In this beautifully produced and generously accessible volume, Piqueux traces the presence of the body on the stages of Old and Middle Comedy as it is reflected in both text and image. Her twin aims are, as she puts it, to “understand the visual aspect of comedy of the Classical era” (1) and to “interrogate the complex interrelatedness of literary and iconographic productions associated with comedy” (1). In other words, Piqueux seeks both to clarify the relationship between Greek comedy’s texts and its visual record—meaning primarily 4th-century vases from South Italy and Sicily, although Attic vases and terracotta figurines are also considered – and to use visual and textual evidence together to further our understanding of embodiment in Greek comic performance. In both of these aims, Piqueux is broadly successful.
In Chapter One (“Comedy and Vase Painting”), Piqueux gives an extended summary of the evidence for Old and Middle Comedy contained in extant texts, fragments, vases, and terracotta figurines. The chapter sets clear boundaries for the project: New Comedy, too stark a shift from earlier comic forms, will be excluded; among material evidence, only those objects that show visible traces of the tradition of Attic comedy and its costumes will be discussed. Two central claims emerge from this overview: that these vases depict comic performances, not comic texts; and that both vase painters and their clients were theatergoers who could recognize and appreciate the complex relationship between vase and stage. Piqueux is perhaps overly generous here in offering summaries of the textual evidence for Old and Middle Comedy, and in rehearsing the history of scholarship on the relationship between Attic Comedy and vases found in Italy, but readers approaching this material for the first time will find this chapter a helpful orientation.
Chapter Two (“The Construction of the Comic Body”) presents the evidence for the key elements of the peculiar body a spectator would encounter on the comic stage: mask, phallus, padding. Regarding what are often called “portrait masks,” Piqueux argues convincingly that we should speak of “iconic” or “metaphorical” masks rather than realist portraits: the possibilities of the comic character would have been too restricted, she concludes, by a mask that accurately captured a public figure’s appearance. The mask, instead, must remain polysemous, a boundless Bakhtinian grotesque whose meaning is negotiated through gesture and speech, rather than one whose meaning is predetermined either by narrow symbolism or by realism. Piqueux also settles, to my mind, the question of whether all actors wore body pads on the 5th- and early 4th-century stage: they did so universally, she argues, and simply varied the size of pads and the style of their attachments to the actor’s body to portray different body shapes. In this chapter, what becomes a central tenet of the book begins to emerge: in Old Comedy, the comic body was universally grotesque and exaggerated; there was then a transitional period around the middle of the 4th century, when some characters were given bodies that more closely conformed to Athenian ideals, while others were marked as marginal (such as enslaved characters, pimps, etc.) by their continued use of the exaggerated body of the 5th-century stage.
The following chapter (“Three: Signs of Genre and Sexual Identity Conveyed by Costume”) explores the presentation of the gendered body in comic texts and images. This book is at its best when it unites its discussions of text and image; here, they are largely separate, and the account suffers somewhat as a result. The long summary of the Agathon scene from Thesmophoriazusae, for example, adds little to the work of Zeitlin,[1] Muecke,[2] Foley,[3] Austin and Olson,[4] and others who have discussed this famous scene. Although it is valuable to observe that cross-dressing scenes also occur on vases and in terracotta figurines, this chapter would have benefitted from engaging more broadly with work on gender in antiquity, particularly work in trans studies.[5]
Chapters Four (“Social and Moral Characterization Through Costume”) and Five (“The Body in Movement”) are the most original and exciting contributions of the book. Here we see Piqueux’s insistence on reading text and image together pays off: she explicates, for example, the ways clothing takes on meaning in relation to the body that is being clothed and pays fine attention to the places where social status (particularly the distinction between enslaved and free) is and is not legible. In one of the most closely argued and helpful sections of the book, she rejects Webster’s rigid classification of mask types for Old and Middle Comedy in favor of something closer to Marshall’s broader and more flexible typology and illustrates her argument with a wonderfully generous series of images of mask types as they recur across vases. Once again, Piqueux traces a compelling historical development, in which both the physical appearance of the comic body and its movements on stage are universally grotesque in the fifth and early fourth centuries but deployed selectively by the mid-fourth century to distinguish grotesque from idealized bodies. In other words, certain Middle Comic bodies—particularly those of the enslaved, of certain hetairai and their pornoboskoi, of parasites, and of non-Greeks—preserve the wildly exaggerated qualities of the Old Comic body; these qualities take on new meaning, however, when they stand in visible contrast to the more normatively schematized bodies of young free citizen characters. Chapter Five, in particular, presents a series of highly compelling readings that juxtapose text and image closely to understand the comic body’s tendency to restless motion, its strange, puppet-like rigidity in early vases, its capacity for transformation, and its ability to recapitulate tragic staging (or perhaps even tragic iconography).
