Verity Platt

This chapter investigates the relationship between materiality and textuality in the Hellenistic period, by focusing on real and imagined tombs of poets. At a time not only of feverish activity when literary texts were being collected, copied, catalogued, canonized, and archived, but also when contemporary poetry was carefully situating itself in relation to an emerging library culture, and, what is more, when texts were being reframed and circulated in the context of anthologies, the tomb as inscribed marker of the poet's literal corpus o ered a rich analogy to the physical objects that sustained his or her surviving corpus of work.

Interdisciplinary scholarship and education remains elusive at modern universities, despite efforts at both the individual and institutional levels. The objective of this paper is to identify the main motivations that bring different disciplines together in joint research and identify some of the obstacles to that coming together. Here we propose that shared purpose (why do I participate?), practice (how do we interact?), and place (where do we interact?) are, in descending order, the most important drivers for what we call "undisciplinary" research in an interaction of different disciplines. Through unstructured workshops we found the choice of participants (who participates?), aspects of time (when do we interact?), and especially the research topics and focus (what are we working on?), to be less important for individual faculty engagement. Metaphor analysis obtained during a charrette-style workshop with 13 faculty from multiple disciplines suggested "inter-epistemological ways of knowing" rather than fields of study to move us from disciplinary to interdisciplinary to undisciplinary scholarship and education. Specifically, the broad intent (why do we participate?) was found to increase the impact of undisciplinary approaches that served as drivers for engagement. These lessons learned from a series of workshops were put to the test at an experimental center that clarified the importance of both synchronous and asynchronous interactions in a common space large enough to allow these and located outside the university. Despite the valuable insights gained in what undisciplinary interaction may look like in a center, it remained clear that space design must start by mapping out why and how individuals in different disciplines may want to interact at a given institution to generate buy-in and build the foundation for continuous refinement of an institutional strategy.

What color are the gods? How does color shape religious experience? Historians of ancient religion have not traditionally paid much attention to these questions; nevertheless, I was compelled to address them when choosing cover designs for a book on divine epiphany (Platt 2011). 1 The image I had chosenof the dramatic arrival of the goddess Selene on a Roman sarcophagus-was predictably monochrome, any traces of pigment having long since vanished from the marble. As so often, antiquity was destined to appear in shades of black and white (Manfrini 2009; Stager 2016: 97-8). When the press's first design arrived on my desktop, however, the cover's accent color was the deep orangey-red so familiar to us from Greek vases. For me, this earthbound tone was not the color of epiphany! After consideration, I requested an ethereal lilac-a shade that evoked the shimmering violet of the rainbow (Bradley 2011: 48-50); the divine porphyreos "purple" that featured in so many sacred garments (Grand-Clément 2011: 116-21; 2016); or the rich drapery that frames the body of Persephone in one of antiquity's most striking scenes of epiphany, from a painted Macedonian tomb (Brecoulaki 2006b; see Figure 4.1). My more allusive approach to imagining ancient color conflicted with one that drew more directly upon antiquity's material relics (in the press's case, vases of Attic clay). Conveying my idea to the designers, moreover, required its reduction to a Pantone number-a branded, standardized system of hues based on specific combinations of pigments designed for modern-day printing (Eiseman and Recker 2011). The challenges I encountered in accessing and reproducing the chromatic qualities of ancient visionary experiences illustrate how difficult it is for 9781474273275_txt_print.indd 63 2/9/2021 8:19:11 AM

In his lectures on Optical Media, Friedrich Kittler sought to trace the history of image production, storage, and transmission through the lens of media technologies, from linear perspective to computer graphics. One of his opening observations is that 'we knew nothing about our own senses until media provided models and metaphors'.¹ To illustrate, he points to Plato's deployment of a wax tablet as a metaphor for 'the immortal and self-storing soul', alluding to the model of memory that Socrates presents in the Theaetetus, whereby sense perceptions are impressed into an ekmageion, or 'imprint receiving device' in the mind (191c-d). The Greek concept of mind (psychê) as a storage device for indexically recorded impressions becomes conceivable, Kittler implies, only through the medium of written philosophy itself. Platonic ontology is made possible by means of the very technology about which he expresses so much ambivalence; in Kittler's words: 'Under the guise of a metaphor that was not just a metaphor [. .. ] the new media technology that gave rise to the soul was eventually seen as the vanishing point of this newly invented soul.' But what was this 'new media technology'? Kittler refers to writing as 'the new medium of Attic democracy', and to 'the new Ionic vowel alphabet', 'the wax slate', and the tabula rasa as the media that brought...

What is the relationship between art history and its objects? Responding to Jaś Elsner’s claim that art-historical writing is inevitably ekphrastic, this essay revisits a site of intense disciplinary anxiety—Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s 1759 description of the Belvedere Torso and its revised version in his 1764 History of Ancient Art. Description has been cast as the “scapegoat” (or pharmakos) of Winckelmann’s art history—that which must be excised yet is fundamental to the operations of the whole. But although it often serves as a site of perceived excess and sublimation in his work, the ekphrastic elements of Winckelmann’s prose are nevertheless some of the most historicist aspects of his scholarship, shaped by a deep engagement with Greco-Roman ekphrastic literature. Description, in this sense, serves as a Platonic pharmakon—both affliction and cure for classical art history’s medial and ontological separation from its ruined and fragmented objects. In Winckelmann’s description of the torso, ekphrasis holds out the potential for the statue’s “completion” (Ergänzung). But understood according to eighteenth-century practices of visual restoration, this raises the question of whether such “whole-making” should be understood as proper or supplemental to the original image. What does it mean to “re-member” the Belvedere Torso through ekphrastic strategies drawn from antiquity itself? And what does this imply for our own textual (and pharmacological) mediations of the visual?

