Visual Conversations is a series designed to foster a new model of comparative inquiry in the histories of ancient art. The aim is to create the spirit of a comparative conversation across the different areas of the art history and archaeology of the pre-modern world—across Eurasia, Africa, Australasia, and the Americas—in ways that are academically and theoretically stimulating. The books serve collectively as a public platform to demonstrate by example the possibilities of a comparative exercise of working with objects across cultures and religions within defined, but broad, historical trajectories.
Vessels
The Object as Container
Edited by CLAUDIA BRITTENHAM
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom
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The authors dedicate this book with gratitude to their students and to the attendees at the Global Ancient Art conferences, whose conversation and debate have inspired these essays.
PREFACE
Richard Neer
The Chicago Center for Global Ancient Art was founded in 2009 by members of the Department of Art History at the University of Chicago. Its animating idea is that a new research paradigm is emerging within art history. Antiquity was, of course, one of the original topics of this discipline as it emerged in Europe in the eighteenth century. For many years, however, art history derived its basic research questions, and its accepted ways of answering such questions, from the study of more recent epochs: the Latin Middle Ages, the European Renaissance, nineteenth-century Paris, 1960s New York. That situation is changing: as the discipline grows and expands, new questions, and new ways of answering them, start to appear. The Center, in particular, explores two developments in recent scholarship: an increasing tendency amongst art historians to study archaeological corpora, and a corresponding tendency amongst archaeologists to move beyond functionalism into “art-historical” topics like beholding, iconography, materials, phenomenology, stylistics, and aesthetics. What happens when these two worlds collide?
We define ancient in procedural terms: wherever it is from, whenever it was made, art is “ancient” if our knowledge of it derives to a significant degree from archaeological data: stratigraphic, archaeometric, typological/stylistic, even quantitative. Antiquity is, in short, a function of method. Because these methods apply to a broad range of regions and corpora, this definition makes it possible to speak in global, comparative terms: a comparativism, however, not so much of the objects of knowledge as of the ways of producing and ordering them. Scholars of ancient China, Greece, and Mexico may work with radically different materials and possess radically different research skills, yet they all use similar kinds of data, and produce facts in similar ways. In a discipline that still partitions itself according to nation, religion, and date (we have sinologists and classicists, modernists and Islamists), these affinities of method provide a new, “horizontal” way to organize research. On offer, in short, is a comparativism of method.
Perhaps the most controversial, even tendentious aspect of this program is the use of the term art. This usage may seem cavalier: art, we are sometimes told, is a quintessentially modern concept that can be applied to older or alien materials only on pain of gross anachronism. We do not pretend to know in advance the compass of this term, or the limits of the aesthetic. On the contrary, it is only by testing the methods of art history against the materials and protocols
of archaeology that we may be in a position to discover whether our questions are well-formed, our answers cogent. Like “global” and “ancient,” in short, our use of the term “art” is procedural, a function of method: a usage that, in its turn, enables comparison across cultures, times, and places. Each volume in this series examines, and compares, a basic concept or category of art-historical and archaeological inquiry. Unlike the widely available Handbooks or Companions to standing fields of inquiry, these books do not codify or survey well-defined bodies of knowledge. They are, instead, exploratory: at once primers for students seeking to expand their research horizons, and provocations to specialists. On offer, in short, is theory from the ground up: an apt description, we hope, of a truly archaeological history of art.
