Images for Classicists ed. by Kathleen M. Coleman (review)

This volume explores how artworks and material objects challenge and enrich text-based approaches to classical antiquity. Topics include the rendering of traditional tales on Greek pottery; the representation of scenes of epic on late-Roman mosaics from the Western empire; philosophical objections to decorating floors and ceilings in antiquity; and the use of numismatic evidence for solving problems in Augustan politics or testing the provenance of the Warren Cup.

In chapter 1, “Approaching the Visual in Ancient Culture: Principles,” Kathleen M. Coleman explores some of the ways in which the digital age has given scholars access to the visual record surviving from antiquity. She identifies some of the challenges that images pose for text-based scholars, and some of the potential rewards of that approach. In the subsection entitled “Polysemous Motifs,” she describes the variety of functions realized by a single visual motif. In “Reading Text and Image Together,” she introduces the case studies that are featured in the rest of the volume, while “Images for the Future” sketches the challenge of harnessing the full potential of the internet age.

In chapter 2, “How Did the Greeks Translate Traditional Tales into Images?” Luca Giuliani surveys how the Greeks succeeded in transferring oral tales to visual images. It is common in modern scholarship to contrast images of myth and images of life. Giuliani concedes that the distance between original audience and ourselves is vast, as we do not use the vases for symposia and do not speak ancient Greek any more. But we keep talking about vase images that were meant to be talked about. If we want to understand the design and demands of such images, Giuliani’s distinction between a descriptive and a narrative mode may prove to be a useful analytical tool.

In chapter 3, “Image, Myth, and Epic on Mosaics of the Late Roman West,” Katherine M. D. Dunbabin explores the relationship between art and text, word and image, in antiquity. She discusses the mosaic of Ulysses and Polyphemus from the Villa Romana del Casale at Piazza Armerina in Sicily, dating from the first half of the fourth century ce. She surveys the subject of Ulysses and the Cyclops in different media from all periods of Roman art, especially mosaics and relief sculpture. Many representations are from Sicily, however, a fact that gives the island a particular topographical relevance in Dunbabin’s chapter.

In chapter 4, “Aurati laquearia caeli: Roman Floor and Ceiling Decoration and the Philosophical Pose,” Timothy M. O’Sullivan cites the Romans’ fascination with, and yet also their frequently expressed disdain for, luxury goods. Coffered ceilings were a feature of royal palaces in antiquity. Another discourse compares ceiling decoration to the sky, and O’Sullivan duly dwells upon Coleman’s interpretation (in her edition of Statius: Silvae IV [Oxford 1988] 108–10) of 4.3.19 to refer to a decorated ceiling, blue with gold stars, in Domitian’s Temple of the Gens Flavia. He argues that many Roman elites were well aware of the paradoxical symbolism of ceiling coffers and chose to use them nonetheless, content with the contradiction that they could serve as symbols of both moral decline and spiritual elevation.

In chapter 5, “Roman Coins and the New World of Museums and Digital Images,” Andrew Burnett and Dominic Oldman offer the perspectives of a Roman numismatist (Burnett) and a museum administrator (Oldman). The authors focus on the Roman emperor Augustus and the Warren Cup to illustrate the spectrum of interpretative possibilities that arise from considering images drawn from numismatics. The study of coins can add to our understanding of the politics of the regime of Augustus. Less familiar is the Warren Cup, a Roman silver cup of the first century CE decorated with scenes of homosexual love. Found near Jerusalem, this cup might have belonged to a wealthy Roman official.

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