, permanently preserving and protecting the offering seen below. The offering seen is also divided into two, those who give offerings and those who receive them. This recurring duality complements the double nature of arsinoe, queen and goddess, and the jeminent characteristics of the cult of these Theoi Adelphoi. Why would the Ptolemies choose to invest in mendis? Mendis itself is truly ancient, with its earliest settlements dating to 3400 BCE. The age value of the site alone is enough to warrant royal attention. The landscape at the site daily mimics primordial creation, with morning mist gently receding to reveal mounds of land. From the 7th through the 4th centuries BCE, Mendis reached its maximum size, 3.5 kilometers distance north-south. And it was an international riverine harbor town. During the 29th dynasty, a short list of four pharaohs who ruled from 398 to 380 BCE made mendis their capital. Therefore, mendis had both primordial importance, but also recent political status, and thereby allowed the Ptolemies to connect with both periods of history. By restoring temples that had been destroyed by the Persians in the previous decades, Ptolemy Philadelphus showcased his piety in fulfilling the basic role of an Egyptian pharaoh in maintaining temples, the literal mansions of the gods. While the Ptolemies are technically foreign rulers of Egypt, they do everything they can to appear as Egyptian as possible. By reviving sacred spaces, Philadelphus asserts his commitment to local Egyptian centers of worship. A row of stars marks the boundary between the top of the lunette and the offering scene, dividing heaven from earth. The offering scene is also divided into two. Central and receiving offerings is the ram of Mendis. This ram is an extinct breed of North African sheep, the Ovasari's long pipes, and is often misidentified as a goat. Like the cult of the apus bull, there was a single ram selected for his pure white coat who served as the avatar of the ram god of Mendis. These animals and their mothers lived comfortable lives on the temple property and received rich burials adjacent to the main temple. The text of the stele emphasizes the ram's fecun powers and solar association. A robe or veil covers his body, which shows the attention to detail by the sculptor with nuances of depth in this relief, mimicking transparent and gauzy linen. The avatar possesses two pairs of horns, one pair that curl downward and another that are horizontal twisted horns atop the head. Egyptian temple inscriptions differentiate between these two types of horns, the abwi page and the hanuti page. This polyserite form is not what this animal actually looked like, as the species only had the curled horn on the side of the head. It is unclear why the avatar has these additional horns. Asundus with a rearing cobra surmounts these horns. The avatar stands atop a large pedestal with a sensor pot. This does double duty as a visual representation of burning incense offered to the holy ram, but is also a realization and hieroglyphs for ram, which is pronounced Ba. His name, Ba Nebjet, identifies his physical form and his geographic domain. He is a ram, Ba, and his lord, Neb, of the abiding place, Jeddum. Ba, Neb, Jeddum. Behind the holy ram is Harpocrates. He is labeled Horus the Child, Great God, who is in the midst of Mendes. Like the avatar, he too stands atop a plinth and is enrobed. In composite profile, he strides forward. In addition to the robe, he wears a broad collar. Grypton's left hand is an ankh. He displays several gestures indicative of his young age, including his forefinger held to his mouth, not a sign of secrecy or silence, as often interpreted by Greek audiences, but rather an indication of his age. He is also nude and bears the side-lock of youth. His small nude body is visible through his robe. Again, a testament to the sensitive renderings of textures and translucencies by the sculpture. Next in procession is the divine pair of Mendes. Ba Nebjet appears again as a ram-headed man wearing a multi-part crown. And Hat Mahit, who is his consort and her name means foremost of the fishes, is shown wearing a crown, bearing a shilby fish, her special gnome standard of Mendee. Both of these figures carry an ankh in their left hand. Together with Harpocrates, these deities form the Mendesian Triad. Arsinwe is the final member of this procession. She wears a tight-fitting garment, is barefoot, and carries an ankh in her left hand and a staff in her right. She wears a composite crown that consists of a tripartite wig, moot vulture cap, a red crown, curved cowhorns, a sun disk, and two upright feathers. Arsinwe is clearly a divine being, not only marked as such by her inclusions of God's receiving offerings, but the label texts confirm she is a neturet, a goddess. On the other side of the scene is a procession of royals bearing offerings. First and foremost is the king, Pohlemi Ussur Ka Ra Mary Eamon, Pohlemi the strong one of the Ka of Ra, beloved of Amun. He wears traditional kingly paraphernalia, including the double crown, a broad collar, a shenju kilt with attached bull's tail, and he is barefoot. He brings a cup of liquid offerings while the offering held in his other hand has been damaged beyond recognition. A plant sprouts between the king and the ram, a testament to the fecundity of the ram when the king performs his prescribed sacred duties. Next in procession is a female figure in a tight-fitting sheath dress. Like Pohlemi before her, she is barefoot and presents offerings. Damage to the stele, abrasions, and discolorations makes some of the details of this figure difficult to identify, but the accompanying text label assists the viewer and her cartouche-bound name inscribed above her form identifies this figure as Arsinwe. The crown worn by this figure is also a composite crown, with comparable elements as seen on the figure of Arsinwe in procession with a Mendezian gob, including a tripartite wig, loot-balcher cap, a red crown, curved cowhorns, a sun-disk, and two upright feathers. However, this crown