The Transformation of Athens: Painted Pottery and the Creation of Classical Greece
304
The Transformation of Athens: Painted Pottery and the Creation of Classical Greece
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Overview
How remarkable changes in ancient Greek pottery reveal the transformation of classical Greek culture
Why did soldiers stop fighting, athletes stop competing, and lovers stop having graphic sex in classical Greek art? The scenes depicted on Athenian pottery of the mid-fifth century BC are very different from those of the late sixth century. Did Greek potters have a different world to see—or did they come to see the world differently? In this lavishly illustrated and engagingly written book, Robin Osborne argues that these remarkable changes are the best evidence for the shifting nature of classical Greek culture.
Osborne examines the thousands of surviving Athenian red-figure pots painted between 520 and 440 BC and describes the changing depictions of soldiers and athletes, drinking parties and religious occasions, sexual relations, and scenes of daily life. He shows that it was not changes in each activity that determined how the world was shown, but changes in values and aesthetics.
By demonstrating that changes in artistic style involve choices about what aspects of the world we decide to represent as well as how to represent them, this book rewrites the history of Greek art. By showing that Greeks came to see the world differently over the span of less than a century, it reassesses the history of classical Greece and of Athenian democracy. And by questioning whether art reflects or produces social and political change, it provokes a fresh examination of the role of images in an ever-evolving world.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781400889938 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 02/06/2018 |
| Series: | Martin Classical Lectures , #35 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 304 |
| File size: | 23 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
The Art of Transformation
1. Art and Society
We all expect that is it possible to recognize the age to which a work of art belongs. We expect those who know anything about painting to be able to tell the difference between a seventeenth-century portrait and an eighteenth-century portrait, between Victorian painting and painting executed in the 1920s. We expect them to do this not on the basis of the fashions worn by any people who are depicted, or of other items of period material culture, but because of something intrinsic to the painting. So we also expect them to be able to recognize the place of origin or of the work of an artist, to be able to distinguish the French postimpressionist work of Vuillard from the English postimpressionist work of Sickert.
If we ask what are the differences between one portrait and another, or one landscape painting and another, the answer normally given is about the way they are painted. Different painters use a different range of colors, different strokes with different brushes. They also have different compositional preferences. We might even acknowledge that people brought up in one country see the world in different ways from those brought up in another, and that different things catch the eye of different painters.
When it comes to the study of the painted pottery produced in Athens in the sixth and fifth centuries BC, the difference between the painted pottery of one generation and that of the succeeding generation has been accounted for almost entirely in terms of the graphic practices and preferences of different painters (1.1, 1.2), associating these graphic practices either with those on other pots signed by a painter — as here with pots signed by Phintias and Euphronios — or on other pots after which a particular artist's hand has been named. That was the way in which Sir John Beazley told his classic tale of The Development of Attic Black-Figure (1951), and it has remained the way the story of both black-figure and red-figure pottery has been told (see chapter 2, section 1).
This way of describing differences between art of different periods is not limited to painting. The same is true of sculpture. It was by close attention to the ways in which the same parts of the body were differently presented that Gisela Richter sought to distinguish from one another archaic kouroi (naked youths; 1.13–1.14) and korai (maidens; 1.11 and1.12). The fullest modern study of the whole history of Greek sculpture organizes itself in successive volumes dealing with The Archaic Style, The Severe Style, Fifth-Century Styles, and so forth. More importantly, it is in terms of stylistic change that the "Greek revolution" in sculpture has been described, the revolution that saw the formal and frontal kouros, who holds his body to attention, disappear from the sculptor's repertoire after 150 years to be replaced by supple bodies that refuse frontality and engage in definitive action, or at least gesture toward it.
There are good reasons why the story of change has been told in this way. Virtually no extant Greek sculptures and only a small percentage of Greek pots bear an artist's signature (see 1.9, 2.1, 2.7, 3.3–4, 3.10, 4.5, 4.7 and plate 15, 4.9–11, 4.15, 4.20–21, 5.5–6 and plate 21, 9.1, 9.4–5); it is only through differences in the detailed presentation of the body, and in the case of pottery differences in graphic technique, that the works of different workshops in sculpture and even different individuals, in the case of painted pottery, can be distinguished with any confidence.
But describing how the painting and sculpture of one period differs from that of a preceding or following period in this way should not be mistaken for offering an account of the change that has occurred. Not only do such descriptions not explain what makes the art of one period or place different from the art of another place or period or reveal why art changes over time, such descriptions frequently fail even to make the observations most relevant to an explanation.
