Greek Vases Research Articles

Some anthropological characteristics of ancient (according to fine art sources) and modern Greeks

Introduction. Greek sculpture and vase painting, despite the comprehensive study of specialists in many fields of science, can represent a source of information for historical and biological anthropology. The vase painting and sculpture of the ancient Greeks has been studied in the context of ethnic and biological continuity with the modern Greek population. Materials and methods. A total of 1020 vases (2379 people) and 174 reliefs (300 people) were studied. Two characteristics were studied – the development of tertiary hair growth (beard growth) and the nature of the head hair of ancient and modern Greeks. The material was collected from online sources and relevant literature, and processed according to anthropological methods. The composite portrait according to F. Galton method in digital format has been used to visualize morphological variability. Results and discussion. Modern Greeks (the middle total type of the population) are characterized by straight or lightly wavy head hair (middle score 1.41) and most often above middle or heavy beard growth (middle score 3.38). The proportion of straight and wavy hair in all vase painting samples is approximately the same, with wavy hair significantly predominant. The middle scores for hair nature and beard growth based on relief funeral images of ancient Greeks in our samples turned out to be significantly higher than for modern Greeks and amounted to: for nature of the hair – 2,62 points for classical time and 2,81 points for late classical and hellenistic times, for beard growth – 4,38 points and 4,30 points, respectively. Conclusion. Despite the change in artistic forms of conveying morphological features during the transition from archaic to classical times, in Greek vase painting and sculpture the representation of the heavy beard growth and the wavy nature of head hair was preserved, which, according to the authors, may be a real reflection of the typical morphological characteristics of the group.

Introduction: the appeal of the Amazons

The fearless ancient Amazons have been seen as forebears and prototypes by lesbians, feminists, and transgender men. In this introduction, I will explore why the Greek legends of the Amazons lend themselves to such interpretation. Ancient Greek literature details how the Amazons challenged patriarchy, lived without men, and defeated their male enemies, thus setting a precedent that would later be emulated by feminists and lesbians. Though the Amazons are clearly designated as women they are also identified with men in ancient Greek lore; in ancient Greek vase painting, they wear masculine outfits and engage in masculine habits, including fighting and hunting. Thus I will examine the Amazons’ gender transgression in ancient Greek contexts in order to understand how and why these myths set the stage for the adoption of the Amazons as role models by later generations of gender nonconformists. I will also briefly examine the history behind those myths, a history which is just as important to lesbian and other queer communities as the myths which it spawned. Finally, I will weave my analysis of the ancient Greek ideology of Amazons with innovative, new research on the reception of the Amazons found in the six other articles that make up this special edition. These essays explore the powerful place of Amazons and Amazon-like women in the imaginaries of peoples ranging from the ancient Romans to modern lesbian feminists, and the importance of historical and legendary warrior women who defied patriarchy and colonialism in locales ranging from the West to Africa to India.

“Rétablir la partie antique isolée de toutes ses restaurations”: A major conservation treatment of the pointed amphora by the Achilles Painter

Purchased in Rome during the winter of 1847-1848, the pointed amphora by the Achilles Painter is one of the centerpieces of the Duke of Luynes’ collection of Greek vases held at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF). The rarity of its shape and the virtuosity of its decoration make it one of the greatest masterpieces of this Athenian vase painter active in the middle decades of the 5th century BC. However, scholars soon noticed the extent of its 19th-century illusionistic restoration.The renovation of the BnF museum provided the opportunity to resume the study and envision the conservation treatment of this vase. Under the supervision of a scientific committee, a preliminary investigation conducted at the Centre de recherche et de restauration des musées de France (C2RMF) led to the decision to undertake a major conservation treatment. The intervention aimed to highlight this masterpiece of Greek vase-painting, facilitate the understanding of the shape of this incomplete amphora and preserve a testimony of 19th-century restoration practices.

