Hi everyone, a bit off topic but I thought some of you may be interested in this. Coursera is offering a free online course called "Roman Art and Archaeology" through the University of Arizona. I'ts a MOOC (massive open online course), it's free of charge and the coursework is pretty light, watch some vids, take some quizzes, that type of thing. If you just wanted to set in and watch the vids/check out the readings and not do any of the assignments you can do so. It just started on Monday, and the first week in introductory stuff. It's also go at your own pace, I'm already working on week 3. Week 2 was interesting stuff about the Etruscan's, I didn't know jack about them really. Week three is the Republic. Good mix of art, architecture, history, archaeology. You can see the syllabus below. Here's a link ... https://www.coursera.org/learn/roman-art-archaeology
Sweet! I haven't taken a Roman art class since freshman year at UCLA, when I got into a bitter battle with the TA and prof about the whether or not Tuscan columns existed. They said no, I said yes, but I never did get my grade changed to reflect it.
lol...just did the vid about columns and temple style, there is a tuscan style. guess it has more to do with the frieze above the column? temple of jupiter capitolinus. to stay coin related, here's a coin from Wikipedia with the rebuilt 2nd temple (1st century AD)....
The question was "how can you tell an etruscan temple vs a roman one?" and one of my characteristics was the Tuscan column, as the only people to use a Tuscan column before the 16th century were the etruscans! Oh well. I'm still bitter about that though