Seeing the Ancients

This book makes some very large and intriguing claims that in the end it does not quite sustain. Its significance lies less in the details of the new understanding of ancient Greek culture it purports to offer, by taking a visual rather than a textually mediated approach to ancient artefacts, than in the provocative nature of these claims, which encourage one to think afresh about the benefits of looking closely at things: how this can bring to light significant aspects of a culture that do not emerge so vividly, or even at all, from textual sources. The claims are twofold. Firstly there is a more general methodological one. Osborne contends that cultural history does not properly take into account visual material, treating the latter where it does from a perspective derived from analysis of textual evidence. The visual representations created by a culture, he contends, need to be scrutinized in their own right for the evidence they offer of what people saw and singled out for attention, independently of what we know about their linguistic or text-based conceptions of things. In particular, he is arguing that by looking closely at ancient Greek visual representations of the human figure, we can gain new insight into important aspects of everyday life and social interaction in the ancient world.

The second claim is to do with ancient Greece in particular. A number of social distinctions, he points out, which textual evidence would indicate were pervasive – such as that between citizen and non-citizen, between Greek and barbarian, between slave and non-slave, between people who were pure and those who were impure – are not visibly marked on the figures represented in Greek sculpture and vase-painting. Thus, he goes on to argue, there were significant arenas of social interaction in the ancient Greek world where for all practical purposes these differences were not in evidence. In his view, visual art indicates that what seem from textual sources to have been fairly hard and fast social classifications in Greek society should be seen as operating only in particular contexts of a strictly political or legal nature, or amongst thinkers seeking clear-cut conceptual distinctions that did not operate in such a way in everyday life. The visual evidence, for example, shows how understandings of what it meant to be accepted as the inhabitant of a city state such as Athens were more fluid and inclusive than characterizations of the distinction between citizen and non-citizen in recent scholarship on the ancient world would lead one to believe.

Whatever one might think about the validity of Osborne’s broader arguments, there is something refreshing about the insistence of the claims he makes for the visual. With the semiotic and linguistic turn in historical and in art-historical studies in the 1970s and 1980s, it became de rigueur, at least in theory, to insist on the thoroughly mediated and conventional nature of visual representation. It was drummed into us that images from a past culture must not be seen as transparent records of what people in that past culture saw, that even photographs were to a large degree culturally loaded signs, framed and presented in ways that invest them with meanings that the phenomena they represented did not in themselves necessarily have. Equally, the stylizations and visual conventions of art were not to be taken as indicating how people (or artists) thought or felt about things they saw because these conventions were particular to the cultural practice of art or image making, not indicators of how people immediately experienced the world. Ideas prevalent when Malraux came out with his famous Voices of Silence in 1951,¹ that visual artefacts could give one more vivid and immediate insight into past cultures than textual evidence, were widely and summarily rejected. However, in the aftermath of this rigorous scepticism and epistemological purism, there has been a turn back to the visual. There is a pressure to think more closely again...