A Homeric catalogue of shapes : the Iliad and Odyssey seen differently 9781350039599, 1350039594, 9781350039605, 1350039608

Table of contents :
Cover page
Halftitle page
Series page
Title page
Copyright page
Dedication
Contents
Illustrations
Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1 Seeing Differently
Illusionistic naturalism
Representational systems
Dynamic traditions
2 A Homeric Object
The dialogue on Nestor’s cup
Nestor and Aphrodite
3 Sculptural Assemblage and the Composite Object Portrait
Cubism, Picasso and sculptural assemblage
The composite object portrait
4 Homeric Iconographies
Traditional Homeric iconographies
Developing an iconography for an oral-formulaic Homer
5 A Catalogue of Shapes 2010–13: Descriptive Catalogue of Artworks
THE WARRIORS
1. ODYSSEUS ΜΗΤΙΣ (2010)
2. ACHILLEUS ΜΗΝΙΣ (2011)
3. TELEMACHOS ΟΦΕΛΛΩ (2011)
4. HEKTOR ΕΧΩ (2011)
THE WIVES
5. PENELOPE ΑΡΕΤΗ (2011)
6. HELENA ΑΕΘΛΟΝ (2011–12)
THE DEITIES
7. KALYPSO ΚΡΥΠΤΩ (2012)
8. ERIS ΦΑΓΟΝ (2012)
9. KIRKE ΦΑΙΝΩ (2012)
10. ATE ΠΑΓΙΣ (2012–13)
THE KINGS
11. NESTOR ΝΟΟΣ (2013)
12. MENELAOS ΒΟΑΩ (2013)
6 A Composite Object Portrait of an Oral-Formulaic Homer
Aesthetic translation
Comparative visualization
Homer as creative methodology
Homer in a catalogue of characters
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

A Homeric Catalogue of Shapes

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Imagines – Classical Receptions in the Visual and Performing Arts Series Editors: Filippo Carlà-Uhink and Martin Lindner Other titles in this series Art Nouveau and the Classical Tradition, Richard Warren The Ancient Mediterranean Sea in Modern Visual and Performing Arts, edited by Rosario Rovira Guardiola Classical Antiquity in Heavy Metal Music, edited by K. F. B. Fletcher and Osman Umurhan

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A Homeric Catalogue of Shapes The Iliad and Odyssey Seen Differently Charlayn von Solms

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BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2020 Copyright © Charlayn von Solms, 2020 Charlayn von Solms has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xiii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Terry Woodley Cover image © Isabelle Grobler All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Solms, Charlayn von, author. Title: A Homeric catalogue of shapes: the Iliad and Odyssey seen differently / Charlayn von Solms. Description: London; New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019 | Series: Imagines – Classical receptions in the visual and performing arts | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019017281 (print) | LCCN 2019019015 (ebook) | ISBN 9781350039599 (epdf) | ISBN 9781350039605 (epub) | ISBN 9781350039582 (hb: alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Homer. Iliad. | Homer.Odyssey. | Art and literature. Classification: LCC PA4037 (ebook) | LCC PA4037 S655 2019 (print) | DDC 883/.01-dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019017281 ISBN:

HB: ePDF: eBook:

978-1-3500-3958-2 978-1-3500-3959-9 978-1-3500-3960-5

Series: IMAGINES – Classical Receptions in the Visual and Performing Arts Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

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For RvS who loves books and TvS who is always making things.

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Contents List of Illustrations Preface Acknowledgements Introduction 1

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3

4

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ix xi xiii 1

Seeing Differently Illusionistic naturalism Representational systems Dynamic traditions

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A Homeric Object The dialogue on Nestor’s cup Nestor and Aphrodite

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Sculptural Assemblage and the Composite Object Portrait Cubism, Picasso and sculptural assemblage The composite object portrait

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Homeric Iconographies Traditional Homeric iconographies Developing an iconography for an oral-formulaic Homer

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A Catalogue of Shapes 2010–13: Descriptive Catalogue of Artworks THE WARRIORS 1. ODYSSEUS ΜΗΤΙΣ (2010) 2. ACHILLEUS ΜΗΝΙΣ (2011) 3. TELEMACHOS ΟΦΕΛΛΩ (2011) 4. HEKTOR ΕΧΩ (2011) THE WIVES 5. PENELOPE ΑΡΕΤΗ (2011) 6. HELENA ΑΕΘΛΟΝ (2011–12)

