Michael Squire
Biographic Data
| ID | 323160 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Michael Squire |
| GIVEN NAMES | Michael |
| FAMILY NAME | Squire |
| SIGNATURE | SQUIRE M |
| AFFILIATIONS | King's College London |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9571-4273 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 44 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 102 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 40 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 4 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2006 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Festival athletics in the Imagines of the Elder Philostratus
Latin Literature and Material Culture
This chapter introduces the rich intersections between Latin literature and Roman material culture. Why should Latin scholars concern themselves with ancient objects? How might study of Roman physical remains inform an understanding of Latin literature? In what ways do attitudes towards Roman material remains align with disciplinary approaches to interpreting Latin literature? The chapter proceeds in seven interconnected parts. The first examines…
The Cambridge Critical Guide to Latin Literature
The Cambridge Critical Guide to Latin Literature offers a critical overview of work on Latin literature. Where are we? How did we get here? Where to next? Fifteen commissioned chapters, along with an extensive introduction and Mary Beard's postscript, approach these questions from a range of angles. They aim not to codify the field, but to give snapshots of the discipline from different perspectives, and to offer provocations for future developme…
Word & Image
This chapter examines the relationships between visual and verbal media in Roman antiquity. More specifically, it demonstrates how the study of Roman art intersects with the study of ancient Greek and Latin texts, and vice versa. Despite the tendency to segregate areas of scholarly expertise—above all, to separate “classical archaeology” from “classical philology”—any critical engagement with Roman imagery and iconography must go hand in hand wit…
Ornament and Figure in Graeco-Roman Art: Rethinking Visual Ontologies in Classical Antiquity
A Cultural History of the Senses in Antiquity
Embodying the Dead on Classical Attic Grave‐Stelai
This article examines ‘embodied objects’ in relation to Classical grave-stelai, produced in Athens between the late fifth and late fourth centuries BCE. Situated above family tombs, stelai probe the problem of transforming bodily loss into physical manifestation: they materialize questions about the ontology of the dead – about what the dead are, were, or have ceased to be. The article begins by exploring Greek attitudes towards the dead, before …
Rethinking Lessing's Laocoon
Ever since its publication in 1766, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s treatise Laocoon, or On the Limits of Painting and Poetry has shaped debates about aesthetic experience and the medial distinctions between words and images. Rethinking Lessing’s Laocoon provides a reassessment of this seminal work on its 250th anniversary, examining Lessing’s interpretation of ancient art and poetry, the Enlightenment contexts of the treatise, and its subsequent lega…
Framing the Visual in Greek and Roman Antiquity: An Introduction
The Frame in Classical Art is a book about the limits of visual representation. Contributors have been invited to explore the boundaries of what can be seen – the edges that defined, demarcated and contained the field of vision in ancient Greece and Rome. While the chapters that follow vary widely across time and place, all are structured around a common cultural histor-ical concern: to analyse the literal frames and metaphorical frameworks that …
Framing the Roman ‘Still Life’: Campanian Wall-Painting and the Frames of Mural Make-Believe
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POP Art
This chapter explores one of Late Antiquity’s most maligned artists: Publilius Optatianus Porfyrius (“Optatian”). Optatian’s works resonate against earlier Hellenistic traditions of picture-poetry (so-called technopaegnia). But Optatian’s exquisite artefacts, framed around an encomium of Constantine, also materialize early fourth-century aesthetic concerns: they operate against the backdrop of new literary forms (including the cento), and shiftin…
Getting to grips with classical art
This chapter focuses on ancient sculpture, exploring how touch could be exploited as an epistemological "touchstone" for probing the ontological status of statues: the three-dimensional forms of classical naturalism. It argues that both encouraged and responded to the fantasy of a sculpted object transformed into a tangible, touching and conscious subject. The chapter turns from life-size sculpture to miniature engraved gems: it surveys how the v…
