Roman Architecture
Published: Feb 20, 2017
Description
Roman Architecture is a course for people who love to travel and want to discover the power of architecture to shape politics, society, and culture. This nine-week journey will allow us to explore the great cities, buildings, and engineering marvels of Rome and its empire in their ancient and contemporary contexts. While architectural developments in Rome, Pompeii, and Central Italy will be highlighted, the course will also survey sites and structures in what are now North Italy, Sicily, France, Spain, Germany, Greece, Turkey, Croatia, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, and North Africa. The lectures are illustrated with over 1,500 images, many from Professor Kleiner’s personal collection.
Course Takeaways
- Discover why and how the Romans were able to turn a local Iron Age village into a vast multicultural empire
- Identify a Roman building, whether it was erected in Italy or countries like Greece, Turkey, France, Spain, Jordan, or North Africa
- Identify different stylistic and temporal periods of Roman art and architecture
- Heighten your ability to make visual connections between modern architecture and its Roman roots and to turn those visual connections into an evolutionary history that has a past, a present, and a future
Meet the Instructors
Diana E. E. Kleiner is the Dunham Professor of History of Art and Classics at Yale University, Founding Director of Open Yale Courses, and former Deputy Provost at Yale. She is the author of numerous books on Roman art in its political and social context including Roman Sculpture (Yale University Press), the fundamental reference on the subject. She has done seminal work on Roman women, centered around the ground-breaking exhibition, I Clavdia: Women in Ancient Rome, and is the author of Cleopatra and Rome (Harvard University Press), which opens a new perspective on one of the most intriguing women who ever lived. Professor Kleiner has resided in Rome and Athens and has traveled extensively throughout what was once the Roman Empire, experiencing firsthand nearly every site and building featured in Roman Architecture. Her expertise, observations, and digital images are now presented in a companion interactive e-book, Roman Architecture: A Visual Guide (Yale University Press, 2014).
Full biography
