[Authors and Titles listed at the end of the review.]
This edited volume, based on the workshop of the same name held in 2015 at Oxford and the seminar series “Objects in Translation” held in 2015–2016 at the Institute of Classical Studies in London, examines two-dimensional visual representations of ancient Greek vases.[1] These depictions occur in a variety of forms and contexts, ranging from the illustrations of vase iconography that adorn lavish antiquarian folios to images of vases in works of art. The graphic reproductions in question include sketches, engravings, lithographs, paintings, tracings, and photographs. By centering such representations, made from the seventeenth through twentieth centuries, the editors and contributors address them as indicators of intellectual exploration and creative engagement (p. 2). While discussion of renderings of Greek vases has sometimes appeared incidentally in historiographic treatments of collecting and the emergence of scholarly interest in vases, Drawing the Greek Vase is the first book dedicated entirely to the visualizations of vases as objects of inquiry, rather than the vases that they represent. The volume, then, positions itself at the intersection of archaeology, art history, and classical reception (p. 2).
The collection consists of ten essays along with an introduction by Petsalis-Diomidis (Chapter 1) and an afterword by Meyer (Chapter 12). In the introduction, in addition to offering overviews of the contributors’ essays, Petsalis-Diomidis also spells out in clear terms what the volume is not, namely a comprehensive treatment of its subject or an in-depth history of the study of Greek vases. Given the topics of the chapters, however, Petsalis-Diomidis’s synopsis reveals that there is indeed a great deal of historiography present, with familiar names including Johann Joachim Winckelmann, William Hamilton, Eduard Gerhard, Adolf Furtwängler, and John Davidson Beazley each making prominent appearances. Also worth pointing out is Petsalis-Diomidis’s recognition that when it comes to artistic reception of Greek vases, the volume’s geographic span is mostly confined to northern Europe—a point which is acknowledged as an opportunity for future exploration by interested parties.
For practical purposes, it is useful to briefly summarize the essays, giving greater attention to some than others. Meyer’s (Chapter 2) contribution, although not labeled as such, should be read as a continuation of Petsalis-Diomidis’s introduction, wherein the volume’s theoretical framing is presented with reference to its specific contributions. This is accomplished via an extended examination of drawing as a mode of two-dimensional visual reproduction of Greek vases as both a cognitive and physical act. Drawing, the reader is told, is a process that is as much a transformation of the artifact as it is visual replication in the transference of iconography from the curved surface of the vase to the flat page.
The rest of the volume proceeds chronologically. Smith (Chapter 3) looks at the role of drawing in the context of the commercial exploitation of the perceived simplicity and elegance of design of Greek vases and their painted decoration by neoclassical ceramic producers such as Josiah Wedgwood and Josiah Spode in the eighteenth century. Looming large is the influence of Johann Joachim Winckelmann, transmitted via the drawings produced for the publications of William Hamilton’s vase collections by Pierre-François Hugues (Baron d’Hancarville) and Johann Tischbein, respectively. Smith points to Winckelmann’s assertion that the drawn contour lines on Greek vases rivalled those of Raphael in playing a significant role in fostering the esteem afforded the drawing of the vase-painters and the resulting appeal of their products to artists. Similarly, Petsalis-Diomidis (Chapter 4) examines the two-dimensional images of Greek vases made and commissioned by the late 18th- and early 19th-century English collector and designer Thomas Hope in picturesque style paintings and neoclassical outline engravings published in books. Petsalis-Diomidis reveals that Hope understood Greek vases simultaneously both as artifacts with ancient functions and contexts and as thoroughly modern objects. As the latter, Hope found vases well-suited for display in elite homes and as iconographic sources of inspiration to be mined for decorative designs for interiors, furniture, and women’s clothing.
