3.4 Análisis e Interpretación de Resultados
3.4.2 Informe de Auditoría
Iconographic studies of figured vases have come to dominate contemporary scholarship in ancient Greek cultural studies.4 Countless studies undertaken by scholars have attempted to view these images alongside written source material to further our understanding of Athenian culture.5 This trend has been tempered by warnings that such images are not representative of daily life in Athens, but rather translations of reality into figurative social constructs.6 This means that when the artist figuratively translates lived experience onto the surface of the vase, culturally determined codes of interpretation take the image one step away from the real.7 There can be no direct depiction of reality as the artist is bound up with convention. Lissarrague makes this point well during a study of images of women driven by masculine dominance; “Athenian society was shaped by its male citizens, and the dominant ideology, the ideology that guided painters in their choices and defined their view in a system that left little room for individual initiative or what we would call inspiration, was chiefly masculine”.8
To decode these iconographic constructs the ancient viewer would need knowledge of the visual language unique to Greek and Athenian culture which informed vase production.9 Without cultural awareness, the images remain impenetrable to us as ill-informed viewers.10 Sourvinou-Inwood has stressed the need to penetrate through our own perception filters in order to recognise the “process of signification” imbued in an iconography which has no fixed meaning.11 Not only do we have to battle with our own cultural language when viewing a vase, we need to acknowledge the unconscious contribution of the artist which left behind varied and changeable meanings.12 As modern viewers, it is necessary to guard against “immediate interpretation” of apparently straightforward images, based on our own culturally informed and
4
This has come to replace more traditional studies of the artists, embodied in Beazley, and perpetuated by Robertson, see (1992).
5
For example, see Oakley and Sinos (1993) for the wedding through imagery, Shapiro (1994) for the relationship between text and image.
6
For example, Beard (1991) 20, Lissarrague (1994a) “images only confirm results arrived at by other means” 139, Carpenter (2007) 398-399.
7
Lissarrague (1994a) 140-141.
8 Lissarrague (1994a) 141. 9
The export of Athenian pottery from Greece suggests that the language of Athenian iconography was universal, or at least met with the expectations of other, ‘foreign’ viewers. See Whitley (2004) 360, for the influence of the export market on democratic imagery, and Lynch (2009) 159-165 , for explicit erotic imagery and its motivation by the export market.
10 Ferrari (2002) 4ff. 11
Sourvinou-Inwood (1990) 395ff.
12
common sense response.13 To go beyond this, an increased emphasis needs to be placed upon the role and experience of the ancient viewer, the successive contributions and conventions of artists, and the use of iconographic syntax and symbols to figuratively construct perceptions of Athenian society.14
Other mediums of visual art have long been at the centre of debates and theories of spectatorship and viewing experience. For example, the reaction of audiences at cinema houses has become a distinct branch of film studies, as outlined in the Introduction. Although two clearly distinct forms of visual art, the painted vase and the film are intended to provoke reactions in the viewer, which are influenced by social conditioning. For our purposes, approaches to spectatorship influenced by psychoanalytic theory is adopted and adapted, popular in currents studies of film. The main focus of debate amongst theorists is the opposing reactions of the psychic self and the social unconscious, both of which come into being when interpreting culturally determined images. Some theories propose the overall importance of the self, whilst others favour the social unconscious. Each factor requires further definition; the psychic self, and the response it provokes, is driven by our own memories of shocks or traumas which are then projected upon the image. This reaction is caused by identification with the image, engineered by our own private dreams or imagination. The social unconscious is a level of cognition entirely informed by living in a society. The response this produces is based upon societal conditioning of the familiar. Conventional visual language is read through filters circulated in wider society. Although apparently familiar, such a reaction is unlikely to be based upon the direct experience of the spectator, but rather something the spectator has absorbed over time due to societal conditioning. When talking of spectatorship in film, Aaron states; “The film’s pleasure is managed by social definitions of perversity. The spectator’s response after the fact is not always, indeed is rarely, in league with the spectator’s experience”.15 In other words, due to the social unconscious a spectator’s response to an image draws more from the ideology that surrounds them, than their own experiences and emotions. However, the division between psychic self and the social unconscious is a hazy one.
When this theory is applied to figured vases, it is necessary to keep in mind that the
13 Schmitt-Pantel (1994) 16, Frontisi-Ducroux and Lissarrague (1990) 210. 14
See Frontisi-Ducroux (1996) 81. For an example in Roman art see Elsner (1996) and (2007).
15
reaction the image provoked worked through a complex dualism, which relied upon the viewer’s own imagination – inaccessible to the artist – an imagination which is filtered through the social unconscious. An image might appear to represent the lived experience of the viewer, when in fact, the image results from the individual as part of the collective. How the viewer constructs the image is how the image constructs the viewer. With the aid of this theory, it is possible to combine the social fact of the vase and the provocation of its imagery. Here, discussion applies these considerations to an apparently straightforward and simplistic image.