bears horizontal twisted horns, horns that also appear on the ram avatar and by Neb Jetta himself, but not worn by Arsinwe amongst the Mendezian gob. Since each version of Arsinwe wears a different composite crown, then two different ceremonial roles are represented. The label for this Arsinwe reads, she presents a flower spike to the goddess who loves her brother, the love of the ram, mistress of the two lambs, Arsinwe. In the lunette we see her offering the life sign and a floral hieroglyph, while the text only names the floral element. This floral sign has more than one possible word value during the Ptolemaic period, including bedet or emmer wheat. Martina Minas specifically connects this symbol to the ear of wheat associated with Greek worship of Demeter. Furthermore, Minas posits that the figure represented here is the priestess of the cult of Arsinwe in Alexandria, the Canaphras. However, her reasons for using Alexandrian religious practices and Greek iconographies for interpreting the Mendezila and Egyptian temple object is unclear. I attempt to foreground indigenous thought and experience in my interpretation of this object. Another reading of the site is Chema or incense. Incense was a common offering for any Egyptian deity and was made from a combination of organic materials, including plant resins, honey, dried plants, and spices. Therefore, this offering could represent a plant from which incense could be made. This offering is a living plant. Arsinwe literally presents this plant along with the sign for life, indicating to me that the plant itself is alive. And this plant seems to be distinctive to her cult at Mendez. Perhaps this plant is a focal point in the on pet, a location mentioned in the stele as a cool leafy place, perhaps a garden. This site is mentioned in the text of the stele as being a locus of worship at Mendez. So rather than a priestess of Arsinwe, I suggest this figure is Arsinwe as priestess. As recorded in the text of the stele, she is elevated to the position of high priestess of the ram of Mendez during her lifetime. Thus, we see Arsinwe as a high priestess of the ram, marked as such by the twisted horizontal horn she shares with the avatar and Banabjet, and she offers a unique local ingredient for making incense. I see a connection between Arsinwe's offering and the perfume industry of Mendez, but this requires further research. Last in the sequence of royals is Ptolemy again, but now wearing the Hefresh, the blue or war-cron. The birth and throne names that label Ptolemy in first position and this Ptolemy are identical. Ptolemy's Usurkara, Mary Eamon, Ptolemy, the strong one of Kha, the lover of Amun. They also wear the same costume besides the crown, which consists of the broad collar, the Shunjakilt, and attached bull's tail, again, all of which are traditional elements of heronic costume. Both figures perform the kingly duty of offering to the gods. Again, the main difference between these two male figures is the crown. While the first Ptolemy wears the double crown, signifying his control of both upper and lower Egypt, the second wears the Hefresh. This crown has been interpreted as reflecting the active participation in political and military activities of the Ptolemy court by the wearer. Furthermore, the Hefresh, or the blue crown itself, can be connected to issues of legitimacy, succession, and co-regency. With the fraught history of succession in the Hellenistic kingdoms after the death of Alexander the Great, perhaps Ptolemy Philadelphus depicted himself as his own heir apparent. At this point in history in the 260s, when the stele was manufactured, the will be Ptolemy III has been removed from the line of succession due to the disgrace and exile of his mother, Arsinoe I sometime in the 270s. With no obvious successor at the time of the stele's manufacture, Ptolemy II must appear twice in the lunat in order to protect the image of a stable dynasty without succession issues. Although Arsinoe herself also appears twice on the stele, the explanation is not due to issues of succession. I suggest that the lunat shows the royal family offering to cult images of the local gods, among which Arsinoe is now included. As cult statues, these forms acted as vessels for the gods that are represented. I suggest the handheld onks indicate that we are looking at statues activated through the opening of the mouth ceremony, which is mentioned in the text of the stele. Through this, cult images are able to receive offerings to sustain their afterlives. However, according to the text, Arsinoe only joins the Mendezian gods after death. To understand the scene in the lunat requires the suspension of linear chronology. Multiple events that occurred years apart in reality are simultaneously represented. It shows the hetip denisuit offering formula enacted at Mendez, which identifies all offering ceremonies performed there as royally authorized. It honors the appointment of Arsinoe as high priestess of the ram of Mendez during her lifetime. It records the restoration of cult statues that had been destroyed during the second Persian period. And it commemorates the addition of Arsinoe into the cult of Mendez with the ideal royal family as their worshippers. And integrating Arsinoe into the fabric of the local pantheon, temple priests at Mendez demonstrate their closeness to the royal family and thereby assert their dominance over other temple sites in Egypt. Furthermore, in centering the deification of Arsinoe at primordial Mendez, these Egyptian priests at Mendez situate the cult of Arsinoe firmly within the religious environs and mythical past of native Egyptians. Again, the lunat shows an idealized situation. The royal family, in consort and heir, offer to the Mendezian gods, the avatar, the divine triad, and the deified Arsinoe. This scene serves as a model for worship practices in every Egyptian temple. The avatar of the local deity, the local triad, and Arsinoe as goddess are to be worshiped at every temple site by each succeeding royal Ptolemaic couple. The Ptolemy's