Roman Making and its Meanings: Representations of Manual Creation in the Literature and Art of Imperial Rome

Project Information

FACERE

Grant agreement ID: 101042699

DOI

10.3030/101042699

EC signature date 31 October 2022

Start date 1 September 2023

End date 31 August 2028

Funded under

• European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 499 999,00

EU contribution

€ 1 499 999,00

Coordinated by

RIJKSUNIVERSITEIT GRONINGEN
Netherlands

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - FACERE (Roman Making and its Meanings: Representations of Manual Creation in the Literature and Art of Imperial Rome)

Reporting period: 2023-09-01 to 2026-02-28

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Across the Roman Empire, objects, buildings, and artworks were produced on an unprecedented scale. Modern research has long focused on how these things were made from a technical or economic perspective. FACERE (“Roman Making and its Meanings”) introduces a new approach by asking what making meant to the Romans themselves. It investigates how ancient writers and artists conceptualised, described, and evaluated the processes of manual creation and how these representations shaped cultural attitudes towards work, skill, and materiality.

The project combines the study of Latin and Greek literature with the analysis of Roman visual culture, such as paintings, reliefs, and mosaics depicting craftsmen, builders, and artists at work. By examining how Romans spoke and thought about making, FACERE aims to write a new cultural history of “Roman making” that reveals the aesthetic, moral, environmental, and social dimensions of production in antiquity. A key strand investigates the visibility and elision of enslaved and low‑status workers in literary and visual depictions of making, exposing how ancient representations both acknowledge and obscure certain kinds of human labour behind artefacts.

A central innovation is the analytical concept of madeness – the perceived relationship between how an artefact was made and how it was understood and valued. Through this concept, FACERE connects discourse and material culture, exploring how the “stories of making” surrounding objects contributed to their meaning for ancient viewers. By analysing who was represented as a maker and who remained invisible, the project also raises wider ethical questions about agency, value, and recognition in creative processes, both in antiquity and today.

FACERE’s broader objective is to bridge disciplinary boundaries between literary studies, art history, and archaeology, and to contribute to present‑day debates about sustainability, creativity, and the cultural value of work. By recovering how Romans evaluated manual creation and human labour, FACERE enhances our understanding of ancient societies and offers conceptual tools relevant to cultural production in other periods.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

1. A comprehensive digital corpus of representations of making in Roman literature has been compiled and systematically coded using qualitative analysis software (CAQDAS). This searchable resource, which also incorporates selected visual material, enables new comparative analysis of how different crafts, materials, and makers were represented in ancient Rome.

2. The project team has developed the concept of madeness through continuous discussion and application across subprojects. Madeness now serves as a shared analytical framework for the entire project and is being disseminated in international publications and lectures.

3. The doctoral projects have both reached their mid‑points. One examines the moral and ecological dimensions of making, focusing on texts and images depicting human interaction with iron in ancient Rome (WP5). The other analyses the sensory and embodied aspects of making, with special attention to food preparation and banquet culture (WP6). Each has presented findings at major international conferences, including the Society for Classical Studies Annual Meeting and FIEC.

4. The Principal Investigator’s work integrates insights from all subprojects. Presentations in e.g. Naples, Wrocław, Philadelphia,Toronto, and Berlin have showcased emerging results on themes such as ‘sacred making’, collaborative labour, the representation of enslaved workers, and conceptions of interaction between human and non-human makers.

Collectively, the work performed so far has positioned FACERE as a reference point for innovative, interdisciplinary research on the cultural meanings of manual creation in antiquity.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

FACERE seeks to advance scholarship beyond the existing state of the art in several ways. Conceptually, it introduces madeness as a new tool for analysing how perceptions of production processes shape aesthetic, moral, and social judgment. This approach moves research on ancient craftsmanship beyond technical reconstruction toward understanding how ideas of labour, material agency, and creativity influenced Roman culture. It also draws attention to the ethical dimensions of making: who is seen, who is silenced, and how the contributions of enslaved and low‑status workers were made visible or erased in cultural narratives.

Methodologically, the use of qualitative data analysis software represents an innovative model for integrating the analysis of discourses across different ancient media. The resulting corpus will form an enduring open resource for future research.

The project establishes a dialogue between classical philology, art history, archaeology, and the environmental humanities. Its focus on sustainability, sensory perception, and embodied experience connects ancient material to contemporary discussions on responsible production, the ethics of labour, and human–environment relations. Beyond academia, FACERE fosters public engagement through workshops for teachers and students, lectures for non‑specialist audiences, and collaborations with museums and cultural institutions. These activities demonstrate the continuing relevance of the ancient world to modern reflections on creativity, labour, and ecological awareness. As the project progresses, its outcomes are expected to inform new cross‑disciplinary research agendas and support comparative studies of ‘making’ in other historical and cultural settings. FACERE thus not only enriches our understanding of Roman culture but also contributes to broader European and global debates on the cultural value