Meaning, Materiality, and Pothos in Late Antique Gold-Glass Portraits

The present study takes the exploration of pothos, a specific type of desire and longing for that which is absent, in ancient portraiture as a point of departure for investigating an understudied type of Roman portrait: the gold-glass roundel. The first half of the dissertation extracts a corpus of eighteen gold-glass portraits from the much larger body of elite objects that survives from antiquity known as gold sandwich glass after their remarkable facture. Subsequent chapters then situate this corpus within the contexts of the exquisite portrait miniature, a tradition reaching back to the Hellenistic period, and contemporarily-executed sculpted portraits of the third century CE.
The second half employs the corpus as a vehicle for exploring theoretical issues related to ancient portraiture more broadly. After introducing pothos and probing how Romans conceived of the portrait image, I turn to the aesthetic and material qualities of the gold-glass portraits themselves. At the conceptual center of my study is what I define as an "aesthetics of wonder" whose characteristics can be traced back to the poetry of Homer and Hesiod. Classical literature connects conceptions of the wondrous and otherworldly with luminosity, gleam, and luster, the very qualities of the portrait roundels. The dissertation considers how the gold-glass portraits harness this aesthetics to transform into powerful, animated images equipped with the agency to assuage pothos.
The project proposes a new epistemology for interpreting the eighteen gold-glass portraits by returning to the vocabulary used by Greek and Roman authors to describe works of art and their world. I contend that the material form of the portrait was tantamount to the type of power it wielded. I argue that the roundels were perfectly suited to mitigate pothos, traversing realms of the real and marvelous to make present the absent beloved. In uniting language, aesthetics, and materiality, this dissertation puts forward a means of looking at art and society that is not limited to portraiture but that can be more widely deployed within the Classical world, and indeed, in other areas of visual culture studies.