Caroline Vout (Cambridge): Roman Funerary Art and the Rhetoric of Unreachability

Join us for light refreshments at 5:00pm followed by lecture at 5:15pm

Roman funerary altars are amongst the most neglected of ancient artworks, assumed to be formulaic in content and simple of style. This lecture takes an avowedly rhetorical approach to demonstrate how, on the contrary, they are sophisticated statements where the clash of art and text manages loss and arouses emotion.

Caroline Vout is Senior Lecturer in Classics at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Christ's College.  In 2008 she was awarded the prestigious Philip Leverhulme Prize for Art History.  She is the author of Power and Eroticism in Imperial Rome and Antinous: the Face of the Antique, which won the inaugural Art Book Award.  Her most recent book, Sex on Show: Seeing the Erotic in Greece and Rome, will be published in November 2013 by UC Press.