Greek Vase Painting Research Articles

Pots and Plays: Interactions between Tragedy and Greek Vase-Painting of the Fourth Century B.C. By Oliver Taplin.

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsPots and Plays: Interactions between Tragedy and Greek Vase-Painting of the Fourth Century B.C. By Oliver Taplin.T. H. CarpenterT. H. Carpenter Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by American Journal of Archaeology Volume 112, Number 4October 2008 The journal of the Archaeological Institute of America Views: 4Total views on this site Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/AJS20627528 Views: 4Total views on this site Copyright © 2008 by the Archaeological Institute of America. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Pots and Plays: Interactions between Tragedy and Greek Vase-Painting of the Fourth Century B.c.

Pots and Plays: Interactions between Tragedy and Greek Vase-Painting of the Fourth Century B.c.

Pots & plays: interactions between tragedy and Greek vase-painting of the fourth century B.C

Greek painted pottery from the fourth century B.C. is one of the largest and most remarkable bodies of theatrically informed material that still survives. Pots and Plays is a thorough and insightful re-evaluation of over 100 Greek vases - mostly from the Greek communities of southern Italy. It demonstrates that while most paintings are not direct representations of actors or scenes, they can be interpreted as referring to theatrical performance. This comprehensive volume provides a large body of superb photographs accompanied by a picture-by-picture discussion of the vases, organized by playwright - including Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides.

Nola and the historiography of Greek vases

Cemeteries that encircled the Campanian town of Nola furnished many of the ancient vases most highly sought after by eighteenth-century collectors. Attracted by the exceptional quality of the glazes on what was later recognized as Attic pottery, antiquaries looked to the figured scenes for reflections of lost masterpieces of ancient Greek painting. Enmeshed practices of connoisseurship, scholarship and commerce were already firmly in place by the 1740s. Comparing vases to Old Master drawings and adopting modes of display popular for Continental porzellan-kabinetten, collectors relocated Greek vase painting from the realm of curiosity to that of fine art.

Lizards, Lions, and the Uncanny in Early Greek Art

An examination of the lizard in the imagery of Archaic Greek vase painting suggests that it was a figure of power and portent and often an omen of disaster. It is argued that the lizard should be ranked among such uncannybeasts as Gorgons, sphinxes, and at least one monumental feline from the Archaic Athenian Acropolis.

Psychological Implications of the History of Realistic Depiction: Ancient Greece, Renaissance Italy and CGI

Art historian Ernst Gombrich argued that learning to create convincing realistic depictions is a difficult, incremental process requiring the invention of numerous specific techniques to solve its many problems. Gombrich's argument is elaborated here in a historical review of the evolution of realistic depiction in ancient Greek vase painting, Italian Renaissance painting and contemporary computer-generated imagery (CGI) in video games. The order in which many problems of realism were solved in the three trajectories is strikingly similar, suggesting a common psychological explanation.

Greek Vase Painting: Form, Figure and Narrative. Treasures of the National Archaeological Museum in Madrid. By P. Gregory Warden.

<i>Greek Vase Painting: Form, Figure and Narrative. Treasures of the National Archaeological Museum in Madrid</i>. By P. Gregory Warden.

The Ko Festival of Performance (review)