List of Illustrations xi
List of Contributors xv
Introduction 1
Claudia Brittenham
1. Ancient Greek Vessels between Sea, Earth, and Clouds 6
Richard Neer
2. A Roman Vessel for Cosmetics: Form, Decoration, and Subjectivity in the Muse Casket 50
Jas Elsner
3. When Pots Had Legs: Body Metaphors on Maya Vessels 81
Claudia Brittenham
4. Practice and Discourse: Ritual Vessels in a Fourth-Century bce Chinese Tomb 120
Wu Hung Index
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
1.1 Attic black-figure eye-cup by Exekias: eyes and battles. 9
1.2 Chalcidian eye-cup by the Phineus Painter 11
1.3 Boeotian kantharos in the form of a ship and of a boar, by the Painter of Boston 01.8110: triton, sirens, dolphins. 12
1.4 Attic bilingual cup by the Painter of London E2: youth with a transport amphora, ships. 13
1.5 Attic red-figured cup in the manner of Douris: Herakles in the cup of the Sun. 14
1.6 Attic black-figure eye-cup with phallic foot by the Lysippides Painter (“the Bomford Cup”). 15
1.7 Attic black-figure cup in the shape of a female breast (mastos). 16
1.8 East Greek oil flask in the shape of male genitalia (aidoion). 17
1.9 Attic red-figured cup by Epiktetos: satyrs disporting with amphorae. 18
1.10 Attic red-figure statuette-vase (rhyton) in the form of a satyr abusing a donkey. 19
1.11 Early Corinthian trick vessel of the Komast Group. 20
1.12 Terracotta flask in the form of a maenad, from Phanagoria. 21
1.13 Attic Middle Geometric belly-handled amphora from the Kerameikos cemetery. 23
1.14 Attic Late Geometric belly-handled amphora by the Dipylon Master (“the Dipylon Amphora”): laying out of corpse, mourner. 25
1.15 Attic white-ground le kythos with false bottom by the Achilles Painter. 27
1.16 Attic white-ground le kythos by the Vouni Painter: visit to the tomb. 28
1.17 Attic white-ground le kythos by the Achilles Painter: visit to the tomb, ghost with psyche 29
1.18 Attic black-figure loutrophoros. Body: laying out of corpse. Neck: mourners (including one with a loutrophoros). 31
1.19 Stele of Aiskhron of Kephale, from Attica: loutrophoros with figural scene. 32
1.20 White-ground le kythos by the Painter of London 1905: visit to the tomb, with loutrophoros-stele. 33
1.22 Attic grave stele: woman leaning on loutrophoros
1.23 Attic loutrophoros stele: gymnasium scene.
1.24 Attic grave stele of Panaitios: vessels.
1.25 Attic grave stele of Panaitios: detail of boy rolling hoop.
2.1 The major sur viving items from the Esquiline Treasure now in the collection of the British Museum.
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2.2 The Muse Casket from the Esquiline Treasure. 52
2.3 Hanging bowl from the Water Newton Treasure, excavated in England in 1975. 54
2.4 Four th-century mosaic figure of a servant carrying a square casket on three chains, from Piazza Armerina in Sicily. 55
2.5 Detail of a four th-century silver repoussé figure of a servant carrying a round casket with a lid hanging from chains, from the Projecta Casket of the Esquiline Treasure.
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2.6 The Toiletry Casket from the Sevso Treasure. 56
2.7 The Muse Casket from above. 57
2.8 The fluted dish from the Esquiline Treasure. 58
2.9 The fluted dish from the Mildenhall Treasure, excavated in England in 1942. 59
2.10 The fluted dish from the Mildenhall Treasure, exterior view, upside down (with base ring at top).
2.11 The Muse Casket, medallion at the top of the domed cover.
2.12 The Muse Casket, open, with the interior containers (four cylindrical canisters and one flask, all in silver) in place.
2.13 The Muse Casket, fully open with the interior containers displaced and fully visible.
2.14 The Sevso Casket, base showing the internal pierced silver disk to accommodate seven flasks of equal diameter.
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2.15 The Muse Casket, exterior of base: vase with central shaft, vine with rosette and furled leaf and birds, flanked by Urania and Melpomene. 65
2.16 The Muse Casket, exterior of base: vase with central shaft, vine with grapes and birds, flanked by Clio and Polyhymnia.
2.17 The Muse Casket, exterior of base: muse par tly covered by solder: either Erato or Terpsichore.
2.18 The Muse Casket, exterior of base: vase with central shaft, vine with rosette and furled leaf and birds, flanked by Euterpe and Thalia.
2.19 The Muse Casket, exterior of base: front with wreath and birds flanked by Calliope and Urania.
2.20 Jug with the nine Muses, found in western Russia.
2.21 Lady at her toilet with a ser vant maid, open domed-lacquer toiletry casket with interior vessels by her side. Admonition Scroll, after Gu Kaizhi.
