Seeing the Ancients
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4493395 |
|---|---|
| Authors | A Potts (0000-0003-0919-7279) |
| Year | 2013 |
| Volume | 76 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 281-290 |
| Publication date | 2013-10-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | History Workshop Journal (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1363-3554 • E-ISSN: 1477-4569 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/hwj/dbt024 |
| OpenAlex | W2003435526 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 4 |
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.
Aesthetics · Ancient Greek · Art · Epistemology · Everyday life · Literature · Perspective (graphical) · Sociology · Visual arts · Visual culture · Anthropology · Byzantine Studies and History · Classical Antiquity Studies · History · Philosophy
| Highly cited | No |
|---|