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90 90 93 96 100 103 104 107 vii

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Contents

THE DEITIES 7. KALYPSO ΚΡΥΠΤΩ (2012) 8. ERIS ΦΑΓΟΝ (2012) 9. KIRKE ΦΑΙΝΩ (2012) 10. ATE ΠΑΓΙΣ (2012–13) THE KINGS 11. NESTOR ΝΟΟΣ (2013) 12. MENELAOS ΒΟΑΩ (2013)

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A Composite Object Portrait of an Oral-Formulaic Homer Aesthetic translation Comparative visualization Homer as creative methodology Homer in a catalogue of characters

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Conclusion

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Notes Bibliography Index

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Illustrations All photographs Courtesy Isabelle Grobler, all illustrations (Figs 2–5) by the author. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

Detail of KALYPSO ΚΡΥΠΤΩ, 2012 Schematic representation of the spatial arrangement of A Catalogue of Shapes Schematic representation of the primary interrelations between the sculptures comprising A Catalogue of Shapes Upper and lower compositional registers in A Catalogue of Shapes Preliminary drawing of TELEMACHOS, ΟΦΕΛΛΩ, 2011 Installation view of A Catalogue of Shapes Front view of ODYSSEUS ΜΗΤΙΣ, 2010 Side view of ODYSSEUS ΜΗΤΙΣ, 2010 Back view of ODYSSEUS ΜΗΤΙΣ, 2010 Front view of ACHILLEUS ΜΗΝΙΣ, 2011 Side view of ACHILLEUS ΜΗΝΙΣ, 2011 Back view of ACHILLEUS ΜΗΝΙΣ, 2011 Front view of TELEMACHOS ΟΦΕΛΛΩ, 2011 Side view of TELEMACHOS ΟΦΕΛΛΩ, 2011 Back view of TELEMACHOS ΟΦΕΛΛΩ, 2011 Front view of HEKTOR ΕΧΩ, 2011 Side view of HEKTOR ΕΧΩ, 2011 Back view of HEKTOR ΕΧΩ, 2011 Front view of PENELOPE ΑΡΕΤΗ, 2011 Side view of PENELOPE ΑΡΕΤΗ, 2011 Back view of PENELOPE ΑΡΕΤΗ, 2011 Front view of HELENA ΑΕΘΛΟΝ, 2011–12 Side view of HELENA ΑΕΘΛΟΝ, 2011–12 Back view of HELENA ΑΕΘΛΟΝ, 2011–12

vi 79 81 85 85 88 91 92 92 94 95 95 97 98 98 101 102 102 105 106 106 108 109 109 ix

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25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

Illustrations

Front view of KALYPSO ΚΡΥΠΤΩ, 2012 Side view of KALYPSO ΚΡΥΠΤΩ, 2012 Back view of KALYPSO ΚΡΥΠΤΩ, 2012 Front view of ERIS ΦΑΓΟΝ, 2012 Side view of ERIS ΦΑΓΟΝ, 2012 Back view of ERIS ΦΑΓΟΝ, 2012 Front view of KIRKE ΦΑΙΝΩ, 2012 Side view of KIRKE ΦΑΙΝΩ, 2012 Back view of KIRKE ΦΑΙΝΩ, 2012 Front view of ATE ΠΑΓΙΣ, 2012–13 Side view of ATE ΠΑΓΙΣ, 2012–13 Back view of ATE ΠΑΓΙΣ, 2012–13 Front view of NESTOR ΝΟΟΣ, 2013 Side view of NESTOR ΝΟΟΣ, 2013 Back view of NESTOR ΝΟΟΣ, 2013 Front view of MENELAOS ΒΟΑΩ, 2013 Side view of MENELAOS ΒΟΑΩ, 2013 Back view of MENELAOS ΒΟΑΩ, 2013