Gaifman (Chapter 5) explores 18th- and 19th-century books that explicitly encouraged the viewing of ancient Greek vases in a similar fashion to drawings. The primary case studies are Baron d’Hancarville’s Collection of Etruscan, Greek and Roman Antiquities from the Cabinet of the Hon. W. Hamilton His Brittanick Majesty’s Envoy Extraordinary at the Court of Naples (1767–1776) and Eduard Gerhard’s Auserlesene griechische Vasenbilder, hauptsächlich etruskischen Fundorts (1840–1858). Gaifman argues that decisions made in illustrating vases had not so much to do with the constraints of the medium or technical limitations as with considerations such as dimensions, color schemes, and framing strategy. The result was the “unrolled” iconography of the vases as flattened images within square or rectangular panels. Bernard’s (Chapter 6) focus is the research archive begun in the 1820s known as the Gerhard’scher Apparat. The archive consists of books, casts, and over five thousand drawings (many of Greek vases from Italian contexts) and offers insight into Eduard Gerhard and his successor Emil Braun’s vision of archaeology as a scientific discipline. Bernard demonstrates that the creation of the Apparat required a great deal of collaboration between Gerhard and Braun and a network of collectors, art dealers, restorers, and artists.
Lorenz (Chapter 7) examines Adolf Furtwängler and Karl Reichhold’s approach to visualizing Greek vases which moved toward restoring the materiality and physical form of the vessel by highlighting two late fifth-century-BCE hydriae by the Meidias Painter included in Herrvoregende Vasenbilder (1904). Tsingarida (Ch. 8) looks at the importance of drawing in the practice of connoisseurship, most notably by John Davidson Beazley but also by the late 19th-century German practitioners who influenced him, namely Paul Hartwig and Friedrich Hauser. The role of drawing and tracing in Beazley’s identification of the hands of anonymous vase-painters is well known, but Tsingarida emphasizes that it was through the differentiation of master and interior lines used to flesh out figures by the ancient artists, both on whole vases as well as fragments, that Beazley was able to define individual personal visual systems that allowed for attribution. Morton’s (Chapter 9) contribution is noteworthy because of her role as a British Museum illustrator, which allows her to give an insightful discussion of the working processes of her predecessors, their tools, and methods before offering her personal insights about drawing and tracing Greek vases in light of evolving technological advancements.
The final two core essays expand focus to include the use of photography in the reproduction of Greek vases, which came to be used regularly from the latter part of the nineteenth century. Dietrich (Chapter 10) compares the benefits and limitations of both drawing and photography. Dietrich points out that, ironically, photography has often been used in incredibly similar fashion to drawing despite the differences in what it can capture. This phenomenon, it is argued, occurs largely because of the ease of enforcing standardization, cheaper cost, and the lingering, though contested, perception of photography’s supposed objectivity. Nørskov (Chapter 11) turns to the use of photographs of vases on the art market, revealing differences in approach depending on the context—in auction catalogues versus art dealers’ archives, such as that of the 19th- and early 20th-century American art dealer John Marshall. Nørskov contends that these kinds of photographs are staged “performances” crafted to appeal to the interest of prospective buyers, underscoring the fact that the objectivity of photography is illusory.
Closing out the volume, Meyer (Chapter 12) considers the linguistic implications of the different terms used throughout the volume (reproduction, illustration, visualization, representation) to describe the drawn Greek vase, before turning to how drawing has often served to transform Greek vases into objects out of time. Instead, he asserts that vases should be seen as living artifacts that are part of a complex network of relationships that include the drawings used to represent them and the artists who create these representations. The essay ends with a rumination on current tools such as 3D printing and other digital methods which can allow for future transformation of how Greek vases are represented, understood, and engaged with.
A major strength of the volume is that its essays not only synthesize a great deal of material and offer in-depth dissection of their subjects, but they do so by vividly constructing narratives around specific individuals. The contributors competently demonstrate how deeply intertwined the nature of collecting and the art market, scholarship, and artistic practice has been historically. The centrality of a recurring dramatis personae results in an ease of flow from one essay to the next. While each reader will approach the book depending on their academic interests and needs, for specialists, this is the rare edited volume that is best read from start to finish at least once, given the high level of cohesion. The large amount of compelling information on display in both the text and the notes, however, creates the need to revisit individual essays for more comprehensive understanding. A small criticism: each chapter addresses multiple issues germane to its primary focus, making it is easy to become lost moving from one subsection to the next. Unlike the transitions between chapters, those transitions within often come abruptly, creating a disjointed effect at times.