Reviewed by: The Ko Festival of Performance Kermit Dunkelberg The Ko Festival of Performance. Amherst, Massachusetts. 1107– 08082004. For the past thirteen years, the Ko Festival of Performance (produced by Ko Theater Works) has brought innovative new theatre to audiences in the western Massachusetts town of Amherst. The company and festival are named for the forty-ninth hexagram of the I Ching, "Ko," which describes revolution as a shedding of skin. The festival strives [End Page 117]to shed conventional approaches to the creation and presentation of performances. This year the festival was organized around the theme of "The Document, the Documenter, and the Documented, celebrating the preservation of knowledge, and lamenting its loss." As the facilitator of postperformance conversations between artists and audiences, I was able to track this theme through the various works of the festival. Sources for the performances included ancient texts, twentieth-century political history, autobiography, and biography. Beyond the preservation of knowledge and its loss, the performances raised issues of the manipulation, falsification, and untrustworthiness of documents. In all of the performances, the performers, directors, and designers were documenters. In some cases, they were also the documented. As is traditional at Ko, the festival opened with a performance on the Amherst College Observatory Lawn by Ralph Lee's Mettawee River Company (Salem, New York). This year's piece, The Heroic and Pathetic Escapades of Karagiozis, centered on the title character: a trickster figure of a Mediterranean shadow puppetry tradition dating back to the fourteenth century. Like Arlecchino in the commedia dell'arte tradition, Karagiozis is an Everyman with insatiable appetites for food and mischief. Lee had been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to research the surviving Karagiozis puppetry tradition in Turkey and Greece. Setting a precedent for the use of documentation throughout the festival, Lee chose not to reproduce the style of this folk tradition, but to adapt two tales from the Greek tradition to Mettawee's own style. Rather than shadow puppets, we were treated to whimsical masks, puppets ranging from finger-size to twelve feet tall, and crazy dragon contraptions, all accompanied by a three-piece jazz combo. Evan Zes as Karagiozis demonstrated remarkable physical comedic skill, and a wonderful sense of scale. A gesture (or Brechtian gest, in its most popular form) might begin in his belly, travel to a finger, and then become a full-bodied run around the playing area. The festival next moved indoors, to Hampshire College's Emily Dickinson Theatre. Ko Theater Works' Out of the Garden: A double bill of Eve and Exilebrought together two pieces written and performed by actor-dancer Lesley Farlow, both based on ancient source materials. Exile, directed by Mitchell Polin, filtered the story of Medea through the contemporary stories of convicted child murderers Susan Smith and Andrea Yates. The juxtaposition of a figure from Greek myth and tragedy with contemporary figures known primarily from journalistic accounts (an episode of the television program American Justicefocused on Smith played in the lobby) humanized the archetype, while bringing a sense of tragic distance to the acts of Smith and Yates. Exilebegan with the sound of water—evoking Medea's exile, the act of childbirth, and the fate of Susan Smith's children. (The sound score was by Polin.) Hieratic gestures reminiscent of Greek vase paintings gave way to a more quotidian movement vocabulary as Farlow slipped us into the contemporary. In a long, affecting passage, Farlow first sat listening to a Johnny Cash rendition of Roberta Flack's "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face." Then, evoking pregnancy, labor, and childbirth, she lugged four plastic bags (the number of Andrea Yates's children) filled with Styrofoam peanuts to separate locations, covered them with a blanket, and "put them to sleep." The bags, it turned out, were the insides of bean bag chairs—quintessentially suburban domestic objects. Farlow navigated between Medea's and Smith's feelings of betrayal, between the archetypal and the hyper-real. In the last moment, she transcended the creepy banality of the desperate acts of Smith and Yates by reaching back to Medea's cry of anguish, uttered in Euripides' ancient Greek. Eve, directed by Janna Goodwin...

Humour in greek vase-painting

L’article passe en revue les différentes formes d’humour rencontrées dans la peinture de vases grecs des VI e et V e s. av. J.-C. La 1 re partie traite des calembours visuels, dans lesquels les peintres jouent avec les codes de l’image. La 2 e partie analyse la comédie de situation, c.-à-d. la façon dont des histoires bien connues peuvent être tournées en ridicule dans les représentations, par le biais d’un déplacement du statut des personnages et de l’humour dans les scènes de vie quotidienne. La 3 e partie porte sur la caricature des difformités physiques. La dernière partie étudie l’utilisation des personnages de satyres dans la parodie de la mythologie et de la vie quotidienne. Ces images n’ont pas le théâtre satyrique pour origine, et les satyres sont un moyen de se moquer des thèmes du répertoire de la peinture de vase elle-même, tant dans les scènes mythologiques que dans celles touchant à la Polis .

Reading the Chigi Vase

Long considered one of the technical masterpieces of Archaic Greek vase painting, the Protocorinthian Chigi vase (ca. 640 B.C.) has defied attempts at interpretation. Its imagery has most often been understood as a randomassortment of exquisite but unrelated scenes-hunts, horsemanship, the Judgment of Paris, and a hoplite battle. It is argued here that there is in fact a logic behind the choice of scenes, and that the vase displays a pliable thematic unity, focusing upon the stages of maturation of the Corinthian male and the inter-penetration of the everyday, the exotic, the heroic, and the divine in the lives of mortals.

Early Greek Vase Painting: 11th-6th Centuries B.C. a Handbook

Early Greek Vase Painting: 11th-6th Centuries B.C. a Handbook

(J.) Boardman Early Greek Vase Painting, 11th-6th Centuries BC. A Handbook. London: Thames and Hudson, 1998. Pp. 287 + ill. £ 8.95. 0500203091.

