“Beardless, Armed, and Barefoot: Ephebes, Warriors, and Ritual on Athenian Vases,” in D. Yatromanolakis, ed., An Archaeology of Representations: Ancient Greek Vase-Painting and Contemporary Methodology (Athens 2009) 373-413 (original) (raw)
Related papers
Aryballos and Hanger: An Iconography of a Unified Entity in Athenian Vase Painting
Hyperboreus 26.1, 2020
This work examines visual representations of aryballoi and their hangers. Both items are always depicted together, thus creating a unified entity, that is, separate objects that operate as a unit. Although the aryballos – a small vase primarily employed in a masculine context – is quite conveniently designed for carrying directly in the hand, it is nevertheless always depicted attached to its hanger, and this affects its handling. A comparative case is brought: the alabastron, a vase primarily employed in feminine contexts. Though bearing formal features similar to the aryballos, in visual representations we see the alabastron being handled very differently, mostly through direct contact and not with a hanger. This leads to the conclusion that vase painters actively gendered vases not only according to type, but even by handling. The combination of aryballos and hanger enables more freedom of movement than the alabastron alone, symbolizing the greater freedom enjoyed by men of the time; while the association of alabastron with women perhaps points to their corresponding lack of freedom. These paintings thus encapsulate and symbolize the differences between the sexes.
Multi-layered Time and Place: Temples and Statues in Vase-Painting in later 5th Century Athens
J. Neils and O. Palagia (eds.), From Kallias to Kritias: Art in Athens in the Second Half of the Fifth Century B.C, 2022
Athenian vase-painters of the 5 th century have left a wealth of images that invite us to enter their world and see it as they did. It is strange, therefore, that they are so rarely enlisted when we seek to know about the constructed environment of the city. Through their eyes, their "gaze", we can in fact tour the Acropolis, encounter the important sculptures set in the Agora, and even view cult buildings in the outer city. 1 Their images may be careful depictions or looser reflections, but they are all valuable as they offer the dimension of the "eye witness" to enhance both archaeological results and later literary sources. Most of these images on vases are embedded in scenes of the regular life of the city and show contemporary structures, buildings and sculptures, but a few appear in imaginary myth-historical scenes and events. The aim of this paper is to explore the manner in which Athenian vase-painters approached the physical environments of their imagined narratives and how they became entangled with those that they actually knew, leading them to create simultaneously multiple identities and multiple moments in time, evoking complex ideas and emotions in the minds of their eventual users. 2 This exploration will also require simultaneous consideration of the connections between vase-painters and their fellow painters of larger, flat surfaces, whether wall, panel or stage-set, for we may be able to observe the former reflecting the works of the latter at several moments in the 5 th century. Note: I should like to thank Polly Lohmann and Ann Grosch (Heidelberg), Dennis Graen (Jena), Anne Coulié, Martine Denoyelle and Christine Merlin (Paris) and Jochen Griesbach (Würzburg) for so very kindly supplying or helping to supply images of the objects illustrated here. Several friends have helped in various other ways: Norbert Eschbach, Jasper Gaunt, Natacha Massar, Rainer Vollkommer and Susan Woodford. I should also like to thank Maria Tourna and Susanna Ipiroti (American School of Classical Studies at Athens) for kindly scanning various articles for me during the confinement. Finally, I am very grateful to the editors for their immense patience during all the difficult months of 2020.
Athenian vases, functions and contexts
Freshly fired crockery was a commodity rarely in short supply in ancient Greece. 249 Except during the impoverished generations that followed the collapse of the Late Bronze Age, the rich clay beds dotted throughout Greece were consistently exploited on a major scale by potters, often of exceptional talent. The vast distribution of Greek pottery, from the Achaemenid palace at Susa to the graves at Alcácer do Sal in Portugal, from Pyramid XXIV in Meroe to the Vix burial near Châtillon sur Seine, is well known. 250 The mechanics of this trade, and the graffiti and dipinti it left on the vases have been studied in depth by Alan Johnston and others. 251 This essay considers instead the shapes and forms into which these vases were fashioned and the uses to which they were put, in the context of the production of the very same shapes in other media: in order to determine what characteristics, if any, made pottery distinctive. The circulation of these vases in diverse media throughout the Greek world, beyond the commercial infrastructure, makes an important contribution to the understanding of these issues. As with other parts of Greece, Athenian potters were to produce three categories of pottery: unglazed coarse ware; and two types of fine-ware, those entirely or mostly glazed, and the most luxurious which were decorated with figures. To these figurally decorated wares should be added plastic vases: small perfume vessels modelled in various forms, and the larger drinking vessels, often oinochoai and rhyta, that were intended for the symposium. Coarse-ware provided solutions for storage (pithoi), shipping (transport amphorae), and kitchenware. 252 It was also fashioned into necessities as diverse as water pipes, beehives, roof tiles and architectural adornment. 253 Some of the large pithoi, although made of gritty clay, are remarkable technical and architectural achievements in their own right. It was inside one of them that hope was trapped when the curious Pandora lifted off the lid. 254 With the exception of roof tiles and architectural adornment which could on occasion be upgraded to marble, the coarse wares would seem not to have had much external competition. The fine wares offered a range of shapes that were designed with some care to perform specific functions. 255 Broadly speaking, they served either as containers for perfume and unguents and small containers for jewellery; or as table-ware for the symposium. The former were made primarily with a female clientele in mind, the latter with a male. But there were many degrees of overlap. Perfume vessels have been found in many male graves, just as sympotic vessels have been recovered from female burials. Most pieces of the pottery recovered from the Marathon tumulus were lekythoi attributed to the eponymous 249 I am grateful to Rui Morais for his invitation to contribute to this volume. For a survey of Greek pottery, see Cook 1997; for the earlier fabrics,
"On the threshold of old age: perceptions of the elderly in Athenian red-figure vase-painting"
R. M. Gondek and C. L. Sulosky Weaver (eds), The Ancient Art of Transformation Case studies from Mediterranean contexts, Oxford, 2019
The aim of this essay is to present an iconographic overview of the elderly in “daily-life,” or “genre,” scenes on late Archaic to Classical (c. 520–400 BC) Athenian red-figure vases through the examination of the various traits of their age-related “transformation.”In order to understand how the elderly were viewed in a contemporary context, the essay begins with a survey of perceptions of old age garnered from ancient literary sources. It is followed by a presentation of the iconographical evidence, which is separated into three parts. The first part will examine symposion (drinking party) and komos (revelry) scenes, which constitute a significant portion of the late Archaic red-figure production (c. 520–480 BC) and often include aged partygoers and, in some cases, aged hetairai (courtesans). The focus of the second part will shift to depictions of departing warriors, since old men are a basic element of the scenes of this extensive iconographic corpus. Finally, the third section will look at some idiosyncratic depictions of aged artisans and craftsmen and their possible connotations.
Spectators at the sides of narrative vase paintings have long been at the mar- gins of scholarship, but a study of their appearance shows that they provide a model for the ancient viewing experience. They also reflect social and gender roles in archaic Athens. This study explores the phenomenon of spectators through a database built from a census of the Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum, which reveals that the figures flourished in Athenian vase paint- ing during the last two-thirds of the sixth century b.c.e. Using models devel- oped from psychoanalysis and the theory of the gaze, ritual studies, and gender studies, Stansbury-O’Donnell shows how these “spectators” emerge as models for social and gender identification in the archaic city, encoding in their gestures and behavior archaic attitudes about gender and status.