112 113 113 115 116 116 119 120 120 122 123 123 126 127 127 129 130 130

Preface In sculptural terms, I am a constructivist. I build an artwork from various separate parts derived from various objects, scraps and materials. When making a sculpture my focus is on constructing meaning by employing the expressive capacity of seemingly incompatible (and often banal) things to create a completely new entity: what the addition of each element means to the whole and how it alters and is altered by the others. But alongside this conceptual process, there is a practical one: working out how to connect objects and materials comprising different weights, densities, surface textures, tensile qualities, etc. to one another. Ensuring that irrespective of how tenuous or fragile I want an element, a link or a balancing act to appear to the viewer, it is provided with an underlying structure strong enough to withstand years of future transit and handling. The more effortless the final set of connections should be, the greater the engineering required. These processes – the conceptual and the technical – are wholly intertwined. The one informs the other and they are both essential, and equally enjoyable, aspects of making sculpture. A comparable awareness of the interplay between methodology and meaning occurs in Homeric studies in the notion of an oral-formulaic Homer. My first encounter with this idea came via Gregory Nagy’s Greek Mythology and Poetics, which I stumbled across in 1997 (while trying to figure out what the notion of the Muse signified in Homer and Hesiod). As compelling as the description of ancient poets working within a tradition of constructing contextually-determined poems from pre-existing formulae, characters and plot-lines, was the nature of the scholarship itself. Homeric theory is innovative, well-crafted and stylistically diverse. The work of scholars such as Egbert Bakker, Leonard Muellner and Ahuvia Kahane (to name but a few) is premised on close and meticulous analysis of the fabric of the poems. Small, seemingly innocuous details are scrutinized within the context of the line in which it occurs, then the passage, the book and finally the entire poem, to produce xi

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Preface

radical insights, such as the multiple and contextually-defined meanings of one word (see Muellner’s The Meaning of Homeric EUCHOMAI Through its Formulas). There is an emphasis on describing the underlying structure that makes the epics both sturdy, yet sufficiently flexible, to survive for millennia. This is interpretation based on an insistence on seeing the Iliad and the Odyssey in a completely different way. The sculptural project described in this book was inspired not just by the idea of Homer as described by these scholars, but also the nature of the scholarship itself. In my opinion, both these constructs deserve a much larger audience: they must be seen, and my expertise lies in showing. This book charts the thinking that underpinned the making of A Catalogue of Shapes. As such, it does not provide a comprehensive overview of the theory of an oralformulaic Homer, but the ideas I most respond to. At its core, the book describes both methodology and interpretation. I hope that I have managed to achieve a balance between these, but there are areas where I have admittedly indulged in technical details. As this publications forms part of an academic series, the budget could not stretch to colour images. Colour is however, an important signifying feature of the sculptures that comprise A Catalogue of Shapes. Fortunately, this is a digital age, and colour versions can be found in cyberspace. The ideal way to view them though, is to walk amongst the sculptures themselves (schematics showing the arrangement of the works appear in Chapter 4). My aim was to create a physical environment where the viewer, like a rhapsode, composes the epics by finding allusions, similes and visual puns; establishing points of correlation and disjunction; and tracing the various interrelationships between characters and plot-points. Here the slow process of circumvention, searching, discovering, and making connections serve as metaphor for creative and interpretive construction.

Acknowledgements I thank Professors Clive Chandler and Bruce Murray Arnott for their enthusiasm, guidance and willingness to brave parts unknown; the members of the Western Cape chapter of the Classical Association of South Africa for their warm reception; and Isabelle Grobler for the photographs and her company on all those trips to Milnerton flea-market. I gratefully acknowledge the generous financial assistance of The South African National Research Foundation and the University of Cape Town Scholarships Committee.

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Introduction

The series of twelve sculptures entitled A Catalogue of Shapes resulted from an exploration of an equivalence between two seemingly disparate art-forms – Homeric poetry (the Iliad and the Odyssey) and sculptural assemblage. While sculptural assemblage is a visual, and largely abstract, art-form, the Homeric epics are literary works that developed from oral traditions to encompass vivid narratives, characterization, similes and metaphors. Superficially, these two forms of expression seem antithetical to one another. However, comparisons of compositional methods reveal surprising similarities. Sculptural assemblage developed from two-dimensional collage as a method of three-dimensional construction using disparate and often pre-existing elements which are altered and recontextualized within a new cohesive whole. Homeric poetry exhibits traits distinctive of oral poetry, such as contextually determined compositions using pre-existing elements such as characters, narratives and formulae. My intention was to explore the synthesis of form and content achieved by the reorganization, manipulation and transformation of pre-existing components in the theory of an oral-formulaic Homer by means of a practical application of sculptural assemblage. Homeric poetics are not restricted to compelling narrative, innovative plot structure and vivid characters, but extend to how the story is told – how people, places, objects and events are evoked in the minds of the audience. As such, Homeric artistry is a synthesis of form and content, a combination that is largely incompatible with the language and literary style favoured by most modern translators. As these are designed to convey the content of the poems, appreciation of the Iliad and the Odyssey as equally formal and conceptual constructs remains the preserve of academia. A Catalogue of Shapes is premised on the idea that Homeric poetics and sculptural assemblage are sufficiently 1

