Images in Mind: Statues in Archaic and Classical Greek Literature and Thought

الغلاف الأمامي
Princeton University Press, 01‏/09‏/2020 - 384 من الصفحات

In archaic and classical Greece, statues played a constant role in people's religious, political, economic, aesthetic, and mental lives. Evidence of many kinds demonstrates that ancient Greeks thought about--and interacted with--statues in ways very different from our own. This book recovers ancient thinking about statues by approaching them through contemporary literary sources. It not only shows that ancient viewers conceived of images as more operative than aesthetic, but additionally reveals how poets and philosophers found in sculpture a practice ''good to think with.''


Deborah Tarn Steiner considers how Greek authors used images to ponder the relation of a copy to an original and of external appearance to inner reality. For these writers, a sculpture could straddle life and death, encode desire, or occasion reflection on their own act of producing a text. Many of the same sources also reveal how thinking about statues was reflected in the objects' everyday treatment. Viewing representations of gods and heroes as vessels hosting a living force, worshippers ritually washed, clothed, and fed them in order to elicit the numinous presence within.


By reading the plastic and verbal sources together, this book offers new insights into classical texts while illuminating the practices surrounding the design, manufacture, and deployment of ancient images. Its argument that images are properly objects of cultural and social--rather than purely aesthetic--study will attract art historians, cultural historians, and anthropologists, as well as classicists.

 

المحتوى

Replacement and Replication
3
Replacing the Absent
5
Replication and Its Limits
19
Developments in Late Archaic and Classical Statuary
26
Works of Art in FifthCentury Texts
44
Late Classical Images and the Platonic Account
56
Inside and Out
79
Representing Divinity
80
For Love of a Statue
185
Image Love in Literary Accounts
186
RealWorld Viewing
207
The Image in the Text
251
The Funerary Monument
252
Victory Statues
259
Honorific Statues and the Encomiastic Address
265
Imaging the Word
281

Cult Activities
105
Vacant or Full?
120
The Quick and the Dead
135
Inanimate Images and the Dead
136
Divine Motion and Sight
156
Lucians Retrospective
295
Bibliography
329
Index of Passages Cited
343
Subject Index
353
حقوق النشر

طبعات أخرى - عرض جميع المقتطفات

عبارات ومصطلحات مألوفة

نبذة عن المؤلف (2020)

Deborah Tarn Steiner is Associate Professor of Classics at Columbia University. She is the author of The Crown of Song: Metaphor in Pindar, and The Tyrant's Writ: Myths and Images of Writing in Ancient Greece (Princeton).

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