The Image of the Artist in Archaic and Classical Greece

Art, Poetry, and Subjectivity

Guy Hedreen

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781107118256
• eBook ISBN: 9781316455739
• Topic: Kunst
• Subtopic: Kunstgeschichte der Antike

This book explores the persona of the artist in Archaic and Classical Greek art and literature. Guy Hedreen argues that artistic subjectivity, first expressed in Athenian vase-painting of the sixth century BCE and intensively explored by Euphronios, developed alongside a self-consciously constructed persona of the poet. He explains how poets like Archilochos and Hipponax identified with the wily Homeric character of Odysseus as a prototype of the successful narrator, and how the lame yet resourceful artist-god Hephaistos is emulated by Archaic vase-painters such as Kleitias. In lyric poetry and pictorial art, Hedreen traces a widespread conception of the artist or poet as socially marginal, and sometimes physically imperfect, but rhetorically clever, technically peerless, and a master of fiction. Bringing together in a sustained analysis the roots of subjectivity across media, this book offers a new way of studying the relationship between poetry and art in ancient Greece.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title
• Title page
• Copyright information
• Dedication
• Table of contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Introduction: ‘‘I Am Odysseus’’
• Chapter One Smikros and Euphronios: Pictorial alter ego
• Chapter Two Archilochos, the Fictional Creator-Protagonist, and Odysseus
• Chapter Three Hipponax and His Make-Believe Artists
• Chapter Four Hephaistos in Epic: Analog of Odysseus and Antithesis to Thersites
• Chapter Five Pictorial Subjectivity and the Shield of Achilles on the François Vase
• Chapter Six Frontality, Self-reference, and Social Hierarchy:
• Chapter Seven Writing and Invention in the Vase-Painting of Euphronios and His Circle
• Epilogue: Persuasion, Deception, and Artistry
• Notes
• References
• Index
• Color plates