This essay explores recent approaches to the “Roman copy” in both scholarship and the museum. Charting a shift from practices of Kopienkritik (which privileged the lost Greek original) to the postmodernist embrace of Roman practices of emulation (which celebrates the creativity of replication), it then looks to the twenty-first century. New archaeological discoveries (many from shipwrecks) as well as more advanced scientific analysis have enhanced our understanding of ancient bronze sculpture, in particular. Recent work not only destabilizes the notion of the singular masterpiece but also examines the production of Greek, as well as Roman, multiples, looking to theoretical concepts such as standardization and remediation. An embrace of the copy has also rehabilitated plaster-casts, now creatively employed in both museum displays and by contemporary artists engaging with the antique. The multiple, it turns out, marks a welcome site where antiquity and modernity can meet.

This essay introduces the theme of the ‘embodied object’. The concept describes artefacts which assume, interact with, substitute for and/or become parts or extensions of human bodies. In doing so, it puts recent work in cognitive archaeology, material culture studies and Actor-Network-Theory into conversation with a longer tradition of phenomenological approaches to art history. To demonstrate how Graeco-Roman artefacts might be understood as ‘embodied’, the authors focus on a fifth-century BCE bronze water-jar with a handle shaped as a female figure. When considered in its original religious context and as a handled container, the vessel’s vitality, agency, and close relationship to the bodies of its users and beholders are made more manifest. Drawing on the essays in this special issue of Art History, the introduction explains how the concept
of the ‘embodied object’ applies to classical antiquity in particular, where one can trace the philosophical roots for conceiving of inert things as possessing or interacting with bodies. At the same time, it argues that a concern with questions of embodiment pertains to art- historical research across all cultures and periods.

In his Natural History, Pliny the Elder refers to a series of paintings left unfinished at the artist’s death. These inperfectae tabulae are ‘held in greater admiration than their completed works’, for they display not only the final traces of each artist’s hand, but also his ‘very thoughts’. While Pliny’s comments have influenced notions of the non finito, less attention has been paid to their significance for his broader ethical and intellectual project. This essay attends to the facture and materiality of the objects that Pliny celebrates, as well as the subjects that they depict.Whilst conventional works are celebrated for their illusionism, the unfinished object offers a different model of viewing, in which the workings of ars are revealed by means of the traces of the artist’s body. Suspended in a state of coming-into-being, the inperfecta tabula invites both a temporal retracing of its own creation, and a connoisseurial fantasy of its imagined completion. Repeatedly returning to themes of parental loss, death, and aborted creativity, the discourse of the unfinished painting evokes cultural
and biological bonds between parents and children that parallel the corporeal connection between the artist and his work.

The Dioscuri—Castor and Pollux—are among the most epiphanic of gods, frequently appearing in battle or to sailors struggling at sea. On Chios, a festival called the Theophania was founded in the third century BC to commemorate an ep-iphany of the twin gods. Indeed, their appearance at the Sicilian battle of the River Sagra c. 540 BC was so well known in Greek—and Roman—culture that it was invoked as a proverbial example of epiphanic manifestation in Cicero's De natura deo-rum (2.1.13); as such, it was the model for several Graeco-Roman battle epiphanies featuring the Dioscuri and their horses, from Postumius' victory at Lake Regillus in 496 BC to Constantine's at the Milvian Bridge in AD 312. The numerous battle ep-iphanies of antiquity have been gathered and assessed by previous scholars (Pfister 1924 and Pritchett 1979). This article posits a new approach to the material, arguing that, because of their fame and ubiquity, epiphanies of the Dioscuri provided a model through which to explore both the validity and visual authority of divine manifestation. The conjuring of divine presence through the physical semeia of the gods is also an important element of the portrayal of the Dioscuri in image form. Representations of these epiphanic gods cover a spectrum of iconicity, ranging from highly anthropomorphized 're-enactments' of their epiphanies (such as the sculptures set up in the Roman forum to commemorate the Lake Regillus victory) to metonymic de-notations of their presence in the form of their polos hats, and sub-iconic depictions of twin stars. This combination of corporeal and cosmic semeia provides a sophisticated commentary upon the cognitive dilemmas raised by epiphany: what kind of bodies do the gods have, how do they reveal these forms to mortals, and how are we to recognize and identify them? As deities defined by dualism—mortals and immortals , gods and heroes, men and stars—the Dioscuri provide a particularly potent model for exploring such issues, for both ancient thinkers and modern scholars of epiphany. This paper explores the epiphanic landscape inhabited by the brother gods Castor and Pollux across a broad range of Greco-Roman cultural artifacts, from theological

Though foundational to the study of art history, Greco-Roman visual culture is often sidelined by the modern, and overshadowed by its own cultural and intellectual reception. Recent scholarship, how- ever, has meticulously unpacked the discipline’s formative narratives, while building on archaeological and literary studies in order to locate its objects of analysis more precisely within the dynamic cultural frameworks that produced them, and that were in turn shaped by them. Focusing on a passage from Pliny the Elder’s Natural History (arguably the urtext of classical art history), this paper explores the perennial question of how the material stuff of antiquity can be most effectively yoked to the thinking and sensing bodies that inhabited it, arguing that closer attention to ancient engagements with materialism can alert us to models of image-making and viewing that are both conceptually and physically grounded in Greco- Roman practices of production, sense perception, and interpretation.