Maggie Popkin, the first CWRU faculty member ever to receive a Rome Prize, spent the spring semester in residence at the American Academy in Rome. Photo by Elliot Morrison
Whenever Maggie Popkin considers an object from antiquity—a triumphal arch, a glass figurine, an engraved silver goblet—she asks what it reveals about the culture that produced it. She wonders how people thought about the object, and what it meant to them. She wants to know how it acted upon their memories and imaginations.
Such queries have driven Popkin’s research—and led to her latest accolade: a 2020-21 Rome Prize, awarded by the American Academy in Rome, a major overseas center for advanced work in the fine arts and humanities.
Popkin, the Robson Junior Professor and associate professor in the Department of Art History and Art, is the first Case Western Reserve faculty member ever to receive this honor. As the Andrew Heiskell Rome Prize Fellow in Ancient Studies, she joined 21 other distinguished scholars and creative artists for a five-month residency at the Academy this spring.
“More than an excellent scholar, Professor Popkin combines an intellectual curiosity with a hunger for interdisciplinary engagement that is everything we look for in a Rome Prize Fellow,” said jury member Steven Ellis, associate professor in the Department of Classics at the University of Cincinnati, when the award was announced last July. “I’m so very glad for both her and the Academy.”
Popkin’s early exposure to art history helped set the direction for her future scholarship. As a first-year student at Williams College, she signed up for an introductory survey of Western art after hearing that it was one of the most popular courses in the curriculum. Although she had taken studio art in high school and was a serious painter, the field of art history was new to her. She enrolled in the class “just for fun,” she says. Soon, she was won over.
Art history, it turned out, was a more expansive field than she had realized, drawing ideas from anthropology and other humanistic disciplines. “It married my love of art with my interest in understanding human culture—how people relate to each other and create social dynamics and power relations,” she explains. Once Popkin declared her major and started taking advanced courses, she found that scholars of classical art were especially committed to an interdisciplinary approach. “We have such fragmentary evidence from the ancient world, you want to go at it from as many angles as you can,” she explains.
Popkin went on to earn a doctorate in art history and archaeology at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University. For her dissertation, she studied monuments Roman generals and emperors had built to celebrate their military victories. These structures, she argued, had influenced—and sometimes distorted —Romans’ understanding of their history.
The Populonia Bottle, a glass flask dating
from the 3rd–4th century A.D., is engraved with monuments of the ancient port cities of Puteoli and Baiae. It was probably made as a souvenir. Populonia Bottle (probably 275–325 A.D.). CMOG 62.1.31. Image licensed by The Corning Museum of Glass, Corning, NY (www.cmog.org) under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.
During her time in graduate school, Popkin also wrote about smaller, less glorious objects: Roman souvenirs and memorabilia. Many of these artifacts—including medallions, glass vessels, jewelry and toys—had been excavated in far-flung provinces of the empire. They were decorated with images of cities, religious sites and festivals, and sporting events. To Popkin, these objects were unexpectedly captivating. Like the imperial monuments, they offered clues to “how Romans perceived and conceptualized their world.”
Once she became a faculty member at Case Western Reserve in 2013, Popkin set about expanding her dissertation into a book. The Architecture of the Roman Triumph: Monuments, Memory, and Identity was published three years later, and other professional accomplishments quickly followed. In 2017, shortly before she was appointed to the Robson chair, Popkin won a highly competitive fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities to pursue her interest in souvenirs.Finally, as a Rome Prize Fellow this spring, she finished writing her second book, Souvenirs and the Experience of Empire in Ancient Rome.
Traditionally, historians of classical art have devoted most of their attention to costly, large-scale works created for an educated elite, Popkin notes. Souvenirs, on the other hand, were inexpensive, portable and accessible to a wide range of socioeconomic classes. Roman visitors to the Parthenon in Athens encountered tradesmen selling miniature reproductions of the great statue of Athena. Travelers to the port city of Puteoli on the Bay of Naples could stop in at glassmakers’ shops and purchase flasks adorned with sketches of local architectural landmarks. Fans of chariot racing and gladiatorial combat—the empire’s two major sports—could purchase cups, knife handles or brooches depicting their favorite competitors.