A noteworthy element across the papers that is worth emphasizing is the importance that the people responsible for vase reproductions played, beyond the esteemed names. For every Hamilton or Gerhard or Beazley, there are numerous lesser-known collectors, scholars, agents, and art dealers who played a role in distilling the three-dimensional Greek vase into two-dimensional images that in some cases have probably been seen more frequently than the original source vases. Recently, Diane Harris Cline and Eleni Hasaki have applied social network analysis to Beazley’s lists of vase-painter attributions, mapping out and visualizing the relationships between the artists of the Athenian Kerameikos.[2] Reading through the essays in Drawing the Greek Vase, one has the sense that there is something similar happening in its pages, albeit without the striking visual renderings of nodes and edges. Charted here are the intersecting and overlapping relationships of the individuals who have crafted the alluring modern visions of the Greek vase, transformations though these may be.
In terms of audience, the collection is suited to a range of interests beyond specialization in the titular artifact. The potential broad appeal is thanks largely to the many settings and media in which Greek vases have been reproduced in two-dimensional visual form over the last four centuries. That said, readers who possess passing familiarity with Greek vases and their modern history will, of course, benefit most, along with archaeologists, art historians, and classical reception specialists with more general knowledge of disciplinary history. Scholars in those fields will find much that is illuminating and thought provoking in the essays. For pedagogical purposes, most of the papers in the volume are probably best suited for graduate-level seminars or independent study, but perhaps also particularly rigorous undergraduate upper-level and honors seminars.
In sum, the editors and contributors to Drawing the Greek Vase prove that there is still stimulating scholarship being produced on ancient Greek ceramics, an area of classical archaeology often regarded as old-fashioned and insufficiently cutting-edge and theoretically driven. Indeed, as the editors admit and the contributors demonstrate, there is a great deal of important work that remains to be done. The volume, by mining four centuries of reproductions of Greek vases and examining their genesis, points the way to an array of avenues for future inquiry.
Authors and Titles
- Introduction (Alexia Petsalis-Diomidis)
- Why Drawing Still Matters: Connecting Hands and Minds in the Study of Greek Vases (Caspar Meyer)
- Winckelmann’s Elegant Simplicity: From Three to Two Dimensions and Back Again (Amy C. Smith)
- The Graphic Medium and Artistic Style: Thomas Hope (1769–1831) and Two-Dimensional Encounters with Greek Vases (Alexia Petsalis-Diomidis)
- The Flattened Greek Vase (Milette Gaifman)
- Images of Greek Vases as a Basis for a Scientific Archaeology: Investigating the Archival Legacy of the Gerhard’scher Apparat’s Drawings (Marie-Amélie Bernard)
- Volume and Scale: Adolf Furtwängler and Karl Reichhold’s Hervorragende Vasenbilder and the Study of Visual Narrative on Late Fifth-Century Vases (Katharina Lorenz)
- Drawing as an Instrument of Connoisseurship: J. D. Beazley and His Late Nineteenth-Century Forerunners (Athena Tsingarida)
- Drawing the Greek Vase: A British Museum Illustrator’s Perspective (Kate Morton)
- Drawing vs Photography: On the Gains and Losses of Technical Innovation (Nikolaus Dietrich)
- The Use of Photographs in the Trade of Greek Vases (Vinnie Nørskov)
- Afterword (Caspar Meyer)
Notes
[1] In this collection, the framing of “Greek” vases is used “broadly” and refers to ceramics, including black-figure and red-figure vases, produced in Greece and South Italy from the seventh through fourth centuries BCE (p. 3).
[2] Harris Cline, D. and E. Hasaki. “The Connected World of Potters in Ancient Athens: Collaborations, Connoisseurship, and Social Network Analysis.” CHS Research Bulletin 7 (2019). http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hlnc.essay:ClineD_and_HasakiE.The_Connected_World_of_Potters.2019