On Thursday, April 14, at 6 p.m., Dr. Nicola Barham, core faculty member in the University of Michigan Interdepartmental Program in Classical Art and Archaeology, will discuss the aesthetic strategies of the iconic funerary reliefs of Palmyra, taking the portrait of a Palmyrene woman in the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology as her starting point. Her talk, entitled "Encrusted in Ancestors: Formal Reflections on the Funerary Reliefs of Palmyra," is part of the Field Archaeology Series on Thursday, presented in hybrid format by the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology. 

The physical lecture will occur in the Classics Library (2175 Angell Hall). The lecture will also be streamed live via Zoom.

Zoom link:

https://umich.zoom.us/j/97521940803

Dr. Barham's talk interrogates the visual effects mediated by the status of these works as relief, and illustrates that when Palmyrene portraits are viewed individually, (as is so common today), the intended dynamic interactions of these sculptures are dramatically elided. The lecture reinserts these portraits into an original tomb context of display to reconstruct the powerful visual effects they were designed to create when operating together as an ensemble. Palmyrene funerary sculptures emerge as both participating in many of the broader discourses of Graeco-Roman artistic production, as well as in the Parthian visual tradition, but as also achieving a highly distinctive and localised visual impact. Like the dead whom they commemorate and, indeed, like the medium of relief itself, these objects occupy an in-between status, at once concealing and revealing, affectively engaging and emotionally withdrawn, stridently individual and defined by group dynamics. The visual strategies of these reliefs are unique to the Syrian desert oasis of Palmyra.