Roman fresco (detail) from the Garden Room of the Casa del Bracciale d’Oro (VI 17, 42) in Pompeii, 50 BCE - 79 CE
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Roman fresco (detail) from the Garden Room of the Casa del Bracciale d’Oro (VI 17, 42) in Pompeii, 50 BCE - 79 CE
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Roman Fresco, Livia Villa, Rome, 30-20 BCE
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Roman Fresco, Livia Villa, Rome, 30-20 BCE
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Roman Fresco, Livia Villa, Rome, 30-20 BCE
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Roman Fresco, Livia Villa, Rome, 30-20 BCE
Above images:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/
[Cited 6/24/10]
In their 2001 OUP survey of classical art [Classics: A Very Short Introduction], Mary Beard and John Henderson describe [the Villa Livia fresco room] as ‘an impossibly utopian mixture of bright flowers beside laden fruit trees, tidy shrubs before a receding woodland vista, planned garden display within a surround of Italian trees, as if in their natural habitat.’ It is ‘an exercise in blue and green. And a celebration of naturalistic technique … But this is not nature reproduced; instead, a world specially made for us - yet made to do without us. Beyond the balustrade, as no wild birds ever could, these pay not the slightest attention to anyone in the room, impossibly ignoring our proximity. Emblematized by the songbird in its golden cage, art here createsnature, beyond anything you could find in the real world.’
http://some-landscapes.blogspot.com/2010/01/garden-room-at-prima-porta.html
[Cited 6/24/10]
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Birth of Iconography and the Western “Point of View”/The 2nd Commandment of the Book of Moses Prohibits Making Naturalistic Images
• Constantine issued an “Edict of Toleration” in 313 and on February 27, 380, Emperor Theodosius I enacted a law extablishing Christianity as the oficial religion of the Roman Empire. (Orlandis, A Short History of the Catholic Church (1993), preface.)
• From at least the 4th century, Christianity has played a prominent role in the shaping of Western civilization.
(Theodosian Code XVI.i.2, in: Bettenson. Documents of the Christian Church. p. 31.)
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Nash Papyrus
reappraisals have pushed the date of the fragments back to about 150-100 BC
The earliest Hebrew manuscript is the Nash papyrus. There are four fragments, which, when pieced together, give twenty-four lines of a pre-Massoretic text of the Ten Commandments and the shema (Exodus 20:2-17; Deuteronomy 5:6-19; 6:4-5). The writing is without vowels and seems palæographically to be not later than the second century. This is the oldest extant Bible manuscript (see Cook, “A Pre-MassoreticBiblical Papyrus” in “Proceed. of the Soc. of Bib. Arch.”, Jan., 1903). It agrees at times with the Septuagint against the Massorah. Another pre-Massoretic text is the Samaritan Pentateuch. The Samaritan recension is probably pre-exilic; it has come down to us free from Massoreticinfluences, is written without vowels and in Samaritan characters.
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/09627a.htm
[Cited 6/28/10]
