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DNO: ART AND TEXTS - (S.) Kansteiner, (K.) Hallof, (L.) Lehmann, (B.) Seidensticker, (K.) Stemmer (edd.) Der Neue Overbeck. Die antiken Schriftquellen zu den bildenden Künsten der Griechen. Band I: Frühzeit, Archaik, Frühklassik. Bildhauer und Maler von den Anfängen bis zum 5. Jh. v.Chr. DNO 1–719. Band II: Klassik. Bildhauer und Maler des 5. Jhs. v.Chr. DNO 720–1798. Band III: Spätklassik. Bildhauer des 4. Jhs. v.Chr. DNO 1799–2677. Band IV: Spätklassik, Hellenismus. Maler des 4./3. Jhs. v.Chr., Bildhauer des 3./2. Jhs. v.Chr. DNO 2678–3582. Band V: Späthellenismus, Kaiserzeit. Bildhauer und Maler vom 2. Jh. v.Chr. bis zum 5. Jh. n.Chr. DNO 3583–4280. Pp. lxx + 617, vi + 915, viii + 801, viii + 776, x + 884, ills. Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2022. Paper, £154.50, €169.95, US$195.99. ISBN: 978-3-11-018234-7.
- Nigel Spivey
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- Journal:
- The Classical Review / Volume 73 / Issue 2 / October 2023
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 04 May 2023, pp. 643-647
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- October 2023
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Art and Archaeology
- Nigel Spivey
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- Journal:
- Greece & Rome / Volume 65 / Issue 2 / October 2018
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 17 September 2018, pp. 266-269
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- October 2018
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Passion. Nowadays everything must be done with passion. No ‘personal statement’ for university admission is complete without some sentiment of passionate motivation; you purchase a sandwich and learn that it has been ‘made lovingly’. So is there anything wrong with studying classical archaeology passionately – with the engagement of emotions, or ‘intensity of feeling’ (OED)? The question arises from the very title of a festal volume devoted to a (some would say, the) historical pioneer of the discipline, J. J. Winckelmann: Die Kunst der Griechen mit der Seele suchend. Since it is conventional to translate die Seele as ‘the soul’, immediately we encounter the problem of mind–body dualism, and the question of where passions are to be located in human biology. But let us accept the sense of the phrase as it is being used here. It is, as Goethe recognized in Winckelmann's work, and celebrated accordingly, an ‘awareness’ (Gewahrwerden) of Greek art that was at once intuitive and reasoned; spontaneous, yet developed by patient study (conducted with ‘true German seriousness’ – so deutsch Ernst). Pious remembrance of Winckelmann has been maintained in his homeland virtually ever since his premature death (a ‘thunderbolt’ of awful news, as Goethe described it) in 1768. This year is the 250th since that loss, and will be widely marked. Meanwhile the recent anniversary of Winckelmann's birth – 1717, as a cobbler's son, in Brandenburg – occasions fresh hagiography, and attendant exhibitions, perhaps most notably a show at the Capitoline Museums, documenting an important part of Winckelmann's intense and eventually glorious activity in Rome.
Art and Archaeology
- Nigel Spivey
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- Journal:
- Greece & Rome / Volume 65 / Issue 1 / April 2018
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 15 March 2018, pp. 124-127
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- April 2018
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If asked to cite a single image as symbolic of Athenian democracy, many Classicists would probably suggest the Tyrannicides group. It seems the obvious choice. Yet while no one would deny the ideological value given to the statue(s) raised in commemoration of the event, there are some well-known historical reasons for being sceptical about any democratic ideals harboured by Harmodius and Aristogeiton when they assassinated Hipparchus in 514 bc. In that sense, the Tyrannicides group is inappropriate. So what alternatives come to mind? Here is one possibility, which was once visible, like the Tyrannicides, in the Athenian agora: a fourth-century bc marble relief showing several figures engaged in making footwear (Agora inv. I 7396). The piece carries an inscription, worth quoting:
Dionysios the son of [Sim?]on, the cobbler, and the children dedicated this to Heros Kallistephanos. Having seen a divine vision in his sleep, Dionysios adorns the hero and the children of Kallistephanos; do you give in return for these things wealth and happy health.