The Frame in Classical Art: A Cultural History
The frames of classical art are often seen as marginal to the images that they surround. Traditional art history has tended to view framing devices as supplementary 'ornaments'. Likewise, classical archaeologists have often treated them as tools for taxonomic analysis. This book not only argues for the integral role of framing within Graeco-Roman art, but also explores the relationship between the frames of classical antiquity and those of more m…
Lessing’s Laocoon as Analytical Instrument: Antiquity, Enlightenment, and the 'Limits' of Painting and Poetry
Luca Giuliani evaluates Laocoon as an ‘analytical tool’ for twenty-first-century classical archaeology. In doing so, he returns to some of the same literary case studies that so engrossed Lessing 250 years ago—and none more so than Homer’s Iliad . By probing Lessing’s theories of the respective workings of art and text, and exploring them in the context of ancient depictions of the Iliad (especially seventh- and sixth-century BC vase-paintings), …
Homer and the Ekphrasists: Text and Picture in the Elder Philostratus’ ‘Scamander’ (Imagines I.1)
In his seminal 1998 book, Homer and the Artists : Text and Picture in Early Greek Art , Anthony Snodgrass makes no mention of the Imagines , or indeed of its author, the Elder Philostratus. As Anthony would no doubt remind us, one would need have a very late (probably Byzantine) view of ‘Greek art’ to conceive of Philostratus alongside the word ‘early’. Yet the Imagines , written at around the beginning of the third century ad, provides one of th…
Homer and the Ekphrasists: Text and Picture in the Elder Philostratus’ ‘Scamander’ (Imagines I.1)
The Roman Marble Sculptures from the Sanctuary of Pan at Caesarea Philippi/ Panias (Israel)
The sanctuary of Pan at Banias (to give the site its modern Arabic name) was one of the most important pilgrimage centres in Roman Palestine. The cultic origins of the sanctuary remain obscure. By
How to Read a Roman Portrait’? Optatian Porfyry, Constantine and the VVLTVS Avgvsti
This article takes its lead from research into the ‘language’ of Roman portraiture. More specifically, it explores a work that literalizes the idea of ‘reading’ a Roman portrait (to quote Sheldon Nodelman's classic phrase): a picture-poem by Publilius Optatianus Porfyrius — a much maligned poet active in the first decades of the fourth century ad — that purports, through its iconotextual form, to visualize the countenance of the emperor Constanti…
Conceptualizing the (Visual) “Arts”
Running rings round Troy: Recycling the ‘Epic Circle’ in Hellenistic and Roman art
Literary responses to (what we call) the ‘Epic Cycle’ are not always literally ‘literary’. In addition to the numerous Greek and Roman poets who engaged with the poems and their stories, artists offered distinctive visual interpretations of their own. Right from the beginnings of Late Geometric Greek figurative art, we find sculptors and painters responding to the tales of Troy, actively adding new twists and variations – necessarily changing the…
Ecphrasis: Visual and Verbal Interactions in Ancient Greek and Latin Literature
This essay explores the intersections between ancient and modern notions of ecphrasis (defined by Imperial Greek rhetoricians as “a descriptive speech” that “brings the subject shown before the eyes with visual vividness”). After surveying recent comparative literary approaches to ecphrastic “intermediality,” the essay first analyzes theories of ecphrasis in the Progymnasmata. Second, by relating these Imperial Greek rhetorical discussions back t…
Sight and the Ancient Senses
Winckelmann and the Invention of Antiquity: History and Aesthetics in the Age of Altertumswissenschaft
Ein Versuch eines Lehrgebäudes (‘an attempt at a systematic framework’): that is the professed aim of Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums , inscribed in the opening paragraph of his ‘history of ancient art’. More than any other Enlightenment writer, Winckelmann has been hailed the Enlightened founder of Altertumswissenschaft —that is, of the complete and holistic historical study of Greek and Roman antiquity. At the s…
Corpus imperii: Verbal and visual figurations of the Roman ‘body politic’
This article examines the political metaphor of the body in ancient Roman words and images. The verbal metaphor of the body of state (corpus rei publicae) gained particular rhetorical currency in the late Roman Republic; likewise, following Augustus rise to power in the later first century bc, related ideas about the corpus imperii (body of empire) played a critical role in legitimising a system of effective one-man imperial rule. But how did thi…
Theordoof rhetoric and the rhetoric of order
