This article demonstrates how a contextual approach to material culture can help us think about the link between Roman hegemony and cultural change in Republican Italy. It does this by focusing on a particular set of artefacts — anatomical votive terracottas — that have been seen to indicate the spread of Roman and/or Latin culture in central Italy. Although the use of anatomical terracottas may have begun in the vicinity of Rome, communities in central Italy actively engaged with these artefacts according to their own cultural dispositions. Such signs of local agency are especially visible in the way that worshippers in the Apennine areas of central Italy favoured votive terracottas depicting legs, feet and hands, instead of reproductive organs, which were more popular in the Tyrrhenian zone. These findings emphasise the key role of local cultural practice in shaping the effect of accelerated political change on the micro-level.

This article provides a reconstruction of a Roman funerary complex that was discovered near the Porta Maggiore in Rome at the end of the nineteenth century (1871), using excavation reports and drawings, archival photographs, topographical indications and epigraphic materials. This paper examines the inscriptions discovered inside these tombs, which have been published in the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum (CIL VI, 5961–6148), but attributed to the wrong funerary context. Thanks to two photographs taken by John Henry Parker in 1871, we can now ‘re-place’ these inscriptions in their original burial chamber. The objective of this study is to use this varied evidence to contribute to our understanding of the archaeological and topographical development of this area, through an analysis of the different periods in which this burial ground was utilized.

This paper brings together literary, epigraphic and iconographic evidence for the victimarii — the attendants responsible for slaughtering sacrificial animals in ancient Rome. It aims to explore the problematic status of victimarii in Roman society, and argues that the often hostile views of the aristocracy have led to the continued marginalisation of this prominent group within scholarly discussions of religion and society. It argues that when the various strands are considered together a far more positive view of victimarii within Roman society emerges, suggesting that this was in some respects one of the most respectable of professions among the slave and freedman communities.

This paper looks at one particular group of non-élite tradesmen — barbers — to see what they can tell us about popular culture, primarily in the city of Rome in the early Empire. It begins by looking at the significance barbers had in wider cultural discourse. Grooming the hair sat under that difficult umbrella term, cultus, which related to all manner of adornment and refinement. A key question for the study of ancient popular culture is whether it is possible to see through this largely élite literary construction and discern something of the underlying realities of everyday life. The paper argues that some level of plausible reconstruction is possible, and outlines what characteristics can be discovered about non-élite life. But popular sociability in the barbershop raised concerns among élite writers, and the paper examines these as a way to understand the nature of the relationship between popular and élite cultures.

By examining the historical narratives of Saint Catherine of Siena's death and burial this paper sheds new light on the liturgical layout of the Dominican church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva in Rome c. 1380. Since then Saint Catherine's remains have been translated five times, and at each translation, the form and decoration of her sepulchre has changed, showing how different aspects of her life were commemorated at each renewal of her tomb. These transformations are examined in the light of what survives today and of other literary documentation. Particular attention is given to the way Catherine was represented before and after her canonization in 1461. This explains why a relief attributed to Donatello that has been associated with her tomb may date c. 1430, while a figure of the saint by an artist close to Isaia of Pisa was made c. 1466. The paper also examines the consequences of placing the tomb under the altar of the Capranica chapel in 1579, and of moving the monument under the high altar of the church in 1855, when Santa Maria sopra Minerva was restored according to neo-Gothic principles. Each phase of her tomb shows how Catherine has been venerated from 1380 until the present.

Francesco di Giorgio, the Sienese architect and artist, visited Rome c. 1470. By looking at his plan of the ‘porticho del Champitolio’, it is possible to reconstruct not only what Francesco di Giorgio saw on the Monte Tarpeo, but also what Poggio Bracciolini, Flavio Biondo, Pietro del Massaio and others saw there. It was apparently a notable site, an evocative ruin worthy of commentary, artistic representation and imaginative reconstruction. Whatever temple remains continued to be visible, however, these were insufficient to suggest that they were originally part of the temple. By the end of the fifteenth century, the temple had been lost. None the less, Francesco di Giorgio unwittingly documented the last standing columns of the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus.

Virgil's poetry has frequently appeared in illustrated editions, and has regularly provided subjects for other works of art, including some of the most celebrated masterpieces of the western tradition. In view of its constant appropriation in literary contexts over the course of the centuries, we might expect the famous fourth Eclogue (the so-called ‘messianic’ eclogue) to have exerted more of an impact on visual culture than it appears to have done. This paper considers some of the possible reasons for the apparent scarcity of engagement with Virgil's poem beyond the literary sphere, and examines the uses to which the poet's text is put when it does make an appearance in visual media — perhaps more often than has sometimes been supposed.

King Charles II's first illegitimate son, the little-known Jacques de La Cloche, married a lady in Naples and had a posthumous son, born in 1669 and known as Don Giacomo Stuardo. Although his father was illegitimate and he himself a Catholic, Stuardo hoped that he might one day become King of England. The Glorious Revolution resulted in opposition between supporters of the Protestant Succession to the British thrones and supporters of the exiled Catholic Stuarts, James II and then his son James III. When the Protestant Queen Anne was succeeded by the unpopular Hanoverian George I in 1714, James III was still unmarried and had no children, so Stuardo hoped that James might recognize him as the Jacobite heir. When James married and had two sons, Stuardo hoped that his cousin would at least receive him as a Stuart prince. All his attempts to meet James III and secure recognition were unsuccessful, and he died disappointed and in poverty in about 1752. In the tercentenary of the Hanoverian Succession, enough archival information finally has emerged to provide a study of the life of this alternative claimant to the British thrones.

This article offers an analysis of the preparation, publication and reception of the two separate versions of William Gell's Pompeiana, texts that exercised a formative influence over Victorian understanding of not just Roman Pompeii, but of domestic Roman life more broadly throughout the nineteenth century, and that highlight a transition from eighteenth-century antiquarianism to a more ‘archaeological’ approach to the past in the nineteenth century. Using unpublished correspondence that has been overlooked by other scholarship on Gell, it argues that the form and content of the volumes responded to both contemporary fascination with the history of domestic life and the need for an affordable volume on Pompeii. But the volumes also reflected many of Gell's more personal interests, developed in a career of travelling in Greece, Asia Minor and Spain, and were a product of his circumstances: they were conceived in order that Gell (and his coadjutor John Peter Gandy in the first edition) might earn much-needed additional income, and were a means through which Gell could consolidate his social position in Naples by establishing his authoritative expertise on Pompeii.

This gazette presents to the reader outside Rome news of recent archaeological activity (primarily in 2014, but also in the first part of 2015), gleaned from public lectures, conferences, exhibitions and newspaper reports.