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The Antefixa Project: Recovering Sacro-Creative Action and the Making of Gods in and Beyond Rome
April 5, 2024 @ 5:00 pm - 6:00 pm CDT
Free
John Hopkins, Associate Professor of Art History, Dept. of Fine Arts and the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University
The Etruscan Foundation presents a public lecture in advance of its 2024 annual meeting in Dallas, co-hosted by The Custard Institute for Spanish Art & Culture at the Meadows Museum.
Life in ancient Italy was steeped in rich and varied religious practices. Temples and precincts were covered in images of gods and demigods, and votives and cult statues filled spaces of belief. But when an expansionist leadership in Rome began violent military campaigns and occupation of the lands around them, they took hold of these diverse and connected sacred traditions and deployed religion as a means to erase, assimilate and appropriate sacred and social life. This included the overwriting and taking of histories of knowledge and artistic production of Etruscan- and Latin-speaking peoples, often claiming them for Rome. In this talk, Hopkins considers these itinerant, often non-Roman maker communities before and during the early years of Roman occupation. They will present the urgent need to re-examine these worlds as well as a new and innovative initiative, the Antefixa Project, which is harnessing scientific and computational imaging methodologies to recover the contributions of communities that have been silenced but were essential to sacred life in ancient Italy.
John Hopkins is Associate Professor of the art and archaeology of ancient Mediterranean peoples in the Department of Art History and the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University. They are author of The Genesis of Roman Architecture (2016, Yale UP, winner of the Spiro Kostof Award from the Society of Architectural Historians), Unbound from Rome: Art and Craft in a Fluid Landscape, 650-250 BCE (2024, Yale UP), and co-editor of Object Biographies: Collaborative Approaches to Ancient Mediterranean Art (2020 the Menil Collection and Yale UP) and Forgery Beyond Deceit: Fabrication, Value and the Desire for Ancient Rome (2023, Oxford UP). They are also co-director of the Quirinal Project and director of the Antefixa Project.