When Michael Baxandall, writing in 1972 about the Italian Renaissance, coined the term "period eye," he analyzed its workings in terms of, among other things, "the body and its language," "figure patterns," "the value of colours," "volumes," "intervals and proportions," and "the moral eye." Baxandall was concerned in his essay "to show how the style of pictures is proper material of social history." For Baxandall, "Social facts ... lead to the development of distinctive visual skills and habits: and these visual skills and habits become identifiable elements in the painter's style," or, as he put it in the conclusion to the work, "the forms and styles of painting respond to social circumstances." But in that conclusion, he insisted also that "the forms and styles of painting may sharpen our perception of the society."
Baxandall effectively insists that art and experience are not separate things but intimately linked, but the mutual relationship between a society and its paintings that he conjures up has the initiative firmly with the society. Paintings may do things to us, "sharpen our perception of the society," but they seem not to do anything to society. Somehow, we can learn to see from looking at paintings, but contemporary viewers learned nothing from them.
T. J. Clark, writing in 1985, made the case for painting playing a very much more active role. Certainly for Clark painting is "a way of discovering what the values and excitements of the world amount to, by finding in practice what it takes to make a painting of them — what kind of play between flatness and depth, what kind of stress on the picture's limits, what sorts of insistence, ellipsis, showmanship, restraint." But Clark saw that painting was more than that, insisting that "when a painting recasts or restructures its own procedures — of visualizing, resemblance, address to the viewer, scale, touch, good drawing and modeling, articulate composition — ... it puts pressure on not just social detail but social structure."
If we acknowledge, with Baxandall, that how members of a culture see, indeed how members of a particular society see, is determined by many different factors, and that this visual experience affects what images those who draw or paint or sculpt in that culture or society will make, our description of those images, and of how those images change over time, needs to reflect this. In particular, the "period eye" affects choice of subject matter, choice of material, choice of color as well as affecting what features of the human body will be shown and in what ways. There will, of course, be particular generic constraints, but our histories of sculpture and of painting, including of painted pottery, need at least to attend to changes to the subject matter of images, not simply to changes to their form.
We need to do this because, unless we do, our account of the history of art, narrowly conceived, will be impoverished, disaggregating form and color from content when these different aspects of an image are in fact closely bound up with each other in visual experience. We also need to do this because unless we do we will never understand the relationship between a culture or society and the work of creative visual artists in that culture or society on which Clark rightly insists. But, equally, if we pay attention to only some aspects of images we will form a very partial view of the culture or society in which those images were created. We will never properly know "the values and excitements" of the world in which the artist lived unless we pay attention to every aspect of the image.
More is at stake here than simply properly exploiting a potentially rich source of knowledge about a past society. Images are never a transcript of the world, they do not merely reflect the visual experience of the artist, providing some mirror image of the world in which the artist lived. What artists do is to offer ways of organizing (visual) experiences, and in an important sense it is their (re)organization of visual experiences that makes the world. The images created by artists, using the term at its broadest, are themselves part of the visual experience of those living in that world. And not a trivial part. The images that artists create play an active role in shaping experience, and not merely a passive role in reflecting it. Drawings, paintings, and sculpture may be conservative or subversive; they can never be neutral, never stand apart from politics and economics, or from other aspects of culture. We must always ask not merely about the role of social, economic, and political changes in changing visual experience, and hence changing what artists do, but about the role of what artists do in social, political, and economic changes. As Clark indicates, there are ways in which art can put pressure on social structure. And not just social structure.
This book is concerned with the way in which artists working in Athens changed their representational choices over a period of just under a century (1.3-4 and plate 1, 1.5=6 and plate 2). It is concerned to give an account of those changes, not merely in the sense of describing them but of explaining why they may have taken place and how they helped other major social changes to take place. I take only a very limited selection of all the images produced in Athens at this time, focusing on a subset of scenes that relate more or less directly to activities that might be observed in Athens or by Athenians and look at how what is represented changes between around 520 and around 440. My question is: what is the relation to Athenian life of the choice of depicting — particularly but not exclusively on pots — this selection of scenes of athletes (or people having sexual relations, or soldiers, or whoever) rather than some other selection of scenes of athletes? How do these changes relate to what we know of the history of athletes (or soldiers or whoever) from historical documents? How do they relate to each other? What has changed in Athenian visual experience to account for the changes in the images? What I am trying to understand is the implications of representing actions of one sort, rather than another, in one way, rather than another, for how people expected to relate to one another in real life.
The thought that art and experience were closely related in classical Greece is not a new one. J. J. Pollitt's Art and Experience in Classical Greece was published in the same year as Baxandall's Painting and Experience in Fifteenth- Century Italy. But the approach to understanding change in the visual arts adopted here is not one that has been previously taken by those studying ancient Greek art or by those studying ancient Greek history. In the next chapter I shall explain why the study of Athenian pottery has shown so little interest in how scenes, other than scenes of mythology, change over time. But in this chapter I place my own work in the context of past histories of Greek art by looking at the models of artistic change that they have offered.
