Image and myth : a history of pictorial narration in Greek art

379 Pages·2013·13.66 MB·English

by  O'Donnell

Image and Myth
A History of Pictorial Narration in Greek Art
LUCA GIULIANI
Translated by Joseph O’Donnell
University of Chicago Press
Chicago and London
Luca Giuliani is the Rector of the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin and professor of classical
archaeology at the Humboldt University of Berlin. Joseph O’Donnell is a professional translator based in
Berlin.
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London English translation © 2013 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. Published 2013.
Printed in the United States of America The translation of this work was funded by Geisteswissenschaften
International—Translation Funding for the Humanities and Social Sciences from Germany, a joint initiative
of the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, The German Federal Foreign Office, the collecting society VG WORT and
the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels (German Publishers & Booksellers Association).
22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 1 2 3 4 5
ISBN-13: 978-0-226-29765-1 (cloth) ISBN-13: 978-0-226-02590-2 (e-book) Originally published in
German as Bild und Mythos: Geschichte der Bilderzählung in der griechischen kunst. © Verlag C.H. Beck
oHG, München 2003.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Giuliani, Luca.
[Bild und Mythos. English]
Image and myth : a history of pictorial narration in Greek art / Luca Giuliani ; translated by Joseph
O’Donnell.
pages ; cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-226-29765-1 (cloth : alkaline paper) 1. Art, Greek—Themes, motives. 2. Narrative art—
Greece. 3. Mythology, Greek, in art. 4. Vase-painting, Greek. I. O’Donnell, Joseph, 1960 September
4–, translator. II. Title.
N5633.G48613 2013
709.38—dc23
2012038002
This is paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).
Contents
Preface: The Pictorial Deluge and the Study of Visual Culture
1. Images and Texts Compared: A Diagnosis of Contrasts
Revisiting Lessing’s Laocoon
Taking Lessing beyond Lessing
2. Images of the World: The Eighth Century
The Shield of Achilles: Description and Narration
Fighting Lions
Seafarer’s Farewell
Siamese Twins
Aristocratic Life and Aristocratic Death
Warriors to Sea
3. The Advent of Pictorial Narratives in the Seventh Century
The Horse on Wheels
Polyphemos, the Defenseless Giant
Epic or Folktale?
4. Playing with Writing in the Eighth, Seventh, and Sixth Centuries
Painters Learn to Write
Name Inscriptions Confirming Narrative Content
Name Inscriptions Generating Narrative Content
Everyman’s Armor: Achilles’ Armor
Kleitias and the Muses
5. Directing the Gaze in the Sixth and Fifth Centuries
Polyphemos Again: The Synchronization of Narrative Images
Hektor’s Corpse: The Surprise at Dinner
The Hero and the Sorceress: Moments of Suspense
The Murder of Priam: Unparalleled Barbarity
The Fall of Troy: Combining Multiple Scenes
Victor and Vanquished: The Limits of Narration and the Possibilities of
Description
6. Images in the Pull of Text: From the Fifth to the Fourth Century
Achilles’ Wrath and Achilles’ Lyre
From Oraliture to Literature: The Emergence of a Culture of Reading
Hastening Furies: Sleeping Furies
7. Pictures for Readers: The Birth of the Illustration in the Second Century
Splendor and Misery of an Odyssey Picture Cycle
The Triumph of Texts and the Fidelity of Images
8. Looking Back: Pitfalls and Nodes
Appendix
Excursus 1: On the Interpretation of the Theseus and Ariadne Scene on the
Kleitias Krater
Excursus 2: On the Reconstruction of the Brygos Painter’s Kirke Cup (Athens,
Acr. 293)
Notes
Bibliography
Name and Subject Index
Index of Ancient Greek Artworks
De toute image, on peut et on doit parler; mais l’image elle-même ne le peut.
—R. Debray 1992, 58
We can never understand a picture unless we grasp the ways in which it shows
what cannot be seen. One thing that cannot be seen in an illusionistic picture
[. . .] is precisely its own artificiality.
—W. Mitchell 1986, 39
PREFACE
The Pictorial Deluge and the Study of Visual
Culture
For some time now, critics of contemporary culture have been warning us of an
inexorably rising tide of imagery and its pernicious consequences. In their view,
the spoken and written word is about to relinquish its traditional preeminence to
the image: homo loquens et audiens is on the verge of becoming homo videns.
Moreover, they argue, this shift is threatening to extinguish an essential—
perhaps the decisive—foundation of human rationality. The higher cortical
centers responsible for the conscious processing of information are for the most
part not involved in visual perception. And the fact that images are not subject to
control by our consciousness makes it all the easier for them to infiltrate and
undermine our capacity for reason. Without our being aware of it, they become
fixed in our minds and exercise a suggestiveness that shapes the way we think
and feel.1
It is difficult to argue with the claim that in our media-pervaded environment
pictures are playing an increasingly dominant role. But can we conclude from
this that we are witnessing a hegemonic transition from the word to the image
and that the power of images is threatening to erode the very foundations of our
capacity for reason?
The debate about the role of images in the media is certainly not a new one
and can be traced back to the advent of press photography more than one
hundred years ago.2 Photographs first began appearing in illustrated journals
around the middle of the nineteenth century. However, it was only in 1880 that
the new technique of halftone printing made it possible to reproduce
photographic images in daily newspapers. Photo reportage altered the visual
habits of the public abruptly and fundamentally by according readers the status
of eyewitnesses. This radical shift was interpreted in different ways. Some saw
these images as a technologically backed guarantee of pure objectivity and
