The catalog, jointly produced with the Réunion des Musées Nationaux Grand Palais, is being published for the largest exhibition ever organized about Augustus, as part of the celebrations to mark the 2,000th anniversary of his death. The quality of the clear, meaningful texts, written by experts from various fields (giving the historical and political, artistic, literary and other points of view), and the illustrations, together with some exceptional loans from the Louvre, have combined to make this work a comprehensive monograph about Rome's first emperor, somehow hitherto lacking in the Italian publishing scenario.
The catalog, jointly produced with the Réunion des Musées Nationaux Grand Palais, is being published for the largest exhibition ever organized about Augustus, as part of the celebrations to mark the 2,000th anniversary of his death. The quality of the clear, meaningful texts, written by experts from various fields (giving the historical and political, artistic, literary and other points of view), and the illustrations, together with some exceptional loans from the Louvre, have combined to make this work a comprehensive monograph about Rome’s first emperor, somehow hitherto lacking in the Italian publishing scenario.
The book opens with a visual essay, a sort of introduction through images on the themes and the impact of the emperor in history, through testimonials that date from Antiquity to the 20th century. This is followed by a gallery of portraits of figures of the dynasty, and a critical anthology of Res Gestae Divi Augusti, Augustus’s autobiography, describing the events surrounding his rise to power. A series of contributions describes the historical conditions which led to the crisis of the late Republic and the establishment of the dynasty. Every aspect of this new civilization is analyzed: religion, how power was celebrated, even through the minting of coins, the emperor’s private life and the influence of the dominant artistic genres in imperial residences in Italy, and the spread of the Augustan culture to the provinces, especially Gaul.
Twenty-five years on from Paul Zanker’s memorable work (The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus), which revealed the political, moral and cultural values of the era in images from the Augustan Age, leading specialists in the international field join together here to update and complete a picture which, probing the recesses of a much studied ideological propaganda, remains strikingly relevant today.