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ARCHES (at risk cultural heritage education series)

A beginner's guide
ARCHES, an introduction
What is cultural heritage?
Cultural heritage “in crisis”
Blow it up: cultural heritage and film
Whose art? Museums and repatriation
Repatriating artworks
From tomb to museum: the story of the Sarpedon Krater
The many meanings of the Sarpedon Krater
Who owns the Parthenon sculptures?
Plunder, war, Napoleon and the Horses of San Marco
Paikea at the American Museum of Natural History
Nazi looting: Egon Schiele’s Portrait of Wally
Seizure of Looted Antiquities Illuminates What Museums Want Hidden
Looting, collecting, and exhibiting: the Bubon bronzes
Napoleon’s appropriation of Italian cultural treasures
Napoleon's booty — Perugino's (gorgeous) Decemviri Altarpiece
Ruins, reconstruction, and renewal
Destruction, Memory, and Monuments: The Many Lives of the Parthenon
Views of past and present: the Forum Romanum and archaeological context
The Roman Forum: Part 1
The Roman Forum: Part 2
The Roman Forum: Part 3
Rome’s layered history — the Castel Sant’Angelo
Looted and revered: The Rosetta Stone
Ruin as abattoir, the Colosseum
Before the fire: Notre Dame, Paris
Conservation as memorial, Mantegna and the Ovetari Chapel
Place and identity
Palmyra: the modern destruction of an ancient city
Ancient Babylon: excavations, restorations and modern tourism
Venice’s San Marco, a mosaic of spiritual treasure
Renaissance Synagogues of Venice
Unearthing the Aztec past, the destruction of the Templo Mayor
Bayt Farhi, a Jewish house in Damascus
Unearthing New York’s history of slavery
Seneca Village: the lost history of African Americans in New York
Ceremonial belt (Kwakwaka’wakw)
Voyage to the moai of Rapa Nui (Easter Island)
The Gwoździec synagogue: the lost art of painted wooden synagogues
The many forms of iconoclasm
Erased from memory: the Severan Tondo
Rewriting history: damnatio memoriae in ancient Rome
Byzantine Iconoclasm and the Triumph of Orthodoxy
Making and Mutilating Manuscripts of the Shahnama
Folio from a Shahnama, The Bier of Iskandar (Alexander the Great)
The Court of Gayumars
Iconoclasm in the Netherlands in the Sixteenth Century
Submerged, burned, and scattered: celebrating the destruction of objects in South Asia
Creative iconoclasm: a tale of two monasteries
Erasing Art: Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning drawing
Destruction as Preservation: Ai Weiwei’s Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn
Destruction, looting, and trafficking
Mesa Verde and the preservation of Ancestral Puebloan heritage
A market for looted antiquities
Save culture – end trafficking
Trafficking the past
We will need Monuments Men for as long as ancient sites remain battlefields
What the bulldozers left behind: reclaiming Sicán’s past
Lost History: the terracotta sculpture of Djenné-Djenno
The Looting of Cambodian Antiquities
Sotheby’s Returns Looted 10th Century Statue to Cambodia
The Scourge of Looting: Trafficking Antiquities from Temple to Museum
How a famous Greek bronze ended up in the Vatican
Fact and fiction: The explosion of Reims Cathedral during World War I
Documenting and protecting cultural heritage
Diarna: documenting the places of a vanishing Jewish history
A Landmark Decision: Penn Station, Grand Central, and the architectural heritage of NYC
Frameworks for cultural heritage protection: from ancient writing to modern law
A race against time: manuscripts and digital preservation
Provenance and the Antiquities Market
A Renaissance masterpiece nearly lost in war: Piero della Francesca, The Resurrection
Saving Torcello, an ancient church in the Venetian Lagoon
The role of archaeology
What is archaeology: understanding the archaeological record
Underwater archaeology and the Antikythera Shipwreck
Saved by shipwreck, The Antikythera Youth
The rediscovery of Pompeii and the other cities of Vesuvius
The importance of the archaeological findspot: The Lullingstone Busts
When there is no archaeological record: Portrait Bust of a Flavian Woman (Fonseca bust)
Conservation vs. restoration: the Palace at Knossos (Crete)
Cultural heritage endangered round the world
Cultural heritage at risk: Mali
Cultural heritage at risk: Peru
Cultural heritage at risk: Turkey
Cultural heritage at risk: Syria
Cultural heritage at risk: Cambodia
Cultural heritage at risk: United States
Saving Venice
The unintended consequences of UNESCO world heritage listing
What you can do now
What can be done to protect cultural heritage?
Organizations and agencies that work to protect cultural heritage
Backstories: additional endangered objects and sites
ARCHES advisors

Ruin as abattoir, the Colosseum

by Dr. Bernard Frischer and Dr. Steven Zucker

 

Colosseum (Flavian Amphitheater, or Amphitheatrum Flavium), c. 70-80 C.E., Rome, an ARCHES video

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Cite this page as: Dr. Bernard Frischer and Dr. Steven Zucker, "Ruin as abattoir, the Colosseum," in Smarthistory, July 19, 2020, accessed May 22, 2022, https://smarthistory.org/ruin-abattoir-the-colosseum/.

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Bank of America's Masterpiece Moment

Hasegawa Tōhaku, Pine Trees

with Masami Zenyia, Executive Director of the Tokyo National Museum

Crafted in the 16th century, this pair of six-panel screens is painted in ink on paper and showcases both Yamato-e and Chinese painting styles. The work features pine trees―a typical Japanese motif―and it has beautifully captured the richness of a Japanese landscape.

Watch the video
Learn more about Bank of America's Masterpiece Moment Close

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At Smarthistory we believe art has the power to transform lives and to build understanding across cultures. We believe that the brilliant histories of art belong to everyone, no matter their background. Smarthistory’s free, award-winning digital content unlocks the expertise of hundreds of leading scholars, making the history of art accessible and engaging to more people, in more places, than any other publisher.

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