do not radically alter worship practices or beliefs by including Arsinoe in all temples directly alongside each local triad. Her inclusion in all temples throughout Egypt is a stipulation in the text of the stele. Rather, as the Mendez stele has shown, Egyptian customs are maintained and the worship of Arsinoe is integrated into local pre-existing system. As portrayed on the Mendez stele, this is a strongly unified family, asserting legitimacy through auto-chessonist customs. Thank you. Thanks so much, Andrea. That was really interesting. Again, I have lots of questions, particularly about, I think, the idea of audience in Ptolemaic art, which I think is really key to considering how real scholars approach it, and also in thinking about what the actual intent behind the strategies that the Ptolemaic rulers used for their visual culture. Again, if you have any questions for Andrea, please pop it into our chat and we will look at them and the question-answer portion at the end. We are now going to move on to Italy, and I'm going to introduce Margaret Kurkowski from Princeton University, who is going to be looking at Severin Portraiture at Villa of Livia. And she is going to be introduced by Dr. Michael Kurkobiom, who is the M. Taylor Pine Professor of Art and Archaeology. So please hand it over to Margaret. I'm Michael Kurkobiom, and I'm Professor of Roman Art in the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton. And it's my great pleasure to introduce to you today our next speaker, Maggie Kurkowski. Maggie is currently a 60-year graduate student in our department, working on a dissertation devoted to the varied imperial presences, that is, presences both actual and artistic, at the villas that stretched across the landscape of Roman Italy. Maggie came to Princeton from Smith College, where she took her undergraduate degree and developed her interest in ancient art. Following graduation, she was a curatorial fellow in the Smith College Museum of Art, where she curated a number of exhibitions, which I should note were not all devoted to the art of antiquity. Since she's been at Princeton, Maggie has been the recipient of numerous fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation, the Lemmerman Foundation, and the Kress Foundation, along with a variety of awards from Princeton. All of these stipends have allowed Maggie to travel extensively in recent years to pursue her research, not only in Italy, but in Germany as well. And she's also spent a year as a foreign borsista at the School of Nomali Superiority, PISA. Maggie has already embarked on a serious and active career. She's presented talks at conferences and seminars in Oxford, Airford, and PISA on a wide variety of topics and is currently organizing a session for next year's AIA conference in San Francisco. She'll speak to us today on a topic that derives from her dissertation research. The talk whose title is Severin Portraiture at the Villa of Livia. Please welcome to your computer screens Maggie Krakowsky. Thank you, Carl and Michael, for your very kind introductions, and thank you to everyone for your time. Today I'll be talking about a series of Severin portraits that were found at the Villa of Livia. So let's begin. In his natural history, the Roman historian Pliny recounts a story that took place in a villa at Prima Porta, a small town just seven miles outside Rome. Livia, the future wife of the First Emperor Augustus, was sitting in her villa garden when an eagle dropped a white hen in her lap. The hen held a fruiting laurel branch in its beak. Interpreted as a portent, the strange occurrence inspired her family to propagate the branch into a grove of laurel trees at that very villa. From this grove, considered sacred, Augustus and his successors would harvest the boughs for triumphal wreaths and other ceremony attire, and then replant the branches. Pliny emphasizes that this grove, and the trees named after the emperors who replanted them, still survived at the time of his writing, more than a century after Augustus' ascension. This story was recounted a few decades later in Suetonius' life of the Emperor Galba, and once again in the early third century CE, in Dio Cassius' political history. In the 19th century, these ancient accounts spurred the Vatican to sponsor an archaeological investigation at their diocese in Prima Porta. To give you a sense of where they were, I've marked Prima Porta with a yellow star on this map, and Rome with a red one. The efforts of the Vatican at Prima Porta did confirm the location of a villa of Livia, in part through the discovery of a larger-than-life statue of Augustus, carved late in the first century BCE, or early in the first century CE. The emperor stands with his hand raised in the so-called ablocutio gesture, as if he were addressing a crowd of Romans. He wears an armored breastplate to represent himself and the guise of a general. The first version of the statue was likely cast in bronze, an original which stood publicly in the city of Rome. At Prima Porta, it was copied in marble for a more intimate viewing. An Italian first published in 1865 offers a fanciful interpretation of these papal excavations. At the center of the print, a team of workers drags the statue of Augustus from a trench as crowds watch on. Framing the central scene of the statue are other notable finds from the first archaeological season. A marble crater, a broken column shaft, and three portrait busts, which are artfully arranged in the foliage of the foreground. I've magnified this detail here. According to contemporaneous written reports, the three portraits represented the emperor Septimius Severus, his wife Julia Domna, and an unnamed adolescent male, all members of the Severan dynasty, who ruled the Roman Empire 200 years after Augustus. These three busts bring into focus an often overlooked characteristic of the site. That is, Augustus was not the only emperor represented at the Villa of Livia. The existence of the busts can suggest a continual imperial presence at the Villa even after Augustus's