16 - Epic Games
- from Part III - The Ritual in the Game, the Game in the Ritual
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- By Nigel Spivey
- Edited by Colin Renfrew, University of Cambridge, Iain Morley, University of Oxford, Michael Boyd, University of Cambridge
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- Book:
- Ritual, Play and Belief, in Evolution and Early Human Societies
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- 06 December 2017
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- 21 December 2017, pp 250-263
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Art and Archaeology
- Nigel Spivey
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- Journal:
- Greece & Rome / Volume 64 / Issue 2 / October 2017
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- 06 October 2017, pp. 204-207
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- October 2017
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Visitors to modern Istanbul struggle to imagine how the city as created by Constantine appeared. But the elongated promenade now usually indicated as Sultan Ahmet Parki, but also known as the At-meidam (‘Horse-Square’), is vaguely conceivable as the ancient Hippodrome, the centre of public life in imperial Constantinople; and of the numerous monuments that once adorned this area, a trio persists along the site of the ‘spine’ of the ancient racetrack. Two obelisks are still conspicuous; between them lurks the ‘Serpent Column’, which was already a piece of antiquity when Constantine had it removed from Delphi. Of all bronzes to survive from the classical world it is perhaps the most deserving of its own ‘cultural biography’. This is what Paul Stephenson offers with The Serpent Column. He starts in the broadest possible terms – mankind's general phobia of snakes – and then guides the reader through two and a half millennia of the vicissitudes endured by a sacred object wrenched from its ‘pagan’ purpose and somehow accorded special status within first Christian and then Muslim theocracies. Several times damaged, but never destroyed, the structure originally erected to mark the Greek victory over the Persians at Plataia in 479 bc now serves as a sort of talisman against snakebites. Stephenson calls upon some esoteric sources to inform its symbolic genesis – though disappointingly attempts no reconstruction of how it originally supported a tripod with cauldron – and shows how that symbolism could be adapted in biblical terms. Constantine's motives for relocating the monument remain obscure; nonetheless, we can surely dismiss Gibbon's conclusion that the emperor reveals merely ‘the rapacious vanity of a despot’. Recall the tradition that in his new forum he buried, beneath a pillar, an ensemble of relics comprising the Trojan-Roman Palladium, Noah's axe, Mary Magdalene's ointment jar, the crosses of the two thieves, and twelve baskets used by the apostles at the feeding of the five thousand. Superstitious he may have been; yet, by his choice of objects, Constantine also shows a fine sense of cumulative tradition at the juncture of Europe and Asia.
Art and Archaeology
- Nigel Spivey
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- Journal:
- Greece & Rome / Volume 64 / Issue 1 / April 2017
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- 14 March 2017, pp. 90-93
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- April 2017
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The nineteenth-century French painter Gustave Courbet famously declared that he did not paint angels because he had never seen one. If artists of classical antiquity were ever troubled by such scruples regarding depictions of the supernatural, it is not (so far as I know) documented. This is not to say that the question of how an artist could represent, say, an Olympian deity, went completely unheeded: Dio Chrysostom's Olympic Discourse of ad 97 is one serious attempt to address that topic, with significant implications for the status of an artist (in this case, Pheidias) famed for ‘imagining’ the divine. Yet evidently the task of visualizing spiritual phenomena devolved no less to humble ‘craftsmen’ – as Hélène Collard shows in her monograph, Montrer l'invisible. This gathers a catalogue of 164 Athenian vases, mostly of the fifth-century bc, as case studies of the various formulations devised to show religious experience – many of them images upon objects, such as white-ground lekythoi, that may once have been used in particular rites and observances. Graphic traditions of mythology, and an established series of personification (e.g. Nike, Eros, Hypnos), assisted the process. However, many of the scenes collected by Collard do not apparently attempt to ‘show the invisible’. They seem, rather, to evoke the realities of regular practice – processions, libations, sacrifice, adornment of a stele. Such scenes only become ‘paranormal’ when invested with some extra knowing detail: for example, a large owl alighting upon an altar (presumably indicating the favour of Athena). And sometimes we simply have to look a little closer to apprehend the signs of divine agency. So a herm-head appears to lean forwards – as if to sip at the kantharos held up in propitiation – while the phallus of another herm seems distinctly to elongate in the presence of two ecstatic women.
(H.) Hochscheid Networks of Stone: Sculpture and Society in Archaic and Classical Athens. Bern: Peter Lang AG, 2015. Pp. xviii + 500. £60. 9783034309929.
- Nigel Spivey
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- The Journal of Hellenic Studies / Volume 137 / 2017
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 07 November 2017, pp. 266-267
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- 2017
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6 - Homer and the Sculptors
- from Section II Around Homer
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- By Nigel Spivey, University of Cambridge
- Edited by John Bintliff, University of Edinburgh, N. Keith Rutter, University of Edinburgh
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- The Archaeology of Greece and Rome
- Published by:
- Edinburgh University Press
- Published online:
- 26 May 2017
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- 31 December 2016, pp 113-152
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Summary
The last time I wrote an essay for Anthony Snodgrass was in February 1980. He set the title: ‘Have we the Hermes of Praxiteles?’ – and, as I recall, gave no indication of what he himself thought was the ‘right’ answer to that question. My undergraduate partner for discussion of the topic would have been John Bennett (already showing signs of being more interested in the Aegean Bronze Age than in problems of Praxitelean authenticity). In the professorial office at the old Museum of Classical Archaeology (‘the Ark’) down Little St Mary's Lane, with Cambridge dusk descending, we sat semi-mesmerised as our mentor went through the many minor rites of cleaning, filling and eventually smoking his pipe. Between puffs came a limited range of responses: ‘Ah.’ ‘Interesting.’ ‘Really?’ ‘Hmmm …’ – and through the fumes, glimpses of a mysterious half-smile. It would be wrong to say that we left none the wiser. But I wondered if this was what it might have been like to consult a subdued version of the Delphic Oracle: aromatic smoke in the twilight; costive utterance to be pondered at length for its interpretation.
