Semester:
Offered:
Seth Estrin
No category of object from ancient Greece has had a more outsized influence on the modern imagination than painted ceramics, especially the black- and red-figure vases produced in Archaic and Classical Athens. In antiquity, ceramic vessels were primarily functional objects, valued much less than their metal counterparts and considered far less important as works of art than wall paintings or sculptures of bronze or marble. Yet the durability of fired clay has enabled ceramics to survive across millennia in far higher proportion than any other art form, transforming them into an irreplaceable visual archive of Greek culture. This course will provide an opportunity to look closely at Greek vases, focusing on the collections of the Harvard Art Museums. We will learn about their facture and imagery, situating them within the ancient social contexts—drinking parties, sanctuaries, funerals—in which they originally gained meaning. But it will simultaneously examine the afterlives of Greek vases, including the histories of their discovery, their place in private collections and museums, and questions of attribution and connoisseurship than have shaped their study. What, we will ask, does the Greek vase tell us about antiquity as it existed, and what does it tell us about antiquity as we have imagined it?