family had died out. The nature of this presence is the focus of our discussion today. Further study of the portraits in their context was quickly curtailed, however. As soon after these 19th century publications, the portrait busts of the Severan rulers seemed to vanish without a trace. For nearly a century, they were presumed to be lost. Today, the most persuasive contenders for the three lost busts belong to the collection of the powerful Torolonia family in Rome. Sometime in the decades after the excavation at Prima Porta, the Museo Torolonia had to cry three portrait busts found at the Veyan estate of Livia. The 1881 catalogue of the collection misidentified the busts as other later members of the Severan dynasty. In fact, if you look closely at this photograph from the earlier catalogues, you can see the misattributed names at the base of the busts. These mistaken identities caused the busts to remain undetected until 1962, when Balti matched the Torolonia busts to the descriptions both pictorial and textual of the lost busts from Prima Porta. For the first time, only this past September, two of these portraits were displayed in a public exhibition, The Bearded Man and the Woman. As you can imagine, I was not in Italy this past October, so we must thank Flickr for these more recent photographs. These two busts do represent Septimia Severus and Julia Domna. The male bust, the pivotal evidence, is his facial hair, which does recall the unusually long, hanging curls described in early excavation reports. Such a beard is typical of the more mature portraits of Septimia Severus, like the example on the right from the Petworth collection in England. This mature portrait type also appears in relief on the arch built by Septimia Severus in his hometown of Leptis Magna, shown here in full. This parallel is particularly helpful because we know that the arch was constructed around 203 CE. In this relief panel from the arch, we can see Septimia Severus with the elongated beard alongside his two sons. Based on this appearance on the arch, we can date the portrait of Septimia Severus with relative accuracy to the last decade of his reign. Compared to the Septimius, a portrait of a woman represents a mature type of the Empress Julia Domna with this characteristic helmet-like hairstyle. Pictured here is the same object at slightly different angles. Similar to the portrait of Septimia Severus, this type also appears on the arch at Leptis Magna, which means it dates to the same decade. That the two busts were carved in the same period is hardly an accident. Produced and displayed as a pair, these portraits of husband and wife promote a claim of sovereignty, not only of Septimia Severus as Emperor, but also as the founder of an imperial lineage to continue under their sons. Together with that of her husband, the portrait of Julia Domna reinforced the familial resonance of the display since it was to her that future dynast would be born. The third and final bust, the portrait of a young adolescent male. Here the same object is shown as pictured in the Torlonio catalog and also from the archives of the German Archaeological Institute in Rome. As you may recall, its original excavators were unable to identify its sitter. It does not resemble any portraits of Septimius and Julia Domna's sons ruling out a grouping of a nuclear family. Various other imperial princes have been proposed as a subject of this Torlonio boy. Among these, the young Emperor Alexander Severus seems the most likely subject. Not only does the cropped but wavy hairline resemble portraits of this Severan prince, he also has the slightly receding shin and the fleshy upper lip seen in other depictions, like the portrait at the Capital Lion Museum on the right. If the Torlonio bust does portray Alexander Severus, it is perhaps a beardless type meant to commemorate his adoption in 221 CE when the young prince was 12. Coins celebrating this specific event share a similar youthful profile, as you can see in this numismatic example. By installing an adoption type of Alexander Severus among portraits of the earlier Severans, the portrait may have contributed to the promotion of Alexander's new status within a long established dynasty. Precisely where these portraits were displayed in the villa is by no means clear. The villa had been periodically inhabited for seven centuries, which diminishes the likelihood that these movable objects were uncovered in the same sector as they had once been displayed. Perhaps they were installed in the villa's entrance hall, the atrium pictured here, in sight of the Prima Porta Augustus. Here, the portraits would also be close to the enormous terrace just to the east of the atrium, which probably held the divine grove of Laurel recounted in Pliny, Suetonius, and Deocasius. The portraits of the Severans would therefore have a direct visual link to Augustus and all the emperors who succeeded him in the form of the Laurel trees named after each one. These three busts do differ from the Prima Porta Augustus in one conspicuous regard. As mentioned earlier, the Augustus is larger than life, likely a copy from an earlier public display meant to honor the emperor in a civic context. The three Severan portraits, meanwhile, are busts reaching less than half of its height. Roman busts are typically modified copies of public statues truncated to suit a domestic environment. By genre and by setting, they are fundamentally intimate works at the eye level of the viewer, unlike the tall statue of Augustus. If all these portraits were in fact displayed together, the contrast between the first century and third century pieces would have been striking to Roman eyes. While we may never locate the exact room where the busts were initially displayed, a survey of the billow as a whole may still shed light on their original role in the estate. A series of renovations occurred at the start of the third century, which expanded the bathing facilities and the water capacity of the entire complex. The portraiture seems to have comprised