Posted by vrcvanderbilt on Monday, October 30, 2017 in Digital Humanities, Events, HART, Lectures, News, VRC.

Bettina Bergman, a leading expert on Greek and Roman art and the art of landscape, explores the visual and intellectual world of the ancient Romans.  Bergmann will deliver the Norman L. and Roselea J. Goldberg Lecture in Art History on Thursday, November 2, in 203 Cohen Memorial Hall.  Her presentation, which begins at 4:10 pm, is titled “Across the Universe: the Bird’s Eye View in Roman Art,” followed by a reception in the atrium.

Bergmann, The Helene Phillips Herzig ’49 Professor of Art, Department of Art History, Mount Holyoke College, notes that the Romans knew navigation on land and sea, but not the perspectives and sensations achieved in flight. The innovative device of the elevated, inclusive bird’s eye view presented an impossible array of viewpoints as one harmonious, coordinated whole.

“From the mythological flights of Icarus and Phaethon to two-dimensional city grids, the elevated view reveals the critical role of boundaries in defining space and the compelling imperative of integration,” she said. “It invites the viewer’s exploration and ordering of great expanses, cognitive processes that resonated with the acquisition of empire.”

Bergmann uses three-dimensional models—real or VR—to help modern viewers see how the fragments of frescoes displayed in museums originally functioned in ancient Roman buildings. She recreates the interiors of Roman homes using her expertise of Roman history, reports by archaeologists, and records left by ancient and modern visitors. Acclaimed for her imaginative work in reconstructing how Romans decorated their houses, she has reconstructed several of the houses buried at Pompeii as well as luxury villas elsewhere in Italy.

“Their sense of space was very different from ours,” she told an interviewer. “We have TV to engage us visually, and we tend to leave our floors, walls, and ceilings relatively bare. But the Romans used walls, ceilings, and floors as a kind of visual stimulation, something that would make them think.” Her scholarly articles arising from this work, such as “The Roman House as Memory Theater,” are themselves models of close visual attention and theoretical sophistication. She argues that Romans had a “protean and cinematic” sense of architectural space, and experienced something like time travel as they contemplated depicted landscapes from ancient Greece.

“I’m thrilled to welcome Professor Bergmann to Nashville,” said Betsey Robinson, associate professor of history of art. “She is an incredibly influential scholar of ancient art. She extends her investigations of ancient architecture and interior design into fascinating studies of environmental and social history.”

Bergmann earned a bachelor of arts in comparative literature at Berkeley and a master of arts in classical archaeology from the Archaeological Institute in Bochum, Germany. She also received a doctor of philosophy in art history and archaeology from Columbia University. Her publications include The Ancient Art of Spectacle, co-edited with Christine Kondoleon (Yale University Press, 1999). That same year she co-curated (with Mount Holyoke curator Wendy Watson) The Moon and the Stars: Afterlife of a Roman Empress, an exhibition at the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum that focused on the newly acquired bust of Faustina the Elder. Bergmann is currently writing essays on Roman gardens and their paintings, Roman interiors, and the Roman house. She is preparing two books for publication, one on Roman ensembles and the other on Roman landscape.

Free and open to the public, the Goldberg Lecture is sponsored by the Department of History of Art. Limited parking is available in Lot 95 outside Cohen Hall on the Peabody campus. For more information, call (615) 322-2831.

Photograph of Bettina Bergman courtesy of Mount Holyoke College; Flight of Icarus, fragment of Roman wall painting from Pompeii, ca. 50-79 CE.