Image and Myth

Image and Myth A History of Pictorial Narration in Greek Art

by Luca Giuliani, translated by Joseph O'Donnell

University of Chicago Press, 2013
Cloth: 978-0-226-29765-1 | Paper: 978-0-226-29766-8 | Electronic: 978-0-226-02590-2
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226025902.001.0001

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ABOUT THIS BOOKAUTHOR BIOGRAPHYREVIEWSTABLE OF CONTENTS

ABOUT THIS BOOK

On museum visits, we pass by beautiful, well-preserved vases from ancient Greece—but how often do we understand what the images on them depict? In Image and Myth, Luca Giuliani tells the stories behind the pictures, exploring how artists of antiquity had to determine which motifs or historical and mythic events to use to tell an underlying story while also keeping in mind the tastes and expectations of paying clients.

Covering the range of Greek style and its growth between the early Archaic and Hellenistic periods, Giuliani describes the intellectual, social, and artistic contexts in which the images were created. He reveals that developments in Greek vase painting were driven as much by the times as they were by tradition—the better-known the story, the less leeway the artists had in interpreting it. As literary culture transformed from an oral tradition, in which stories were always in flux, to the stability of written texts, the images produced by artists eventually became nothing more than illustrations of canonical works. At once a work of cultural and art history, Image and Myth builds a new way of understanding the visual culture of ancient Greece.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

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.

REVIEWS

“Three clear virtues set Luca Giuliani’s book apart. First, it sets the discussion of scenes related to myth in Greek art into the wider context of discussion of the relationship between art and text. Second, it has both important methodological and important substantive theses to argue—that pictures may relate to stories as a whole rather than only illustrating the words of a particular text, and that a marked change from relating to stories to relating to texts occurred at the end of the fifth century. Third, Giuliani takes seriously the importance of other images in shaping an artist’s choice of presentation and reads images in series. Image and Myth, now sensitively translated, puts German scholarship back at the center of the argument about art and text. All future study of the subject will have to begin from the pleasures of Giuliani’s text.”

— Robin Osborne, University of Cambridge

Preface: The Pictorial Deluge and the Study of Visual Culture

Images and Texts Compared - Luca Giuliani, Joseph O’Donnell
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226025902.003.0001
[mythological images, narrative images, nonnarrative antithesis, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, narration, description, representation]
This chapter discusses the narrative nature and content of mythological images and aims to show how to distinguish narrative images from nonnarrative ones. It argues that, without a clear idea of this nonnarrative antithesis, the distinctiveness of the narrative mode of representation itself remains unclear. This issue was already addressed in the mid-eighteenth century by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing in his treatise Laocoon: An Essay upon the Limits of Painting and Poetry. Lessing systematically compared narration and description as two fundamental possibilities of representation that are both antithetical and complementary. Laocoon provided both a significant impulse and a conceptual framework for this book. Since this framework will not be explicitly addressed in the following chapters, it is important to recall here the major features of Lessing's argument, not least to emphasize those points that are in need of revision and reformulation. (pages 1 - 18)
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Revisiting Lessing’s Laocoon

Taking Lessing beyond Lessing

Images of the World - Luca Giuliani, Joseph O’Donnell
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226025902.003.0002
[description, narration, shield of Achilles, Iliad, Hephaistos, epic narration, aorist]
This chapter uses the shield of Achilles, a quintessential example of a picture that aspires to depict the whole world, as a backdrop in defining description and narration. This shield is described in the eighteenth book of the Iliad, when the divine craftsman Hephaistos forges new weapons for Achilles. It is described as such; “The shield consisted of five layers, and he made all sorts of decorations for it, executed with consummate skill.” The arrangement of the individual images on the shield is left open to interpretation, but the poet implicitly seeks to represent nothing less than the entire world with these “decorations.” The descriptive character of this text is associated with an idiosyncratic grammatical form that clearly deviates from the characteristic form of epic narration. The dominant tense is the aorist; however, there are hardly any aorist forms to be found in the shield's description. (pages 19 - 52)
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The Shield of Achilles

Fighting Lions

Seafarer’s Farewell

Aristocratic Life and Aristocratic Death

Warriors to Sea

The Advent of Pictorial Narratives in the Seventh Century - Luca Giuliani, Joseph O’Donnell
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226025902.003.0003
[descriptions, formulaic elements, diversity, cliche, chaos]
This chapter presents a perspective on descriptions positing that they are never passive reflections of how the world works but a cognitive outline of what we think we know of the world. For the purposes of comprehension, descriptions translate the diversity of the world into an intelligible form. They move between two polar extremes that can be termed cliche and chaos. A description degenerates into cliche when it involves excessive reduction of what is real and relies too much on formulaic elements, resulting in the portrayal of a world with which recipients are already well acquainted. On the other hand, a description that encompasses an unexpected degree of diversity and eliminates familiar systemic categories can overburden its recipients and result in their perceiving only chaos. The fundamental problem of descriptive representations thus consists in maintaining a balance between these two extremes. (pages 53 - 88)
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The Horse on Wheels

Polyphemos, the Defenseless Giant

Epic or Folktale?