In assessing the significance of these objects, Popkin has drawn from recent work in cognitive science and neuropsychology—fields that have shed light on the nature of human memory.
Imagine, for instance, a merchant who returned from a business trip to Puteoli with one of those souvenir flasks. When he looked at the cityscape etched on its surface, he would have recognized structures he saw during his visit: the monumental pier in the harbor, two amphitheaters, a stadium, a temple honoring the emperor Augustus. By emphasizing these landmarks, Popkin suggests, artisans had projected an ideal vision of their city, whose architectural wonders testified to the patronage it had enjoyed under a series of Roman emperors.
Gladiators in combat appear on this glass drinking cup, dating from the 1st century A.D. Courtesy of Metropolitan Museum of Art
But the flask might not have simply reminded the merchant of Puteoli’s major attractions. Over time, it could also have altered the way he remembered the city. Sites depicted on the glass might have come to dominate his recollections, while others faded from his mind. Cognitive research, Popkin points out, has demonstrated that our memories are “constantly reshaped, constructed and reconstructed,” and that “visual stimuli can manipulate, distort or falsify” our mental images of places and actions we credit ourselves with recalling exactly as they were. The flask, then, could have been a “shaper of memory,” not merely an aid to it.
Popkin also argues that the souvenir’s impact might have extended beyond the merchant. Perhaps he would have shown the flask to guests or bequeathed it to his children. These people might never have visited Puteoli, but now they, too, would have had a mental image of the city. And this image would have seemed definitive to them, since they had no postcards or travel brochures to compare it to. The visual representations on souvenirs were the only ones in circulation.
Popkin tells a similar story about religious objects. Romans who did not travel to certain sacred sites would have seen famous statues of goddesses only in the form of souvenirs: a perfume bottle modeled after the Tyche of Antioch, a gem carved with the Artemis of Ephesus, a medallion on which the Parthenon’s Athena bears her tri-crested helmet and shield.
The sports memorabilia of ancient Rome hold a special fascination for Popkin, in part because they anticipate the sports merchandise of our own day. She writes that objects depicting gladiators and charioteers conferred celebrity status on select contenders and “created an appetite for athletic performances in the provinces.” They were critical to the emergence of team loyalties and a sense of community among fans who were dispersed across the empire.
These two objects—a bronze statuette (1st–2nd century A.D.) and a glass bottle (2nd–3rd century A.D.)—are both modeled on the Tyche of Antioch, a famous Greek statue depicting the goddess of fortune. Yale University Art Gallery
Excluding such objects from our study of antiquity, Popkin argues, would be like omitting social media and other aspects of popular culture from an analysis of our postmodern world: “You couldn’t hope to understand our experiences today without considering those,” she says. And Popkin doesn’t worry that she is attributing greater meaning to these objects than the Romans did themselves. Many souvenirs, she notes, have been discovered at burial sites—evidence that their owners valued them highly enough to take them along to the afterlife.
Popkin speaks gratefully of the opportunities afforded her during her residency as a Rome Prize Fellow. She revisited many of the city’s most important collections of ancient art and explored several museums for the first time. Italian colleagues generously shared their expertise; for example, she toured the Circus Maximus, the ancient stadium for chariot racing, with the archaeologist in charge of the excavations there.
Popkin also had access to the extraordinary library of the American Academy in Rome, and to its specialized collections of rare books and archaeological studies. But the greatest resource of all, she says, was the vibrant intellectual community the fellows created. They took walks through different parts of the city, sharing insights about its history. When they learned that an ancient Roman aqueduct, the Aqua Traiana, runs beneath the Academy’s building, they climbed down into it to look around. Each week, one humanities scholar and one artist would present their work together in a “shop talk.”
“I was paired with Katherine Balch, a composer who uses quotidian objects as instruments,” Popkin recalls. “It was wonderful to think about how we are both rehabilitating ‘ordinary’ objects that people often overlook but that have so much potential for creating amazing music or helping us understand society.”