wtih Dr. Lauren Petersen, Professor of Art History

This intensely collaborative study focuses on a now-faded fresco that decorates the walls of a fullery (a Roman laundry) that formed the background scenery for workers laboring in strenuous, water-logged, and foul-smelling tasks. While the fresco includes symbols and tools of fulling, its scenes feature workmen engaged in varied activities, most of them seemingly unconnected with fulling: standing trial, dancing(?), marching around, hunting owls or gathering olives or both, hiding, and defecating. While a general description of a seemingly odd collection of scenes raises questions about interpretation, this study embraces the fresco’s complex heterogeneity and examines its entanglements to make a kind of “sense” of the fresco’s idiosyncratic clustering of images.

Wednesday, September 4th, 2024
4:00pm
Old College 212