My dissertation offers the first complete compilation of all known examples of the door motif in Roman Italy, from its initial appearance in the second century BCE, to its disappearance in the early fourth century CE. My research expands the corpus from 91 examples to 242 examples. The door motif can be defined as the fundamental rather than incidental rendering of a door found in various media in Roman art. In this project, I examine seven types of works with this motif: domestic decorations, urns, altars, cippi, loculus slabs, stelae, and sarcophagi. Particular attention is paid to the distribution of this extant material, their chronology, context, formal characteristics, and any unusual features related to the door motif’s appearance. In addition, this dissertation includes catalogue entries with the most up-to-date information on the location, date, findspot, descriptions, and images of every example of the door motif found on the Italian peninsula.
Despite considerable earlier literature on the door motif, the subject has not been systematically investigated. In current and previous scholarship, the door motif is often mentioned but almost always in passing, and primarily in relation to its appearance in funerary contexts or occasionally in domestic wall paintings. The two most extensive publications on the door motif, now forty-five years old, are incomplete and focus largely on the door’s symbolic meaning. My dissertation compiles and updates this existing scholarship to present the only comprehensive catalogue of door motif examples in Roman Italy. In addition, by gathering this previously disparate material, I use the catalogued group of objects to open new discussions that focus specifically on the depiction of the door. These discussions include the door’s formal characteristics, context, and frequency of its appearance. In re-examining the door motif and its representation more closely, this dissertation also provides a foundation for future scholars to ask new questions about the image’s meaning. Altogether, the materials presented in this dissertation provide a new foundation for the examination of the popular door motif and a springboard for future scholarship.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bu.edu/oai:open.bu.edu:2144/47057 |
| Date | 03 October 2023 |
| Creators | Yen, Alexandria H. |
| Contributors | Kleiner, Fred S. |
| Source Sets | Boston University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
| Rights | Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ |
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