Almost four decades on, I feel I have come no further in being able to read the mind of Anthony Snodgrass. What he will think of my offering to this volume is pleasantly unpredictable. It aims, however, to add a complementary angle to what I think is his most forthright and unequivocal book, Homer and the Artists, and comes with abiding respect.
‘In the beginning, Homer was just a very good poet living in Ionia’ (Snodgrass 1998: 11). That premise is more controversial than perhaps it seems at first sight: if Homer appeared to his contemporaries an extraordinary genius, a poet uniquely privileged with divine inspiration, then one might indeed argue that he directly catalysed the coming of Greek literacy, and the development of figure scenes in early Greek art. But suppose, for present purposes, that the reputation of an eighth-century bc Homer was local to Ionia, and that the poet died (as one legend had it) poor and obscure. So his genius was only recognised/created/celebrated later; and so ‘a very good poet’ became Homer the great founding father of Classical literature.
Art and Archaeology
- Nigel Spivey
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- Journal:
- Greece & Rome / Volume 63 / Issue 2 / October 2016
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 16 September 2016, pp. 274-277
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- October 2016
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It is an obvious strategy of revisionism, in Classical archaeology: to see what J. J. Winckelmann said about this or that object, or sort of object, and then to measure ‘how far we have come’, in terms of interpretative enlightenment since the late eighteenth century. With the great Nilotic mosaic of Palestrina, that strategy looks at first sight promising enough. Winckelmann's theory was that it must represent a heroic narrative – specifically, the curious variant of Helen's abduction in which Paris carries off merely an eidolon, while the real Helen is secreted by the gods to Egypt and eventually retrieved from there by Menelaus (for details of the story, see Euripides’ Helen). Winckelmann proposed Menelaus to be the foreground figure in greenish armour holding up a drinking-horn, Helen the lady attendant with a ladle – but there was little else to support his reading, and so alternative theories have multiplied (naturally enough – since the date of the mosaic is not absolutely established). In this case, however, it seems we are still short of a satisfactory resolution. By including discussion of the mosaic in her survey of Egypt in Italy, Molly Swetnam-Burland admits that it could as easily post- as pre-date Rome's annexation of the Ptolemaic kingdom; and yet she does not want it to be generically categorized as a sample of nilotica. ‘Representations of Egypt were rarely if ever to be considered in isolation’ (154). This could be the motto of her study, which explores how objects and ideas from and about Egypt became ‘recontextualized’ by the Romans. We may not have a definitive account for the Palestrina mosaic, but overall the results of this approach are worth reading. Analysis of the process whereby the first two obelisks were brought from Egypt to Rome, for example, demands that we do not content ourselves with seeing these transplanted megaliths as simply the trophies of Aegypto capta, nor just signs of Rome's attempt to rival Alexandria, but part of a claim by Augustus to pharaonic/cosmic powers. The author does not confine herself to archaeology: a substantial section of the book is devoted to an analysis of Juvenal's Satire 15.
Art and Archaeology
- Nigel Spivey
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- Journal:
- Greece & Rome / Volume 63 / Issue 1 / April 2016
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 29 March 2016, pp. 140-143
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- April 2016
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In 1830 a hoard of Roman silver weighing some 25 kilograms was recovered from farmland near Berthouville, between Rouen and Caen. The silver was mostly worked into drinking vessels and associated items such as jugs, ladles, and bowls. Two statuettes of the god Mercury confirmed this as a votive deposit, as indicated by various dedications from Romano-Gallic pilgrims, notably on nine pieces left by Quintus Domitius Tutus (‘Mr Safe’) in the mid-first century ad. Restored by conservation experts at the Getty Museum, the cache – along with several other treasures from Gaul – has served as witness to ‘Roman luxury’ in an exhibition on tour in the USA. The exhibition's catalogue is a volume that earns its place in any classical library. The Berthouville Silver Treasure and Roman Luxury may not add very much to our understanding of luxuria in Roman discourse: it is left unclear what happens when a ‘luxury object’ is put out of circulation, or at least transferred into the enclosed economy of a sanctuary; and if Mercury was a deity of fortune favoured particularly by freed slaves, perhaps a set of silver spoons was not such an ‘elite’ attribute as supposed? Beyond such factors of value, however, the figurative elaboration on display is striking. At the centre of a libation bowl we find the Lydian queen Omphale in a drunken slumber, exposing her derrière – as if to say ‘Beware how you imbibe’. One wine pitcher shows Achilles leaping aboard his chariot, with the body of Hector trussed in tow; turn the jug round, and there is Achilles again, now himself stricken in battle. On another pitcher, Achilles is among Greeks mourning the death of Patroclus; and there is Hector's corpse in a pair of scales, as the price of his ransom is assessed. We would be impressed to find such ‘sophisticated’ iconography upon objects in use at some stately villa at Rome or around the Bay of Naples. What does its appearance in the moist pastures of Normandy signify – at least for our preconceptions of ‘provincial taste’?