3.1 Basal-flange bowl excavated from Burial PNT-025, Tikal.
3.2 Tetrapod bowl with bird lid, excavated from Burial PNT-062, Tikal.
3.3 Tetrapod bowl showing a bird on the lid catching a fish; four peccary heads form the supports for the vessel.
3.4 Tripod bowl from Uaxactun Burial A20.
3.5 Basal-flange bowl with a bird on the lid and a turtle on the basal flange, excavated from Burial PNT-062, Tikal.
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3.6 Tripod vessel from Burial 10, Tikal. 91
3.7 Line drawings of the tripod vessel from Burial 10, Tikal. 92
3.8 Teotihuacan Thin Orange Ware tripod vessel with lid. 92
3.9 Teotihuacan tripod vessel with stucco decoration. 93
3.10a–b Tripod vessel from Tikal Problematical Deposit 50. 93–94
3.11a–b Tripod vessel from Burial 10, Tikal. 97
3.12a–b Tripod vessel from Burial 10, Tikal. 98
3.13 Mold-made heads from Teotihuacan figurines. 99
3.14 Teotihuacan, aquatic scene from the Zona 5-A apartment compound. 100
3.15 Río Azul Tomb 1. 101
3.16 Plan of Burial 10, Tikal, Yax Nuun Ahiin’s tomb. 102
3.17 Lidded vessel from Burial 10, Tikal. 103
3.18 Stucco-painted lidded tripod vessel from Burial 48, Tikal. 104
3.19 Plan of Burial 116, Tikal, Jasaw Chan K’awiil’s tomb. 106
4.1a–b “Design of Cuo’s funerar y park,” found in Cuo’s tomb. 123
4.2 Cross-section of Cuo’s tomb reconstructed by Yang Hongxun. 125
4.3 Cuo’s tomb. 126
4.4 Photo of Cuo’s tomb, showing the second level and “storage pits.” 127
4.5 Reconstr uction of Cuo’s tomb. 127
4.6 Drawing of the west chamber 130
4.7 Drawing of the east chamber 131
4.8 Group A in the west chamber. 134
4.9 Hu (vessel), commissioned by Cuo. 135
4.10 Ding (tripod), commissioned by Cuo. 136
4.11 Group B in the west chamber. 140
4.12 Group B in the west chamber. 141
4.13 Hu with an inscription by Ci from the east chamber. 144
4.14 Possible grouping of some objects in the east chamber. 147
4.15 Bronze lamp from the east chamber. 148
4.16 Inlaid table stand from the east chamber. 149
4.17 Middle stand of a folding screen from the east chamber. 150
4.18 Gold belt plaque, Siberia. 150
4.19 Inlaid hu from the east chamber. 152
4.20 Cylinder-shaped object from the east chamber. 153
4.21 Potter y ding from Cuo’s tomb. 154
4.22 Potter y he (pitcher) from Cuo’s tomb. 155
4.23 Potter y basin with a sculpted bird from Cuo’s tomb. 156
4.24 Bronze basin with a sculpted bird from Cuo’s tomb. 157
4.25 Group C in the west chamber. 159
4.26 “Tomb quelling beast” from Tianxingguan Tomb 1. 160
4.27 Potter y dou (stemmed dish), Shandong. 167
Whilst ever y effort has been made to secure permission to reproduce the illustrations, we may have failed in a few cases to trace the copyright holders. If contacted, the publisher will be pleased to rectify any omissions at the earliest opportunity.
LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS
Claudia Brittenham is Associate Professor of Art History and the College at the University of Chicago. Her research focuses on the art of Mesoamerica, especially Central Mexico and the Maya area, with particular interests in the materiality of art and the politics of style. She is the author of The Murals of Cacaxtla: The Power of Painting in Ancient Central Mexico (University of Texas Press, 2015), The Spectacle of the Late Maya Court: Reflections on the Murals of Bonampak (University of Texas Press, 2013; co-authored with Mary Miller), and Veiled Brightness: A History of Ancient Maya Color (University of Texas Press, 2009; co-authored with Stephen Houston, Cassandra Mesick, Alexandre Tokovinine, and Christina Warinner).
