Glossary of Terms
The following vocabulary list is taken from the third edition of the book, Roman Art, by Nancy H. Ramage and Andrew Ramage.
Acanthus: A broad-leafed plant with many spikes, used as a decorative pattern on Corinthian capitals and reliefs.
Acroteria: Ornaments at the apex of the gable and at the corners of the roof of a temple.
Adlocutio: formal speech, often given by the emperor to his troops. Sometimes used for the traditional stance, with one arm raised, associated with such a speech.
Adventus: Latin for arrival. Used to represent the formal arrival of an emperor or general, with all its pomp and circumstance.
Aedicula: A small pedimented pavilion forming parts of a façade. Often used for the backdrop of theaters or for framing figures on sarcophagi.
Aggregate: The inert material, usually sand, gravel, or rubble that is bound together with pozzolana to form concrete.
Ala: The wing or side section of a house or temple.
Alimenta: The custom of distributing food to the populace, often at the personal expense of the emperor.
Apotheosis: The occasion when someone (often an emperor) becomes a god or goddess after death. Typically, this is represented by the person being carried up to heaven.
Apse: A semicircular space, usually at the end of a hall or basilica.
Ara: Latin for altar. The word is often used for the ceremonial enclosure as well as the sacrificial stone itself.
Architrave: The horizontal architectural element above the columns in a classical temple.
Arx: A citadel. At Rome, the Arx was the fortified part of the Capitoline Hill.
Atmospheric Perspective: A device for creating the illusion of distance by making faraway objects appear hazier than objects in the foreground.
Atrium: The central room of a traditional Roman house.
Attic: The upper portion of a triumphal arch.
Augustus: A title for the emperor meaning, "revered." The name was originally taken by Octavian but was used subsequently for all reigning emperors.
Aureus: The name for the standard Roman gold coin. It was about ¾ inch (2cm) in diameter.
Barbarians: People who were from foreign lands and by implication considered less civilized than the Romans.
Baroque: A term transferred from seventeenth-century art, suggesting ornamental enrichment and elaboration for its own sake, especially in architectural façades.
Basilica: The conventional name for halls built to accommodate a crowd of people for civic and administrative purposes.
Bucchero: Fine black polished pottery made by the Etruscans, especially in the seventh and sixth centuries B.C.
Caesar/Caesares: Title used by the imperial family. Derived from Julius Caesar, it was first a family name, and eventually came to designate a son or junior colleague destined for the imperial throne.
Caldarium: The hot room of a Roman bath.
Canopic Urn: An Etruscan container for the ashes of the dead. The lid often takes the form of a human head, and sometimes schematic features of the human figure are added to the body of the jar.
Capital: The upper, spreading element of a column, forming a transition between the vertical shaft and horizontal elements of the architrave.
Capitolium: The main temple for civic worship in Roman colonies. Named for the deities (Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva) who were venerated on the Capitol in Rome.
Cardo: The name for a north-south street in the rectangular grid system of Roman town planning. Often used loosely for the principal north-south street (see decumanus).
Caryatid: A female figure used as a support, most commonly for mirror handles or as a replacement for columns.
Castrum: Latin for camp. Used for the rectangular ground plan of Roman colonial settlements that followed a similar layout.
Cavea: The rounded hollow space in a theater where the seats were placed.
Cella: An enclosed room of a temple, usually housing the cult statue.
Chiaroscuro: The use of light and shadows to create the illusion of shape and volume in painting or sculpture.
Chimaera: A mythical beast in the form of a fire-breathing lion, with the head of a goat (usually growing from its back) and the head of a snake (usually shown at the tip of the tail).
Coffers: The box-like shapes in the ceiling of architectural monuments and triumphal arches. Used to reduce the mass of the vaulting.
Colonnade: A row of columns, either surrounding a temple or standing as an independent architectural element.
Columbarium: A communal tomb with many niches to contain ash urns, named for its similarity to a bird house with many nesting boxes.
Composite: One of the five orders of architecture: Tuscan, Doric, Ionic, Corinthian, and Composite.
Consuls: The two chief administrators of the Roman state during the Republican period. They were elected annually. The office continued under the empire but became more of a titular post.
Corinthian: One of the five orders of architecture.
Cupola: Another word for a dome.
Dacians: A nation whose homeland lay on the north side of the lower Danube, and was roughly equivalent to modern Rumania. They were the enemy in the reliefs on Trajan's Column.
Dado: Part of a wall, sometimes up to waist height, often decorated with designs imitating different kinds of stone.
