“Images in context: Contextualising Palmyrene Portraits” - Rubina Raja

“Images in context: Contextualising Palmyrene Portraits”
Professor Rubina Raja, Aarhus University
Friday, 24th of May 2024
16.00 CEST (Rome, Paris, Berlin / GMT+2)
15:00 BST (London, GMT+1)
17.00 (İstanbul, Athens / GMT+3)
10.00 (New York / GMT-4)
Palmyrene funerary portraits make up the largest group of portrait sculpture from the Roman imperial period, the first three centuries CE, stemming from outside Rome itself, the corpus totals app. 4,000 portraits stemming from loculus reliefs, sarcophagi, and banqueting reliefs as well as sculpture in the round and a few wall paintings. Over the last decade these portraits have been collected and studied within the framework of the Palmyra Portrait Project. As part of the project, a detailed study of the contexts of each single portrait or object on which the portrait was situated, including their collection histories, has been conducted.
This study has investigated exactly how many of these come with any kind of in-situ information and still are or were until recently in-situ. It is a staggering low number where in-situ contexts can be traced, leaving us with a few - but important cases of in-situ situations. This lecture introduces the corpus of Palmyrene funerary sculpture and discusses the conclusions of the project as well as the implications that the results of the project have for the way in which we need rethink images - in this case portraits - in or out of contexts - not only in Palmyra - but in a much broader context within the Roman Empire .