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A Homeric Catalogue of Shapes

similar in terms of structure, methodology and hermeneutics, to enable a sculptural evocation of the immersive and participatory hermeneutics of an oral-formulaic Homer for a contemporary audience. Contemporary Homeric studies tend to describe the compositional strategies which produced the Homeric epics as a creative methodology premised upon the integration of the formal with the aesthetic, and the immediate with the inherited. The result has been an enhanced recognition of the poetic significance of procedural and formal elements of the Iliad and the Odyssey. The interdisciplinary nature of Homeric scholarship resulted from a rejection of conventional literary criticism as inadequate for the analysis of an archaic oral epic. Too many core characteristics of the poems remained inexplicable when interpretation rested on the assumption that the epics were the work of a single literate author. Milman Parry and Albert Lord’s anthropological approach to studying oral performance produced a unique critical methodology where interpretation of the Homeric epic is contingent upon an understanding of its means of production.1 Visual artist David Hockney notes that ‘like most painters, I imagine, when I look at paintings I am as interested in “how” it was painted as “what” it is saying or “why” it was painted (these questions are, of course related)’.2 While it is logical for creative practitioners to draw a relation between how an artwork is made and what it means, Parry’s emphasis on this correlation is a rarity in the scholarship and critique of art and literature. Parry’s procedure-focused approach to the Homeric question echoes the basic principles of chaîne opératoire (operational sequence) in experimental archaeology, where theories on ancient technologies are tested by attempting to create accurate reconstructions. By contrast, my aim was not to examine theories of Homeric composition through a close replication of epic performance, but to produce a contemporary ‘aesthetic translation’ of Homeric poetics based on selected features of the Iliad and the Odyssey. The function of an ‘aesthetic translation’ is to reinterpret an artwork or text for a new audience based on both its content and its form (this approach is discussed in Chapter 6). Aesthetics and representational systems can differ radically from one culture or period to another. Since translations of texts such as the Homeric epics are designed to meet the expectations of the intended audience, formal features that do not conform to these will be excised. The most significant

Introduction

3

consequence of such omissions in various translations of the Homeric epics is that they reinforce the long-held idea that the epics – like their translations – were composed by a literate author for a literate audience. Long considered the ‘ultimate’ poet, doubts regarding Homer’s authenticity and creative genius at the beginning of the modern era signalled a shift in perceptions of the aesthetic and cultural merits of archaic Greek art and poetry. While the notion of an oral basis underlying archaic Greek epic was initiated by Friedrich August Wolf in the late eighteenth century,3 it was first more fully developed by Milman Parry and Albert Lord. Parry’s theory of oral formulaic composition was premised on a predominantly functional understanding of the methodology of using prescribed phrases and inherited themes and motifs to create complex compositions within oral epic performance traditions.4 The essential dimension that Parry adds is the perception that the dependence of language on verse is not merely an issue of aesthetics, the result of the hexameter functioning as a poetic generative principle, but a matter of functional motivation. Parry shows that the bewildering variety of epithets and morphologically heterogeneous dialectical ‘forms’ is not an arbitrary feature of ‘epic style’ but conforms to a system designed to facilitate oral composition in performance.5

Subsequent Homeric scholars (such as Gregory Nagy, Egbert J. Bakker, Ahuvia Kahane and Leonard Muellner) developed the notion further to demonstrate how formal features of the Homeric epic (such as its polysemic vocabulary, metrical structure, repetition and variation) relate to poetic themes and characterization. The resulting view is that the Homeric poems ‘constitute acts of interpretation as well as acts of creation’ and that instead of being conceived of as a ‘simple matter of inflexible dependence on antecedents, [Homeric composition] has emerged, on the contrary, as a process of selection at every stage’.6 The conflation of selection and interpretation with creation suggests an art-form based on the continuous appropriation and alteration of existing elements. A perception that the Homeric epics were fixed and perfected at a specific moment in the distant past with little alteration through their subsequent history is contrary to an understanding of the Homeric as inherently adaptive and performative. The notion of composition in performance suggests that each interpretation of the epic (by a rhapsode or a scholar) is an interpretative

