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.
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