Art and Archaeology
- Nigel Spivey
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- Journal:
- Greece & Rome / Volume 62 / Issue 2 / October 2015
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 10 September 2015, pp. 241-243
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- October 2015
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Poiesis is the simple title of the first book under review, and its front cover carries a view of that well-known Attic red-figure kylix in Berlin, ‘the Foundry Cup’, showing bronze sculptors at work. But librarians may wonder where exactly to classify Peter Acton's monograph on craftsmanship in classical Athens. The author himself is categorically unusual: a Classics graduate who became vice-president of a major global management consultancy firm before undertaking his doctoral dissertation, he clearly enjoys the transfer of intellectual property from academia to the world of commerce, and vice versa. ‘The ancient economy’ is probably where this belongs, though its most substantial case study is focused upon pottery production. Some of Acton's opening declarations are made over-confidently: that ‘craftsmen were well-regarded’ (7) is debatable, given the various literary instances of patent disregard for those engaged in ‘banausic’ activity (both concept and reality of the banausos are conspicuously avoided throughout). And there is carelessness in the presentation of details: the potter Cachrylion becomes ‘Cachsilion’ (281), for example, and the account of bronze and stone sculpture (215–25) is somewhat muddled. Nonetheless, Acton does well to insist upon a city of creators, not consumers. A famous passage in Plutarch concerning the multiple trades involved in building the Parthenon (Vit. Per. 12) implies as much, but our stereotypical image of Athens tends to exclude all workshop smoke and grime.
Art and Archaeology
- Nigel Spivey
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- Journal:
- Greece & Rome / Volume 62 / Issue 1 / April 2015
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 25 March 2015, pp. 119-123
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- April 2015
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The archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann once met, in London, the poet Alfred Tennyson – who, though he saluted Mount Ida tenderly, never travelled much south of the Dolomites. In the course of conversation, Schliemann remarked: ‘Hissarlik, the ancient Troy, is no bigger than the courtyard of Burlington House’. ‘I can never believe that’, Tennyson replied. Most of us, I dare say, would understand Tennyson's disbelief – and agree, accordingly, with the sentiment that Troy the site is not a marvellous ‘visitor experience’. The location may be broadly evocative – for those imaginatively predisposed to survey a landscape of epic combat. Yet the excavated remains are rather underwhelming, and difficult to comprehend. The huge trench cut through the Bronze Age settlement by Schliemann, and the resultant spoil heap left on the northern edge of the citadel, certainly contribute to a sense of confusion. But that aside, the multiple layers of habitation, from c.3000 bc until Byzantine times, customarily represented like a pile of pancakes in archaeological diagrams, will test even those pilgrims arriving with some expertise in ancient construction methods. Choice finds from the city are lodged in remote museums; and the substantial extent of Troy in Hellenistic, Roman, and possibly earlier times, indicated mainly by geophysical prospection, is hardly discernible. So archaeologists, post-Schliemann, have to work hard to make the ‘Trojan stones speak’ – at least if they also wish to avoid the charge of being obsessed (as Schliemann notoriously was) with establishing some kind of historical reality for Homer's epic. The late Manfred Korfmann, director of the international excavations at Troy since 1988, produced an enthusiastic guidebook. Now his colleague C. B. Rose has made a one-volume synthesis of the results so far, The Archaeology of Greek and Roman Troy. This will be particularly welcome for students unable or unwilling to access the annual excavation journal, Studia Troica. But novices, I fear, may soon despair of grasping the phases of stratification and ceramic assemblage more often cited by the author than explained (e.g. ‘LH III2a/VIh’). And any reader seeking new answers for old questions about the site's relationship to ‘the Trojan War’ should prepare for disappointment. Much of the evidence for Troy in the late Bronze Age – the period of c.1250 bc, generally reckoned to correlate with events transformed into epic – remains elusive: where, for example, are graves comparable to those of Mycenae? On the other hand, the lesson of the multi-period approach is that Troy the historical city largely constructs its identity upon Troy the mythical citadel – as does the Troad region. So Rose does well to devote an entire chapter to the remarkable archaic sarcophagus recovered in 1994 from a tumulus in the Granicus valley, with scenes of the sacrifice of Polyxena, Hecuba's attendant distress, and some kind of celebration. The iconography here may not be easy to relate to the gender of the deceased (a middle-aged man, according to osteological analysis). Yet it makes a visual statement about the sort of mythical bloodline to be claimed in the region: and, in due time (for Rose's survey is chronological), we will see the epigraphic and monumental evidence for similar ancestral claims by members of the Julio-Claudian clan.