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reiteration that perpetuates fundamental attributes of the poem, while simultaneously creating a unique version specific to its immediate audience and context. The resulting scenario is not of a text with a single occasion and person of origin that has since been distorted, but a revelatory and adaptive ‘poetic system’ perpetuated by a string of continuators.7 By contrast, the gradual fixation of the Homeric in a single and authoritative textual format reflects a long-standing desire to reconstruct the Homeric Urtext (such as Aristarchus’ hunt for corruptions in the texts), or the most ‘consistent’ version (as many modern editors aim to achieve). Barbara Graziosi, for example, rejects attempts such as Nagy’s proposed multitext edition of the Iliad – which would allow modern audiences to comprehend the multiformity and complexity of Homeric poetry – on the basis that modern readers, like ancient ones, want to read Homer’s Iliad, and modern editors must satisfy their readers’ desire to ‘read the great work of the best poet’.8 Andrea Doyle also argues in favour of translations of Homer that conform to the tastes of modern audiences in her review of Richard Whitaker’s The Iliad of Homer: A Southern African Translation (2012).9 Whitaker’s translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey (2017) are aimed at a South African readership, incorporating a five-beat rhythm and a vocabulary drawn from the country’s multiple cultures. Doyle’s critique centres on some of the most fundamental aspects of Whitaker’s translation: she questions the necessity for such a culturally specific translation; she finds the mixed vocabulary jarring and alienating; she struggles to reconcile the mental image she has of Achilles in his armour with that of a Zulu impi (warrior); and argues that the survival of the Homeric epics can be ascribed to the success of what she terms ‘culturally neutral’ translations, such as Richmond Lattimore’s. Doyle’s concerns highlight many assumptions regarding Homeric poetry. When she asks whether South Africans are ‘not capable of connecting with a narrative of rage, jealousy, forgiveness, pity and bad decisions without it being put into “our language”?’ she reveals the extent to which, in translation, the epics are largely conveyed in terms of their content, not their form. In a South African context, any intentional omission of the formal aspects of Homeric poetry is ironic. As I will discuss in Chapter 1, a range of factors have enabled the survival and continued development of South Africa’s various oral poetic traditions, producing a literary tradition where orality and literacy co-exist and

Introduction

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merge. A corollary of this is an openness to recognizing oral forms in foreign literatures. Sol Plaatje, the first black South African author of an English novel (Mhudi, published 1930) was also the first to translate Shakespeare into an African language. Seddon argues that Plaatje’s ‘translations were a reactivation of the oral elements of Shakespeare’s relationship with an oral tradition that was long absent from English assessments of the play-texts in the early twentieth century’.10 Plaatje’s translations of Shakespeare were informed by his research into the reception of the playwright by the Batswana people. He found that the Batswana revered Shakespeare as an orator and storyteller: ‘I visited the Chief ’s court at Mafikeng and was asked the name of “the white man who spoke so well”. An educated Chieftain promptly replied for me; he said William TsikinyaChaka (William Shake-the-Sword)’.11 Like his audience, Plaatje regarded Shakespeare’s works as transcribed speech and transmitted his translations both textually and verbally. As Phaswane Mpe notes: In retelling Shakespeare’s stories orally, Plaatje presumably added or subtracted things from the originals as it suited him . . . The process involved the retelling of Shakespeare’s written stories, giving them a voice or a sound with the audience asking questions . . . [Shakespeare’s] plays were not only oralised, but were also democratised. That is, the act of translating and circulating them orally, though perhaps in a new form, made his reception wider than would have been the case with the printed scripts only. There is a case to be made, then, that Shakespeare’s stories became part of the popular [Setswana] tradition of storytelling.12

The main difference between South African receptions of Shakespeare and Homer is that English is widely understood, while ancient Greek is not. Homer is primarily encountered in translations, such as Lattimore’s, where the formal (oral) aspect is largely absent. Traditional South African art-forms (oral and visual) share an openness to foreign and unfamiliar elements, which are appropriated, transformed and incorporated into existing traditions. This capacity for recontextualization makes these art-forms highly dynamic and adaptable (see Chapter  1). As the Setswana reception of Shakespeare’s plays demonstrates, within the context of a living oral tradition, the appreciation and appropriation of this foreign text was based equally on the quality of the story and the skill with which it is told. Whitaker’s incorporation of flowing rhythm and mixed vocabulary conveys some of the core formal attributes of

