Ancient Visual Culture (Archaeology)

Introduction to new English translation of an article by Jiří (Georg) Mordechai Langer  (Prague, 1894 - Tel Aviv, 1943): ''On the Function of the Jewish Doorpost Scroll (Mezuzah),'' first published in Freud's Imago Journal in 1928. Langer suggests an explanatory model for the ritual object in the context of compulsion neuroses and totem theory.

Errata: Note 3 should read: Elliot R. Wolfson, Language, Eros, Being: Kabbalistic Hermeneutics and Poetic Imagination (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005); Note 14 should read: Mordechai G. Langer, Die Erotik der Kabbala (Prague: Verlag Dr. Josef Flesch, 1923).

Ashoka's legacy is carreid through the sandstone pillars that were erected during his rule in various parts of northern India. These pillars were inscrbed upon with edicts revealing Ashoka's intended policy framework of Dhamma for his subjects and neighbours. However, there are pillars that have been discovered without either capitals or inscriptions, and in some cases neither Ashokan evidence exists. Therefore, there has been further reason to explore the origins of these pillars. although the initial exploration was driven more by the aesthetic beauty of these pillars. This essay tries to shed light on both perspectives - historical and aesthetic - that make these pillars and their animal capitals powerful symbols in Indian culture.

More than 20 years after presenting his first interpretation of the mosaic from the House of Aion in a paper entitled “Uwagi na temat mozaiki z Domu Aiona w Nea Paphos (Cypr)” (Meander 9/10, 1987, p. 421-438, in Polish, and translated to English: « The Immortality of the Human Soul and the Dionysiac Mysteries in the 4th Century Allegory [in Connection with the Interpretation of the Mosaic from the “House of Aion” at Paphos in Cyprus]»), where he proposed reading the five mythological panels (1. Leda and Zeus; 2. Dionysus on Mount Nysa; 3. The Dionysian thiasos; 4. Apollo and Marsyas; 5. The Apotheosis of Cassiopeia) as an allegory of the destiny of the human soul and body, starting with conception and ending with the liberation of the soul and its apotheosis, the author now enhances his initial interpretation with numerous reflections concerning the historical context of this work of art, created in the years 320-360.
If, according to the author, the mosaic is a “Hymn” in honour of the pagan gods, Man (his soul) and his place in the (pagan) universe, then at the same time it polemicises with the Christian faith and its God, Jesus Christ.
The author puts forward numerous new solutions relating to the mosaic’s iconography and iconology. Analysis of the mosaic also leads him to propose a solution to the as-yet unanswered question regarding the absence of images of the crucified Christ in Christian art of the 3rd and 4th centuries, up until 420/430, when the first images of Christ on the cross appear.
CONTENTS:
Introduction
1. Research to-date (recap)
2. Description of mosaic (recap)
2.1. Composition of five mythological scenes
2.2. Brief iconographic description of mythological panels
2.3. Outline of individual iconographic elements and their respective roles
2.4. The pagan gods’ air of majesty and dignity as an expression of piety
3. A few words about the pagan reaction
4. An apology of pious human life according to pagan principles and a polemic on the Christian model of Man and his theological idol, Jesus Christ
4.1. Divine intervention in the act of human conception (allusion to/polemic on the Annunciation to the Virgin Mary)
4.2. The Epiphany of Dionysus (an allusion to the Epiphany of Christ – Theou Pais)
4.3. The procession and dissemination of Dionysian order (allusion to/polemic on Christ’s entry into Jerusalem)
4.4. The error of Marsyas (polemic on/allusion to the error of Jesus the Messiah): arrest, sentencing for arrogance and lack of piety (asebeia) and condemnation to a martyr’s death
4.5. The anabasis (or anagoge psyches) of a ‘beautiful soul’ (allusion to/polemic on the Ascension of Christ)
5. A few words on the mosaic programme prior to final conclusions
Final conclusions
Key words: mythological mosaic, House of Aion, Nea Paphos, Late Antiquity, Roman art, allegorical narrative, allusive language of mythological pictures, wordplay (Marsyas-Messias), Jesus Christ, anti-Christian polemic, Dionysos, Cassiopeia, Apollon, Nereides, Abstract Personifications, Greek Mythology, ΚΥΠΡΟΣ

The late third and early second millennium BCE saw the rise of the terracotta plaque production and the (temporary) end of figurines in southern Mesopotamia. This media-based transformation is usually considered a mere technological advance but we have to acknowledge that it coincides with new ways of visualizing the human form. I argue that profound differences in the perception and conceptualization
of images lie at the heart of these changes. During this process depictions of male/female bodies moved from visual references to persons into generic representations of symbolic concepts.
Keywords: terracotta figurines, terracotta plaques, gender, body visualization, artistic genre change, Ur III, Isin-Larsa, Old Babylonian.