This chapter takes its rhetorical cue from an epigram inscribed in prominent Greek letters on a small tablet housed in Rome’s Musei Capitolini (Figure 11.1). The marble relief is one of twenty-two objects that have come to be termed Tabulae Iliacae (‘Iliac tablets’), dating from the late first century bc or early first century ad, and discovered (where provenances are known) in or around Rome. Like the majority of other examples, this particular …
Making Myron's Cow Moo: Ecphrastic Epigram and the Poetics of Simulation
Myron's bronze sculpture of a cow proved an extraordinarily popular subject for Greek and Latin epigram over an exceptionally long time-span (Palatine Anthology 9.713-42, 793-98, Posidippus 66 A-B, Ausonius 63-71, Epigrammata Bobiensia 10-13). But why the fascination? This article reads the image as an icon for the poetic simulations of ecphrastic epigram. First, it emphasises the ambivalence with which the poems celebrates the statue's verisimil…
Ekphrasis at the forge and the forging of ekphrasis: The ‘shield of Achilles’ in Graeco-Roman word and image
The Homeric description of the shield of Achilles (Iliad 18.478–608) is Western literature's earliest and most influential attempt to evoke images in words. This article examines the passage anew, demonstrating not only its paradigmatic concern with the collaborative and competing resources of word and picture, but also its significance in forging ideas about ekphrasis in the ancient world. By revisiting the passage and subsequent Graeco-Roman re…
The Art of the Body: Antiquity and Its Legacy
The art of the human body is arguably the most important and wide-ranging legacy bequeathed to us by Classical antiquity. Not only has it directed the course of western image-making, it has shaped our collective cultural imaginary - as ideal, antitype, and point of departure. This book is the first concerted attempt to grapple with that legacy: it explores the complex relationship between Graeco-Roman images of the body and subsequent western eng…
Reading a View: Poem and Picture in the Greek Anthology
‘A picture is a silent poem, a poem is a speaking picture’ (attr. Simonides) ‘A picture is a silent poem, a poem is a blind picture’ (Leonardo da Vinci) How do words represent images? In what ways do visual signs function like (and unlike) verbal ones? And which medium better captures its represented subjects—pictures that are seen, or poems that are heard, written and read? These questions stretch the length and breadth of western literary criti…
Apparitions Apparent: Ekphrasis and the Parameters of Vision in the Elder Philostratus’s Imagines
Apparitions Apparent:Ekphrasis and the Parameters of Vision in the Elder Philostratus’s Imagines Michael Squire (bio) sed quemadmodum si litteras pulchras alicubi inspiceremus, non nobis suffice-ret laudare scriptoris articulum, quoniam eas pariles, aequales decorasque fecit, nisi etiam legeremus quid nobis per illas indicaverit: ita factum hoc qui tantum inspicit, delectatur pulchritudine facti ut admiretur artificem; qui autem intel-legit, quas…
Corpus imperii: Verbal and visual figurations of the Roman ‘body politic’
This article examines the political metaphor of the body in ancient Roman words and images. The verbal metaphor of the body of state (corpus rei publicae) gained particular rhetorical currency in the late Roman Republic; likewise, following Augustus rise to power in the later first century bc, related ideas about the corpus imperii (body of empire) played a critical role in legitimising a system of effective one-man imperial rule. But how did thi…
Embodied Ambiguities on the Prima Porta Augustus
Introduction: The Art of Art History in Greco-Roman Antiquity
To what extent can we talk about Greco-Roman processes of making, viewing, and writing about images as "art history"? How did ancient concepts of image-making resemble those used in other cultural spheres? What role do post-Enlightenment systems of aesthetics continue to play within the study of (what some prefer to call) ancient "visual culture"? The introduction to this guest-edited volume explains why these questions are so pressing. Concepts …
Embodying the Dead on Classical Attic Grave‐Stelai
This article examines ‘embodied objects’ in relation to Classical grave-stelai, produced in Athens between the late fifth and late fourth centuries BCE. Situated above family tombs, stelai probe the problem of transforming bodily loss into physical manifestation: they materialize questions about the ontology of the dead – about what the dead are, were, or have ceased to be. The article begins by exploring Greek attitudes towards the dead, before …
The Ancient Middle Classes: Urban Life and Aesthetics in the Roman Empire, 100 BCE-250 CE
Emanuel Mayer, Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 2012, xiv +295 pp., US$45 / £33.95 GBP, ISBN 2011051597 Historians of ancient Greece and Rome grapple with a recurrent interpretive quandary
Counterfeit in Character but Persuasive in Appearance”: Reviewing the Ainigma of the Tabula Cebetis
