Reflection, Ritual, and Memory in the Late Roman Painted Hypogea at Sardis

Late Roman painted hypogea at Sardis reveal a unique visual language blending regional and Late Antique decorative traditions. These underground burial sites, dating to the fourth century C.E., feature a distinctive corpus of 12 hypogea with homogenous imagery—scattered flowers, garlands, baskets, and birds—that elevates mundane motifs into polysemic allusions tied to funerary practice and belief. While similar imagery appears across the Roman world, compositional parallels in Western Anatolia suggest a local visual vocabulary, distinguishing Sardis from Roman standards while underscoring shared late Roman funerary decoration patterns. The paintings create a supranatural world grounded in familiar domestic imagery, evoking funerary processes and social negotiation between the living and deceased.

Rousseau, V. (2019). Reflection, Ritual, and Memory in the Late Roman Painted Hypogea at Sardis. Arts, 8(3), 103. https://doi.org/10.3390/arts8030103