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Group: Brazil, Colonial
People: Procopius
Topic: Roman art
Location: Delphi Greece

Roman art

Years: 189BCE - 476

Roman art refers to the visual arts made in Ancient Rome and in the territories of the Roman Empire.

Roman art includes architecture, painting, sculpture and mosaic work.

Luxury objects in metalwork, gem engraving, ivory carvings, and glass, are sometimes considered in modern terms to be minor forms of Roman art, although this would not necessarily have been the case for contemporaries.

Sculpture was perhaps considered as the highest form of art by Romans, but figure painting was also very highly regarded.

The two forms have had very contrasting rates of survival, with a very large body of sculpture surviving from about the first century BCE onwards, though very little from before, but very little painting at all remains, and probably nothing that a contemporary would have considered to be of the highest quality.

Ancient Roman pottery was not a luxury product, but a vast production of "fine wares" in terra sigillata were decorated with reliefs that reflected the latest taste, and provided a large group in society with stylish objects at what was evidently an affordable price.

Roman coins were an important means of propaganda, and have survived in enormous numbers.

Other perishable forms of art have not survived at all.

"Not to know what happened before you were born is to be a child forever. For what is the time of a man except it be interwoven with that memory of ancient things of a superior age?"

― Marcus Tullius Cicero, Orator (46 BCE)