Heroics of Dress: Exekias and Ornament in Greek Vase Painting

Heroics of Dress: Exekias and Ornament in Greek Vase Painting

Роль сатиров в культе Диониса по данным древнегреческой вазописи

Роль сатиров в культе Диониса по данным древнегреческой вазописи

Moving Images, Moving Bodies

Abstract At the end of the nineteenth century, under the influence of chronophotography and the arguments of the French musicologist Maurice Emmanuel, it was believed that ancient dance could be recovered for the modern world by animating the figures on ancient Greek vases. This led to a flurry of practitioners of so-called ‘Grecian’ dance across Europe, the US and the British Empire. At the beginning of the twentieth century, moving like a Greek became as popular and as liberating for women of the upper classes as discarding a corset and dressing in a Greek-style tunic. In the Edwardian period, since the most celebrated practitioners of Greek dance were women, this new corporeal Hellenism was viewed with deep suspicion as a perilous bid for Sapphic liberation from the patriarchy. But this new corporeality was no less part of a wider utopian return both to nature and the ideal of the collective that laid the groundwork for fascist appropriations of Greek dance in the 1920s.

REFLECTIONS FROM A GREEK VASE

The theme proposed in this Article is: “Reflections from a greek vase”. The development of this Article took place under the qualitative methodology with bibliographic, qualitative, referential, interpretative, descriptive and critical-dialectical methods. Reflecting on a Greek Vase is the main objective of this Article, considering the importance of Greek Vases: the legacy of the attic vases helped greatly in building the knowledge of athenian society. Topic 1 will deal with the Power of the Image; Topic 2 will deal with Greek Vases and the 3rd Topic will analyze a Greek Vase. Then, the Final Considerations. I hope the academic environment will receive a good contribution, both practical and theoretical, by conducting my analyzes.

Gods, Goddesses, and Mortals for the 21st Century: The Reinstallation of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts Collection of Ancient Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Art

Gods, Goddesses, and Mortals for the 21st Century: The Reinstallation of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts Collection of Ancient Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Art

The Plastic Bag Store (Excerpt)

The Plastic Bag Store (Excerpt)

The possibility and necessity of reconstructing ancient Greek buildings to study the depicted architecture in Greek vase painting of the Archaic era.

This paper examines the problem of depicting and interpreting architectural structures on the two-dimensional surface of vases in the archaic era. And accordingly, during the period of formation of the necessary iconographies and methods of interaction between the depicted space and plane. The purpose of this study is to study the architecture depicted in vase paintings during the Archaic period. As part of such research, there is a need to analyze the remaining relief or structural parts of ancient architecture, scan them and create at least approximate virtual models. What becomes possible with the development of the latest information technologies. This will help a deeper study of the origins of the architectural fantasies of ancient Greek vase painters. In the meantime, within the framework of the initial stages of such a study, examples have been selected for comparisons of individual elements of architectural buildings and types in general. Some origins and share of the vase painter’s fantasies are determined. This study proves that the depicted architecture can play many functions, solve a large number of problems in vase painting scenes; often, masters use it as a kind of language to convey important non-verbal, semantic points.

