(Current research 2025 – present) Sculpting Time: Identity and Temporality in Roman Funerary Portrait Reliefs Roman funerary portrait reliefs offer a remarkable opportunity to think about how people in the ancient world represented themselves and how they wanted to be remembered. These reliefs do not simply record likenesses; they express identities and values, often through the careful combination of different artistic styles. In my PhD research, Read more....
Sophie Ploeg
Art | History
About
PhD Researcher. Department of Classics and Ancient History, University of Warwick
Sophie Ploeg is an art historian interested in how images and spaces are viewed, experienced, and interpreted. She is currently a PhD researcher in the Department of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Warwick. Her research focuses on Roman portraiture, memory, and the ways in which individuals used visual culture to express identity and relationships with the past.
Originally trained in Art and Architectural History in the Netherlands, Sophie has maintained a long-standing interest in visual culture across architecture, portraiture, and the professional arts. Alongside her academic work, she worked for many years as a professional artist, writer and tutor, with a practice rooted in art historical research. Her work was supported by a National Portrait Gallery Research and Travel Grant and has been exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery in London. At the moment she is particularly interested in the portrait culture of ordinary Romans and what it can reveal about Roman visual art, as well as the continuing role of images in shaping our understanding of identity and the past.
Research Interests
- Roman Funerary Portraiture: Specifically the monuments and self-representation of freed people.
- Temporality & Memory: How private memorials utilize visual rhetoric to negotiate the past, present, and future.
- Visuality & Staging: The role of art and architecture in "staging" experiences and expressing identity.
- Material Culture & Status: The use of dress, attributes, and portrait style to communicate social standing in the Roman world.
- Ancient & Early Modern Era: Visual expression from the Roman era, as well as the early modern period in England and The Netherlands
Education
University of Warwick | 2025 – Present
PhD, Classics and Ancient History. Funded by the University of Warwick. Researching the visuality of memory and self-representation in Roman private funerary reliefs.
University of Edinburgh | 2024
MSc, Ancient Worlds. Focus on Roman history, dissertation on identity in funerary portrait reliefs of freed people.
University of Groningen / VU University Amsterdam | 2006
PhD, Art and Architectural History. Funded by NWO. Thesis focused on the role of classical rhetoric and the sublime in early modern architecture.
Publication: ‘Staged experiences: the church designs of Nicholas Hawksmoor’, in: Winters, E., & van Eck, C.A. (eds.), Dealing with the Visual: Art History, Aesthetics and Visual Culture, Routledge (2005), 215-37.
VU University Amsterdam | 1998
BA + MA, Art and Architectural History. Focus on architectural history.
Publication: ‘Nederland en het Neoclassicisme’, in: Kunstlicht, 20 (1999), nr. 2, 11-15.
College of Art HKU, Utrecht | 1991-1992
Hogeschool voor de Kunsten, propedeuse Theatre Design.
Recent Talks
18 May 2026. 'Verism and the problem of the past in Roman funerary portrait reliefs', Departmental Colloquium:Formations and Transformations, department of Classics and Ancient History, University of Warwick
24 October 2025. 'The Ideal and the Ugly in Roman Funerary Portraiture'. Conference: The Ideal and the Ugly: bodies through senses, media and cultural memory. University of Warwick.
23 March 2025. 'The Intricacies of Lace in Tudor and Jacobean Portraiture'. West of England Costume Society, Bath.
Research
[Archive 2013-2023] Lace in late 16th and early 17th Century Portraiture Lace features in almost every European elite portrait from the late sixteenth onwards. It takes up large areas of the canvas, yet is often skipped by art historians as merely decorative and meaningless. In the past years I have explored how the depiction of lace in early modern portraiture developed from the birth of lace Read more....
[Archive] Staged Experiences Architecture and rhetoric in the work of Sir Henry Wotton, Nicholas Hawksmoor and Sir John Vanbrugh Ph.D Art History University of Groningen/Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (2006) My Ph.D research focussed on the role of classical rhetoric in English 17th and early 18th century architecture. I analysed Sir Henry Wotton’s 1614 treatise on architecture, Hawksmoor’s early 18th century London churches and Vanbrugh’s country houses, as well Read more....
Blog Posts
On April 20, 2025
A new and very large full-figure funerary portrait relief has been excavated in Pompeii, in the necropolis just outside the Porta Sarno at the east end of the town. The portrait relief is around 2 meters tall, carved out of tufa stone. It has the shape of Read more....
On January 21, 2025
The Ashmolean museum in Oxford houses an extraordinary marble funerary portrait relief, depicting a Greek couple from around 100 CE. The relief was found in Rome and scholars assume that is where it is from. The famous English collector Thomas Arundel purchased it from an Italian shop in Read more....
On June 21, 2021
Despite its title, Vincenzo Cartari’s (1502? -1570s?)  Images of the Gods (Le imagini degli dei delli antichi, Venice, 1556) was initially published without illustrations. But that did not stop this wonderful book from becoming one of the most important visual guides to ancient gods and myths in late 16th and Read more....