Full Description
Most people today encounter ancient Greek vases as static, untouchable artifacts safely out of reach behind glass, in the quiet of a museum gallery. Once, however, these vessels were also useful objects, made to be held, filled, and generally used in a variety of settings, from the ritual to the quotidian. This volume considers these ancient vases together with the theoretical frameworks developed by pioneers of phenomenology such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Edmund Husserl, helping us experience Greek vases as they once were. The principles of phenomenology require that we understand objects as active participants in shaping the manner in which humans experience the world. A phenomenological perspective allows us to see how the function and use of Greek vases shaped both their visual appearance and the perceptual experience of them—as well as our continued understanding of them today—while taking into account multisensory perspectives. With this alternative approach to the study of classical pottery, the authors offer new and illuminating insights not just into the objects in question but also into ancient Greek culture and life more broadly.
Contents
List of Illustrations
List of Abbreviations
Introduction: Experiencing Vases
Carolyn LaferriÈre
Part One
Chapter 1. Ornament, Kant, and the Dependent Beauty of Greek Vases
William Austin
Chapter 2. The Satyr, the Krater, and Hegel: Mediated Subjectivity in a Peucetian Tomb
Savannah Sather Marquardt
Chapter 3. Swallowed by the Vase: Clementina Anstruther-Thomson's Phenomenology of Greek Pottery
Seth Estrin
Chapter 4. The Phenomenology of Pictorial Representation: Gombrich, Wollheim, and Husserl
Guy Hedreen
Chapter 5. Pandora's Pseudea and the Truth in Art: A Phenomenological Interpretation of the Niobid Painter's Krater (BM 1856,1213.1)
Clifford Robinson
Chapter 6. Merleau-Ponty and the Greek Vase
SeungJung Kim
Chapter 7. The Unmanly Behind: Queer Phenomenology and the Male Body in Athenian Vase Painting
Anthony F. Mangieri
Part Two
Chapter 8. Phenomenological Approaches to Archaic Boeotian Zoomorphic Rhyta in Their Ancient Use Context
Trevor Van Damme
Chapter 9. Reading (into) the Writing on Vases on Vases: Self-Referentiality in Late Archaic Athenian Red-Figure Vase Painting
Seth Pevnick
Chapter 10. Colors and the Gloss Effect in Attic Black- and Red-Figure Pottery
Arne Reinhardt
Chapter 11. An Embodied View of the Figured Greek Kylix
D. Buck Roberson
Chapter 12. On Douris's Cup with Amazons
David Saunders and Sanchita Balachandran
Chapter 13. The Ecology of Festival Ware
Amy C. Smith and Katerina Volioti
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
References
Contributors
Index
