How Do We Look: The Body, the Divine, and the Question of Civilization

by Mary Beard

I shall be looking at some images from the distant past with the same suspicious eyes that we usually keep for those in the modern world. It is important to remember that plenty of ancient Egyptian viewers, or ancient Romans, may have been just as cynical about the colossal statues of their rulers as we now are about the parade of images of modern autocrats.

Balbilla’s poetry especially reminds us that the history of art is not just a history of artists, of the men and women who painted and sculpted. It’s also a history of the men and women, who like her looked and interpreted what they saw, and the changing ways in which they did so.