Art and Archaeology
- Nigel Spivey
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- Journal:
- Greece & Rome / Volume 61 / Issue 2 / October 2014
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 12 September 2014, pp. 287-290
- Print publication:
- October 2014
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Whatever Luca Giuliani writes is usually worth reading. Image and Myth, a translation and revision of his Bild und Mythos (Munich, 2003), is no exception. This monograph engages with a topic germane to the origins and development of classical archaeology – the relation of art to text. Giuliani begins, rather ponderously, with an exposition of G. E. Lessing's 1766 essay Laokoon, ‘on the limits of painting and poetry’. Lessing, a dramatist, predictably considered poetry the more effective medium for conveying a story. A picture, in his eyes, encapsulates the vision of a moment – likewise a statue. The Laocoon group, then, is a past perfect moment. A poet can provide the beginning, middle, and end of a story; the artist, only the representation of a fleeting appearance. Giuliani shows that this distinction does not necessarily hold – works of art can be synoptic, disobedient of Aristotelian laws about unity of place and time (and scale). Yet he extracts from Lessing's essay a basic dichotomy between the narrative and the descriptive. This dichotomy dictates the course of a study that is most illuminating when its author is being neither narrative nor descriptive but analytical – explaining, with commendable care for detail, what we see in an ancient work of art. But is the distinction between narrative and descriptive as useful as Giuliani wants it to be? One intellectual predecessor, Carl Robert, is scarcely acknowledged, and a former mentor, Karl Schefold, is openly repudiated; both of these leave-takings are consequent from the effort on Giuliani's part to avoid seeking (and finding) ‘Homeric’ imagery in early Greek art. The iconography of Geometric vases, he maintains, ‘is devoid of narrative intention: it refers to what can be expected to take place in the world’ (37). In this period, we should not be asking whether an image is ‘compatible’ with a story, but rather whether it is incomprehensible without a story. If the answer is ‘no’, then the image is descriptive, not narrative. Thus the well-known oinochoe in Munich, clearly showing a shipwreck, and arguably intending to represent a single figure astride an overturned keel, need not be read as a visual allusion to Odyssey 12.403–25, or some version of the tale of Odysseus surviving a shipwreck. It is just one of those things that happens in the world. Well, we may be thinking – let us be glad that it happens less frequently these days, but double our travel insurance nevertheless. As Giuliani commits himself to this approach, he is forced to concede that certain Geometric scenes evoke the ‘heroic lifestyle’ – but, since we cannot admit Homer's heroes, we must accept the existence of the ‘everyman aristocrat’ (or aristocratic everyman: either way, risking oxymoron). Readers may wonder if Lessing's insistence on separating the descriptive from the narrative works at all well for Homer as an author: for does not Homer's particular gift lie in adding graphic, descriptive detail to his narrative? And have we not learned (from Barthes and others) that ‘descriptions’, semiotically analysed, carry narrative implications – implications for what precedes and follows the ‘moment’ described? So the early part of Giuliani's argument is not persuasive. His conviction, and convincing quality, grows as artists become literate, and play a ‘new game’ ‘in the context of aristocratic conviviality’ (87) – that of adding names to figures (as on the François Vase). Some might say this was simply a literate version of the old game: in any case, it also includes the possibility of ‘artistic licence’. So when Giuliani notes, ‘again we find an element here that is difficult to reconcile with the epic narrative’ (149), this does not, thankfully, oblige him to dismiss the link between art and text, or art and myth (canonical or not). Evidently a painter such as Kleitias could heed the Muses, or aspire to be inspired; a painter might also enjoy teasing his patrons with ‘tweaks’ and corrigenda to a poet's work. (The latter must have been the motive of Euphronios, when representing the salvage of the body of Sarpedon as overseen by Hermes, rather than by Apollo, divergent from the Homeric text.) Eventually there will be ‘pictures for readers’, and a ‘pull of text’ that is overt in Hellenistic relief-moulded bowls, allowing Giuliani to talk of ‘illustrations’ – images that ‘have surrendered their autonomy’ (252).
