Most people today encounter ancient Greek vases as static, untouchable artifacts safely out of reach behind glass, in the quiet of a museum gallery. Once, however, these vessels were also useful objects, made to be held, filled, and generally used in a variety of settings, from the ritual to the quotidian. This volume considers these ancient vases together with the theoretical frameworks developed by pioneers of phenomenology such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Edmund Husserl, helping us experience Greek vases as they once were. The principles of phenomenology require that we understand objects as active participants in shaping the manner in which humans experience the world. A phenomenological perspective allows us to see how the function and use of Greek vases shaped both their visual appearance and the perceptual experience of them-as well as our continued understanding of them today-while taking into account multisensory perspectives. With this alternative approach to the study of classical pottery, the authors offer new and illuminating insights not just into the objects in question but also into ancient Greek culture and life more broadly.
Danielle Smotherman Bennett is an assistant research curator at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston. Guy Hedreen is the J. Kirk T. Varnedoe '67 Professor of Art at Williams College. He is the author of The Image of the Artist in Archaic and Classical Greece: Art, Poetry, and Subjectivity; Capturing Troy: The Narrative Function of Landscape in Archaic and Early Classical Greek Art; and Silens in Attic Black-Figure Vase-Painting: Myth and Performance. SeungJung Kim is an associate professor in the Department of Art History at the University of Toronto. She is the author of The Temporal Revolution in Greek Art. Carolyn LaferriEre is an associate curator of ancient Mediterranean art at the Princeton University Art Museum. She is the author of Divine Music in Archaic and Classical Greek Art: Seeing the Songs of the Gods.
List of Illustrations List of Abbreviations Introduction: Experiencing Vases Carolyn LaferriEre Part One Chapter 1. Ornament, Kant, and the Dependent Beauty of Greek Vases William Austin Chapter 2. The Satyr, the Krater, and Hegel: Mediated Subjectivity in a Peucetian Tomb Savannah Sather Marquardt Chapter 3. Swallowed by the Vase: Clementina Anstruther-Thomson's Phenomenology of Greek Pottery Seth Estrin Chapter 4. The Phenomenology of Pictorial Representation: Gombrich, Wollheim, and Husserl Guy Hedreen Chapter 5. Pandora's Pseudea and the Truth in Art: A Phenomenological Interpretation of the Niobid Painter's Krater (BM 1856,1213.1) Clifford Robinson Chapter 6. Merleau-Ponty and the Greek Vase SeungJung Kim Chapter 7. The Unmanly Behind: Queer Phenomenology and the Male Body in Athenian Vase Painting Anthony F. Mangieri Part Two Chapter 8. Phenomenological Approaches to Archaic Boeotian Zoomorphic Rhyta in Their Ancient Use Context Trevor Van Damme Chapter 9. Reading (into) the Writing on Vases on Vases: Self-Referentiality in Late Archaic Athenian Red-Figure Vase Painting Seth Pevnick Chapter 10. Colors and the Gloss Effect in Attic Black- and Red-Figure Pottery Arne Reinhardt Chapter 11. An Embodied View of the Figured Greek Kylix D. Buck Roberson Chapter 12. On Douris's Cup with Amazons David Saunders and Sanchita Balachandran Chapter 13. The Ecology of Festival Ware Amy C. Smith and Katerina Volioti Conclusion Acknowledgments References Contributors Index
"A timely volume with an impressive range, introducing the many possibilities of engaging with phenomenology in ancient Greek art. The new methodology and innovative approach to material culture make this an exciting addition to the field." - Sheramy Bundrick, author of Athens, Etruria, and the Many Lives of Greek Figured Pottery
