Abstract:

Social identity may be a late-modern concept, styling one’s station in life through art, however, was indeed a recognizable trait of the past. Alexandrian art is the product of a society mixed both ethnically and culturally, so much so that social framing in it appears to become an end in itself. Acknowledging the liminality of death, funerary painting, and especially funerary portraiture from the Ptolemaic world, describes and defines the individual according to a predetermined set of values that are meant to reconfirm the community’s ways of representing itself. Through a series of remarkable examples, the lecture will comment on the development of Alexandrian funerary painting as a way of discussing Ptolemaic art in its Hellenistic context.

Publisher's Version