Jas Elsner is Professor of Late Antique Art at the University of Oxford and Humfry Payne Senior Research Fellow in Classical Archaeology and Art at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He has been a Visiting Professor in Art History at the University of Chicago since 2003, and also at the Divinity School since 2014, and was Senior Research Keeper in the Empires of Faith Project on art and religion in late antiquity at the British Museum from 2013 to 2018. Since 2009 he has been an Honorary Foreign Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and in 2017 he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy. He works on art and its many receptions (including ritual, religion, pilgrimage, viewing, description, collecting) in antiquity and Byzantium, including into modernity, with strong interests in comparativism, global art history, and the critical historiography of the discipline.
Richard Neer is Barbara E. and Richard J. Franke Distinguished Service Professor in Art History, Cinema & Media Studies and the College at the University of Chicago, where he is also Director of the Franke Institute for the Humanities. From 2010 to 2018 he was the Executive Editor of the journal Critical Inquiry, where he continues to serve as a co-editor. He has published widely on Greek art, early modern French painting, stylistics, and cinema. His most recent volumes are Art and Archaeology of the Greek World: A New History, 2500–100 bce , 2nd edition (Thames & Hudson, 2018); Davidson and His Interlocutors , co-edited with Daniele Lorenzini (special issue of Critical Inquiry , Winter 2019); and Pindar, Song, and Space: Towards a Lyric Archaeology, co-authored with Leslie Kurke (Johns Hopkins, 2019). He is also editor of Conditions of Visibility, another volume from the Center for Global Ancient Art, forthcoming from Oxford University Press.
Wu Hung is Harrie A. Vanderstappen Distinguished Service Professor of Art History and the College at the University of Chicago, and also Director of the
Center for the Art of East Asia and Consulting Curator of the Smart Museum of Art. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, and sits on the boards and advisory committees of many research institutes and museums in both the United States and China. He has published widely on both traditional and contemporary Chinese art, experimenting with different ways to integrate these conventionally separate phases into new kinds of art historical narratives, as exemplified by two of his most recent books, A Story of Ruins: Presence and Absence in Chinese Art and Visual Culture (Princeton University Press, 2012) and Zooming In: Histories of Photography in China (University of Chicago Press, 2016). Several of his ongoing projects follow this direction to explore the interrelation between art medium, pictorial image, and architectural space, the dialectical relationship between absence and presence in Chinese art and visual culture, and the relationship between art discourse and practice.
The contributors to this volume are the founding members of the Center for Global Ancient Art at the University of Chicago.
Introduction
Claudia Brittenham
The vessel might seem an unproblematic category. Vessels are, after all, essential to human survival. They are necessary to contain water, to cook, to store food and goods for future use. Nearly all societies have made and used them; indeed, clay vessels, or their fragments, are one of the principal kinds of archaeological data that give us empirical access into distant worlds of the past. A good proportion of ancient art in museum collections around the world consists of things we would categorize as vessels.
Such ubiquity makes vessels central to many kinds of historical investigation. Archaeologists rely on quantitative surveys of durable potsherds to answer questions about chronology, population, trade, and the function of particular spaces, while close attention to the iconography on vessels furnishes important documentary evidence about many aspects of ancient society. Yet as the essays in this volume demonstrate, such approaches by no means exhaust the perspectives that vessels may offer on ancient societies. Many vessels—and assemblages of vessels— were in their own time sites of considerable intellectual power, smart and sophisticated commentaries on the very categories that they embody.
On closer examination, the category of the vessel is complex. A vessel is defined not only by its shape, but also by its function, by the presumption that it contains something, though that something may be concealed when the vessel is in use and is not always easy to reconstruct from the archaeological record. But what about a Greek rhyton, a drinking horn with an opening at the bottom, so that liquids poured into one end stream out the other? What about an unused vessel that never held its intended contents; a Maya chocolate pot, broken and then repaired in a way that is no longer watertight; or a thin and fragile gu cup from a Chinese tomb, the form so attenuated that it could never be used? “Is it really a vessel?” is perhaps the least interesting question we can ask about these objects. As Richard Neer argues in his essay in this volume, for us as much as for the ancient Greeks, the value of the category “vessel” might lie precisely in its openness.
In the ease with which the functional becomes conceptual, the ease with which the idea of a container develops into a compelling metaphor, we can see ancient people thinking through objects.
