Shaky Ground: Context Matters

I am working my way through Elizabeth Marlowe's Shaky Ground: Context, Connoisseurship and the History of Roman Art (Debates in Archaeology; Bloomsbury 2013). Readers of LM need to read this important contribution. There is a chapter on "Indifference to Context", and "Red Herrings" includes discussions of licit / illicit, the Nostoi exhibitions, as well as repatriation.

The work includes a short discussion (and photograph) of the bronze Marcus Aurelius in Cleveland that appears to have come from Bubon in Turkey.

Marlowe is reminding her readers that loss of context has an impact on the way that scholars can interpret works of art that have been removed from their find-spots without record.