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.