Between Past and Present: Twombly at Boston’s MFA

Between Past and Present: Twombly at Boston’s MFA Brandon Jones (bio) Roughly twenty years ago during my time as a high school teacher in Boston’s southern suburbs, I spent many summer days wandering around the Museum of Fine Arts—to different galleries, but never without a visit to those showcasing masterpieces of classical antiquity. I always commenced the procession through a dark, narrow hallway, detouring on a rightward loop through the Egyptian funerary collection, and then rejoining the narrow passage to another dark room with Greek vases, where I would check on red-figured Aktaion and on bilingual Achilles and Ajax playing board games before I angled into an almost hidden corner room with an Etruscan couple in tufa calmly laying at rest in a cool, quiet setting. I still recall vividly the change in temperature, humidity, even the scent of the air as I opened each door to each successive gallery. Some years later, the company for which my father worked was commissioned by the MFA to install new doors within most of its galleries. With some acknowledged irony, my brother and I have since made holiday visits to the MFA during which we admire the glass doors, especially those that open smoothly almost as if a motor were propelling us into a world of ancient art; we also playfully grimace at those that slow our passage with a squeak or hinder our view with a fingerprinted film. Of course, my father’s art was different from that of the sculptors, painters, weavers, and many others who are responsible for so much of what gives the MFA its true raison d’être. Yet, this unusual connection to the museum helps me appreciate the many ways that modern hands bear on our way of experiencing ancient art. They construct the doors which help preserve and provide access to the ancient past. Sometimes the passage or view through those doors is clear; sometimes it takes an extra umph or squint. [End Page 91] While most of the doors my father built remain throughout the MFA, my previous route through the Behrakis Wing yields a very different display of the museum’s antiquities collections after renovations completed in 2009 and 2021, both of which brought an emphasis on explicit connections between the present and the ancient past. Themed galleries from the 2009 renovation included didactics on such timeless topics as daily life, drama, and drinking parties. The most recent renovation expanded the didactic mission, especially in the new Early Greek Art Gallery which includes themed sections on the body, burial, local identities, storytelling, and trade. In the same gallery, video of the seaside cliffs at modern-day Behramkale, Turkey projects against a wall, opposite reliefs of Herakles chasing centaurs and sphinxes facing one another from the architrave of the ancient Temple of Athena at Assos, or modern Behramkale. Throughout the Behrakis Wing, interactive video monitors focusing on pigment in sculpture and vase painting techniques, along with a looping video of student testimonials on antiquity’s allure, aim to connect present and future visitors to the ancient past. Click for larger view View full resolution Fig. 1a. Untitled (Odalisca), August 1988 (1 of 6) Collection Cy Twombly Foundation. © Cy Twombly Foundation. Photograph by Mimmo Capone. Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Click for larger view View full resolution Fig. 1b. Untitled (Toilet of Venere), August 1988 (3 of 6) Collection Cy Twombly Foundation. © Cy Twombly Foundation. Photograph by Mimmo Capone. Courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Just beyond the Early Greek Art Gallery’s architrave from Behramkale, the Lubin Family Gallery now serves as a space for a rotating display of modern artistic interactions with the ancient world—the boldest instantiation of the MFA’s mission to show past and present [End Page 92] together. The gallery currently features three sculptures by Cy Twombly surrounded by Sally Mann’s photographs of Twombly’s studio in Lexington, Virginia. It serves as a teaser to the massive, temporary exhibition, Making Past Present: Cy Twombly, which has crossed the country from the J. Paul Getty Museum and will reside in the Linde Family Wing galleries at the MFA through May 7, 2023. Click...

Enhancing Human Pose Estimation in Ancient Vase Paintings via Perceptually-grounded Style Transfer Learning

Human pose estimation (HPE) is a central part of understanding the visual narration and body movements of characters depicted in artwork collections, such as Greek vase paintings. Unfortunately, existing HPE methods do not generalise well across domains resulting in poorly recognised poses. Therefore, we propose a two step approach: (1) adapting a dataset of natural images of known person and pose annotations to the style of Greek vase paintings by means of image style-transfer. We introduce a perceptually-grounded style transfer training to enforce perceptual consistency. Then, we fine-tune the base model with this newly created dataset. We show that using style-transfer learning significantly improves the SOTA performance on unlabelled data by more than 6% mean average precision (mAP) as well as mean average recall (mAR) . (2) To improve the already strong results further, we created a small dataset (ClassArch) consisting of ancient Greek vase paintings from the 6–5th century BCE with person and pose annotations. We show that fine-tuning on this data with a style-transferred model improves the performance further. In a thorough ablation study, we give a targeted analysis of the influence of style intensities, revealing that the model learns generic domain styles. Additionally, we provide a pose-based image retrieval to demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. The code and pretrained models can be found at https://github.com/angelvillar96/STLPose .

‘Some Useful Hints for Improving the Elegance and Dignity of her Attire’: Thomas Hope and Henry Moses, Greek Vases and Neoclassical Fashion

Author, artist, designer and collector Thomas Hope (1769–1831) published his influential Costume of the Ancients in 1809 and in an enlarged version in 1812. This article identifies archaeological sources for figures in the plates of Costume of the Ancients and seeks to explain why Hope altered his sources by adding patterns from Greek vases. The process of adding Greek vase patterns is traced from preliminary drawings by Hope at the Gennadius Library in Athens, through a second album of final drawings at the Gennadius Library by Henry Moses, the principal engraver for Costume of the Ancients, and to Moses’s plates in Costume of the Ancients. The argument provides evidence that Hope’s choices of added patterns were made with an eye to how they could serve to improve contemporary Neoclassical dress. That this was Hope’s intention was stated in the 1809 edition of Costume of the Ancients, where he expressed the desire to ‘present to his fair model some useful hints for improving the elegance and dignity of her attire’. Signed etchings from Moses’s Sketches in Outline (1808), an untitled pamphlet of 1808–1809, and Designs of Modern Costume (1812) provided examples of ideal contemporary dress in the Greek style. Moses’s etchings accomplished this by incorporating Greek patterns from Costume of the Ancients, along with its Greek drapery types that were adapted to conform with contemporary dress forms. Unsigned fashion plates from Lady’s Magazine from 1807 to 1809 exhibit these same patterns and drapery types, and may have been designed by Moses.