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Homeric artistry. Whitaker notes that in his early attempts he experimented with a six-beat line, comparable to the Homeric hexameter, but found that English functions differently in such a rhythmic system than does ancient Greek. This necessitated a switch to ‘a swifter five-beat line, something like an iambic pentameter, but with frequent trochaic elements to enhance the speed of the narrative’.13 The result is a shortening of the line and a compression of the narrative, but a text that is ideally suited for performance and reading out loud. Of Whitaker’s use of mixed vocabulary, Doyle observes that ‘no one in South Africa speaks like this or uses this melting-pot vocabulary, thus various terms will resonate for various readers but it is unlikely that any single South African reader will feel that his or her own language is reflected in the translation’.14 The vocabulary developed by Whitaker for his translation is an elaboration of the South African practice of borrowing words and phrases from each other’s languages. As such, his translation is unique in enabling a modern reader to experience Homeric language as a hybrid of dialects and words from various time-periods. The Iliad and the Odyssey feature a stylized or ‘special’ form of speech (see Bakker 1997).15 Karl Meister’s (1921) definition of Homeric language as a Kunstsprache described it as a wholly artificial creation. This special speech or Kunstsprache is characterized by formal attributes (such as polysemy, meter, rhythm, parataxis, phonology, accidence, and the use of catalogues) that are noticeably different from everyday speech, yet derive from specific features of normal verbal interaction (such as the description of observed and remembered events). The distinctiveness of the Homeric idiom is notable: its vocabulary is limited to a few thousand words; it conforms to a regular hexametrical structure; it is marked by a high frequency of repetition/recurrence – particularly of set phrases; and it does not reflect any specific vernacular, but is an assemblage of dialects, language usages and vocabularies from various time periods and geographic locations.16 Within the logic of the poems, this type of speech comprises the ‘normal’ discourse of gods and heroes. By adopting this artificial manner of speaking, the performer of an epic poem evokes its mythic speakers. In addition, the formulaic attributes of heroic verbal interaction allow the poet to emphasize the distinction between the mythic and the everyday worlds as simultaneous, but disparate. To Graziosi and Doyle, the multiformity of Homeric artistry is antithetical to the aesthetic expectations of modern readers, and therefore

Introduction

7

cannot be accommodated in translations or modern editions of the epics. While Doyle regards translations such as Lattimore’s as ‘culturally neutral’, it must be noted that a preference for stylistic unity, and clarity and directness of meaning, along with the idea of the creative genius, are hallmarks of European art-forms from the Italian Renaissance onwards. In Chapter  2, I aim to demonstrate how an interpreter’s own culturally determined aesthetic expectations can inform their understanding of an early Greek inscription. Homeric compositional strategies described by modern scholars differ significantly from those involved in producing the literary texts with which a contemporary audience would be comfortable. The Homeric comprises a dynamically adaptive poetic system. While the analogy of ‘strata’ of accumulated dialects suggests a museum or an archive where inherited linguistic elements are conserved intact, a more complicated situation is evident: dialectical features were ‘routinely ignored when they threatened creativity just as readily as they were artificially extended when they proved themselves useful’,17 while archaisms stemmed from instances where a dialectical form was an integral part of a fixed expression. In such instances, ‘two or more mutually incompatible elements or characteristics were forced together . . . [to create] a resistive amalgam of incompatible elements’.18 In addition, what is termed Homeric language is but a part of a larger compositional system that extends beyond purely linguistic elements: this poetic system ‘is a higher-level system than a language, since its compositional units and syntactical conventions are more complex and feature narratives and characters as well as words and formulas and lines of poetry, but it is not a text with a single synchrony or a single grammar’.19 In this system, content and form are intertwined. It is arguable that the ambiguity of seemingly incompatible meanings, accumulated through a process of adaptive repetition, are a primary feature of Homeric artistry. For any translation of the epics, to reflect both these attributes and conform to the unity of style and clarity of expression that is associated with traditional European literary conventions is unworkable. However, by the twenty-first century this aesthetic, like the representational systems associated with it, is challenged by different conventions. Contemporary examples of ergodic literature,20 such as Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000), have found large audiences, suggesting a growing receptiveness to challenging textual