2. Were They Pushed or Did They Jump?
Histories of Greek art variously invoke two factors to drive their story. On the one hand, individual artists themselves experiment as they come to terms with the world around them. On the other they become enchanted by others' technology, learning from visual artists who are outside their culture or their society or from the creative endeavors of those in their own society who compose not images but texts, or overwhelmed by current events that totally change their view of the world. These factors have been invoked both in the history of sculpture and in the history of painted pottery, but they have played out in different ways. I start with the history of painted pottery.
Supply and Demand
When human figures begin once more to be represented on painted pottery after the relentless geometric decoration of the so-called Dark Age, they are "perfectly integrated with their geometric habitat" (1.7). Their torsos are triangular, their arms at sharp angles, and artists display a preference for scenes in which many figures adopt the same posture. Yet scholars have insisted that "the development of a Geometric figure style was not internally generated." The favored iconography is dominated by "the battlefield, the chariot file, the heroic death and its funerary celebration," but scholars have debated whether these reflect what the artists saw happening around them, or express "a mythic consciousness in which they lived and which impelled them to decorate objects at all." They have asked whether "there is a willing separation from the direct experience of reality," suggesting that "it is a medium for rejecting the world of direct sense and experience in favor of the constructed, the imagined, the interpreted." The imagination invoked by scholars has traditionally been not the imagination of the artist, but of outsiders, of artists elsewhere or of poets — particular figure groups are held to have been borrowed from (for example) the art of North Syria, and heroic scenes to have been inspired either by Homeric epic or by folktales. Only in the most recent work has the possibility that geometric artists worked with and on the visual experience of the world in which they lived begun to be explored, as Susan Langdon has insisted "on the utility of Geometric art for ordering and unifying communities."
Around 700 BC there was a revolution in painted pottery (1.8). Geometric patterns vanish and are replaced by curvilinear decoration that alludes strongly to the natural world. In Athenian art, human figures are portrayed on a larger scale and in a much greater variety of actions. Above all, incidents and monsters that feature in myth can be identified for the first time, as can representations of the Greek gods. What caused this revolution? The favored explanation has been exogenous: "a tide of Eastern imagery swept away the Geometric style in this period, and Eastern motifs and customs pervaded Greek society at every level," writes Richard Neer.
That many of the motifs that dominate painted pottery in this period were learned from objects made in the Near East there is no doubt. But far from being overwhelmed by the arrival at the end of the eighth century of Eastern artifacts, Greeks had by 700 been long familiar with these exotic objects: "Oriental art was widely available and discreetly imitated throughout much of the Geometric period." We are dealing with active and selective borrowing, not star-struck imitation. But even those who acknowledge this concentrate on form: "eastern forms are for the most part reinterpreted," "the Greek vase painter almost never copied an eastern metal vessel or its decoration directly, and the new forms were introduced piecemeal, assimilated, and rapidly adjusted to serve their new functions." The question of why these forms were found attractive has hardly been asked, let alone answered.
At the end of the seventh century, Athenian pottery underwent another revolution, adopting incision to replace outline drawing and soft-edged figures with silhouettes with sharp outlines and intricate internal detail (1.9). The story scholars tell is once more about technique and imagery being carried in from outside, both in terms of medium and in terms of place: "probably under the influence of imported eastern ivories and metal work with incised decoration," "acceptance of the black figure technique in Athens seemed to carry with it some of Corinth's obsession with" animal friezes, writes Boardman. Neer converts this description in abstract terms into a claim about people. He writes that "Corinthian immigrants, perhaps invited by the statesman Solon, gave the industry a powerful boost."
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
List of Figures vii
List of Plates xiii
Abbreviations xv
Preface xvii
I
1 The Art of Transformation 3
2 Athenian Pottery and Athenian Culture 26
II
3 Changing in the Gymnasium 53
4 Changing the Guard 87
5 Courting Change 122
6 Sacrificing Change 151
7 Drinking to and Reveling in Change 168
8 The Changing City of Satyrs 188
III
9 Morality, Politics, and Aesthetics 207
10 The Road Not Taken 228
11 The Transformation of Art 249
Bibliography 259
Index 277
What People are Saying About This
"This is a highly engaging, persuasive, and original book. Combining rigorous scholarship with clear and lively prose, it almost seamlessly integrates a variety of theories with a more empirical approach."—Jonathan Hall, University of Chicago"This is the first book to address, in a large-scale way, what vase painting reveals about the ‘social imaginary' of ancient Athens. It finally accounts for the changes in this area of art in a systematic fashion and contextualizes them within the larger history of Greek art."—Kathryn Topper, University of Washington