Reviews:
Journal of Roman Archaeology 24 (2011) 512–15 [D. Ridgway]; Scholia 20.4 (2011) [R. Roth]; American Journal of Archaeology [online] 114.3 (2010) [S. Stoddart]; Antiquity 84:324 (2010) 565–67 [T. Rasmussen]; Bulletin Antieke Beschaving 85 (2010) 212–13 [B. van der Meer]; Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2010.02.32 [C. Smith]; Classical Review 60.2 (2010) 572–74 [L. Pieraccini].


Table of Contents

1. Between Crustumerium and Eretum: Observations on the First Iron Age Phases and the Finds from the Archaic Period / Paolo Togninelli

2. Civitalba and Roman Programs of Commemoration and Unification / Peter J. Holliday

3. Etruscan Cults in Roman Times: The Strange Ruins of Chianciano Terme / David Soren and Erin Nell

4. The Gods in the Circus / Carin Green

5. Far from Etruria: Etruscan Fakes in Japan / Stephan Steingräber

6. "Etruscan" Gold from Cerverteri (and Elsewhere) in the University of Pennsylvania Museum / Jean MacIntosh Turfa

7. From Crustumerium: A Proposal against Looting. Loans in Exchange for Resources for Preservation / Francesco di Gennaro

8. How Did Painters Create Near-Exact Copies? Notes on Four Center Paintings from Pompeii / John R. Clarke

9. Is Linear Perspective Necessary? / Jocelyn Penny Small

10. Some Thoughts on the Baubo Gesture in Classical Art / Larissa Bonfante

11. One More Etruscan Couple at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston / Marjatta Nielsen

12. Dueling Warriors on Two Etruscan Bronze Mirrors from the Fifth Century B.C.E. / Alexandra A. Carpino

13. The Blood of Animals: Predation and Transformation in Etruscan Funerary Representation / P. Gregory Warden

14. The Deified Deceased in Etruscan Culture / Giovannangelo Camporeale

15. On the Origin of the Vanth: Death Harbingers and Banshees in the Etruscan and Celtic Worlds / Anthony Tuck

16. Guests, Hosts, and Politics at Herculaneum / Carol C. Mattusch

17. The Lost Iter Hetruscum of Athanasius Kircher (1665-78) / Ingrid Rowland

18. Ingrid Edlund-Berry, Larthi, Turms, and Vel: Real Etruscans in Modern Fiction"

The goal of this paper is to offer a re-interpretation of Roman funerary portraits as mediums – archaeological objects carrying certain messages. In contemporary research, the Roman province of Syria is often described as a field to the very successful fusion of Roman and ‘Eastern Greek’ culture. The pivotal example of that fusion is illustrated on Palmyra Portraits – an extraordinary set of reliefs combining Roman, Hellenistic, and local stylistic, iconographic, and epigraphic traditions. Undeniably the funerary portrait reliefs from Palmyra are the visual and epigraphic mediums – they communicate certain values and ideas across time and space. The messages transmitted by this group of monuments were the product of complex mechanisms of cultural transformation in the region. In his ‘Empire and Communication’ Innis observes that the invention of the alphabet subversed the relationship between the center of civilizations and those on their fringes. As a result, new ideas or techniques could emerge in the marginal zones. That observation certainly applies to Palmyra where the correlation between three-lingualism and extraordinary rich artistic culture can be attested. The Palmyrene funerary reliefs are often depicted by several attributes including writing tools. The several messages concerning male identity can be read simultaneously: schoolboys, Greek and Roman citizens, entrepreneurs, mourners, and cult observers. Further, the female portraits decorated by household insignia, rich jewelry, other attributes as well as Greek and/or Aramaic inscriptions communicate the statuses of modest wife, rich bourgeoise, mother, and relation to the man-of-letters. The perfect examples of cultural dialogue and deliberate, spontaneous code-switching in the private, funerary space of Roman Near East the Palmyra Portraits give also a unique example of balance between visual and written media. The image plays here as a crucial role as text – sanctioning the position of the one that was depicted as would Innis write.

Transmedia storytelling in its broadest sense can be understood as telling a story with different media. The current discourse largely implies that this form of storytelling was caused by the recent phenomenon of media convergence. From the perspectives of narrative theory and cultural history such an assumption is doubtful. It will be shown that the first occurence of this special practice of storytelling cannot be attached to a certain time or culture. Rather, we have to assume that transmedia storytelling dates back to the beginning of storytelling itself. On the example of ancient Greek images it will further be discussed which additional epistemic potential can be derived from the standpoint of cultural history.