In exploring how vessels can both reflect and shape ideas about the world, it becomes obvious that the analytical techniques ready to hand are only the beginning—and, indeed, that our ways of classifying and studying ancient vessels often work against a deeper understanding of their ancient meaning. As several essays in this volume mention, the way that archaeological reports frequently separate vessels by medium (clay in one place, wood or metal in another) and then further sort them by shape and chronology works against fine-grained studies of context and assemblage. It also makes it harder to see the play among media that frequently characterizes vessels the world over. Likewise, art historians’ focus on only the finest, most iconographically dense objects—the ones most suited to traditional art-historical analysis—not only leaves its practitioners open to accusations of elitism but also neglects vital relationships between these most elite objects and the class or series of more mundane objects from which they emerge. Vessels, like so many other kinds of ancient art, challenge traditional arthistorical methods, for which the normative object is a flat painting made by a named artist and intended for display. In what follows, I outline some of the defining characteristics of vessels that pose the greatest methodological challenges for their study.
A vessel is not flat. As a putative container—be it for a liquid, a solid food, or a more evocative substance like incense—a vessel has certain functional constraints. By necessity it has an inside and an outside. The whole cannot be seen at once; the surface is continuous and topologically complex. Vessels are the ultimate tactile or haptic objects, utterly unsympathetic to the optic discourses governing so much contemporary high art and to the flat photographic discourses dominating our contemporary virtual consumption of art, whether as reproductions in books and journals or as images in the world of the internet. When we encounter a rolled-out image of the scene on a Greek vase or a Maya cylindrical chocolate cup, we must also strive to recall the way the image spreads over a three-dimensional surface, not all visible simultaneously, requiring that the vessel be rotated in the holder’s hands.
A vessel is interactive. Contrary to the current museum model of objects unavailable behind glass cases, vessels cr y out to be handled, turned, peered into, opened, fondled, eaten from. A vessel exists to connect a human being, its user, to the materials stored inside the object. A vessel is thus always one element of a triangle: the material form in which the user and the substance can meet, the relic or memory of both a particular moment of personal usage and of a social institution of usage prevalent at a given time and place. For ancient societies, it is a window—however opaque or pellucid, however clear or obscure its modes of
usage—into how a world worked, how people used things, how they crafted items to enable their further use of things, and how they thought about these processes of crafting and using.
Yet a vessel not only invites human interaction, but also may define a particular kind of space. A space where wine is mixed in a dinos in ancient Greece is a symposium; a space where a reliquary contains a relic is a shrine in Buddhist or Christian tradition; a place where the nine ritual vessels are assembled in the proper order in China is a tomb or a temple that honors the ancestors. Of course, vessels don’t always show up in the archaeological record in the contexts in which they were used; rarely do we find an interrupted meal, for example, perfectly preserved, or a ritual procession in progress. And places where vessels do tend to aggregate, like tombs, may be only the final stop on a long itinerary. In other cases, as in Inka feasts, vessels might be destroyed after their use and only painstakingly pieced back together in modern times.
No vessel is sui generis. Any vessel is an entry into a long series of objects related by morphological and functional constraints, by the pragmatic possibilities of the kinds of material in which its class of objects was normally made, as well as by the bonds of tradition. If archaeology has traditionally focused on the aggregate at the expense of the individual object, art history often places too much emphasis on the genius of an individual work, losing sight of the series to which it belongs. Yet even the most exquisitely decorated vessels, or the vessels made out of the most precious materials, or even the ritual vessels elaborated beyond the possibility of function are in dialogue with more humble and utilitarian objects.
Our evidence is always partial. Vessels that survive whole or in good enough shape to be restored to something of their former glory, the kinds of objects most likely to make their way into museums and other collections, are—we must remember—only one small fraction of the vessels used in antiquity. Many more vessels ended up in the midden or trash heap, worn out and used up, and those fragments, particularly of clay vessels, might then find other uses, as supports for spindles, as ballast for sailing ships, or as saggers to protect yet more pots during firing. Vessels made out of perishable substances—wood, gourd, or animal hides, for example—are radically underrepresented, as are vessels made of precious metals such as gold, silver, or bronze that were often converted back into currency or into another precious thing. Clay was always a choice, and its centrality to archaeological schemes of classification and chronology should not blind us to that.