Damnatio Memoriae: A decree of the Senate condemning someone's behavior and ordering that all images of him and documentary references be destroyed or erased.
Decumanus: An east-west street in the grid layout of Roman towns. Often used of the decumanus maximus, or principal east-west thoroughfare (see cardo).
Denarius: The most common Roman silver coin. It was about 3/4 inch (2 cm) in diameter.
Dictator: A person with sweeping powers appointed in a time of crisis to restore the government or defend the state. The word does not carry the ugliness of modern connotations.
Domus: A single family townhouse, as opposed to a villa, which is a country house.
Doric: One of the five orders of architecture.
Emblema: The central motif in a mosaic; often set off by a frame, and better made than the background.
Encaustic: A painting technique where heated wax is used as a coloring and sealing medium.
Engaged Columns: Half-columns projecting from a wall to give the appearance of a closed colonnade.
Entablature: The upper architectural elements of a temple, above the columns.
Exedra: A large curving space set back in a wall or colonnade. Generally uncovered and bigger than an apse.
Fasces: Bundles of 12 canes bound up together around an axe, carried by the attendants of the chief magistrates, indicating their powers of corporal and capital punishment.
Faun: A young man with tail and goat ears who follows the wine god Dionysus.
Fibula: An ornamental brooch rather like a safety pin.
Fluting: Vertical grooves or channels on the columns. Doric fluting is shallow and meets at a sharp edge. Ionic and Corinthian fluting has a flat edge between the channels.
Foreshortening: An illusionistic device that reduces the length of objects seen obliquely, in order to suggest depth in an economical way on a flat surface.
Forum: The public open space in a Roman city or town, originally used as a market; the center of political and administrative activities.
Freedman: An emancipated slave. Freed slaves frequently became wealthy and important figures during the period of the Roman empire.
Frieze: The horizontal space above the main crossbeam in a classical temple, usually decorated with sculptured figures or floral ornament. Often used for any decoration arranged in a horizontal band.
Frigidarium: The cold room of a Roman bath.
Fury: One of a group of female personifications of vengeance who punished criminals, especially murderers who killed their own kin.
Granulation: The decoration of gold jewelry by covering the surface of the object with small globules of gold in elaborate patterns.
Grotteschi: Painted figures (especially imaginary creatures) copied or adapted in the Renaissance from the walls of the ancient buildings in Rome that were underground "grottoes' at the time.
Groundline: The pictorial representation of the surface on which figures stand.
Hellenistic: Refers to the period of Greek art and politics between the death of Alexander the Great (323 BC) and the establishment of Roman government in Greece and Asia Minor during the first century BC.
Hippodrome: The Greek equivalent of a track for chariot racing. In Latin, it is called a circus.
Impasto: Thick grayish pottery made by many Iron Age communities in Italy.
Impluvium: A small pool that catches the rain coming through an opening in the roof in the middle of the atrium of a Roman house.
Indigenous: Native to the geographical area, and not imported.
Insula: A multiple dwelling in a Roman town, usually encompassing a whole block. Derived from the Latin word for "island."
Ionic: One of the five orders of architecture.
Iron Age: The period between 1000 BC and 700 BC, when the use of iron was becoming more widespread.
Kouros: A standard sixth-century BC Greek statue type of a standing male, usually shown nude.
Latium: The area to the south and east of Rome. Home of the Latin tribes.
Lictors: Roman officers who accompanied official magistrates and who carried the fasces as a symbol of their power.
Maenad: A female follower of Dionysus, often seen holding cymbals or castanets in ecstatic dances.
Mappa: A ceremonial cloth used as a starting flag.
Material Culture: The term used to encompass the whole range of objects made and used by a particular group of people.
Municipium: A town whose inhabitants enjoyed Roman citizenship, although they usually followed their own laws.
Neoclassical: Usually refers to an art movement in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that imitates Greek and Roman art.
Neoplatonism: A doctrine originating from the revival of interest in the philosophy of Plato in the third century A.D.
Nereid: One of the daughters of Nereus. Also a general term for sea nymphs.
Nymphaeum: A term used for a formal fountain building in Roman imperial architecture.
Obelisk: A tapering pillar of square section, with a pointed top, set up by the ancient Egyptians, but often carried off for re-use by the Romans.
Oculus: The round opening in a dome to let in light. Derived from the Latin word for "eye."
Opus Incertum: A masonry technique using small stones of irregular size and shape to retain the concrete core of a wall.