The contributions to this collection discuss – from a general perspective and on the basis of concrete examples – how the epistemic potentials of the manifold current strands of image and visual culture studies on images and their perception – which proliferated since the pictorial and the iconic turn – can be made available for the archaeological study of image cultures. They address semiotic and perceptual, frame-semantic, affect-theoretical and cognitive approaches as well as questions of image contexts and the agency of images.

Several subdisciplines within historiography, most notably the arms and armour or martial arts studies, are interested in inferring physical qualities of historical material objects from historical sources. Scholars from these fields face serious deficiency of written accounts when it comes to various crucial information regarding their subject matter. Therefore, researchers’ attention is often drawn to iconographical sources, sometimes resulting in certain fascination with the material culture depicted in primary technical literature (Fachliteratur). This tendency seems particularly strong in studies on HEMA which rely heavily on pre-modern combat treatises known as ‘fight books’ (Fechtbücher) and are tempted either to treat the available iconography as a faithful representation of its corresponding material reality or to interpret apparent mismatch between icono-graphical representations and their material source domain as evidence for the inferior skills of the illustrator.

We would like to put forward that there is a fundamental oversight in such approach to Fachliteratur in general and fight books in particular, namely the lack of consideration for the artwork as a diagrammatic representation of the functional aspects of depicted embodied technique, where proportional ‘realism’ is of lesser priority. It may be fruitful to develop a more nuanced method of ‘reading’ such images. Our survey of select late-medieval fight books shows that equipment, and even body parts, are regularly distorted in their depictions in the fight books to better communicate the subject matter, especially where textual descriptions would be complicated. Interpreted in Gestalt terms, this phenomenon may serve as an example of historical pragmatic application of the cognitive principle of holism – that the whole is something different than the sum of its parts.

The sanctuary of Zeus Stratios, located on a plateau near Yassıçal, 10 km east of Amaseia, has often been brought into connection with the shrine where Mithridates VI Eupator built a grand sacrifice that was noticed several miles out at sea, according to Appian. But how possible is this? This study examines the range of visibility from the grand altar for Zeus Stratios near Yassıçal, and asks whether this could even be the same altar that Appian described. It then turns the question around, examining the areas that clearly had a good view of the peak, or at least of the smoke columns rising from it, and finds a remarkable correspondence with the territory of Amaseia. This is brought into relation with the circle of ‘markers’ found around the altar and bearing place names, interpreted by David French as evidence of a sacred and political assembly. It seems that the sanctuary served as a territorial focus through ritual at the top but also through its visibility from below, via the smoke columns from the sacrifices which would have brought an immediacy of place to the far reaches in the territory of what was one of the largest cities in antiquity.

Textiles are sensuous; we respond to them through touch, vision and smell, movement, sound and temperature. Through sensations, textiles embody emotions of identity, and define hierarchies of power and value. Yet through the taphonomy of decay, ancient textiles are frequently devoid of their original sensory properties, they come to us as faded, fragile, dirty rags. A sensory archaeology of textiles, therefore, requires a suite of methods to reveal these sensations and a contextual analysis to interpret them within their chronological and regional archaeologies. In raising to this challenge, this chapter proposes for the first time a sensory archaeology of textiles. Through innovative case studies, the author invites the reader to recognise the implications of a sensory archaeology of textiles, and to consider the consequences for their own research fields.

Wie Bildmotive und Darstellungsweisen wandern auch Bilderzählungen und ihre narrativen Strukturen durch verschiedene kulturelle Komplexe und Zeiten. Diese Wanderungen und Rezeptionsvorgänge weisen ein besonderes kulturanalytisches Erkenntnispotential auf. Um die kulturspezifischen Muster und Strukturen von Bilderzählungen, die für die Konstituierung von Identitäten von Bedeutung sind, mit Blick auf eine kultur- und epochenübergreifende Vergleichbarkeit zu ermitteln, wird ein Instrumentarium benötigt, dass es ermöglicht, jene Strukturen zu beschreiben. Zur Schaffung einer Grundlage für eine kulturelle und zeitliche Differenzierung unterschiedlicher Erzählstrukturen, die auch den Nachvollzug wandernder Bilderzählungen ermöglicht, geht dieser Artikel der Frage nach, ob in den Fächern, die sich mit antiken Bildern auseinandersetzen – insbesondere der Klassischen Archäologie –, ein solches Instrumentarium vorhanden ist oder woher gegebenenfalls geeignete Konzepte bezogen werden können.

The essay applies the theoretical study of visual culture to an analysis of the role of
the visual in the communication of religious ideas by the New Testament author,
Paul. The discussion explores the contributions of anthropologists and iconologists to
the study and understanding of visual culture. After an exploration of the role of vision
in understanding generally, the essay then turns to the goals of creating visual experiences
in ancient rhetoric. The letters of Paul and his followers drew on the experiences
of Roman imperial iconography in multiple media to create their own visual worlds
and effect persuasion.

