The Domesticity of Their Darkness: Snapshots of the Enslaved in Roman Art

Iain Ferris examines enslaved people in Roman art by turning attention to figures who often occupy the margins of domestic and social scenes. Rather than trying to construct a single continuous visual history of Roman slavery, he works through a series of ‘snapshots’, asking how enslaved individuals were represented, positioned and sometimes visually diminished within the artistic record.

A figure placed at the edge of an image is still part of the world the artist chose to show. Ferris asks us to look at that figure rather than the wealthy household or idealised domestic setting that usually commands attention. The surviving images are fragmentary and made within unequal societies; they cannot give us the enslaved person's full experience. They can, however, reveal something about how Roman viewers were invited to see the people whose labour sustained their homes.