Playing with Writing in the Eighth, Seventh, and Sixth Centuries - Luca Giuliani, Joseph O’Donnell
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226025902.003.0004
[writing, written characters, Greeks, modified alphabet, Greek ceramics]
This chapter discusses the shift from representation using images to the use of writing. By adding a few supplementary characters to Semitic written characters, the Greeks produced a modified alphabet that was able to represent not only consonants but also vowels and could thus, more or less, mirror the sound shape of oral expressions. From the second half of the eighth century onward, written characters have been found on Greek ceramics. These writings were used for three different functions that appear in chronological stages. The first stage comprises vessels with an inscription carved into them after, as opposed to during, production. The second stage comprises inscriptions that are not engraved after the completion of the vessel but painted on prior to firing. Finally, the third stage comprises written text that is related to the images themselves. (pages 89 - 130)
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Painters Learn to Write

Name Inscriptions Confirming Narrative Content

Name Inscriptions Generating Narrative Content

Everyman’s Armor—Achilles’ Armor

Kleitias and the Muses

Directing the Gaze in the Sixth and Fifth Centuries - Luca Giuliani, Joseph O’Donnell
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226025902.003.0005
[narrative images, temporal sequence, storytelling, suspense, vase painters, dramatic quality]
This chapter discusses a handicap possessed by narrative images—that of being incapable of structuring the process of their reception as a temporal sequence. As opposed to storytelling by means of words, where the listener has no option but to allow the narrator to lead him or her through the plot and place them in a state of suspense, it is very difficult for an image to evoke such suspense in its beholders. In the late sixth century , however, Attic vase painters began developing strategies to compensate for this handicap. The problem that presents itself here concerns the relationship of images to time—although, as will be shown later in this chapter, the focus of the artists themselves was on the dramatic quality of the scene rather than the temporal aspect. (pages 131 - 193)
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Polyphemos Again

Hektor’s Corpse

The Hero and the Sorceress

The Murder of Priam

The Fall of Troy

Victor and Vanquished

Images in the Pull of Text - Luca Giuliani, Joseph O’Donnell
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226025902.003.0006
[Greek vase, vase painters, narrative scenes, iconography, Attic ceramics, Gulf of Taranto, red-figure vases]
This chapter explores the extensive changes undergone by Greek vase production. In the fifth century, the number of workshops declined and there was a change in the chosen themes of vase painters. The most significant change was the apparent shift away from narrative scenes that began in the second half of the fifth century and culminated with their virtual disappearance in the fourth century. The reason for this shift in the iconography is unclear. What is clear is that the decline of Attic ceramics is directly linked with the emergence of new production centers, particularly in southern Italy. In the second half of the fifth century, workshops on the Gulf of Taranto began to produce red-figure vases. The production of red-figure vases in Apulia led to a rapid decline in Attic imports, which had completely disappeared by 400. (pages 194 - 224)
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Achilles’ Wrath and Achilles’ Lyre

From Oraliture to Literature

Hastening Furies—Sleeping Furies

Pictures for Readers - Luca Giuliani, Joseph O’Donnell
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226025902.003.0007
[red-figure vases, black-glazed ceramics, metal vessels, figured ornamentation, Hellenistic Greece, Macedonia, Thessaly]
This chapter describes the decline in the production of red-figure vases and the shift to the manufacture and successful export of a type of black-glazed ceramics closely resembling metal vessels. Prosperous clients now increasingly came to prefer vessels made of bronze or silver, while less prosperous clients had to make do with ceramic copies. As a rule, these copies feature a monochromatic slip without figured decoration; embellishments are limited to plant motifs, wreaths, and tendrils, which hardly require interpretation. Even those who used the vessels would have had no reason to regard this ornamentation as a basis for telling stories. Ceramics featuring figured ornamentation were extremely rare in Hellenistic Greece. The majority of finds come from Macedonia and Thessaly, and Macedonia, where casting molds for the production of such vessels have also been found, was probably home to the most important production centers. (pages 225 - 242)
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Splendor and Misery of an Odyssey Picture Cycle

The Triumph of Texts and the Fidelity of Images

Looking Back - Luca Giuliani, Joseph O’Donnell
DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226025902.003.0008
[paintings, subject matter, peinture d'histore, peinture de genre, genre painting, historical painting]
This chapter discusses the systematical categorization of paintings on the basis of their subject matter. The more highly valued category addressed themes such as biblical stories, classical mythology, the lives of the saints, and secular history, while all other subject matter was consigned to a second and clearly subordinate category. In eighteenth-century France these two types became known as peinture d'histore and peinture de genre, respectively. The concept of “genre,” which initially referred to still life, landscapes, and portraits, subsequently became more narrowly specified. “Genre painting is devoted to the depiction of normal life as opposed to the depiction of religious, heroic, and other elevated moments, which constitute the subject of historical painting,” as an early definition puts it. This distinction thus draws a clear boundary between normal, everyday life and the elevated sphere of history. (pages 243 - 254)
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Appendix - Excursus 1

Appendix - Excursus 2

Notes

Bibliography

Name & Subject Index

Index of Ancient Greek Artworks