The Archaeology Lecture Series Presents: Alexander Ekserdjian

Professor Alexander Ekserdjian's lecture is titled, "Defining the Divine: Sculpture and the Gods in Roman Italy." The abstract reads: 

This talk analyses the material culture of cult places in late-Republican Italy to propose a visual language of the sacred specific to Roman Italy. Cult statues and sanctuary dedications demonstrate the ways that sculptural choices expressed relationships between worshippers and their gods. The vast gulf between the divine and the human was made manifest through material choices, sculptural scale, and modes of display. First sketching out the mechanics for this system of visual communication, I then turn to exemplary works of Republican sculpture to illustrate its workings. Finally, surviving statues from the city of Ostia are used to test the application of these ideas to a chronologically and spatially bounded context. Drawing on the methods of archaeology, art history, and anthropology, I aim to show how much may be gained by more fully incorporating close analysis of sculpture into histories of Roman religion.