Art and Archaeology
- Nigel Spivey
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- Journal:
- Greece & Rome / Volume 61 / Issue 1 / April 2014
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 04 March 2014, pp. 133-136
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- April 2014
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Mit Mythen Leben, the 2004 study of Roman sarcophagi by Paul Zanker and Björn Ewald, has appeared (with updated references) in English. This is a cause for gladness among all Anglophones engaged in the teaching of ancient art, because for non-German readers there was frankly nothing to match the intellectual scope and illustrative quality of Zanker–Ewald. Our only regret may be that students will find this explanation of the imagery on the sarcophagi so convincing that further debate seems futile. It is well known that Roman sarcophagi, of which thousands survive from the second and third centuries ad, have had a ‘presence’ or ‘afterlife’ in Western art history for many centuries: some were even re-used for Christian burials (the tale of one such case in Viterbo, the so-called ‘Bella Galiana’ sarcophagus, might be one addendum to the bibliography here). But what did they once signify? Many were produced in marble workshops of the eastern Mediterranean, from which the suspicion arises that Roman customers may not have exercised much discrimination when it came to selecting a subject or decorative scheme. (Our authors rather sidestep the question of how much was carved at sites of origin, such as Aphrodisias, then completed – with portrait features added? – in Rome.) Accepting, however, that an elaborate sarcophagus was a considerable investment – the cost calculated as about six months’ or even a year's salary for a captain in the Praetorian Guard – and supposing that the imagery were more than a status symbol, we are left with essentially two options. One is to follow the Belgian scholar Franz Cumont and others in analysing the iconography in terms of its clues to Roman beliefs about the afterlife. For certain images of myth this seems to work very well – the story of Alcestis, for example; for others, rather abstruse allegories must be sought: what eschatology is lodged in Medea's tragedy, or a scene of Achilles on Skyros? The alternative is to follow Zanker and Ewald in supposing that the sarcophagi do not so much represent the belief systems of the deceased as offer a sort of visual counselling to the bereaved. Hence the title – living with myths, not dying with them: for the regular occasions on which Romans were obliged to remember and honour the dead (parentalia, rosaria, etc.), sarcophagi on display in family burial enclosures provided ‘encouragement to free association’ (31) in various therapeutic and consolatory ways. These of course encompass some of Cumont's reconstructions of Stoic comfort and so on – but with its emphasis upon the response of viewers, the Zanker–Ewald approach clearly allows more flexibility of significance. To say that the message often reduces to ‘it could be worse’ is a brutal summary of the sympathetic and subtle readings expounded in this book. Yet occasionally one could wish for more sophistry. For example, in discussing the consolatory potential of images of Niobe and her unfortunate offspring – a ‘massacre of the innocents’ with obvious pertinence to mors immatura – the authors allude (74) to the curious persuasive strategy deployed by Achilles when he, at last in a mood to yield up the mangled body of Hector, invites the grief-stricken Priam to supper (Il. 24.603 ff.). As Malcolm Willcock long ago showed (CQ 14 [1964], 141 ff.), Achilles resorts to a formulaic paradeigma: ‘You must do this, because X, who was in more or less the same situation as you, and a more significant person, did it.’ Only in this the case the a fortiori argument relies upon a rather implausible twist to the usual story, namely that Niobe, having witnessed the deaths of her twelve children – and with their corpses still unburied, since everyone in the vicinity has been turned to stone – adjourns to dinner. No other telling of the myth mentions this detail: indeed, Niobe herself is usually the one turned to stone. Of course this version suits Achilles well enough: if Niobe lost all her children but not her appetite, why should Priam, who has lost merely one of his many sons and daughters, hesitate to share a meal? But did Homer expect his audience to be disconcerted by such mythical manipulation, or was it typical of what happened when myth served as consolation? And if Achilles/Homer may resort to such embroidery, did educated Romans feel inclined to do likewise? Was this part of the presence of myth in ‘everyday life’?