(J.) Boardman Early Greek Vase Painting, 11th-6th Centuries BC. A Handbook. London: Thames and Hudson, 1998. Pp. 287 + ill. £ 8.95. 0500203091.

Early Greek Vase Painting: 11th-6th Centuries B. C. By John Boardman.

<i>Early Greek Vase Painting: 11th-6th Centuries B. C.</i> By John Boardman.

Staging Ancient Drama: The Difference Women Make

Staging Ancient Drama: The Difference Women Make Mary-Kay Gamel Sue-Ellen Case, an eminent theorist of performance, has issued a strong challenge to feminists who work on ancient Mediterranean drama.1 The ‘classics’ of Athenian, Roman and Elizabethan drama were all produced by cultures that denied women access to the stage and allowed them few legal and economic rights. The values of a patriarchal society are embedded in the texts of these periods. Female characters reflect the absence of real women from the stage and the reasons for their absence. Each culture that regards it as valuable to revive those classic plays actively participates in the same patriarchal subtext which created those female characters as ‘Woman.’ Case urges contemporary feminists to refuse to participate in this subtext. Instead they should seek to expose “the methodology and assumptions of patriarchal production” and the alliance of theatre with patriarchal prejudice …. The feminist theatre-practitioner might, for instance, understand Lysistrata not as a good play for women, but as a male drag show, with bur1 Feminism and Theatre (New York 1988) 12. Gamel: Staging Ancient Drama 23 lesque jokes about breasts and phalluses playing well in the drag tradition. The feminist director might cast a man in the role of Medea, underscoring the patriarchal prejudices of ownership and jealousy and the ownership of children as male concerns. The feminist actor may no longer regard these roles as desirable for her career. Overall, feminist practitioners and scholars may decide that such plays do not belong in the canon—and that they are not central to the study and practice of theatre.2 As a feminist, I agree that all theatrical productions—not only contemporary dramas, but “subsequent performances” of older plays—have ideological implications, whether overt or veiled. But Case’s polemic contains several overgeneralizations and mistaken assumptions . She lumps together plays which differ greatly in theme, ideology, and theatrical form. She allows for no critique of the patriarchal subtext either within ancient scripts or on the part of ancient audiences. And she suggests, by her use of the word “revive,” that all productions of ancient drama replicate the meaning of these dramas in their original performance context. Overall, Case takes far too narrow a view both of the meanings and effects of ancient drama in its original context and of the performance traditions and staging choices available to contemporary performers of that drama.3 Twentieth-century performers’ and audiences’ understanding of the effects of ancient performance can be increased by productions which include elements of ancient staging, such as performing outdoors , dividing speaking roles among three actors, and staging choral odes with song and dance. Some modern productions of ancient 2 ibid., 19. 3 Useful guides to postclassical stagings of ancient drama include J. Michael Walton, Living Greek Theatre: A Handbook of Classical Performance and Modern Production (New York 1987); Hellmut Flashar, Inszenietung der Antike (Munich 1991); Marianthe Colakis, The Classics in the American Theater of the 1960s and Early 1970s (New York 1993); Karelisa V. Hartigan, Greek Tragedy on the American Stage (Westport , Connecticut 1995); Peter Burian, “Tragedy Adapted for Stages and Screens,” and Fiona Macintosh, “Tragedy in Performance: Nineteenth- and Twentiethcentury Productions,” both in The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy, P.E. Easterling , ed. (Cambridge 1997). The electronic journal Didaskalia (whose URL is http://didaskalia.berkeley.edu) regularly publishes reviews of productions around the world. 24 Syllecta Classica 10 (1999) drama use “authentic” elements in order to evoke the radical alterity of older performance texts. For example, in 1986 the New York Greek Drama Company staged Medea with the actors in masks and chitons speaking Greek in pitch accents, while the chorus choreography was inspired by Greek vase paintings. In his introduction to the videotape of this production William Arrowsmith declares that it is “meant to seem strange to us,” whereas presenting tragedy in English translation dispels “the otherness the achieving of which is presumably the chief reason for producing the play in the first place.” Other productions offer conspicuously non-authentic alterity. The Ninagawa Company of Japan toured a Medea to London in 1987 which combined Eastern and Western, ancient and modern elements. The onnagata (female impersonator) who...

