Portland Vase Research Articles

Archaeology in the home: neoclassical ceramics for new audiences in mid-nineteenth-century Britain

Abstract For audiences not familiar with antiquity, the shattering of the Portland Vase at the British Museum in 1845 raised awareness of a classical past which was claimed by many European nations as their cultural heritage. This article explores how the British ceramics industry quickly exploited a ready market, prompted by such interest. A new genre of wares was produced industrially, mainly in Stoke-on-Trent until the 1870s, although manufacture continued sporadically until 1900. Modern techniques, including moulding and transfer-printing, allowed the creation of versions of black- and red-figure ancient Greek ceramics, sometimes in vivid polychrome. Hitherto largely overlooked by museums and standard histories of ceramics, the material evidence of this fashion endures. Although the resulting artefacts were often marketed without reference to their origins in antiquity, an argument is presented here for their having more than merely decorative significance.

The Duchess’s Shells. Natural History Collecting in the Age of Cook’s Voyages

The frontispiece to the 1786 posthumous sale of the Duchess of Portland’s collection – with its fabulous cornucopia of vases, cameos, engravings, books, plants, butterflies, corals and shells pouring from overflowing cabinets – is well known to historians of collecting. The words ‘Portland Museum’ drawing back the curtain hold the tantalizing promise of an enormous and exemplary collection – but it is a collection that has until now eluded detailed revelations and focused studies. The contents are known, as much as they can be, from auction descriptions, listed for the famous thirty-eight-day sale of 4,263 lots held in the Duchess’s London house in the Privy Garden in Whitehall; but what comes as a surprise, even to those who knew her collection was devoted not mainly to antiquities (the frontispiece image is dominated by, and her name attached to, the Portland Vase) but to natural history, is that thirty days of the auction, over half of the lots, were devoted to shells, each of those lots consisting of sometimes dozens in number. It is this aspect of the Duchess’s collection that Beth Tobin uses as a focus for an exemplary, wide ranging, in-depth account of natural history collecting in the second half of the eighteenth century.

Mystifying What Matters: Erotic Antiquarianism in Erasmus Darwin’s Portland Vase

Critics from the eighteenth century to the present have largely agreed in portraying Erasmus Darwin as an apostle of sexual liberation. One of Darwin’s career-long themes, that erotic love unifies the visible universe and the invisible, reaches its apotheosis in The Botanic Garden (1792) with his account of the famous Portland Vase as reproduced by Josiah Wedgwood. According to Darwin, the vase represents the Eleusinian Mysteries, an ancient fertility ritual where the god Eros presides. Darwin’s interest in this tradition parallels the contemporary antiquarian movement, represented particularly by the Society of Dilettanti, which researched the sacramental character of sexuality in the pagan world. I argue, however, that such work more often perpetuated an ideology of sexual restraint than of freedom. The antiquarians discerned two different myths of Eros: that of the divine progenitor from the esoteric rites, and that of the impish mischief-maker from popular tradition. By valorizing the former at the expense of the latter, they sublimated the socially and ontologically disruptive qualities of sexuality itself into decorous abstractions. Reading Darwin alongside these antiquarians helps bring into relief his own anxieties about the way that raw sexuality, and raw matter in general, challenges a unitary vision of the cosmos. For Darwin, the Portland Vase ultimately becomes a fetish—a mystification of the material realities not only of sexual desire but also of industries like Wedgwood’s.

Enchanted Objects: Visual Art in Contemporary Fiction by Allan Hepburn (review)