simply one feature of a broader project of attention at the villa already ancient by that era. Concurrent to these changes, the proprietor refurbished the atrium with a black and white pavement, a fashionable update for the third century. This slide offers a different view of the atrium, with the pavement in clearer focus. As you can see, the bulk of the floor is paved in simple black tiles with a white border along the edges of the atrium. Circling the Impluvia Pool at the center of the room is a representative design that depicts, in black and white, a wall with regular brick or stone courses that runs around the pool. Here is a closer look at the design. Black towers periodically interrupt its circuit and marillons are depicted along the top, indicating this is a battlement or a city wall. When the Impluvia Pool was filled with rainwater, as it would have been in antiquity, the scene may have alluded to the fortification surrounding a harbor, an image of civic stability and protection. What this choice shows, stepping back a bit, is that the proprietor sometimes integrated new motifs into the interior design of this historic house during the third century. This was not a wholesale invention, reinvention of the villa, however. Amid these upgrades, the renovator consciously chose to preserve earlier aspects of its original design. Two of these we have discussed earlier, the actual garden to the east of the atrium and the larger-than-life statue of Augustus himself. The third-century proprietor also preserved another paragon of early first-century art, the vivid frescoes of an underground dining room, now known as the Garden Room of Livia. This photograph comes from the modern display of these frescoes within a facsimile gallery in the Palazzo Massimo Museum in Rome. Museum visitors today often express surprise at how modern, almost impressionistic these frescoes seem. To viewers of the third-century CE, however, the style and subject of these lush paintings would have seemed distinctly old-fashioned. Bearing in mind the prestige accorded to the site by Roman historians over centuries, this impulse to preserve surpasses simple anti-quinarianism. It appears to represent the desire to maintain the villa's first-century legacy. Prima Portavilla of the first-century CE had served as a memorial to the Emperor Augustus, elevated on a hill high above the surrounding landscape. What these interventions of the third century suggest to me is that later in generations also saw fit to commemorate this first emperor at his estate. And to integrate into its fabric imagery of a new dynasty, unrelated by blood or by adoption. And, as recounted at the start of this talk, these material interventions occurred amid a literary backdrop that still celebrated and maintained early stories about the villa as a backdrop to Augustus' rise. In this sense, the villa at Prima Porta remained an imperial space for centuries, indelibly associated with the status that Augustus had imposed on the Roman political landscape. In terms of who held the deed to the property at the start of the third century CE, two possibilities assert themselves. Perhaps the villa remained an imperial hands, continuously or not, from Augustus through Alexander Severus. This scenario would render the display of Severan portraiture a self-referential act, a assertion of ownership and of kinship with the first emperor. Should this interpretation be correct, we might read a touch of religious reverence in the choice to retain an over-life-sized portrait of Augustus on prominent display. While the presumed proprietor, a later emperor like Septimius Severus, chose to present himself in the more modest form of a bust. Another possibility is that the villa had, sometime between Augustus and Septimius Severus, fallen out of imperial ownership into private circulation. We do have ample evidence for the display of emperor portraits in private homes, presumably for religious or political motivations. If the villa of Livia had become a private property, then the owners continued to perpetuate the memory of Augustus' dynasty in the continued preservation of his statue in Garden, while simultaneously demonstrating fidelity to the current rulers. We cannot identify these hypothetical owners definitively, although there would most likely be the wealthy dependents of the Severan family or elite courtiers who installed portraits to make clear their loyalties. Whoever owned the villa in the 3rd century CE, however, an imperial presence remained highly conspicuous in the portraits of Augustus and of the later Severans and in the careful presentation of select Augustan imagery. The addition of Alexander Severus two decades later demonstrates that these concerns remained active as new rulers came to the fore. Our vision of this villa as a persistently imperial space continues into the modern era. Since those 1863 excavations, the site has remained famous for its statue of Augustus and the so-called Garden Room of Livia. Today, the estate as a whole is commonly called the Villa of Livia, recalling not only the Empress, but her conspicuous role in the Omen that predicted Augustus's rise to power. Even now, the villa extols the heritage of the Julio-Claudian dynasty and the emperors who followed them. Thank you. Thanks so much, Parker. That was really interesting. I think some really interesting overarching themes throughout all of your talks have been kind of apparent. Particularly, I think ideas about kind of imperial strategies of iconography and audience as well, which I'm really kind of interested in seeing what all of you think, how your papers connect together, which I think actually worked out really well in considering that they're not just thinking of these as a group of papers that are bound by time period as being kind of ancient, but also very much interconnected, I think, as well. So thanks so much to all of you for your talks. I definitely have a bunch of questions myself. I think what we'll do is that I will start off by asking each of you some of my questions, and