Date of Award
4-25-2025
Major
Art History, Classics
Faculty Advisor
Sanders, Brenda K.
Abstract
Sarcophagus, translating to “flesh-eater” in Greek, is a marble coffin Romans used for burials, commissioned for the elite and wealthy. Beautiful and unique, Roman sarcophagi are woefully under-researched, leading to many unknown and unanswered questions around their creation and existence. This thesis focuses on the question of ‘unfinished portraiture’ – a term used to describe a phenomenon in which the sarcophagus is fully carved except for the head or portrait features of the deceased. Unlike other funerary monuments such as busts or statues, ‘unfinished portraiture’ is singular to sarcophagi. This thesis explores and problematizes widely accepted explanations that range from a lack of familial financials to stock pieces bought for untimely deaths and finishes with my own synthesis of arguments accounting for one of the greatest mysteries of late Roman funerary art: that the portraits were, in fact, purposeful – meant to preserve the memory of the deceased through the supplementary carvings, as well as an approach to exploring the unknowns of death itself.