A red-figure pyxis now in Copenhagen, dated to the late fifth century, inscribed on the lid by the potter Gaurion, depicts a single calyx-krater on its lid (fig. 4.1).16 This single iconographic vase has no part in any larger narrative, but seems to be a straightforward depiction of a vase. However, when situated amongst the wider iconography of sympotic and drinking scenes, the iconographic krater evokes the masculine world. The shape of the Copenhagen pyxis suggests an intended function and viewer in the domestic world, as the imagery and shape of the pyxis is generally described as one of the ‘women’s pots’.17 In Chapter Three we confronted the issue of intentionality and its misleading qualities.18 Here, it is evident that a contradiction remains between the surface and the shape of the vessel. In a similar way, but with less contradiction, a pyxis excavated from the Athenian Agora, also dated to the later fifth century, depicts a single cosmetic box (fig. 4.2).19 Boxes in various sizes are often depicted on such containers and hold important symbolic value for expressing views about women and the feminine, and as a result, the Agora pyxis evoked a feminine identity through an iconographic convention.20 The opened box awaits the return of the opener, who stores mysterious items inside. The viewer is a voyeur in the domestic world. In a detailed assessment of the images of women, Lewis queries the role of the pyxis as a woman’s vase by drawing attention to the volume of containers excavated outside the domestic context; “In fact pyxides on pots themselves are rarely shown in domestic and non-ritual contexts”.21 If it is possible to use iconographic pyxides as illustrative of the
16 Copenhagen, National Museum: 953. A second pyxis, also signed by the Gaurion Potter, depicts a
shield with the device of an arm holding a sword, a strongly masculine image; British Museum, E770.
17 Lissarrague (1995) 97. For a typically feminine image, see for example; Berlin, Pergamonmuseum:
3373.
18 Intention of the artist does not result in realty of the situation. 19
P 23897.
20 Lissarrague (1995) 91ff. The Agora pyxis has letters and markings on its lid and underneath, suggesting
either mark of commercial units or personal ownership; in either case suggesting that the vase fulfilled a practical function in the household, see Lang (1976) esp.p56.
21
function and context, the pyxis more correctly resides in the ritualised context, either an offering or grave good.22 The imagery reflects a construction, not the reality of gendered pots. A second example further illustrates the complexities of the pyxis as a gendered pot, or even as one that epitomises heterosexuality. A black-figure pyxis, now in Mississippi, dated to the second third of the sixth century, and said to have been found in Athens, depicts scenes which connect heterosexual and homosexual relations.23 One scene shows an unveiling bride, standing before the bridegroom, a second scene shows two women sharing a cloak, and a third scene shows intercrural sex between youths. Davidson discusses this vase as particularly significant due to its shape and implied function. Pyxides were commonly associated with weddings, and here, the Mississippi pyxis links the homosexual to the heterosexual wedding as another form of betrothal.24 The Mississippi pyxis is neither a gendered nor heterosexual vessel in this case.
Returning to the Copenhagen pyxis (fig.4.1) it is possible to attempt a second interpretation influenced by its status as an archaeological phenomenon in the ritualised contexts, and a vessel which required the social unconscious. The pyxis is more commonly found outside the domestic context, suggesting that its iconography is misleading in terms of its connection to function. The image was evocative, and not illustrative. The Copenhagen pyxis in particular drew upon a much wider framework of meanings beyond its apparently simple iconography. The viewer sees the single calyx-krater and considers the possibilities of a narrative outside that which is represented by the artist. The krater is depicted in countless communal drinking scenes, allowing the vessel to become a symbol of male collective experience of drinking and excess. The Copenhagen pyxis provokes a combined response, one which draws upon the imagination as informed by conventional figurative language. It epitomises the tension between the seen and the unseen.
In the first section of the discussion which follows, we consider how the krater in particular constructed perceptions of male gender through iconography of the symposium. Although these images appear to depict real life, interpretation of such imagery was informed by social expectations and conventions. These societal and individual influences upon the viewing
lack of pyxides of the Shrine of Nymphe in Athens (see Brouskari (1974)), measured against the popularity of pyxidies as grave goods in the Kerameikos (see Knigge (1976).
22
See Goteborg, Rohsska Mus: 72.58, Athens, Dinopoulos: 8, New York, Metropolitan Museum: 26.60.75, Berkeley , Phoebe Apperson Hearst Mus. of Anthropology: 8.4583.
23 University of Mississippi, 1977.3.72, for a detailed discussion of the image, see Davidson (2007) fig. 54,
597-598.
24
experience determined the response had by the viewer. It was not only the image that provoked a response, but the vessel conveying the image to the viewer. The function/ality of the vase enabled it to interact as part of the social nexus.