then we'll go into some of the questions from the audience as well. So if I start with, in the order that we went with, if I start with Amy, thanks, your talk was really interesting. I think for me particularly, I found a lot of resonance in my own work looking at architecture and thinking about the sensory experience and the kind of phenomenology of architectural space, which I think is really important, because I think sometimes particularly for art historians and archaeologists, we kind of look at architecture in very kind of technical terms of looking at how it's constructed, different phases of development, and not so much thinking about that human aspect of it. That is obviously the most important part of it, really. So I loved your discussion about light and thinking about how that impacts all of the senses. So I was going to ask as well, being familiar with Mary Sheperton's work on light in Mesopotamia, have you actually produced like a light analysis plan of the town temple on any scale? Yeah, no, I wish. Basically what I've been able to do is just, I've been lucky enough to travel to Jarosch quite a bit and different times of the year and different times of the day and different weather conditions. I've been rained on in Jordan just trying to capture the photographs and just doing a lot of comparative work. So I have this really large catalog of photography that I have recreated, the same kind of views at different times of the year, different hours of the day, which, so that's kind of all of, I haven't really done like the technical studies that Mary has been able to, you know, but get your protractor out and really start drawing the angles and stuff. So sorry to disappoint you there, but I do think that that kind of stuff is important in looking at the cast of shadows and how those change throughout the day and the movement of the sunlight across the site. It's just, it's really something to watch it in a slideshow when you start to see it happen. So maybe that can be the start of another talk. Oh, yeah, for sure. That would be super cool. I really enjoy seeing like a time lapse of how the light travels across the spaces and like how it creates these different effects over even like things like seasons. Like it's really lucky that you've been able to do that and actually experience it at different times of the year, which is obviously I think really hard to do for some people, depending on where you're studying and where you're looking at. Right, I have some more questions too, but I'm going to move on to Andrea. I really enjoyed your talk. Tollumic art is something that I'm really interested in myself because we have a lot of Tollumic objects in the Barnes Foundation that I'm working on. So I'm really kind of getting a good like grasp of like different types of Tollumic art, both domestic and royal. And one of the things I'm really interested in is the kind of the diversity of different styles that the Tollumies used in their kind of imperial iconography. And of course, they're not just using kind of Egyptian, very traditional Egyptian styles like you were looking at, but also looking at kind of Hellenist and hybridized kind of what we would probably just call like Tollumic, really, rather than anything else. So in your Stila, it's obviously in a traditional Egyptian temple. But how do you think it might relate to kind of wider audiences as well, not just Egyptians? Because I think with Tollumic art, we have a lot of this engagement with thinking about how the Tollumies convinced Egyptians of their kind of legitimacy, whilst actually society is pretty broad. Yeah. So for this talk specifically, because we are at the site of Mendys, I mean, in the Delta, which is close to Alexandria, but because it is an Egyptian temple, Egyptian temple site, for this, I don't see as much of a connection between Alexandria and art at this time period with this Stila. I still think that at this point, you know, it's only the second ruler of the Tollumic dynasty we're talking about here. He is still kind of, how do I want to say this? Trying to let the priests feel like they are a little bit in charge. That's how I interpreted it, at least. So I see this object as very Egyptian. I do, however, in my dissertation deal with objects that would have multiple audiences. And so I really do, like using Whitney Davis' Methodologies of Visualities, look at how different audiences would react to the same object. It didn't come up in this talk, but it is part of my study. Well, you had, you know, limited time and so much to grapple with. It's completely understandable. Yeah, no, I think it's just super interesting in thinking about like that, in those concepts as well particularly because we have, you know, kind of evidence of, you know, Greeks who are kind of using traditional Egyptian, you know, statuary styles in one context, but then they're doing something else completely different in another context. So I think it's kind of, I think, really interesting to grapple with this idea about maybe not there being quite so much like a dichotomy between kind of Egyptian versus Greek and, you know, more thinking about like this emerging Ptolemaic, you know, population style iconography that's kind of more accessible to everyone. But as you said, like this is still very like early Ptolemaic periods, so it's still kind of... That transition... That's still pretty recent even just from Alexander, so like, you know, and recovering from Persia in this as well, although I would say recovering just changing from Persia. Right. Just another quick question because I'm interested. Did you manage to be able to go see the Stila as well? I have not. So basically what's been going on pre-pandemic, of course, they are in the process of transitioning from the old museum to the new Grand Egyptian Museum, and this Stila has been kind of behind the scenes, not accessible for a couple years now. So it is definitely... The Grand Museum? I'm sorry? Do you know if they're taking it to the Grand Egyptian Museum? Yes. Yes, that is what