credibility and hailed the photographs as a significant step toward authenticity
and genuineness. Others criticized this belief as a seductive illusion, claiming
that observers were merely borrowing the gaze of the photo reporter. This was a
gaze that viewers had no capacity to shape, and they were thus consuming
images that were fundamentally outside their control. As a result, the appearance
of immediacy was founded on a deception and promoted comfortable acceptance
devoid of any critical attitude.
The dichotomy represented by these two positions is still making itself felt
today, even if there has been a significant shift in the focus of discussion. After
the Second World War, television rapidly established itself as the dominant mass
medium3 and, at least since the 1970s, has become the preferred target of attacks
that have tended to be articulated as a critique of the image. One of the most
influential critics of television as a visual medium has been Neil Postman who,
in the 1980s, vigorously lamented “the decline of the Age of Typography and the
ascendancy of the Age of Television.”4 “On television, discourse is conducted
largely through visual imagery, which is to say that television gives us a
conversation in images, not words.”5 Postman claims this change to be crucial,
for an image “cannot deal with the unseen, the remote, the internal, the abstract.
It cannot speak [sic] of man, but only of a man, not of tree, only of a tree.”6
Worse still, in the realm of images there is no distinction between true and false:
“The words true and false come from the universe of language, and of no other”;
the image “offers no assertion to refute, so it is not refutable.”7 The transmission
of images is seen here as relying on a passive consumer attitude on the part of
the viewer, one that does not involve any sophisticated cognitive processing. By
substituting the discourse politics typified by the print media with image politics,
television has brought about nothing less than “a cultural revolution”; what
transmitted images convey to the public is “ideology, pure if not serene:
ideology without words, and all the more powerful for their absence.”8 While
exhibiting an engaging simplicity, this critique is itself not exactly a product of
sophisticated cognitive processing. It reduces television to its pictorial
components in order to contrast it with radio and print media. This in turn gives
rise to a polar opposition between (bad) visually and (good) linguistically based
media, with critical information being located in the realm of the word and
manipulative disinformation in that of the image. Although such a restriction of
television to the visual dimension is convenient, it is hardly plausible. In the
normal case, television broadcasts are dominated by the spoken word. They
continually show people talking, and the image often serves as no more than a
backdrop that is either irrelevant or redundant. Hardly anyone watching the daily
news would turn down the sound (whereas, by contrast, in many cases switching
off the picture would not mean missing much in terms of information at all).
Communicating information through the mass media faces a specific problem,
one which in the first instance has little to do with the opposition between word
and image. All media—whether television, radio or print—aspire to a form of
reportage that is extensive, rapid, and generally understandable. This is asking a
great deal. In order to realize this goal, the complexity of reality must first be
reduced to a level where it is intellectually (but also aesthetically and morally)
manageable. Coverage that includes news from all over the world and aims to
reach a wide audience has no choice but to divide the multiplicity of reality into
comprehensible portions and reduce it as far as possible to familiar paradigms.
The more quickly news flows, the less time is available for its production and
reception, and these conditions do not readily lend themselves to a differentiated
analysis or meticulous description of the individual case. Thus, if indeed the
mass media do exhibit a certain tendency to present information superficially,
then this is already conditioned by the disproportionate relationship between the
sheer quantity of information and the time available for its presentation.
Walter Lippmann’s 1922 classic, Public Opinion, offers an early and
insightful analysis of the mass media and their efficacy. Lippmann’s thesis is as
simple as it is striking. In every more or less democratically structured mass
society, the broad public—and, outside our specific areas of competence, each of
us is a member of this public—no longer forms its opinions on the basis of
firsthand knowledge and independent reflection. In the modern world individual
experience is framed by predefined mental templates and conceptions, which
Lippmann defines as stereotypes. Stereotypes condition our perception of reality
in the sense that “[for] the most part we do not first see, and then define, we
define first and then see. In the great blooming, buzzing confusion of the outer
world we pick out what our culture has already defined for us, and we tend to
perceive that which we have picked out in the form stereotyped for us by our
culture.”9 Today, Lippmann’s analysis is more current than ever. It addresses the
fundamental structure of our media-based information society and can certainly
not be reduced to a (for its part, stereotypical) critique of the image. In fact, not
all images can be defined a priori as stereotypes. Nor is it the case that
stereotypes are necessarily or even predominantly communicated in terms of
images.
In its tendency to polarize the picture and the word, the present-day critique of
the image takes up (in most cases unknowingly) a topos with a long and
illustrious tradition. Arguments currently used to decry the danger of images can
already be found in the sixteenth-century writings of reformatory theologians
who proclaimed the primacy of the spiritual word of God and sought to have all