TEST 02 - Elsevier's Scopus, the largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature. Search and access research from the science, technology, medicine, social sciences and arts and humanities fields
The Cultures within Ancient Greek Culture. Contact, Conflict, Collaboration
1. Introduction Carol Dougherty and Leslie Kurke Part I. The Circulation of Cultures: 2. 'Culture' of 'cultures'?: Hellenism in the late-sixth century Jonathan M. Hall 3. The Aristonothos Krater: competing stories of conflict and collaboration Carol Dougherty 4. Hybridity and the cultures within Greek culture Carla Antonaccio Part II. Negotiation and Conflict at the Margins: The Case of Delphi: 5. Aesop and the contestation of Delphic authority L…
Introduction: The Art of Art History in Greco-Roman Antiquity
To what extent can we talk about Greco-Roman processes of making, viewing, and writing about images as "art history"? How did ancient concepts of image-making resemble those used in other cultural spheres? What role do post-Enlightenment systems of aesthetics continue to play within the study of (what some prefer to call) ancient "visual culture"? The introduction to this guest-edited volume explains why these questions are so pressing. Concepts …
Reading a View: Poem and Picture in the Greek Anthology
‘A picture is a silent poem, a poem is a speaking picture’ (attr. Simonides) ‘A picture is a silent poem, a poem is a blind picture’ (Leonardo da Vinci) How do words represent images? In what ways do visual signs function like (and unlike) verbal ones? And which medium better captures its represented subjects—pictures that are seen, or poems that are heard, written and read? These questions stretch the length and breadth of western literary criti…
Making Myron's Cow Moo: Ecphrastic Epigram and the Poetics of Simulation
Myron's bronze sculpture of a cow proved an extraordinarily popular subject for Greek and Latin epigram over an exceptionally long time-span (Palatine Anthology 9.713-42, 793-98, Posidippus 66 A-B, Ausonius 63-71, Epigrammata Bobiensia 10-13). But why the fascination? This article reads the image as an icon for the poetic simulations of ecphrastic epigram. First, it emphasises the ambivalence with which the poems celebrates the statue's verisimil…
Truly Beyond Wonders: Aelius Aristides and the Cult of Asklepios, by Alexia Petsalis-Diomidis
review of A. Petsalis-Diomidis, Truly Beyond Wonders: Aelius Aristides and the Cult of Asklepios
The Art of the Body: Antiquity and Its Legacy
The art of the human body is arguably the most important and wide-ranging legacy bequeathed to us by Classical antiquity. Not only has it directed the course of western image-making, it has shaped our collective cultural imaginary - as ideal, antitype, and point of departure. This book is the first concerted attempt to grapple with that legacy: it explores the complex relationship between Graeco-Roman images of the body and subsequent western eng…
Claudius Caesar: Image and Power in the Early Roman Empire – By Josiah Osgood
“Fantasies so Varied and Bizarre”: The Domus Aurea, the Renaissance, and the “Grotesque”
To explain the importance of the Domus Aurea and its imagery during the Renaissance, the chapter proceeds in four interrelated stages. It begins by summarizing when, where, and how Nero's palace came to be discovered in the late 1400s. It then proceeds to investigate the immediate reception in Rome. Next, the chapter turns to the atelier of Raphael, and in particular Raphael's Loggia in the Vatican, in an attempt to unpack the visual, cultural, a…
Epic visions on the Tabulae Iliacae
What is the relationship between epic as poem and epic0020as picture? Can epic texts ever be turned into images? And how, if so, can viewers hope to recognise the epic within a picture, or indeed the picture within an epic? As the preceding chapters have demonstrated, these are not just our questions, derived from a (post-)post-structuralist penchant for ‘intermediality’ and ‘iconotexts’. Rather, ancient critics themselves pondered related themes…
Ars in their ‘I’s: Authority and authorship in Graeco-Roman visual culture1
This chapter investigates the hermeneutics of the signature in Greek and Roman visual culture. Ancient artists, it argues, exploited artistic agency as a meaning-making mechanism. The chapter focusses on the common practice of craftsmen working under the name of a more celebrated artist, taking as a particular case study the Iliac tablets. Created in the first century AD, several associate themselves with the ‘Theodorean techne’. This chapter arg…
Epic Visions: Visuality in Greek and Latin Epic and its Reception
