Books by Nathaniel B Jones
Greek Culture in the Roman World, Cambridge University Press, 2019
In the first centuries BCE and CE, Roman wall painters frequently placed representations of works... more In the first centuries BCE and CE, Roman wall painters frequently placed representations of works of art, especially panel paintings, within their own mural compositions. Nathaniel B. Jones argues that the depiction of panel painting within mural ensembles func tioned as a metapictorial reflection on the practice and status of painting itself. This phenomenon provides crucial visual evidence for both the reception of Greek culture and the interconnected ethical and aesthetic values of art in the Roman world. Roman metapictures, this book reveals, not only navigated social debates on the production and consumption of art, but also created space on the Roman wall for new modes of expression relating to pictorial genres, the role of medium in artistic practice, and the history of painting. Richly illustrated, the volume will be important for anyone interested in the social, ethical, and aesthetic dimensions of artworks, in the ancient Mediterranean and beyond.
Papers by Nathaniel B Jones
The Art Bulletin , 2018
The phenomenon of continuous narration - the representation of multiple narrative moments in a si... more The phenomenon of continuous narration - the representation of multiple narrative moments in a single visual field - in Roman painting of the first centuries BCE and CE attests to the ways time and space could be creatively connected in ancient art. This pictorial device animates painting in its interplay with the viewer, at once multiplying points of view and mediating between internal and external images. It thus models Roman attitudes toward not only the representation of the world but also the interpretation of pictures. In so doing, it demonstrates a significant form of material agency.
Classical Antiquity, 2018
Roman writing of the late Republic and early Empire, especially historiography, is filled with ex... more Roman writing of the late Republic and early Empire, especially historiography, is filled with exempla, stories of the past meant to serve as models for contemporary and future behavior. This period also witnessed the rise of an encyclopedic mode of composition among Latin authors, which purported to collect and organize the totality of knowledge in a given field. The following essay proposes that exemplarity and encyclopedism were not just literary devices, but deep organizational principles throughout Roman culture. It seeks to show how they were operative in the visual arts in the first century BCE, focusing especially on a frieze depicting the baking process on the tomb of Marcus Vergilius Eurysaces in Rome. By approaching a monument like the frieze of Eurysaces through such principles we may better articulate both visual and thematic relationships across a variety of genres within the broader Roman image world.
Art History, 2015
This essay reexamines key questions about ancient Greek representational practice by studying rep... more This essay reexamines key questions about ancient Greek representational practice by studying representations of the dead. It examines both literary and visual evidence, stretching from the 8th to the 4th century BCE, but focuses especially on a fifth-century Attic vase painting. Historicist readings of textual sources indicate that the concept of the image was only fully developed in Greek philosophical writings of the fourth century BCE. The essay argues that Greek visual culture provides evidence of complex thinking about the role and status of images within a broader spectrum of representational possibilities prior to their philosophical theorization. This kind material evidence supplies the historical matrix for the development of philosophical theory, but it also exceeds the complexity of that theory.
Museum Archetypes and Collecting in the Ancient World. Ed. M. Gahtan and D. Pegazzano. Monumenta Graeca et Romana. Leiden: Brill, 2015
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Books by Nathaniel B Jones
Papers by Nathaniel B Jones