ABSTRACT
The introduction announces the contrast that the book will develop, between ancient and early modern Rome. The introduction suggests that the general cultural divide between ancient and modern is focused around differing ideas of nature. While antiquity often asserted the divinity of nature, and saw the cosmos as an orderly place to which human beings belonged, modernity understood nature through the engagement of the imagination and our interpretive lenses. Modernity dispensed with the idea of the pre-given order of a cosmos which was inherently intelligible and instead put a new emphasis on human creative power. All of this was very relevant in ancient and early modern Roman art, as later chapters in the book will argue. The introduction then goes on to give an account of how art can be connected to changing ideas of nature even when artists or artisans are not directly engaged in science or philosophy of nature. Finally, it gives some caveats about key terms, like “cosmos”, “ancient”, “modern” and “early modern”, and points to later chapters where some exceptions to the ancients/moderns dichotomy will be addressed.