Vase media/mass media : les fonctions communicationnelles des vases grecs hier et aujourd’hui

The Greek vase takes today the benefit of a renewed interest. How were the pictures on the Greek vases a communication medium yesterday and today? What was their function in the Antiquity? Are the pictures listed on the bulge of the vases identified (and even identifiable) by people of the XXIrstcentury? It is not forbidden to wonder about the motivations of these artless or experienced visitors. And more precisely, to question this surprising modernity with the instruments of analysis offered by the sciences of information and communication.

An Etruscan Black-Figure Hydria: The Judgment of Paris in Archaic Etruria

Abstract This paper assesses a rediscovered Etruscan black-figure hydria in the collection of the Higgins Museum, Bedford. It is immediately apparent that the hydria depicts the Judgment of Paris, common on contemporary Greek vases imported into Etruria. This discussion seeks to attribute the hydria to the Micali Painter. The discovery of this vase allows for a greater study of the attributes of figures present in already known Archaic Etruscan Judgment of Paris scenes. As certain consistent elements become recognizable on these examples, this analysis suggests that Etruscan artists were not simply copying the iconography of Greek imported vases; indeed, the attributes of the deities depicted on the vase indicate an engagement with, and deeper understanding of, the subject.

1 Measuring the Shapes of Ancient Greek Vases

1 Measuring the Shapes of Ancient Greek Vases

ФЕНОМЕНЫ ПОГРЕБЕНИЯ, ПОГРАНИЧЬЯ, ПЕРЕХОДА В КОНТЕКСТЕ ИЗОБРАЖЕНИЙ ДРУГИХ В ГРЕЧЕСКОЙ ВАЗОПИСИ

Greek perception of the Others was syncretic: real facts were mixed with fantastic ideas; in their view the Others lived on the outskirts of the oikumene, that is on the border with the other worlds – in the broad sense – real and fantastic, the world of alive and dead – this connected them with the phenomena of borders, transition, burial, etc. Due to this, the Others in Greek art were often represented in mythological subjects and as mythological characters. Also, some subjects where the Others were represented were connected with the phenomena of transition and burial – war, preparations for war, hunt, etc. Also, some details of such images were connected with these phenomena. The semantics of the Greek vase painting was controversial and multilayered therefore interpretation of many of such images is disputable. Besides, the phenomena studied might be examined in a more narrow or more broad sense. Moreover, the connection of many characters represented with the other world, other gods and myths is much more complicated and outgoes far beyond the borders of the thematic connected with the Otherness.

Winckelmann’s influence on the Neoclassical reception of Greek vases

Winckelmann’s influence on the Neoclassical reception of Greek vases

The Sarpedon Krater: The Life and Afterlife of a Greek Vase

The Sarpedon Krater: The Life and Afterlife of a Greek Vase

‘눈이 그려진 술잔’의 페르소나 : 고대 그리스 도기화에서 인격화로서의 눈의 도상

Scholars have come up with various interpretations of what eye motif means in so called ‘eye-cups’ over the past century. The oldest argument is viewed as an apotropaic purpose, and since the 1980s, it has been suggested that the eye motif acts as a mask in symposia in connection with the birth of the Greek tragedy. However, the eye motif highlighted in eye-cups may be interpreted to more fundamental perceptions related to vision. This study will consider the origin and development of eye-cups, and will examine various views presented in previous studies. Based on the visual design of the eye motif as personification, the reason may be inhered by how the eye motif in eye-cups could be adapted in various contexts according to the perspective of the ancient Greeks.<BR> From the 8th century B.C., Greek sculptors reproduced anthropomorphic figures, and in the 7th century B.C., Greek vase potters and painters also used head-shaped vases to represent human faces. At the same time, Greek artists personified their works with inscriptions. The eye-motif drawn on kylikes that appeared in the second half of the 6th century B.C., was a design that symbolically reproduces human faces in pottery, and can be seen as an extension of the method of personifying pottery. An artist would have expected that a kylix(personified) with the image of eyes would interact appropriately to the needs of various users, find a necessary role, and express a “persona” that fits it and be usefully consumed. Therefore, the iconography of the eyes in kylikes can be seen as a result of visual invention intended to realize its usefulness in various contexts.