Will Pedrick is the Samuel H. Kress Foundation Rome Prize Fellow in Ancient Studies and has just received his PhD from the Department of Art & Archaeology at Princeton University. His research explores how visual artists in the ancient Mediterranean depicted pictorial depth, time, and setting. By combining analysis of ancient images with textual and archaeological sources, he explores how artists employed visual strategies that drew on the use of architectural spaces in ancient life. His recently completed dissertation examines hanging objects in ancient art, archaeology, literature, and epigraphy. In September, he will begin his new position as Assistant Professor of Art History at Rutgers University–New Brunswick.
How has your time in Rome shaped or shifted the direction of your project so far?
One of the core reasons I needed to spend sustained time in Rome to complete my dissertation was to study a series of Late Archaic Etruscan monuments. That corpus has snowballed into a much larger group of ancient Etruscan objects and images. This is not only due to the greater accessibility of these artifacts in Rome – it is also because here at the Academy, scholars and artists are writing, talking, and thinking about the Etruscans. Day trips are planned around Etruscan archaeological sites; Tarquinian wall paintings are cited as ancient comparisons in conversations about portraiture or design. This has been such an exciting place to think through the place of Etruscan art within a broader Archaic Mediterranean.
What part of your daily routine or environment at the Academy has most influenced you and your work?
I’ve never worked in such a lovely place as my office at the Academy. Its tall windows look out onto the cortile with its central fountain and busy flocks of little birds. On warmer days I keep the windows and my office door open so that the sounds and fresh air of the cortile race through the room toward the other fellows popping by my doorway to chat. I can’t imagine a better place to write the final chapters of my dissertation.
Have any encounters – with people, places, new information – opened up new paths in your research or practice in the past months?
I’ve been surprised at how many research interests I share with visual artists, architects, landscape architects, poets, and designers. We’re grappling with some of the same issues, and it’s been exciting to learn some of the disciplinary vocabularies we each use to discuss what seem to be interdisciplinary questions. Particularly helpful for me in working through ideas in my own work was the conversation I had with ceramicist and sculptor Ginny Sims-Burchard during our ShopTalk regarding the movement of artists and artisans and the blending of different regional techniques in both the contemporary and ancient worlds. These sorts of casual conversations that happen everyday over meals, at the billiards table, or while standing beside the Ara Pacis have altered the ways I think about my research in ways I could have never guessed.