Sarah Bassett, "Style and Meaning in Late Antique Art" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

Exchanges: A Cambridge UP Podcast

How do we best see and understand the art of late antiquity? One of the perceived challenges of so doing is that this is a period whose visual production has been defined as stylistically abstract and emotionally spiritual, and therefore elusive.

But this is a perception which – in her path-breaking new book – Sarah Bassett boldly challenges, offering two novel lines of interpretative inquiry. She first argues, by focusing on the art of late antiquity in late nineteenth-century Viennese intellectual and artistic circles, that that period's definition of late antique form was in fact a response to contemporaneous political concerns, anticipating modernist thinking and artistic practice. She then suggests that late antique viewers never actually abandoned a sense of those mimetic goals that characterized Greek and Roman habits of representation. This interpretative shift is transformative because it allows us to understand the full range and richness of late antique visual experience.

New Books in Late Antiquity is presented by Ancient Jew Review

Sarah Bassett is Associate Professor Emerita, Art History at Indiana University

Michael Motia teaches in Classics and Religious Studies at UMass Boston