Trimalchio ad nauseam: Roman Art as a Tyranny of Bad Taste?

Description

Ruth Bielfeldt, Harvard’s Harris K. Weston Associate Professor of the Humanities, takes the lavish dinner party of the Roman freedman Trimalchio—described in Petronius’s Satyricon—as the starting point for a critical look at wall paintings and other domestic art of early Imperial Rome. Are excess and mishmash always bad, or does Trimalchio’s desire to turn the world into an overstuffed dish offer a key to a different understanding of Roman tastes and aesthetics?

Free