In 1967 Ranuccio Bianchi Bandinelli introduced the first issue of the journal Dialoghi di Archeologia with a programmatic article entitled “Arte plebea”. With this term he designated forms of artistic representation that replaced ‘high-art’ conventions of figural representation such as spatial perspective or naturalistic proportions with the symbolic isolation of motifs in order to increase their immediacy and expressiveness--a phenomenon that was especially apparent in the cultures of ancient Italy. His study of the arte plebea, and the very conception of the Dialoghi di Archeologia, were informed by the requirement that classical archaeology be pursued in a new way, namely as a critical discipline with an explicit historical orientation. This requirement led to sustained controversies, but also had a wide impact and substantially changed the field. In the Germany of the 1970s this change occurred mainly thanks to the publications of Paul Zanker. Together with the notion of arte plebea, Zanker’s scholarship has significantly contributed to the understanding of a basic phenomenon of ancient art, as well as of art generally: the relationship between form, content, and the social locus of artworks. In June 2007, on the occasion of Zanker’s 70th birthday, a colloquium was held in Rome with the aim of determining the current standing of the study of this relationship, especially from the point of view of Zanker’s closest colleagues and friends. The ten papers from that conference that are presented here expound a variety of perspectives on the interpretation of ancient works of art in their social and political context, in terms of both form and content: while particular attention is devoted to the imagery of Pompeii, topics covered range from ancient Greek art to provincial Roman art, and include Greek votive reliefs, Roman state reliefs, funerary monuments, and portraits. In this way the ongoing relevance of the issues related to the arte plebea and similar formal phenomena can also be underscored diachronically. Using the questions formulated since 1967 and the 1970s as a starting point, these selected case studies manage to disclose further perspectives of research for classical archaeology understood as a form of socially oriented art history.weiterlesen