Reviewed by: Enchanted Objects: Visual Art in Contemporary Fiction by Allan Hepburn Lisa Mendelman Allan Hepburn. Enchanted Objects: Visual Art in Contemporary Fiction. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2010. x + 278 pp. Allan Hepburn’s Enchanted Objects contemplates the centrality of art objects—paintings, statues, books, porcelain, vases, excavated ruins—in contemporary fiction. Considering how these objects circulate in novels of the past forty years, Hepburn uses literature as a leaping-off point to theorize aesthetic value in culture writ-large. His description of his primary sources aptly summarizes his own monograph: like the novels Hepburn analyzes, Enchanted Objects “speculate[s] on what an artwork is and does,” as well as “historicize[s] value and critique[s] museum culture” (10–11). Organized by topic (details, ornamentation, fragility, ugliness), Hepburn’s meditation integrates discussions of museums and objects (The Museum of Jurassic Technology, The Portland Vase, Peter the Great’s collection of pulled teeth) into its expansive study of recent fiction and several centuries of theory. As such a capacious archive intimates, Enchanted Objects reflects Hepburn’s wide-ranging interest in contemporary visual art, museum culture, and determinations of aesthetic value. Hepburn’s study moves fluidly between the novels he analyzes and the questions of aesthetic and economic value dramatized by the narratives, and it is these questions of non-fictive cultural investment that are ultimately Hepburn’s major concern. In his second chapter, for example, Hepburn analyzes the function of detail in recent novels that feature the paintings of seventeenth-century Dutch master Johannes Vermeer, most notably Tracy Chevalier’s Girl With a Pearl Earring (1999). Developing a poetics of detail that focuses on literature but considers art objects more broadly, Hepburn suggests that detail’s role in the narrative and style of these specific works of fiction has its corollaries in painting and other aesthetic forms. In the particular case of these Vermeer novels, Hepburn contends, the details of paintings and other art objects reveal often hidden or obscured issues of gender, class, and labor. Thus, Hepburn concludes, “details are not [End Page 408] valuable in themselves, but function as the repository of value” in both narrative and visual art (86). In subsequent chapters, Hepburn relies on similar analogies to advance claims about the economic underpinnings of contemporary aesthetics in literary and nonliterary contexts. His third chapter, for example, focuses on ornamentation. Engaging theories of ornament by Kant, Blake, Ruskin, and Baudrillard as well as the case studies of Allen Kurzweil’s A Case of Curiosities (1992) and Thomas Wharton’s Salamander (2002), Hepburn argues that ornamentation functions in both an economic and extra-economic aesthetic of valuable excess. Kurweil’s and Wharton’s novels, Hepburn proposes, “recuperate ornamentalism as an aesthetic” through their narratives and literary style (112). Reinforcing the novels’ metafictional representation of books as objects of ornamental value, “Kurzweil and Wharton create an ornamental style characterized by exuberance, digression, narrators’ intrusions, and puzzles” (88). Hepburn concludes, “Although the narrative trajectory of Salamander, dedicated as it is to the making of an infinite book, purports to demystify cultural production, the generous detail and ornate structure of the novel maintain the mystery of language and its textual manifestation in books” (128). Thus, Hepburn argues, both novels affirm the potential of their own physical form—the book—as a valuable aesthetic object, regardless of its market worth. The second half of Enchanted Objects concentrates on museum culture and its literary dramatizations. In Hepburn’s discussion of Bruce Chatwin’s novels and nonfiction prose, the organizing concept of fragility takes on several meanings, connected by shared issues of collection, ownership, and possession. First, fragility exists as a physical property that increases an object’s aesthetic value, as in the case of the state-protected porcelain that the eponymous protagonist of Chatwin’s Utz (1988) collects, protects, and ultimately shatters. Second, fragility characterizes the cultural status of objects in the “long history of looting and breakage” involved in cultural acquisition (171). Third, fragility describes aesthetic reception and the viewing experience in light of “the devitalizing effect that museums have on objects” (159), as institutional practice “dehistoricizes and rehistoricizes artefacts” (160). Given their potential for damage in each of these contexts, fragile...

The Portland Vase and the Wedgwood copies: the story of a scientific and aesthetic challenge

Cet article se propose d’étudier le vase de Portland, abrité au British Museum depuis 1810, et la copie que le célèbre céramiste Josiah Wedgwood en a faite à la fin du XVIIIème siècle. Après avoir brièvement retracé l’histoire du vase original et évoqué quelques-unes des hypothèses tentant d’expliquer les bas-reliefs qui l’ornent, je souhaiterais montrer comment Josiah Wedgwood s’est saisi de cette œuvre à des fins scientifiques, commerciales et pédagogiques et comment sa copie, célébrée jusque dans un poème, a contribué à propager et entretenir la fascination qu’exerçait l’original.

