Rabun Taylor | The University of Texas at Austin (original) (raw)

Papers by Rabun Taylor

River Cities, City Rivers, 2018

American Journal of Archaeology, 2020

American Journal of Archaeology, 2017

Res: Anthropology and aesthetics, 2005

American Journal of Archaeology, 2015

Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome. Supplementary Volumes, 2003

The link provides access to the website (created with Adam Rabainowitz) that publishes the strati... more The link provides access to the website (created with Adam Rabainowitz) that publishes the stratigraphy: much of the book is available on Google Books.

Classical Philology, 2005

The Classical World, 2005

American Journal of Archaeology, 2020

Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome, 2010

RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, 2005

What is an oscillum? As it is used today, the term oscillum (oscilla in the plural) refers to two... more What is an oscillum? As it is used today, the term oscillum (oscilla in the plural) refers to two distinct but related things in the Roman world: in one case an artifact, in the other a historical construct. According to standard modern usage it was an object of marble worked in relief on both sides, probably painted, and suspended by a hook from the architrave or ceiling of a colonnaded portico.1 It tends to take one of three forms: tondo (a thin disk), pinax (a framed rectangle), or pelta (a broad, lunate shield). Small marble theater masks, usually hollowed out in the back, have sometimes been found in the company of conventional oscilla, most famously at the House of the Golden Cupids at Pompeii (fig. 1). All these objects are frequently depicted hanging from fictive colonnades or garlands in Pompeian frescoes. The reliefs appearing on oscilla are mostly typical Roman genre scenes dominated by Dionysiac and theatrical themes; occasionally a mythological vignette will appear in highly abbreviated form. Marble oscilla of the Roman west (a few have also been found in Athens) came into vogue only in the first century ce. and declined in popularity after the mid second century. Clearly their various forms were deemed interchangeable by the time they began to appear in permanent materials. But their eclecticism is not meaningless. Indeed, we should see their popularity in domestic contexts as a commodif?cation of a variety of ritual traditions on the Italian peninsula which extended back for centuries, and which shared one common feature: their meaning was defined or enhanced by the act of suspension. Although the scholarship on oscilla is not robust, a number of article-length studies, a dissertation, and a short monograph have appeared on the topic.2 These have been concerned not only with the oscillum as a material artifact, but with the Latin word oscillum from which the modern term is derived?a word so obscure that literary commentators in late antiquity could only speculate about it. To distinguish between the archaeological artifact, which is never directly referenced in any ancient text, and the lexicographic one, I will designate each by typeface: the former in roman, the latter in italic. My intention is not to establish an absolute distinction, but merely to place emphasis on one designation or the other. Since the nineteenth century, there has been a strange gulf between art historians, who tend to sidestep the literary construct too quickly, and the students of religion such as Franz Altheim and Jean-Louis Voisin, who deal at length with the literary sources and the various claims to ritual origins for oscilla but hardly acknowledge the existence of a physical corpus of suspended objects, let alone the extant representations of them in a variety of media.3 The question of origins This article investigates a range of possible primary functions?most of them ritual in nature?that underlie the more overtly semantic and aesthetic secondary 1. Marble plaques are not the only class of objects called oscilla. Railler lays out the problem of definition succinctly: "l'emploi indiscrimin? de ce terme comporte quelques inconv?nients, quand le m?me mot en vient ? d?signer des bas-reliefs de marbre du 1er s. ap. J.-C, des masques ou poup?es suspendus aux arbres dans de vieux cultes italiques, de petits m?daillons de terre cuite du IVe s. av. J.-C.