Art and Archaeology
- Nigel Spivey
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- Journal:
- Greece & Rome / Volume 60 / Issue 2 / October 2013
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 16 September 2013, pp. 338-341
- Print publication:
- October 2013
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‘And verily so excellent he was in this perspective, that a man would say, his even, plaine, and flat picture were embossed and raised work.’ Philemon Holland's endearing 1601 translation of Pliny's Natural History (35.50) is one of the earliest documented references in English to ‘perspective’, understood as ‘the art of delineating solid objects upon a plane surface so that the drawing produces the same impression of apparent relative positions and magnitudes, or of distance, as do the actual objects when viewed from a particular point’ (OED). The passage relates to a Sicyonian painter called Pausias, whose penchant for representing oxen front-on, and yet conveying all their bulk and size, clearly impresses Pliny. But in a sour footnote, the Loeb edition comments: ‘there is no proof that perspective is meant’. It is true that the established text of Pliny does not support Holland's claim that Pausias ‘had a singular gift to work by perspective’. With the benefit of Renaissance expositions, Holland presumably knew what perspective was. But did Pliny know – or indeed did any other ancient writer or artist understand the basic principle of a vanishing point? Modern scholarship has been frustratingly incapable of answering that question, with authorities such as Panofsky and Richter concluding that the geometrical know-how existed, but was not applied, and others (e.g. John White) content to accept that artists understood the principle without needing its formal articulation. Given this aporia, one seizes Rocco Sinisgalli's monograph, Perspective in the Visual Culture of Classical Antiquity, with an eager hope that we may resolve the issue. It is a slim volume, and promises that ‘key concepts…are clarified and enhanced by detailed illustrations’ (cover). Alas, the diagrams rarely clarify or enhance the somewhat staccato text; and the central claim of the book, that ‘ancient theories of perspective were based primarily on the study of objects in mirrors, rather than on the study of optics and the workings of the human eye’ (cover), remains (appropriately, it may be) speculative. If read in a certain way, texts of Euclid and Ptolemy imply the use of mirrors by painters. But one has only to glance at the surviving text of Ptolemy's Optics, as translated from Arabic into Latin by a twelfth-century Sicilian admiral (sic) of Byzantine Greek origin, to see that it is the stuff of a very sadistic Latin Unseen; and that even if Ptolemy's terms meta (‘destination’) or nutus (‘sign’) be sympathetically understood as ‘principal vanishing point’, we could wish that Ptolemy – and indeed the other authors deployed by Sinisgalli, such as Lucretius and Vitruvius – had expatiated upon the utilization of a vanishing point by artists. The trompe-l'oeil trick of linear recession is played often enough in Roman wall-paintings – but that is not quite the same thing, and painters seem not to have been concerned about creating a complete illusion. Sinisgalli imagines Augustus at home on the Palatine, in the Room of the Masks: it is proposed that if the emperor was wearing slippers, with an eye-level at 1.48 metres, and in shadowy light, he would share in a unified ‘perspective’. But I fear we are still unsure.
Art and Archaeology
- Nigel Spivey
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- Journal:
- Greece & Rome / Volume 60 / Issue 1 / April 2013
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 12 March 2013, pp. 176-179
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- April 2013
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The front cover of John Bintliff's Complete Archaeology of Greece is interesting. There is the Parthenon: as most of its sculptures have gone, the aspect is post-Elgin. But it stands amid an assortment of post-classical buildings: one can see a small mosque within the cella, a large barrack-like building between the temple and the Erechtheum, and in the foreground an assortment of stone-built houses – so this probably pre-dates Greek independence and certainly pre-dates the nineteenth-century ‘cleansing’ of all Byzantine, Frankish, and Ottoman remains from the Athenian Akropolis (in fact the view, from Dodwell, is dated 1820). For the author, it is a poignant image. He is, overtly (or ‘passionately’ in today's parlance), a philhellene, but his Greece is not chauvinistically selective. He mourns the current neglect of an eighteenth-century Islamic school by the Tower of the Winds; and he gives two of his colour plates over to illustrations of Byzantine and Byzantine-Frankish ceramics. Anyone familiar with Bintliff's Boeotia project will recognize here an ideological commitment to the ‘Annales school’ of history, and a certain (rather wistful) respect for a subsistence economy that unites the inhabitants of Greece across many centuries. ‘Beyond the Akropolis’ was the war-cry of the landscape archaeologists whose investigations of long-term patterns of settlement and land use reclaimed ‘the people without history’ – and who sought to reform our fetish for the obvious glories of the classical past. This book is not so militant: there is due consideration of the meaning of the Parthenon Frieze, of the contents of the shaft graves at Mycenae, and suchlike. Its tone verges on the conversational (an attractive feature of the layout is the recurrent sub-heading ‘A Personal View’); nonetheless, it carries the authority and clarity of a textbook – a considerable achievement.
6 - Temple Stories
- Nigel Spivey, University of Cambridge
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- Greek Sculpture
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- 01 December 2014
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- 31 January 2013, pp 150-173
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Summary
No ancient author cares to tell us why Greek temples were decorated the way they were. We know that the construction of a temple was a major political and financial commitment: we may suppose that the embellishment of a temple gave ‘added value’ to an already valuable edifice – enhancing a sense of indebtedness between those dedicating the temple and the divinities in whose honour it was dedicated. What else is to be expected? Some sort of religious instruction, presumably: some visual statement of what was intended as the ritual and spiritual function of the building. Subsequently this sacramental element might be encompassed (in Christian parlance) by the term ‘liturgy’, which transliterates a Greek word for ‘public duty’ (leitourgia); but it is not clear whether temple decoration was so specifically prescriptive as to instruct worshippers on their actual conduct within the sacred precinct (temenos) – or to provide, as one scholar phrases it, ‘prayers in stone’. (Still less is it clear that such decoration served as if ‘scripture for the illiterate’.) Rather, images were evocative of the cosmological, mythical and historical reasons for ritual, and veneration of the gods. Images set the scene: images articulated local and Panhellenic systems of praise and shame, heroism and cowardice, virtue and wrongdoing. And it was in the nature of Greek imagery to generalize not only the rules of these systems, but also their application.