Finally, vessels as they have come to us in the archaeological record often exist as part of assemblages. They may be part of matched sets of objects of similar function and appearance, such as a set of wineglasses, that create relationships of commensality and equality among those that hold them; or there may be groupings of items with disparate functions, whose combination is required by tradition, such as the nine types of ritual vessels required for a Chinese tomb or the
numerous items of silverware so often found in late Roman hoards. As Wu Hung argues in his essay in this volume, we need to pay more attention to the act of assemblage itself as an intellectual and creative endeavor. Because of its place within such a bound system, some substitution of any given vessel might be possible within the logic of its culture, like Saussure’s chess piece that can be replaced with a walnut. Although functional constraints may be more stringent for vessels than for chess pieces, one can still drink wine out of a coffee mug if all of the wineglasses are in use, yet even this example demonstrates how tightly our conception of a vessel is bound to its intended contents and function.
Indeed, vessel typologies, which name and classify vessels by their shape and function, privilege this kind of analytical rigidity, ignoring possibilities of play and pragmatic substitution. The very precision of terminology, with its instrumental uses to help us assign dates or places of production, can be a distraction from broader questions, and we need to be aware of the distinctions between ancient emic vocabularies for discussing and using vessels and our modern impulse to typologize and classify.
The essays in this volume all go beyond and cut across traditional vessel typologies. Richard Neer’s essay complicates the very category of the vessel in Classical Greece, arguing that this category was, for the ancients as for us, open and unbounded, subject to creative reinterpretation around the margins. Ranging freely from eye-cups—simultaneously wine vessels and masks—to kraters in the form of ships to vessels shaped like bodies or body parts to stone relief sculptures of vessels marking graves, he demonstrates just what a fruitful and porous concept the vessel was in ancient Greece, in contexts from the tipsy symposium to the stillness of death.
Jas Elsner’s essay focuses on a Late Antique silver vessel recovered from a cached hoard. A container for cosmetics, with further vessels contained within, it raises issues about inside and outside, concealment and revelation, gender, ornament, and the process of self-adornment that it supports. Ultimately, he concludes, the meaning of the object resides in the now-lost play between container, contained, and user—or indeed users, for the vessel surely addressed the bodies and subjectivities of servants as well as elites.
Yet morphology is not meaning, and formal similarity may conceal significant difference, as I suggest in a study of vessels found in royal tombs at the Maya city of Tikal during the first millennium ce. Examining three distinct historical moments when vessels with human heads on the lids asserted a metaphorical equivalence between a human body and a vessel, I argue that the precise resonances of the body metaphor changed dramatically over the years, from a potentially unsuccessful evocation of a generic female body to a eulogistic portrait of a deceased king. At the same time, the context of the body metaphor moved from the realm of the living to that of the dead, from vessels made for courtly feasts
and only later deposited in tombs, to objects made specifically for funerar y purposes. Her e, the artists of later vessels productively cited earlier exemplars, transforming their meaning in the process.
Assemblage as well as the forms of specific vessels may be a site of significant meaning, as Wu Hung argues in his study of a fourth-century bce Chinese royal tomb. By paying close attention to the contexts and materials of the many vessels recovered within the tomb, he is able to regroup them into sets, to reconstruct different rituals carried out around the death of the king of Zhongshan, and to tie them to the very particular historical circumstances surrounding his death. Equally important, he demonstrates that these rituals represented a particular kind of Confucian piety on the part of the king, his heir, and their advisors.
The goal of bringing together such geographically and chronologically disparate objects of study in a single volume is not to seek abstract generalizations about the nature of vessels the world over. On the contrary, the essays demonstrate a conviction that the most fruitful comparative conversation is one that is historically grounded and contextually sensitive. Such comparison throws into relief assumptions that we each take for granted in our particular time and place of study and offers a new range of propositions to test against our respective corpora. It also creates space for methodological experimentation and for reflection about method, allowing us to look productively anew at familiar things.
In the end, all the authors agree, what matters as much as the function and shape of a vessel is context—not just that the vessel effectively held what it was meant to hold but the social situations in which the vessel was used and displayed. And, here, a vessel in the archaeological record can capture only a part of a complex and multisensory experience: the delicious aromas rising from steaming hot dishes; the increasingly fluent wit of tongues loosened by wine; the solemn majesty of the proper ritual music attending an offering. Such context can never be fully reimagined, but we hope that the essays gathered in this volume suggest new avenues for investigating some of the ancient world’s most persistent material metaphors.