Early Greek vase painting: 11th-6th centuries B.C.: a handbook

This volume completes a series of four titles which comprehensively cover the development of Greek vases. One of the most intriguing things about Greek vase painting from the 11th to the 6th centuries BC is that it shows all the components of Greek art which were to culminate in the Classical styles of the 5th century BC. Geometric vases gave way by about 700 BC to the influence of the Near East and in this new Orientalizing period the Greeks learned how to tell a story in pictures. Early Greek vases display the Greek painter's craft at its most mathematical, its most colourful and most narrative, and are here set against the background of the history and culture of their day.

Odysseus on the Niobid Krater

The Niobid krater in Paris (Louvre G341) is not one of the masterpieces of Greek vase painting. The vase is not even one of the best works of the artist, who receives his name, the Niobid Painter, from the rare depiction of Apollo and Artemis killing the children of Niobe on the reverse. The vase is, however, one of the touchstones of the history of ancient Greek art. The Niobid krater has this distinction because it is the earliest contemporaneous witness to the new developments in mural painting in the Early Classical Period, developments best understood from the descriptions of the traveler Pausanias six centuries later. The actual quality of the Niobid krater is therefore secondary to its documentary value.Since the krater's discovery in 1881, most discussion has focused on the iconography of the scene on the obverse, showing a group of warriors with Athena (PLATE IIa). The ambiguity of the scene comes from the large number of figures and the lack of action or iconographical evidence to help in their identification. Of the 11 figures, only Herakles (figure 6 on PLATE IIb), with his club and lionskin and Athena (4) in her aegis and helmet are clearly identifiable.

Greek Vase Painting. By Dietrich von Bothmer.

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsGreek Vase Painting. By Dietrich von Bothmer.John H. OakleyJohn H. Oakley Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by American Journal of Archaeology Volume 93, Number 4October 1989 The journal of the Archaeological Institute of America Views: 1Total views on this site Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.2307/505344 Views: 1Total views on this site Copyright © 1989 by the Archaeological Institute of America. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Dionysian Imagery in Archaic Greek Art: Its Development in Black-Figure Vase Painting

This study examines the development of Dionysian imagery in Greek vase painting from the first appearance of the god on an Attic vase c. 580 BC to the point at which red figure overtook black figure as the dominant style of vase painting in Attica c. 520 BC.

Sprang Hair Nets: Their Manufacture and Use in Ancient Greece

Since the beginning of this century it has been recognized that the small textile hand-frames shown on Greek vases were probably used for the production of sprang. This view was recently endorsed by L. Clark in "Notes on Small Textile Frames Pictured on Greek Vases," AJA 87 (1983) 91-96. So far only representations of a forked frame have been discussed. The British Museum, however, possesses a pyxis lid on which is clearly shown a rectangular device which, we argue, must have been used for making sprang. We examine the practical application of the sprang technique in ancient Greece and, in particular, its use for hair nets similar to those worn in Coptic Egypt. Finally, on the evidence of Greek vase painting, we consider the social status of the women who are shown making sprang.

Gorgos' Cup: an Essay in Connoisseurship

In 1954 a small red-figured cup was found in the Athenian Agora. Its style of drawing resembles that of one of the greatest Athenian vase-painters—the Berlin Painter, active shortly before 500 BC to around 460 BC. Any of his vases, newly discovered, excites scholarly interest; if the vase is possibly his earliest, and a shape which he is not known previously to have decorated, interest is very great. Martin Robertson, to whom this article is affectionately dedicated, argued persuasively for an attribution of the cup to the Berlin Painter. Sir John Beazley agreed, although with reservations. The cup has continued to attract attention and provoke controversy: no one denies a close connection with the Berlin Painter but some feel that the stylistic similarities are not sufficiently compelling to attribute the cup firmly to his hand. The cup is, therefore, an excellent example of the difficulties inherent in connoisseurship.My interest in the Berlin Painter was deepened by preparing for publication drawing (PLATES Vld, Vllc–d) which Beazley ‘traced’ off more than fifty of the artist's vases. The Berlin Painter (Oxford 1983) presents Beazley's Berlin Painter. It attempts to show how Beazley looked at the painter's vases and what criteria he valued most highly in their attribution; it does not enter into the controversy over Gorgos' cup or other vases of the artist's earliest years whose attributions have been questioned. Elsewhere I discuss connoisseurship in Greek vase-painting; here my purpose is an explanation of method. My ‘conclusion’—that the Berlin Painter probably did not decorate Gorgos' cup—is relatively unimportant.