The Frame in Classical Art


Book Description

The frames of classical art are often seen as marginal to the images that they surround. Traditional art history has tended to view framing devices as supplementary 'ornaments'. Likewise, classical archaeologists have often treated them as tools for taxonomic analysis. This book not only argues for the integral role of framing within Graeco-Roman art, but also explores the relationship between the frames of classical antiquity and those of more modern art and aesthetics. Contributors combine close formal analysis with more theoretical approaches: chapters examine framing devices across multiple media (including vase and fresco painting, relief and free-standing sculpture, mosaics, manuscripts and inscriptions), structuring analysis around the themes of 'framing pictorial space', 'framing bodies', 'framing the sacred' and 'framing texts'. The result is a new cultural history of framing - one that probes the sophisticated and playful ways in which frames could support, delimit, shape and even interrogate the images contained within.




Greek Vase Painting


Book Description




Greek Vases


Book Description

The eloquent beauty of the vases produced in the workshops of the ancient Greeks is represented by a selection of pieces from the superb private collection of Molly and Walter Bareiss that spans more than a thousand years of the craft. From a delightful miniature stirrup vase dating ca. 1300 B.C. to prime examples of the molded vases from Augustan Rome, the Bareiss collection includes a splendid representative collection, guided by a sure instinct for the unique beauty of design and drawing. Assembled in this brief catalogue are illustrated discussions of forty-seven of the masterpieces from the 258 vases currently on loan to the Getty Museum. Dietrich von Bothmer, Chairman of Greek and Roman Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, introduces this most important collection, one with which he has been intimately involved since its conception, advising, studying, interpreting, and even piecing together shattered vases. Following the individual catalogue entries is a full checklist of an additional 205 vases that are on loan to the Getty Museum.




Aesthetic Experiences and Classical Antiquity


Book Description

This book investigates the nature of aesthetic experience with the help of ancient material, exploring our responses to both narratives and images.




The Image of the Artist in Archaic and Classical Greece


Book Description

This book explores the persona of the artist in Archaic and Classical Greek art and literature. Guy Hedreen argues that artistic subjectivity, first expressed in Athenian vase-painting of the sixth century BCE and intensively explored by Euphronios, developed alongside a self-consciously constructed persona of the poet. He explains how poets like Archilochos and Hipponax identified with the wily Homeric character of Odysseus as a prototype of the successful narrator, and how the lame yet resourceful artist-god Hephaistos is emulated by Archaic vase-painters such as Kleitias. In lyric poetry and pictorial art, Hedreen traces a widespread conception of the artist or poet as socially marginal, sometimes physically imperfect, but rhetorically clever, technically peerless, and a master of fiction. Bringing together in a sustained analysis the roots of subjectivity across media, this book offers a new way of studying the relationship between poetry and art in ancient Greece.




Pots & Plays


Book Description

This interdisciplinary study opens up a fascinating interaction between art and theater. It shows how the mythological vase-paintings of fourth-century B.C. Greeks, especially those settled in southern Italy, are more meaningful for those who had seen the myths enacted in the popular new medium of tragedy. Of some 300 relevant vases, 109 are reproduced and accompanied by a picture-by-picture discussion. This book supplies a rich and unprecedented resource from a neglected treasury of painting.




Artists and Signatures in Ancient Greece


Book Description

This book offers insight into Greek conceptions of art, the artist, and artistic originality by examining artists' signatures in ancient Greece.




Polygnotos and Vase Painting in Classical Athens


Book Description

Matheson provides the first comprehensive chronology for Polygnotos's own works, and then analyzes the distinctive, evolving Polygnotan style first isolated by Sir John Beazley, comparing this style to that of contemporary Athenian workshops and demonstrating its seminal influence on the later vase painting of southern Italy.