The Image of the Artist in Archaic and Classical Greece: Art, Poetry, and Subjectivity
Cambridge University Press, 11/26/2015
EAN 9781107118256, ISBN10: 1107118255
Hardcover, 408 pages, 26.1 x 18.6 x 2.2 cm
Language: English
This book explores the persona of the artist in Archaic and Classical Greek art and literature. Guy Hedreen argues that artistic subjectivity, first expressed in Athenian vase-painting of the sixth century BCE and intensively explored by Euphronios, developed alongside a self-consciously constructed persona of the poet. He explains how poets like Archilochos and Hipponax identified with the wily Homeric character of Odysseus as a prototype of the successful narrator, and how the lame yet resourceful artist-god Hephaistos is emulated by Archaic vase-painters such as Kleitias. In lyric poetry and pictorial art, Hedreen traces a widespread conception of the artist or poet as socially marginal, and sometimes physically imperfect, but rhetorically clever, technically peerless, and a master of fiction. Bringing together in a sustained analysis the roots of subjectivity across media, this book offers a new way of studying the relationship between poetry and art in ancient Greece.
Introduction
'I am Odysseus'
1. Smikros and Euphronios
pictorial alter ego
2. Archilochos, the fictional creator-protagonist, and Odysseus
3. Hipponax and his make-believe artists
4. Hephaistos in epic
analog of Odysseus and antithesis to Thersites
5. Pictorial subjectivity and the Shield of Achilles on the François vase
6. Frontality, self-reference, and social hierarchy
three Archaic vase-paintings
7. Writing and invention in the vase-painting of Euphronios and his circle
Epilogue
persuasion, deception, and artistry on a red-figure cup.