Hiding in Plain Sight, Yet Again: An Unseen Attribute, An Unseen Plan, and A New Analysis of the Portland Vase Frieze

Hiding inPlain Sight,Yet Again: An Unseen Attribute,An Unseen Plan, and A New Analysis of thePortland Vase Frieze RANDALL SKALSKY JLhe Portland Vase has always drawn a crowd, and in the seventeen-plus years since my interpreta tion of itscelebrated frieze appeared here inArion,1 the bib liography has grown considerably. Offerings of differing readings have appeared; others have averred the primacy of older ones; none has gained any currency. Remarkably, though, all interpretations to date have failed to see, much less explain, a crucial figurai attribute in the frieze, one that proves to be both explicit and explicatory, and whose loca tion and appearance secures the identification of not one but, indeed, three figures. Furthermore, the attribute lies at the heart of a distinct schema of figurai grouping and arrangement that has also gone unheeded in previous treat ments of the Portland Vase frieze. Hiding inplain sight, this overlooked attribute can be seen almost dead center on the cover of the Winter 1992 Avion in which my interpretation was published.2 How is it that in the forty-six or so published interpretations spanning some four hundred years, an attribute thatwill soon seem imme diately apparent could be so consistently overlooked by so many for so long? Yet such was the case with the architec tural cryptograms revealed here almost two decades ago, and so it is again with these new findings. It is therefore a pleasure to amend the opening sentence of paragraph two inmy 1992 article: "The obstacle to inter preting the frieze is that all but one of the figures lack iden ARION I8.1 SPRING/SUMMER20IO 2 HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT, YET AGAIN tifyingattributes," a statement prefacing the notion that the frieze could not be interpreted via the standard method of attributes.3 That contention is somewhat off the mark. By dint of this previously unknown attribute, Iwill show that one can, in fact, straightforwardly read the opening scene of the frieze using the attributes therein provided, but the open ing scene only. To complete the task, a second methodol ogy?that which I laid out in 1992?is a categorical sine qua non. One can, as I have already shown, successfully navigate the entire frieze using that second methodology alone but, as so many others have shown, not contrariwise. These new findings?the attribute and figurai plan?convince me that the artistic vision of the Portland Vase was purposefully ex ecuted in a two-part program. In this two-part scheme, one of themost strategically chal lenging programs in art history, the Portland artist first draws the viewer into his unique visual narrative by starting out with the old and familiar method of attributes, but then quickly changes all the rules. The use of attributes to identify figures and thereby tell a tale is a passive exercise requiring little effort on the part of the viewer; it is a common, shop worn, unexceptional methodology in ancient art. But the Portland Vase?technically, artistically, and conceptually ex ceptional by any standard?demanded more. Thus, rather than simply laying down an entire narrative in a labeled, linear sequence as was the norm, the artist changed gears halfway through, shifting into a second strat agem whereby a complex narrative involving changes in time, space, and players could be delivered, a unique format compelling the viewer to not just observe, but to participate; to not just read a series of attributes, but to actualize a pro gram of multi-dimensional, abstract thought. These new findings validate and verify the salient points I made in 1992; they further demonstrate that it iswise to heed Aesop in treating with the Portland Vase, for appear ances are indeed very often deceiving on this unique art work?architecture is not architecture, limbs are not limbs, Randall Skalsky 3 serpents are not serpents, attributes are not attributes, and divisions do not divide. Coming to these new findings?(a) the figurai arrange ment and grouping; (b) the new attribute; and (c) the two part methodology of decoding the frieze?began, in part, when revisiting a 1995 essay by Denys Haynes wherein, among other issues, he definitively argues that the creature nuzzled up to...

The Portland Vase: Sir William Hamilton, Josiah Wedgwood and the Darwins

The Portland Vase in the British Museum is named after the Dukes of Portland who owned it from 1786 to 1945, and is the finest piece of Roman cameo–glass in existence. From a report of 1697 it is probable, but not certain, that it was discovered in 1582 near a marble sarcophagus found on excavation of a burial chamber in a mound, known as the Monte del Grano, beside the Via Tuscolana, three miles south–east of the Porta San Giovanni of ancient Rome.

The Portland vase: new clues towards old solutions

The number of interpretations of the scenes (or scene, if it is regarded as one continuous one) on the two sides of the Portland Vase had by the end of 1992 reached the impressive total of forty-six. All of these, while involving valuable observations about the figures, their poses and setting, fall a long way short of proof. Most are over-complicated, introducing implausible identifications of figures and scenes. This is true of the most recent attempts by Painter and Whitehouse in the Journal of Glass Studies, repeated in the volume on Roman glass jointly edited by one of the same writers, and of a note in JHS cxii (1992) by Harrison.

The Portland vase: a reply

In JGS xxxii (1990), a volume devoted to the Portland vase, the sections on the discovery of the vase (85-102) and on the interpretation of its frieze (130-6) are jointly contributed by Kenneth Painter and David Whitehouse (hereafter P. and W.), who refer at some length to my own published views on these problems, but only to dismiss them as untenable. The purpose of this note is to show why they have not persuaded me to change my mind on either.

