Significant Others: The Male-Female Pair in Greek Geometric Art

Abstract

After a century of scholarship, Greek Geometric figural art continues to pose fundamental problems of identification and interpretation. The intractable nature of basic iconographic questions is in part the result of the historiographic circumstances that formed the present canon of major and minor Geometric works. This study focuses on the specific iconographic theme of the male-female couple and traces its disappearance from histories of Geometric art as a result of academic and cultural biases operating in the early 20th century. Two examples, a pair of terracotta heads from Amyklai and a group of misidentified female figurines from Geometric bronze tripods, illustrate the progressive marginalization of the theme from the art historical mainstream. An inquiry into the origins of scholarship on Geometric sculpture demonstrates how crucial contextual information could be lost and what its restoration can offer in terms of a richer corpus of Geometric iconography with which to approach the challenges of interpretation. Emphasizing the iconographic flexibility of Geometric style, this study suggests that the image of a warrior with female companion was newly introduced in the mid-eighth century by elite patronage and found widespread social utility in the changing world of early Iron Age Greece.