Want to create an interactive transcript for this episode?
Podcast: New Books in Ancient History
Episode: Sarah Bassett, "Style and Meaning in Late Antique Art" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
Description: How do we best see and understand the art of late antiquity? One of the perceived challenges of so doing is that this is a period whose visual production has been defined as stylistically abstract and emotionally spiritual, and therefore elusive. But this is a perception which – in her path-breaking new book – Sarah Bassett boldly challenges, offering two novel lines of interpretative inquiry. She first argues, by focusing on the art of late antiquity in late nineteenth-century Viennese intellectual and artistic circles, that that period's definition of late antique form was in fact a response to contemporaneous polit...