Images in mind : statues in archaic and classical Greek literature and thought / Deborah Tarn Steiner.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Steiner, Deborah, 1960-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Greek literature--History and criticism.

Greek literature.

Statues in literature.

Art and literature--Greece.

Art and literature.

Sculpture in literature.

Aesthetics, Ancient.

Statues--Greece.

Statues.

Sculpture, Greek.

Greece.

Physical Description:

xviii, 360 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, [2001]

Summary:

In archaic and classical Greece, statues played a constant role in people's religious, political, economic, aesthetic, and mental lives. Evidence of many kinds demonstrates that ancient Greeks thought about -- and interacted with -- statues in ways very different from our own. This book recovers ancient thinking about statues by approaching them through contemporary literary sources. It not only shows that ancient viewers conceived of images as more operative than aesthetic, but additionally reveals how poets and philosophers found in sculpture a practice "good to think with."

Deborah Tarn Steiner considers how Greek authors used images to ponder the relation of a copy to an original and of external appearance to inner reality. For these writers, a sculpture could straddle life and death, encode desire, or occasion reflection on their own act of producing a text. Many of the same sources also reveal how thinking about statues was reflected in the objects' everyday treatment. Viewing representations of gods and heroes as vessels hosting a living force, worshippers ritually washed, clothed, and fed them in order to elicit the numinous presence within.

By reading the plastic and verbal sources together, this book offers new insights into classical texts while illuminating the practices surrounding the design, manufacture, and deployment of ancient images. Its argument that images are properly objects of cultural and social -- rather than purely aesthetic -- study will attract art historians, cultural historians, and anthropologists, as well as classicists.

Contents:

Chapter 1 Replacement and Replication 3

Replacing the Absent 5

Replication and Its Limits 19

Developments in Late Archaic and Classical Statuary 26

Works of Art in Fifth-Century Texts 44

Late Classical Images and the Platonic Account 56

Chapter 2 Inside and Out 79

Representing Divinity 80

Cult Activities 105

Vacant or Full? 120

Chapter 3 The Quick and the Dead 135

Inanimate Images and the Dead 136

Divine Motion and Sight 156

Chapter 4 For Love of a Statue 185

Image Love in Literary Accounts 186

Real-World Viewing 207

Chapter 5 The Image in the Text 251

The Funerary Monument 252

Victory Statues 259

Honorific Statues and the Encomiastic Address 265

Imaging the Word 281

Epilogue: Lucian's Retrospective 295.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [329]-342) and indexes.

ISBN:

0691044317

OCLC:

44573398