I understand but we'll see. You know, when it's done, where stuff turns up. When it's done, we'll know. Great. I'd like to move on to Margaret as well. Also really enjoyed your talk. Obviously, I think some great synergies with previous two papers and thinking about imperial art and kind of audience. I'm really interested on this fact that we seem to have this kind of big gap between Augustus to the Severin dynasty and what is going on at the site in between there. I'd really like to suggest that maybe it's kind of taken over by an elite family or maybe it's still kind of an imperial estate that is maintained in some way. Do we have anything at all to kind of really suggest what happened in between and if it's used again in some way because I kind of find it really interesting that we only find the Severin bust there. Yes, so this longer history of the site is something that definitely interests me. And so as I mentioned during the talk, the villa seems to have been more or less continually inhabited for seven centuries. So in the periods between Augustus and Septinia Severus we not only have sort of the remnants that indicate people were living there, trash and that kind of thing from those earlier periods but also renovations that happened at the site. However, the only material episodes that indicate that we have an imperial presence of some kind are those statues of Augustus and the portraits of the Severins. Between those two material episodes there is no traces, there are no traces of some kind of no surviving traces I should say of some kind of imperial display. That being said, we do have the literary accounts that I mentioned at the beginning of my talk which kind of frame and explain how even in those interim periods the site was still associated with Augustus. And this was a site that continued to be inhabited after the Severins as well. It's only when a fire breaks out during the reign of Theodosius that suddenly no one seems to be living at the estate anymore. Oh cool, yeah I was going to ask about that as well because I was kind of interested to see to hear if there was anything else further on in time. But yeah, it's just really kind of curious that we don't have any kind of other imperial statuary or anything there as well because particularly if it's something that's being curated, basically a curated kind of a state that's still occupied over time particularly because it has strong ties with Augustus, then you would have thought that maybe that was the prime place for like going and putting your bust in or something. Exactly, it's really fun to sort of guess at what could have been there but in this case I think sort of the long life of this villa actually works against it because it was probably looted pretty extensively in the medieval period, not only for sort of objects that were taken for their beauty but also because marble was a pretty key component for a lot of early concrete and so often these villas were stripped for materials in use to create new buildings throughout the Italian peninsula. Right, of course yeah that would make sense and of course like there could also I suppose be, you know, preferences on removing maybe artworks as well by other emperors for various you know, political social reasons some of them are more deeply well received so. And actually that these 19th century excavators did find two other busts but they were so damaged that it was impossible to recognize who they may have represented and there was a possibility that there were other types of there were other portraits that represented emperors or potentially that they represented private citizens but unfortunately weren't able to tell. Yes, yeah Oh goodness so interesting I'm just like particularly coming from like the Egyptian background like where we have lots of you know instances of like continued like kings coming building in Sykes again and again and I know this is this case for Rome as well it's just kind of really intriguing that like there isn't more there or what we have is not everything so very very interesting I'm gonna give a couple of the questions that have come in from the feed for you guys as well so for Amy, Kaylin Joule who was our awesome Byzantine archaeologist at the Barnes she says Thank you for a beautiful talk Amy I wonder what your thoughts are on architectural ephemera that no longer survives so what structures of wood or textile Thank you for that that's actually something that does come into kind of consideration especially along colonnaded streets things that would be shades to block sunlight as well so it definitely something that I don't have really good enough evidence for it in Geroche to be able to make a case of how these things that would be either door or window coverings or any kinds of overhead shades would where they would be right now in the city I can make some guesses but I would love to kind of I wish that material existed to be able to kind of talk about ways that shades work because we know that they existed we know that colonnaded streets are connecting to shops and creating other little pockets of shade throughout the city that would invite people to stop, play a board game have a snack so the path that I presented through the city was rather direct but I think that there is far more opportunity for interruptions and little hauses and that such kind of more ephemeral architecture would assist with so thank you for that question Yeah, that's a great question, Kaelin, actually I think it's like cool to also think about comparable examples like Neo-Assyrian palaces where we have good examples kind of the idea that textiles are decorating the walls and the floors and things as well but they're part of these part of these atmospheres because they also work to kind of decorate but they also kind of muffled sound and they kind of impact temperature and things and your experience of walking across floors that are stone textile, dirt and things as well so there's all these wonderful other elements that get added into it as well Great, also for