Orchestra: The flat, semicircular space in front of the stage within the theater.
Palaestra: The Greek and Latin word for a wrestling ground; a space for field events.
Papyrus: A reed that grows in the Nile delta. The stalk is used for making a material like paper that is also known as papyrus. Writings on this material are called papyri.
Parthians: A nation that overran much of the area to the east of the River Euphrates in the second century BC, and was a constant threat to the eastern Roman provinces.
Patera: A saucer-like dish often used for holding liquid offerings to the gods.
Patricians: Citizens who were members of noble families.
Peristyle: The rectangular courtyard or garden of a Greek or Roman house.
Personification: The process of giving human shape to abstract ideas such as Justice, or to rivers and places, like the Danube or Africa.
Plebeians: Citizens who made up the common people; not members of noble families.
Porphyry: A dense red volcanic stone quarried in Egypt. The Romans made general use of it for architectural decoration, but it was reserved by the imperial family for their own statuary and sarcophagi.
Portico: A porch, or a line of columns in a colonnade.
Pozzolana: Volcanic earth from the area of Pozzuoli, near Naples, which sets hard like cement after it is mixed with water. The active ingredient in Roman concrete.
Pronaos: The Greek word for the front porch of a temple.
Province: Technically the area of responsibility of a magistrate, but usually equated with a particular geographical region.
Pylons: Important gateways, or the square pillars that support an arch.
Quoins: Squared stones set at the outside corners of walls made of opus incertum. The effect is to strengthen the ends and make a neater line.
Register: A horizontal division of a pictorial area; like a zone or band.
Rinceau: A sinuous and branching scroll made of plant stem and leaves.
Roman Foot: This was slightly shorter than the modern standard, and measured about 11 ½ inches.
Rostra: The prows of captured ships set up in the Roman Forum and used as a pulpit for public speeches.
Sarcophagus: A container to hold a dead body. Usually made of stone, but can also be of terracotta or metal.
Sestertius: Originally a small silver coin worth one quarter of denarius. In imperial times a large brass piece about 1 3/8 inch in diameter.
Spandrel: The triangular space between the springing and center of an arch. Usually occupied by a Victory.
Strigil: A curved piece of metal with a handle, used for scraping an athlete's body to remove sweat and dust after exercise.
Stucco: Plaster used on walls or ceilings. Often referring specifically to three-dimensional ornament in plaster.
Tepidarium: The warm room of a Roman bath.
Terracotta: Baked clay, usually with reference to roof tiles or sculpture.
Tessera: A squarish piece of stone or glass used to create a mosaic.
Testudo: Literally a tortoise. The name given to an army formation where the Romans put their shields together overhead for protection against the defenders of a city or town wall.
Tetrapylon: A four-way arch, usually triumphal or commemorative, found at crossroads.
Tetrarchs: Four rulers of the late Roman empire, each with a particular sphere of influence in east or west. Two were subordinate, but were picked for succession to the higher positions.
Toga: The basic formal outer garment for Roman men. It was a semicircular piece of woolen cloth, about five yards long, that was draped over one shoulder and hung down to the feet.
Togatus: A man wearing a toga.
Torque: A necklace made of a heavy piece of twisted gold. Worn by barbarians.
Trabeated: An architectural term for a structure with horizontal beams set on vertical supports. Also known as post and lintel.
Travertine: A light-colored limestone that is commonly used for building in the region around Rome.
Triclinium: A dining room.
Triton: Male equivalent of a Nereid, i.e. a male sea creature.
Trophy: A victory monument composed of the armor of the defeated enemy, which was set up on the battlefield.
Trussed Roof: A roofing system using triangular bracing elements for extra support so that the roof can have a wider span than would be possible with a single beam.
Tufa: Soft stone composed of compacted volcanic ash.
Tumulus: The type of round burial mound used by the Etruscans.
Tuscan: One of the five orders of architecture.
Tyrrhenus: A Lydian prince, supposed first leader of the Etruscan people.
Vaults: A barrel or tunnel vault is a simple semicircular arched roof. A groin or cross vault is the intersection of two such tunnels and the configuration of the joined space.
Vestal Virgins: Priestesses of the goddess Vesta, who were required to be unmarried and chaste.
Vicomagistri: Local officials or magistrates; often freedmen.
Villanovas: The general name given to the Iron Age inhabitants of Italy.
Virtus: Latin for courage and strength. The idea or quality associated with having those attributes.
Voussoir: One of the wedge-shaped stone blocks used to make an arch.