The Portland vase revisited

D. E. L. Haynes' 1964 booklet The Portland Vase and Bernard Ashmole's article of 1967 ushered in a spate of renewed speculations concerning the scenes depicted on the Portland Vase (FIG 1). Despite the considerable literature since then, I venture to propose a new interpretation of part of the vase. First of all, it should be said that I accept the view of Ashmole (and others) against Haynes (and others) that the vase depicts two separate scenes and not one continuous one. I also accept (with many others) Ashmole's interpretation of the first scene as the love or marriage of Peleus and Thetis; the two lovers are figures A and C, Thetis being marked out as a sea-goddess by the sea snake in her lap, with Eros (B) and Zeus or Poseidon (D) looking on.

Sir William Hamilton as Collector, Exporter, and Dealer: The Acquisition and Dispersal of His Collections

Although it is well known that Sir William Hamilton, British ambassador to the Court of Naples, was a prominent collector of Greek vases, no previous study has concentrated on his methods of acquiring and disposing of antiquities. He dealt not only as an agent for his own interests, but also for those of his family, friends, and acquaintances. He bought and sold antiquities, accepted gifts, and in turn gave presents both to individuals and to the British Museum. He even exported antiquities despite the fact that it was illegal, and against the explicit instructions of the King of Naples.Hamilton's views on the restoration of vases and sculpture, and those of contemporary dealers and artists, shed light on the 18th-century attitude toward the conservation and repair of antiquities. We read of debates regarding the restoration of the stone Warwick Vase, which, together with the Portland Vase, was the most famous of Hamilton's imports to Britain. A drawing that belonged to Hamilton, of an altar that he gave to the British Museum, shows the propensity of artists to restore whatever might be broken on ancient pieces. Yet, Hamilton's own views on the advantages of leaving vases and sculpture unrestored were remarkably progressive.By looking at Hamilton's correspondence, some previously unpublished, we find out much about the way he conducted business. We learn, too, how he felt about his customers and competitors, and how they in turn regarded him. His clients included other dealers of antiquity, writers and travelers, the trustees of the British Museum, and the kings and countesses of Europe.

The Breaking and Remaking of the Portland Vase

The Breaking and Remaking of the Portland Vase

The Portland Vase again

In Euripides' Iphigeneia in Aulis the chorus at lines 1036–97 compares the wedding of Peleus and Thetis (1036–79) with the fate of Iphigeneia, brought to Aulis by the deceitful promise of marriage to Achilles in order to be sacrificed to Artemis (1080–97). Of the two scenes on the Portland vase (fig. 1), one has been persuasively identified as the wedding of Peleus and Thetis, with figures A, B, C and D representing respectively Peleus, Eros, Thetis and Poseidon or Zeus. The interpretation of the second scene, however, has proved more difficult. Here J. G. F. Hind has recently stressed the importance of the lowered wedding torch held by the central reclining female figure F. He suggests Dido for this figure with Aeneas as figure E and Venus or Juno as figure G, so that the whole vase becomes ‘an early imperial essay in adapting Hellenic legend to relate to Rome's past, and specially to Rome's Augustan present’. An alternative identification of figures E, F and G with Achilles, Iphigeneia and Artemis would give a simpler thematic unity to the vase's decoration and restore its character as a private object.

Greek and Roman epic scenes on the Portland vase

The subject, or subects, of the scenes on the Portland Vase is an old problem which has teased art historians for long enough. There have been fairly long periods when the interpretation seemed to be generally agreed, or when scholars' ingenuity waned, and the last suggestion reigned unchallenged for some time. There have also been short periods when the vase evoked avid scholarly activity, as for instance 1957–68.For a recent debate one should consult the article by B. Ashmole, and the reply to it made by D. Haynes (JHS1967 and 1968). In both editions of his British Museum booklet,The Portland Vase(1964 and 1975) Haynes gives an amusing appendix, listing ‘other interpretations’, which from 1642 to 1967 amounted to twenty-three more or less different theories. If one adds to these the articles by Brown and Clairmont published subsequently inAJA(1968, 1970, 1972) and a recent paper by Evelyn Harrison in a GermanFestschrift(1976), then the vase has knocked up more than its quarter century of rival interpretations. It is no wonder that many modern general works state simply that the scenes have not been satisfactorily interpreted, but that one of the sides may represent a sea goddess.In summary it may be said that previous theories have taken one of two main paths. They haveeitherlinked the scene with a Greek legend,orhave sought in the vase a reference to contemporary Roman history, albeit a history dressed up in a Hellenic and classicising style.

