The Visual Culture of Roman Theatre (Clarke)
Author
Jessica Clarke, UCL History Department
Supervisors
Prof. Valentina Arena, UCL History Department (Principal Supervisor)
Prof. Corinna Riva, UCL Archaeology Department (Secondary Supervisor)
Dr Benet Salway, UCL History Department (Tertiary Supervisor)
Summary
The visual culture of Roman theatre is a large and invaluable category of archaeological material, which includes a range of object types in a wide variety of materials. This visual culture has been previously catalogued and published in a series of supplements to the Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies, with the most recently being a revised edition of Monuments Illustrating New Comedy (MINC) published in 1996. This revised catalogue totals over 3500 objects and is a remarkable compendium, which groups the material into six chronological periods. However, the catalogue poses challenges to the researcher aiming to interrogate this material. In the first instance, the most recent revisions took place almost thirty years ago, and, as a result, the catalogue does not reflect the new material which has been rediscovered in collections at the British Museum, the J. Paul Getty Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Moreover, as the catalogue is currently undigitized it is difficult to manipulate the data to suit new research questions and suggest new conclusions.
My research project involves the creation of an independent digital database for the visual culture of theatre in Italy. This database extracts from the MINC catalogue all the material produced or imported to the Italian peninsula between c. 325 BCE and 50 CE, and each of these objects and their bibliographies have been examined and, in places, their entries revised, re-dated, or re-categorised. The dataset has also been added to with items which had either been erroneously omitted by MINC, or had not been published when the catalogue was revised in 1996. The result is a digital dataset of 965 artefacts, which includes a significant number of objects which were previously uncatalogued, and which can be queried to answer a variety of research questions. This critical recompilation of the visual source material will be made open access with the completion of the thesis.