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The proem to Herodotus's history of the Greek-Persian wars relates
the long-standing conflict between Europe and Asia from the points
of view of the Greeks' chief antagonists, the Persians and
Phoenicians. However humorous or fantastical these accounts may be,
their stories, as voiced by a Greek, reveal a great deal about the
perceived differences between Greeks and others. The conflict is
framed in political, not absolute, terms correlative to historical
events, not in terms of innate qualities of the participants. It is
this perspective that informs the argument of The Art of Contact:
Comparative Approaches to Greek and Phoenician Art. Becky Martin
reconsiders works of art produced by, or thought to be produced by,
Greeks and Phoenicians during the first millennium B.C., when they
were in prolonged contact with one another. Although primordial
narratives that emphasize an essential quality of Greek and
Phoenician identities have been critiqued for decades, Martin
contends that the study of ancient history has not yet effectively
challenged the idea of the inevitability of the political and
cultural triumph of Greece. She aims to show how the methods used
to study ancient history shape perceptions of it and argues that
art is especially positioned to revise conventional accountings of
the history of Greek-Phoenician interaction. Examining Athenian and
Tyrian coins, kouros statues and mosaics, as well as the familiar
Alexander Sarcophagus and the sculpture known as the "Slipper
Slapper," Martin questions what constituted "Greek" and
"Phoenician" art and, by extension, Greek and Phoenician identity.
Explicating the relationship between theory, method, and
interpretation, The Art of Contact destabilizes categories such as
orientalism and Hellenism and offers fresh perspectives on Greek
and Phoenician art history.
Miniature and fragmentary objects are both eye-catching and yet
easily dismissed. Tiny scale entices users with visions of
Lilliputian worlds. The ambiguity of fragments intrigues us,
offering tactile reminders of reality's transience. Yet, the
standard scholarly approach to such objects has been to see them as
secondary, incomplete things, whose principal purpose was to refer
to a complete and often life-size whole. The Tiny and the
Fragmented offers a series of fresh perspectives on the familiar
concepts of the tiny and the fragmented. Written by a prestigious
group of internationally-acclaimed scholars, the volume presents a
remarkable diversity of case studies that range from Neolithic
Europe to pre-Colombian Honduras to the classical Mediterranean and
ancient Near East. Each scholar takes a different approach to
issues of miniaturization and fragmentation but is united in
considering the little and broken things of the past as objects in
their own right. Whether a life-size or whole thing is made in a
scaled-down form, deliberately broken as part of its use, or only
considered successful in the eyes of ancient users if it shows some
signs of wear, it challenges our expectations of representation and
wholeness, of what it means for a work of art to be "finished" and
"affective." Overall, The Tiny and the Fragmented demands a
reconsideration of the social and contextual nature of
miniaturization, fragmentation, and incompleteness, making the case
that it was because of, rather than in spite of, their small or
partial state that these objects were valued parts of the personal
and social worlds they inhabited.
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