D. E. L. Haynes: The Portland vase. London: British Museum Publications, second edition, 1975. 48 pp., colour frontispiece, 16 pls., 1 fig. (pull-out). £1.30 (paper), £2.25 (cloth).

D. E. L. Haynes: The Portland vase. London: British Museum Publications, second edition, 1975. 48 pp., colour frontispiece, 16 pls., 1 fig. (pull-out). £1.30 (paper), £2.25 (cloth).

D. E. L. Haynes: The Portland vase. London: British Museum Publications, second edition, 1975. 48 pp., colour frontispiece, 16 pls., 1 fig. (pull-out). £1.30 (paper), £2.25 (cloth).

D. E. L. Haynes: The Portland vase. London: British Museum Publications, second edition, 1975. 48 pp., colour frontispiece, 16 pls., 1 fig. (pull-out). £1.30 (paper), £2.25 (cloth).

Achilles and Deidamia on the Portland Vase

Previous articleNext article No AccessAchilles and Deidamia on the Portland VaseEdwin L. BrownEdwin L. Brown Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by American Journal of Archaeology Volume 76, Number 4October 1972 The journal of the Archaeological Institute of America Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.2307/502872 Copyright © 1972 by the Archaeological Institute of America. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

The Portland Vase Again

The editor having invited me to reply to Professor Bernard Ashmole's ‘New Interpretation of the Portland Vase’, the reader will, I hope, forgive me for returning to a topic which he may think in danger of being worn threadbare. Although my own interpretation has been generously characterised by Professor Ashmole as ‘persuasively argued’, its failure to convince not only him but Professor Hans Möbius and Professor F. L. Bastet shows that it was not persuasive enough; and the aim of the following pages is to re-state the case for it and to fortify it, as I hope, with additional arguments which would have overloaded the popular publication in which it first appeared.I begin, as before, with the young man who advances to the right in front of a small structure consisting of two square pillars raised on a continuous base and supporting a Doricising entablature (Plate IV). According to Möbius and Ashmole this structure is a gateway and the young man has just passed through it. ‘Ask yourself’, Ashmole bids the reader, ‘where he can have come from if not through the gateway, and you will see that this must be the correct solution.’ But must it? If the young man had come through the supposed gateway, surely the foot he first set to the ground—his left—would be more or less on the axis of the opening and not, as it actually is, with the heel almost touching the corner of the base nearest the spectator: an artist in whose work ‘no detail is negligible’ would hardly have put a foot as wrong as that.

A New Interpretation of the Portland Vase

For three hundred years and more the meaning of the figures on the Portland Vase has been a matter for speculation of the most strange and varied character.During the first half of this century there was something of a lull, but ten years ago Professor Erika Simon, after a wide-ranging and sensitive study of all the evidence, put forward a highly ingenious theory connecting the scenes with the ancestry of Augustus and, shortly after, Professor L. Polacco embroidered it further. In 1964 Mr Denys Haynes produced the excellent little book which is on sale at the British Museum: this was reviewed by Professor H. Möbius, who had his own theory, elaborated since in a longer article; and Professor H. Biesantz has exposed the weaknesses of all the solutions, without however propounding one of his own.The wide differences of opinion among these scholars have prompted me to place on record some observations I made twenty years ago, when we first acquired the vase at the British Museum; and I shall take Mr Haynes' book as a starting-point, because it is the latest comprehensive account, and, being persuasively argued, bids fair to hold the field.However, before we begin to examine the vase in detail, a few words must be said on its technique, its date, and the circumstances in which it was made (plates I–IV, VI–VII). The technique was to make a bubble of very dark blue glass, clear but so thick that it cannot be seen through, and over it a skin of white translucent glass reaching as far upwards as the base of the neck: then to join two deep-blue glass handles from the middle of the neck to the shoulder of the vase; and, finally, using the technique of the cameo-carver, to carve, and carve away, the white glass layer in order to produce figures and landscape. The blue glass becomes the background of the scene where the white has been completely removed: where the white has been thinned but not completely removed, the blue provides suggestions of shadow and distance.

The portland vase

Journal Article The portland vase Get access Thomas J. Jeakes Thomas J. Jeakes Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Notes and Queries, Volume s9-VIII, Issue 199, October 1901, Page 330, https://doi.org/10.1093/nq/s9-VIII.199.330a Published: 19 October 1901