Drawing the Greek Vase

How have two-dimensional images of ancient Greek vases shaped modern perceptions of these artefacts and of the classical past? This is the first scholarly volume devoted to the exploration of drawings, prints, and photographs of Greek vases in modernity. Case studies of the seventeenth to the twentieth century foreground ways that artists have depicted Greek vases in a range of styles and contexts within and beyond academia. Questions addressed include: how do these images translate three-dimensional ancient utilitarian objects with iconography central to the tradition of Western painting and decorative arts into two-dimensional graphic images carrying aesthetic and epistemic value? How does the embodied practice of drawing enable people to engage with Greek vases differently from museum viewers, and what insights does it offer on ancient producers and users? And how did the invention of photography impact the tradition of drawing Greek vases? The volume addresses art historians of the seventeenth to twentieth centuries, archaeologists and classical reception scholars.

About the Author

Caspar Meyer is Professor of Classical Archaeology and Material Culture at the Bard Graduate Center in New York. His research focuses on the cultural dynamics of craft production in the Aegean city states and among the mobile pastoralists of Eurasia. Another area of interest is the history of the instruments and media which archaeologists have developed to aid the transformation of artefacts into written explanations. He previously taught in London and held research fellowships at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles and the Centre Louis Gernet in Paris. He is editor of W86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture . Alexia Petsalis-Diomidis is Senior Lecturer in Classics at the University of St Andrews. She has published Truly beyond Wonders: Aelius Aristides and the Cult of Asklepios (OUP 2010) and many articles on religion, travel, and the body in the Greek world of the Hellenistic and Roman periods. She also works on the reception of Classical material culture in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, and has edited The Classical Vase Transformed: Consumption, Reproduction, and Class in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain (OUP 2020) with E. Hall.