An excerpt from a brief but deeply influential Aristotelian text, the Poetics, justifies this practice. Aristotle is discussing literary media; but what he says about ‘poetry’ is transferable to ‘art’.
The poet's function is to describe not the thing that has happened, but a kind of thing that might happen, i.e. what is possible as being probable or necessary. The distinction between historian and poet is not in the one writing prose and the other verse – you might put the work of Herodotus into verse, and it would still be a species of history; it consists really in this, that the one describes the thing that has been, and the other a kind of thing that might be. Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are of the nature rather of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.
POETICS 1451B, TRANS. BYWATER
1 - Introduction: the Study Of Greek Sculpture
- Nigel Spivey, University of Cambridge
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- Greek Sculpture
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- 01 December 2014
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- 31 January 2013, pp 1-15
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The primary motive for studying the art of ancient Greece can be easily stated: its sheer beauty, which beyond our delight and wonder may demand some explanation. But that is an aesthetic sentiment, and such sentiments carry little weight nowadays. So we are obliged to summarize why the endeavour involved in ‘understanding Greek sculpture’ is objectively worth our time and intellectual effort.
As a logical progression, the reasoning might go as follows. Whether or not we agree that Greek sculpture is generally ‘beautiful’ to behold, there is no doubt that the artists who created this work, and those who commissioned it, were aware of the capacity of three-dimensional images to cause delight, wonder and awe. The potential for enchantment was there from the beginning; we have not invented it. The archaeological contexts of early Greek sculpture make it clear that it was originally and essentially produced as ‘gifts for the gods’: as such, intended for marvellous display.
That certain craft techniques were developed by Greek sculptors with the aim of making their work ‘marvellous’ is equally evident, whether from the material remains of the work itself or circumstantial inscriptions and ancient literature. In the history of Western art, there is no place and period to compare with what happened in the Greek world between c. 800 BC to c. 300 BC: a half-millennium of technical innovation and refinement, rooted in a continuity of artistic tradition that was often passed on from father to son. An apprentice in Greek sculpture might very well start work aged 7 or 8 (a letter survives from the Athenian Agora, written to his mother by one very unhappy boy set to work in a foundry). It is tempting to relate this custom to the modern reductive calculus whereby ‘genius’ relies upon some 10,000 hours of practice.
At Cambridge University (for example), the study of Greek sculpture has been part of the Classics curriculum since the early 1880s; today, it is widely diffused in school and university courses, particularly those titled around the concept of ‘Classical Civilization’. Why so?
Note
- Nigel Spivey, University of Cambridge
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- Greek Sculpture
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- 01 December 2014
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- 31 January 2013, pp xxii-xxiv
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4 - Anathêmata: Gifts for the Gods
- Nigel Spivey, University of Cambridge
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- Greek Sculpture
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- 01 December 2014
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- 31 January 2013, pp 86-121
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Most Greek sculpture was originally intended for installation in one sanctuary or another; and it is obligatory for us to remind ourselves that however ‘picturesque’ the ruins of a Greek sanctuary may now appear, what we know of ancient Greek cult practice is not pretty. The principal activity within cult precincts was animal sacrifice: the killing of cattle, sheep, goats and pigs was carried out on a daily basis, and occasionally on a large scale (a deity honoured as hekatomboios, such as Zeus at Olympia, was literally ‘worth a hundred oxen’). Slaughtering techniques were basic – an axe-blow to the skull, and/or a knife-slash to the throat – and beyond the sight of blood, the smell of death and the shouts of worshippers, we must add the piercing sound of animals in panic. A detail of the Parthenon frieze, poetically saluted as ‘that heifer lowing at the skies’ (in Keats’ Ode on a Grecian Urn), patently evokes that panic (Figure 4.1).
It was Christian doctrinal disdain for this custom that caused the formal closure of many Greek sanctuaries in the late fourth century AD (Christ's own blood was sufficient: cf. Hebrews 10.12). But of course the practice of animal sacrifice is only one aspect of Greek sanctuaries that creates a categorical and imaginative distance between ourselves and the past. We now tend to separate ‘religion’ from day-to-day business in a way that immediately makes it difficult for us to sympathize with a society in which the distinction between ‘the sacred’ and ‘the secular’ was often obscure. Ancient Greece, arguably, was like that; and whatever the relative status of matters that were deemed ‘sacred’ and those that were not, the fact remains that a predominant quantity of Greek sculpture comes from sanctuaries: so the challenge of understanding Greek sculpture must include the effort of recreating, in the mind's eye, how the sanctuaries of Classical antiquity once flourished and, in particular, how far the presence of sculpture contributed to their prodigious, albeit transient, success.
Anathêmata, ‘things set up’, is the generic Greek term for these offerings: the lexicon reminds us that in archaic usage – for Homer, at least – the meaning more broadly entails ‘ornaments’ that bring delight: to mortals and deities alike.