A01=Deborah Tarn Steiner
Aeschylus
Agathon
Alcestis
Allusion
Anecdote
Apuleius
Author_Deborah Tarn Steiner
Boeotia
Brooch
Category=AFKB
Category=AGA
Category=DSBB
Charites
Clothing
Cratylus (dialogue)
Cult image
Daedalus
Deity
Diodorus Siculus
Dionysus
Dismemberment
Drapery
Ekphrasis
Epigram
Epithet
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Euripides
Evocation
Fifth-century Athens
Gorgias
Greek art
Harmodius and Aristogeiton
Hephaestus
Herodotus
Hesiod
Homer
Hubris
Iconography
Illustration
Isocrates
Kleobis and Biton
Maenad
Motya
N. (novella)
Narrative
Nudity
Odysseus
Parthenos (mythology)
Pelops
Phidias
Philosopher
Physiognomy
Poetry
Polykleitos
Praxiteles
Procession
Rhetoric
Silenus
Simile
Simulacrum
Sophist
Suggestion
Superiority (short story)
The Philosopher
The Various
Theogony
Thucydides
To Helen
Tragedy
Transliteration
Trojan War
Tyrtaeus
Viewing (funeral)
Wreath
Xoanon
Product details
- ISBN 9780691094885
- Weight: 567g
- Dimensions: 152 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 01 Dec 2002
- Publisher: Princeton University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
In archaic and classical Greece, statues played a constant role in people's religious, political, economic, aesthetic, and mental lives. Evidence of many kinds demonstrates that ancient Greeks thought about--and interacted with--statues in ways very different from our own. This book recovers ancient thinking about statues by approaching them through contemporary literary sources. It not only shows that ancient viewers conceived of images as more operative than aesthetic, but additionally reveals how poets and philosophers found in sculpture a practice "good to think with." Deborah Tarn Steiner considers how Greek authors used images to ponder the relation of a copy to an original and of external appearance to inner reality. For these writers, a sculpture could straddle life and death, encode desire, or occasion reflection on their own act of producing a text. Many of the same sources also reveal how thinking about statues was reflected in the objects' everyday treatment. Viewing representations of gods and heroes as vessels hosting a living force, worshippers ritually washed, clothed, and fed them in order to elicit the numinous presence within.
By reading the plastic and verbal sources together, this book offers new insights into classical texts while illuminating the practices surrounding the design, manufacture, and deployment of ancient images. Its argument that images are properly objects of cultural and social--rather than purely aesthetic--study will attract art historians, cultural historians, and anthropologists, as well as classicists.
Deborah Tarn Steiner is Associate Professor of Classics at Columbia University. She is the author of "The Crown of Song: Metaphor in Pindar", and "The Tyrant's Writ: Myths and Images of Writing in Ancient Greece" (Princeton).