This article analyzes boy viewers as internal audiences in Imperial ekphrastic treatises. The first section traces the origins of the boy viewer to Plato’s Republic and examines early examples in the Tabula Cebetis and Rhetorum praeceptor. The second half of the article then investigates how the Philostrati and Callistratus rework this device in their own texts, focusing on themes of childlike wonder and susceptibility to illusion. I conclude that these treatises use the boy viewer to subvert the distinction between expert and inexpert viewing, and thereby contest the ideal of the cultured gaze inherited from the Second Sophistic.

The main purpose of this essay is to find explanations for the differences and/or similarities between the Parthenon conversion and the transformation of the temple of Athena in Syracuse into a cathedral. To find an answer to this question this essay has focused on similarities, followed by a closer look at the differences.
Similarities: use of the already present foundations of the earlier temples, reversing of orientation, and adding of windows.
Differences: Parthenon keeps outer colonnade while Cathedral of Syracuse closed off the spaces between the collonades to form a chamber, and some sculpture on the Parthenon was not removed, in contrast to the Temple of Athena.

The shape shifting of Dionysus:  When metamorphoses from myths appear in Greek and Roman art, it is for the most part only the central moment that is indicated, and the physical change in shape is left to the imagination of the viewer. 
This study will point out, by means of a Roman monument, the possibility that water and fountains could represent one particular metamorphosis; the self-willed transformation of a god.  The fountain as such may solve the artistic problem of how to represent a perpetually recurring metamorphosis and would in itself realize that metamorphosis by means of its iconography and water.

Analyses of performance (and performance events) depicted in the iconography from Minoan Crete most often focus upon religious aspects of these activities. In this article, a performance approach is adopted; this alternative viewpoint emphasizes the significance of performances for materializing ideologies, reinforcing elements of the socio-political order, and the negotiation of power relations. Using archaeological material from the Minoan period of Crete, the role of depictions of dances, bull leaping, and boxing for  the development of power relations and socio-political change are examined.  It is concluded that both the representations of these activities, and perhaps the activities themselves, played significant roles in shaping competitive authority structures and a social order frequently influenced by competition among rival factions.

This article briefly presents some of the author’s research on art in archaeology, focusing especially on her contributions to research on Greek and Roman sculpture and its historiography. In particular, the problems of research on copies and imitations in Roman culture, Republican portraits of the elderly, the style of Greek sculpture, and the cult statue of Aphrodite of Cnidus are discussed.

I worked on five plays by Jean-Marie Besset, a French Parisian and trendy gay-leaning playwright. He touches at times very serious social or cultural subjects but his tendency to bring in sexuality and particularly a gay option that is yet some kind of second choice makes him see the circumstantial side of life and not the existential or spiritual side of the world.

His vision of Molière in the last play is typical: he did not capture the frightening depth of an aging creative mind who needs some young stimulation that cannot be more than titillation to refuel his creative inspiration. Unluckily Besset saw jealousy in Molière where he should have since impatience.

Uczta to nie tylko posiłek, lecz także spotkanie, pokaz zamożności, a przy tym pozycji społecznej. Za pomocą uczty można pokazać, że np. wyzwoleniec jest czcigodnym bogaczem, ktoś pochodzący z gminu osobą ważną. Bardzo wiele elementów może wpłynąć na uzyskanie efektu- dobór gości, potraw, zastawa, oprawa, dodatkowe atrakcje.

In 1961 Hans Jonas identified the ability to make images as a differentia specifia of humans. The term homo pictor refers to the cultural anthropological dimension and the fundamental importance of the relationship between images and humans. It is not by accident, then, that analysis and interpretation of images are of great significance in the archaeological disciplines. Many material remains of past cultures carry images or pictorial elements that are invaluable in the interpretation of these cultures. Correspondingly, there is a broad spectrum of analytical methods that are employed to answer a variety of questions. While some of these methods of image analysis have their conceptual foundation in art history, others have been developed autonomously within the field of archaeology and without reference to interdisciplinary discourses. A consistent theoretical framework that would allow for a systematic conceptualisation of a discipline-specific or historic study of images in archaeology has not yet been articulated. Since the pictorial and the iconic turn there has been a vast trans-and interdisciplinary research on images and their perception under the categories of image science (Bildwissenschaften) and visual culture studies. The conference seeks to explore whether and how these contemporary developments can contribute to theories of the image and methods of image analysis within archaeology. Reciprocally, it will also be asked in what ways archaeology – due to its large material corpora and long scholarly tradition – could make a considerably larger contribution to the fields of image and visual culture studies than acknowledged to date – especially as the object of its research reaches back to the origins of humans and images and their relationship.