Ancient Greek Vessels between Sea, Earth, and Clouds
Richard Neer 1
We do not know the boundaries because none have been drawn. To repeat, we can draw a boundary—for a special purpose. Does it take this to make the concept usable? Not at all! Except perhaps for that special purpose.
Ludwig Wittgenstein 2009, §I.69
For François Lissarrague
What is a vessel? It is, first and foremost, a tool. It is a tool historically, in the prosaic sense of an item manufactured in the more or less distant past for the purpose of containing something. But a vessel is also a tool for historians: vessel is a taxonomic term, naming a category of data that we use to build arguments. An animating idea of the present volume is that these two tools may not be identical. It is for this reason that it makes sense to ask: What is, what counts as, a vessel? One might rephrase this question more precisely to say: What are the necessary and/or sufficient conditions of being a vessel? This way of putting it is very Greek, even Socratic. But what if there are no such conditions, nothing that does the work of essence when it comes to vessels? That seems, in fact, to be the case when it comes to Archaic and Classical Greek materials. This is not to say that ancient Greek vessels had nothing in common beyond the fact that they were called vessels (angeia, skeue ). What these objects had in common is that they were vessels, which is to say that they answered to a certain use. In early Greece, the application of a term like vessel was arbitrary, not random, and could be projected into new and unexpected contexts. There is no answer to the question, What is a vessel? if, like Socrates, we take it to request a definition; the demand for a definition only leads to problems. I will make this point informally, by demonstration and reductio
It may be tempting to identify the two ways of using the word vessel that I have just described with the anthropologist’s distinction between emic and etic categories.1 How does the “insider’s view,” the emic category, of a given type-concept relate to the “outsider’s perspective,” the etic one? This way of putting the matter begs the question in at least two ways. The first way has to with the distinction itself, the second, with the notion of category that it implies. Regarding the first, a comparative archaeology brings out very quickly the flimsiness of the emic/etic distinction. Exactly because archaeological evidence is so sparse and archaeological inference so ampliative, it is apparent that we come to know emic categories only through etic ones, only through our own “schematization” of the evidence. Insofar as the vessel is a primary tool by which we come to know the ancient past, a basic category by which we identify and organize data, it is a precondition, not a product, of research. No emic categories, therefore, without etic ones, and so the distinction collapses.
This is old hat. It is hardly news that taxonomies are the sine qua non of historical discourse, even as they predetermine what sorts of questions we may ask of our data, indeed, what can count as data at all. When it comes to vessels, archaeologists have often drawn attention to just this point; the evidentiary status of typology is a recurrent obsession of the discipline.2 In classical archaeology, more specifically, critics often point to the tradition of classifying and publishing finds by type, as opposed to findspot. In this subfield, it remains standard practice to segregate vessels from the other finds and publish them according to shape in site reports; the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, for instance, uses this format to publish the finds from the Athenian Agora, the flagship excavation of American classical archaeology.3 Alternatives—publication by assemblage, for instance—are less common in synoptic volumes but more usual in preliminary publications or supplementary volumes.4 The latter method is more congenial to thick, contextualist description and, accordingly, often gets singled out for praise. Digital publication is tending to obviate the distinction by making any number of sorting options available in a single publication; for now, however, the vessel continues to play a structuring role in the organization of data.
But the issue goes deeper than tabulation and hyperlinking. Neither the traditional taxonomy (exemplified in the stand-alone volume devoted to vessels of some kind or another) nor the leading alternative (exemplified in the site report organized by assemblage) really puts pressure on the basic category. Even an
1 Headland and Pike 1990.
2 For basic orientation on the topic of typology see Adams and Adams 1991; Wylie 2002, 42–56; Trigger 2006, 298–9. Key texts of the “typology debate” are collected in Deetz 1971.