This wide-ranging, interdisciplinary collection explores different ways of visualising Greek and Roman epic from Homer to Statius, in both ancient and modern culture. The book presents new perspectives on Homer, Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, Valerius Flaccus and Statius, and covers the re-working of epic matter in tragedy, opera, film, late antique speeches of praise, story-boarding, sculpture and wall-painting. The chapters use a variety of methods to ad…
Ancient Rome as a Museum: Power, Identity, and the Culture of Collecting
Steven H. Rutledge, Oxford Studies in Ancient Culture and Representation, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2012, xxiv+395 pp, £85 (US$135), ISBN 978 0 19 957323 3 ‘This study has its origins ... in a
Animating Classical Art History
The Ancient Middle Classes: Urban Life and Aesthetics in the Roman Empire, 100 BCE-250 CE
Emanuel Mayer, Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 2012, xiv +295 pp., US$45 / £33.95 GBP, ISBN 2011051597 Historians of ancient Greece and Rome grapple with a recurrent interpretive quandary
Embodied Ambiguities on the Prima Porta Augustus
Apparitions Apparent: Ekphrasis and the Parameters of Vision in the Elder Philostratus’s Imagines
Apparitions Apparent:Ekphrasis and the Parameters of Vision in the Elder Philostratus’s Imagines Michael Squire (bio) sed quemadmodum si litteras pulchras alicubi inspiceremus, non nobis suffice-ret laudare scriptoris articulum, quoniam eas pariles, aequales decorasque fecit, nisi etiam legeremus quid nobis per illas indicaverit: ita factum hoc qui tantum inspicit, delectatur pulchritudine facti ut admiretur artificem; qui autem intel-legit, quas…
Ekphrasis at the forge and the forging of ekphrasis: The ‘shield of Achilles’ in Graeco-Roman word and image
The Homeric description of the shield of Achilles (Iliad 18.478–608) is Western literature's earliest and most influential attempt to evoke images in words. This article examines the passage anew, demonstrating not only its paradigmatic concern with the collaborative and competing resources of word and picture, but also its significance in forging ideas about ekphrasis in the ancient world. By revisiting the passage and subsequent Graeco-Roman re…
Theordoof rhetoric and the rhetoric of order
This chapter takes its rhetorical cue from an epigram inscribed in prominent Greek letters on a small tablet housed in Rome’s Musei Capitolini (Figure 11.1). The marble relief is one of twenty-two objects that have come to be termed Tabulae Iliacae (‘Iliac tablets’), dating from the late first century bc or early first century ad, and discovered (where provenances are known) in or around Rome. Like the majority of other examples, this particular …
Der Körper des Princeps: Zur Problematik eines monarchischen Körpers ohne Monarchie
Counterfeit in Character but Persuasive in Appearance”: Reviewing the Ainigma of the Tabula Cebetis
TEST 02 - Elsevier's Scopus, the largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature. Search and access research from the science, technology, medicine, social sciences and arts and humanities fields
Conceptualizing the (Visual) “Arts”
Running rings round Troy: Recycling the ‘Epic Circle’ in Hellenistic and Roman art
Literary responses to (what we call) the ‘Epic Cycle’ are not always literally ‘literary’. In addition to the numerous Greek and Roman poets who engaged with the poems and their stories, artists offered distinctive visual interpretations of their own. Right from the beginnings of Late Geometric Greek figurative art, we find sculptors and painters responding to the tales of Troy, actively adding new twists and variations – necessarily changing the…
Ecphrasis: Visual and Verbal Interactions in Ancient Greek and Latin Literature
This essay explores the intersections between ancient and modern notions of ecphrasis (defined by Imperial Greek rhetoricians as “a descriptive speech” that “brings the subject shown before the eyes with visual vividness”). After surveying recent comparative literary approaches to ecphrastic “intermediality,” the essay first analyzes theories of ecphrasis in the Progymnasmata. Second, by relating these Imperial Greek rhetorical discussions back t…
Sight and the Ancient Senses
Winckelmann and the Invention of Antiquity: History and Aesthetics in the Age of Altertumswissenschaft
Ein Versuch eines Lehrgebäudes (‘an attempt at a systematic framework’): that is the professed aim of Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums , inscribed in the opening paragraph of his ‘history of ancient art’. More than any other Enlightenment writer, Winckelmann has been hailed the Enlightened founder of Altertumswissenschaft —that is, of the complete and holistic historical study of Greek and Roman antiquity. At the s…
Art (34 works) · Classical Antiquity Studies (34 works) · History (24 works) · Literature (21 works) · Philosophy (18 works) · Art history (16 works) · Byzantine Studies and History (15 works) · History (15 works) · Archaeology (14 works) · Visual arts (13 works)