Amy, Taylor Hobson also says thank you does that consideration of how and when these structures were used to help to more narrowly define the atmosphere as it would be most typically experienced by a community member for instance, the seasonal or daily timeframes prescribed by ritual programs which I think we kind of touched Yeah, it's interesting because the temples in of Zeus actually in Geroche is an asylum temple so it's something that was definitely that was a destination that pilgrims would have come to to seek kind of all of the asylum and do all of the practices that are associated with the rituals and everything so the calendars that would have been around so it would have been a highly forested city in addition to having a local community so there's the tourist factor, there's the trade factor because it's a caravan site so there's all of these different populations coming through connection down with Petra and kind of serving as a gateway to Asia Minor so not just ritual programs which I think are very important to the populations and the communities moving through there but also the trade factor is a big component as well to who's moving through these cities and kind of creating these social groups and the ways that they're different ways they're moving through the city and the different ways they're using the architecture I really like this consideration of multiple different pathways as well through the city according to what you're doing it doesn't always down through the direct main route that if you want to go on a shopping trip you might go on a completely different way of navigating around the city if you're doing something more social engagement with visiting people or if you're going through something more ceremonial that's tied to political actions like there's so much variation of where you can kind of come in and out and move around in the space so yeah, I really like that great Kaelin also has a question for Margaret thank you so much for an interesting talk I'd love to hear you discuss a bit more about the domestication of civic monuments within the Roman sphere i.e. bringing public monuments into the domestic sphere via marble busts terrific yes, so when we see portraits or hear about portraits in the early Roman home there are often representations of family members I mean the most traditional form of a portrait in a Roman home is the imaginase which are literally the death masks of ancestors that people would keep on display within the atrium or the tablinum of the Roman house and but as we move into the imperial period we start seeing a greater number of sculpted representations busts really come into busts first appear as a portrait format in the late first century BCE but they really start hitting their stride in the middle of the second century and become sort of the typical the standard form of the sculpted portrait in the home and so in a Roman context a full-size statue such as that of Augustus is actually the aberration this is something that is rare to see in a home a full-size portrait statue of a person that was a portrait format that was much more commonly disseminated in public centers and sanctuaries and other places where a lot of people congregated so when we see this bust format however we can often compare it to other examples depicting the same person in different contexts like those city centers like those sanctuaries and it does seem that they draw on the same types but truncated to better fit into a home and so it's not entirely clear exactly how some of these portrait busts were displayed it seems likely that they probably were erected rather than on statue bases on furniture such as tables which have just not survived to the modern era though there's a few other possible display contexts in terms of niches that may have been built into a home purposely for the display of portrait busts when we see an adaption of a civic portrait for a domestic environment we are typically talking about portraits of emperors and other members of the imperial family simply because those are the most common types that we are able to recognize and they tend to fall under certain standard types that correlate to accomplishments in the emperor's career and so emperor receives a new title he commissions a new portrait type that gets spread out throughout the entire empire I think we've had a technical difficulty with that okay perfect I was wrapping up anyway which is to say we see the same types in these two environments just in different portrait formats sorry about that don't worry it's bound to happen exactly great I had just one more question this one for Andrea I was wondering I think you did mention it in your talk but the original context find spot of the stele that you were looking at it's in it's obviously in a temple right do we have any idea what part of the temple is on so I'm actually working on comparative studies of where the stele appear earlier in Egyptian history because sometimes our theological reports you know either things have moved since their original location or the notes just don't quite tell us where things are but if like other Egyptian stele it would probably be set up towards the front of the temple so a slightly larger audience would see it it wouldn't just decrease yeah that's what I was thinking about like if it would be in one of the first high long kind of courtyards where it would be seen by larger audience which is what I was thinking as well I think with other examples of Ptolemaic and stele late period, third intermediate period stele like they're found in kind of more public facing parts of the temple so that you can get more engagement with them as well great okay well thanks so much to all of you I think we're going to wrap up there and as we come to the end of the session please come and join us again for our next session and enjoy a nice little break until then and thanks again for all of the speakers today it's been really interesting and really engaging and great to hear more stuff about ancient art thank you Carl thank you