3 See, for instance, Moore 1997.
4 For a fine example of such publication, see L ynch 2011. For a compromise involving large amounts of data and a truly heroic system of cross-referencing, see Runnels, Pullen, and Langdon 1995.
assemblage-based report will still, typically, include a heading for pottery and, below that, subheadings for different types of vessel.5 To see how the category of vessel remains a basic structuring principle, it suffices to note that pottery or ceramics does not really include everything made of ceramic or pottery, at any rate in classical archaeology. There is a separate category, terracotta, for items made of fired clay that are not vessels, which may or may not include prosaic things like roof tiles. One and the same material can be pottery when it is in vessel form and terracotta when it is in figurine form. Pottery, in short, is willy-nilly a subcategory of the larger heading: vessel.
This brings us to the second, more interesting way in which the emic/etic distinction begs the question of historical meaning: the operative notion of a category. In contrasting the historical, emic concept of vessel with the modern, etic one, my claim is not that we have two concepts, each with necessary and/ or sufficient conditions of identity, and that these concepts turn out, on close inspection, to be dissimilar. My claim is, rather, that the ancient concept is not bounded in the relevant way at all. The ancient Greek category simply lacks exhaustive conditions altogether; this is not to say it is not a proper category or that the Greeks lacked a concept of the vessel. The emic vessel is in this case a mirage both by virtue of being emic and by virtue of being a category in an inapt sense of the term. Most of what follows is concerned with making this second point, in the hopes that doing so will lend credibility to the first.
The question of what, if anything, a vessel might turn out to be can become acute when a vessel seems to become something else. In the Greek drinkingparty or symposium, a space of intoxication and double-seeing under the sign of Dionysos, god of wine and drama, a cup need not be merely a cup. It can also be a mask, as in the famous class of so-called eye-cups (Figure 1.1). This type seems to have its origins in East Greece, and the first Athenian examples date to around the middle of the sixth century.6 Its peak of popularity was in the third quarter of the century; it disappears thereafter, only to return briefly to vogue in the late Archaic. Such cups interact with their users and viewers—the two need not coincide—in a distinctive fashion. For whatever else they may be, eye-cups are all, in a way, masks.7 The drinker will don this mask every time he takes a sip of wine, and he will remove it every time he pauses to speak, listen to music, or play a game. By the same token, the cup will return the gaze of any beholder; the eyes
5 See Runnels, Pullen, and Langdon 1995.
6 For the histor y of the type see Williams 1988. For a general discussion of intoxication at the symposium see Osborne 2014.
7 A classic discussion of eye-cups and their relation to masks is Ferrari 1986. On the type’s thematization of beholding see Neer 2002, with earlier bibliography. More recently see Bundrick 2015; Grethlein 2016. The present discussion draws liberally on the one in Neer 2002.
F igure 1.1. Attic black-figure eye-cup by Exekias: eyes and battles. Clay, ca. 550 bce. Munich, Antikensammlungen 8729; Beazley Archive Database no. 310403.
“animate” it. This play between ingesting something, bringing it inside, and masking, turning an outer face, was for the Greeks endlessly fascinating.
The Dionysiac emblem par excellence, the mask figures the alienation from self that defines both dramatic performance and drunken reverie.8 The Greek word for this state is ecstasy or ek-stasia, literally, a “standing apart from” the self. With an eye-cup—any eye-cup—the symposiast becomes an actor, a participant in a little drama of presence and absence. One minute he is there among friends, and the next he is gone, replaced by the staring eyes of the cup/mask. He shuttles between the two, as the vessel’s eyes replace his own. The poet Theognis apostrophized himself—that is, stood outside himself to address himself—in very much these terms in the sixth century bce:
My heart, to all your friends keep turning about your painted complex self [poikilon ethos] to your painted complex self, properly mixing your temperament to the like of each. Have the temperament of a tangled cuttlefish, who always looks like whatever rock he has just clung to. Now be like this; then, at another time, become someone else in your coloring.9
Or, again, addressing his young lover:
Kyrnos, to all friends turn a painted complex self [poikilon ethos], properly mixing your temperament to the like of each; now follow this man, now like another raise up your temperament. Surely skill is even better than great virtue.10
8 On masks see Frontisi-Ducroux 1991; Frontisi-Ducroux 1995.
9 Theognis 213–18 IEG. On the poikilon ethos and pottery see Neer 2002, 14–23, 98–100.
