Roman art

Art is that which is made with the primary intention of stimulating the human senses as well as the human mind or spirit. Today I write about Roman art. Roman art grows out of Etruscan art, and at first it is a lot like Etruscan art. Because of this, it has a close relationship to Greek art as well. Roman art as a type of its own really gets going around 500 BC with the beginning of the Roman Republic. Roman people were particularly interested in portraiture: in making statues that really looked like one particular person, especially a famous person. Greek people were more interested in ideals: what is the most beautiful man? What is the most athletic man? But the Romans were more interested in reality. A lot of people living in Rome seem to have believed, also, that having a good image of somebody’s face was important to keeping their ghost happy after they died so they wouldn’t haunt you. So throughout the time of the Roman Republic and all the way through the Roman Empire we see a lot of portraits. Romans were nearly unique in the mixures of materials (e.g. marble and porphyry) used both for painting and sculptures themselves, largely due to cost. While inspired by the Greeks, Romans also developed some of their own innovations, such as the bust and the democratization of the portrait.