Dr Peter Stewart
Reader in Classical Art & its Heritage
MA, MPhil, PhD (Cambridge)
Contact details
The Courtauld Institute of Art
Somerset House
Strand
London WC2R 0RN
+44 (0)20 7848 2163
Peter Stewart completed all his studies in classics at the University of Cambridge. He also taught there as a temporary lecturer in Greek and Roman art before moving to a permanent post at Reading University, where he was lecturer in classics and curator of the Ure Museum of Greek Archaeology. He moved to The Courtauld Institute of Art in 2000. He has worked widely in the fields of classical art and cultural history, publishing on topics as diverse as Roman Britain in ancient literature, the image of Priapus and Roman lamps, as well Roman statues - the subject of his 1998 PhD thesis. His main current interests lie in Roman provincial sculpture and the history of the sculpture collection at Wilton House. In 2010-11 he is serving as Acting Dean of the Institute.
research interests
- Catalogue of the sculpture collection in Wilton House near Salisbury
- Roman provincial sculpture
- 'Bad art' in antiquity
- Roman portraits and statuary
- Collecting antiquities in seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Britain
Courses Taught in 2010-11
- BA1/CGDHA Foundations: two lectures
- MA: Antiquity to Byzantium (with Antony Eastmond)
RECENT PHD THESES SUPERVISED
- The Search For an Architectural Style: Roman Architecture in the Reign of the Emperor Hadrian (completed 2007)
- Collecting and Collections: The Museo Pio Clementino in the Light of the Enlightened Classical Scholarship (submitted 2010; supervised with Dr Katie Scott)
- Sex and Context: Exploring Images of Sexual Behaviour and the ‘Erotic’ in Roman Art (in progress)
Recent publications
'Geographies of Provincialism in Roman Sculpture', RIHA Journal 0005 (27 July 2010)
‘Totenmahl Reliefs in the Northern Provinces: A Case-Study in Imperial Sculpture', Journal of Roman Archaeology 22, 253-74
The Social History of Roman Art (Cambridge University Press, 2008)
'Baetyls as Statues? Cult Images in the Roman Near East', in E. Friedland et al. (eds.) The Sculptural Environment of the Roman Near East: Reflections on Culture, Ideology, and Power (Peeters, 2008), 293-310
'Gell's Idols and Roman Cult', in R. Osborne and J. Tanner (eds.), Art's Agency and Art History (Blackwell, 2007), 158-78
'Continuity and Tradition in Late Antique Perceptions of Portrait Statuary', in F.A. Bauer and C. Witschel (eds.), Statuen und Statuensammlungen in der Spätantike – Funktion und Kontext (Reichert 2007), 27-43.
The Road to Byzantium: Luxury Arts of Antiquity Exhibition catalogue (Fontanka Press, 2006), edited with A. Eastmond et al.
''Sculpture' in E. Bispham, T. Harrison and B. Sparkes (eds.) The Edinburgh Companion to Ancient Greece and Rome (Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 183-93.
'The Image of the Roman Emperor', in R. Shepherd and R. Maniura (eds.), Presence: The Inherence of the Prototype within Images and Other Objects (Ashgate Publishing, 2006), 243-58
Roman Art (Greece and Rome New Surveys in the Classics, no. 34) (OUP for the Classical Association, 2004).
Statues in Roman Society: Representation and Response (Oxford University Press).
Roman Art, no. 34 in Greece & Rome New Surveys in the Classics (Oxford University Press, 2003)
KEYWORDS
Roman art; Roman sculpture; Roman Empire; provincialism; Greek art; Wilton House; Earls of Pembroke; history of collecting; statues; Roman portraiture