This book, though generous and compelling, is not without its flaws. Piqueux’s discussion of comic depictions of African characters is limited by an almost total lack of engagement with recent scholarship on race in antiquity: she relies heavily on Snowden, certainly an important figure in the history of scholarship on this material, but she could have done something much more compelling with the evidence she presents here by drawing on Haley,[6] Derbew,[7] McCoskey,[8] Isaac,[9] and others who have brought a great deal of additional complexity and nuance to our understanding of depictions of blackness and African ethnicities in Greek art; this section is also strangely isolated from her very productive discussions elsewhere in the book of skin color as a marker of gender. Traces of the book’s journey from doctoral thesis to French manuscript to English publication occasionally emerge: footnotes sometimes crop up multiple times (e.g., 159 n.92 = 178 n.162), dissertation-style recapitulations of prior scholarship are in places somewhat excessive, and although the bibliography is very thorough up until about 2015, there is relatively little engagement with anything past that date.
Despite these issues, Piqueux’s work develops a thorny collection of evidence into a legible archive, and she is largely persuasive in her readings of it; her mastery of the iconographic record and her skill as an interpreter of vase imagery are on display throughout the book. Although Taplin’s Comic Angels will perhaps remain the standard point of entry for people interested in comic imagery on vases,[10] Piqueux’s Comic Body would be the perfect next step for a reader eager to see what we can do interpretively with this material. Piqueux and OUP are to be commended, moreover, for the extraordinarily rich inclusion of images, many in full color; the book is beautifully printed, with crisp, legible photographs of something like 87 vases and terracotta figurines, with figures reliably cross-referenced throughout Piqueux’s arguments. Although one may sometimes disagree with individual details of Piqueux’s analysis, anyone interested in ancient comic performance and its reflection in the visual record will find this book indispensable.
Notes
[1] Zeitlin, Froma I. (1981). Travesties of gender and genre in Aristophanes’ Thesmophoriazousae. In Foley, Helene P. (Ed.), Reflections of women in antiquity (pp. 169-217). New York: Gordon & Breach Science Publ.
[2] Muecke, Frances (1982). A portrait of the artist as a young woman. CQ 32, 41-55.
[3] Foley, Helene P. (2014). Performing gender in Greek Old and New Comedy. In Revermann, Martin (Ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Greek Comedy (pp. 259-274). Cambridge.
[4] Austin, Colin F. L. and Olson, Stuart Douglas (Eds.). (2004). Thesmophoriazusae. Oxford.
[5] For example: Allison Surtees and Jennifer Dyer (Eds.). (2020). Exploring Gender Diversity in the Ancient World. Edinburgh; or Isabel Ruffell (2020). Poetics, perversions, and passing: approaching the transgender narratives of “Thesmophoriazousai”. ICS 45(2), 333-367.
[6] Haley, Shelley P. (2009). Be Not Afraid of the Dark: Critical Race Theory and Classical Studies. In Nasrallah, Laura, and Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza (Eds.), Prejudice and Christian Beginnings: Investigating Race, Gender, and Ethnicity in Early Christianity (pp. 27-50). Minneapolis: Fortress.
[7] Sarah Derbew’s Untangling Blackness in Greek Antiquity (2022; Cambridge) will obviously have appeared too late for Piqueux to make use of, but should now be regarded as the best point of entry on this topic. Derbew’s dissertation or earlier work could have be engaged with, however, such as: (2018) “An Investigation of Black Figures in Classical Greek Art,” The Iris (Behind the Scenes at the Getty), April 25; (2018). The metatheater of blackness: looking at and through black skin color in ancient Greek literature and art. Diss. Yale.
[8] McCoskey, Denise Eileen (2012). Race: antiquity and its legacy. London: Tauris.
[9] Isaac, Benjamin (2006). The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity. Princeton.
[10] Taplin, Oliver (1993). Comic angels: and other approaches to Greek drama through vase-painting. Oxford.