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formats. The extent – and apparent intentionality – of formal and conceptual ambiguities characteristic of the Iliad and the Odyssey, suggests a method of composing poetry in which meaning is inherently variable and contextually defined. While ergodic texts, including ‘cybertexts’, incorporate flexible narratives and formal diversity, I propose that in contemporary artistic expression, sculptural assemblage offers a more comparable compositional system to the Homeric, as it does not derive from literate models. In Chapter 3 the origins of assemblage are traced to the transformative engagement between modern art and the antique in the ‘systemic Classicism’ of Cubism. The methodological and interpretive characteristics of this formally disparate, but visually cohesive, and predominantly metaphoric (non-literal) type of sculpture are related to Pablo Picasso’s innovations in collage and assemblage. A key feature of Picasso’s approach to using visual elements in his assemblages is his adeptness at employing polysemy – enabling an object to hold multiple meanings at the same time. Likewise, the adaptation and transformation of linguistic elements reflect an important aspect of Homeric poetry where the meaning of a word, phrase, motif, and even a character, is flexible and can shift according to context. In Leonard Muellner’s (1976) study of the verb εὔχομαι (euchomai), for example, he observed how, depending on its context, this word could have three very different meanings.21 The extent of this flexibility is such that ‘a word’s metrical, verbal, and syntactical contexts can function to support polysemy’.22 In terms of character description, one word – Aiantes – can refer to either of two pairs of heroes: Ajax Telamon and Ajax Oïleus, or Ajax Telamon and his half-brother Teukros. A single entity can also be identified by two interchangeable names (such as Paris/Alexandros, Skamandros/Astyanax, Xanthos/Skamandros, Troy/Ilos and Achaians/Danaans). This linguistic adaptability reflects a broader preference for ambiguity where words and characters are defined primarily in terms of one another. Linguistic flexibility serves a structural purpose, allowing for the incorporation of archaisms and glosses that may be unintelligible in isolation, but are made comprehensible by their context. This approach incorporates a dialectical reciprocity based on the expressiveness of elements in combination with others. Another core attribute of assemblage is the establishment of multiple sets of associations between various attributes of visual elements and material objects to construct meaning. Aspects of an object, such as its form, function, utility,

Introduction

9

normal context, etc. can be emphasized or obscured by relating other objects or elements to it. On the level of Homeric characterization, plot and theme, the associations most significant to this project are comparative relationships based on juxtaposition, similarity and the seemingly paradoxical combination of contradiction with similarity. Examples of juxtaposition include what may be termed dissimilarity and opposition. Block and Kahane23 use the term ‘sympathetic antithesis’ to refer to Menelaus, Patroclus and Eumaeus as paired with Agamemnon, Achilles and Odysseus, respectively. In this context, the juxtaposition of paired heroes emphasizes their dissimilarity, but does not denote enmity. Instead, the identification of an alter establishes a type against which major characters can be sketched. Juxtapositions of complete opposites (such as Odysseus compared to Antinous, or Penelope compared to Clytemnestra) define characters as relative due to their dissimilarity. In such a scenario, attributes possessed by one are notably absent or oppositional in the other (such as respect for one’s host, or marital fidelity). Similar actions and shared epithets can thematically link characters. While comparative relationships are frequently established by the previously mentioned means, the simile represents an additional method for establishing comparative relationships in Homeric poetry, and provides the means for creating the most complex and ambiguous of these – a juxtaposition which reveals an underlying similarity. Similes contribute to the frequently noted ‘visuality’ of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and the complexity of Homeric examples is discussed in Chapter 6. As a comparative poetic device, the simile exploits the audience’s ability to mentally visualize juxtaposed elements both separately and in relation to one another. Mental visualization is premised on the audience’s existing visual ‘vocabulary’. Consider for example Doyle’s observation that her mental image of Achilles’ finely wrought armour is incompatible with that of the Zulu warrior in Whitaker’s translation. Most modern audiences can be expected to imagine something like the Parthenon reliefs when reading the description of the scenes depicted on the shield made for Achilles by Hephaestus. After all, the epics and the Parthenon are both ancient Greek artforms and the combination of Classical iconography with Greek and Roman mythology is an entrenched feature of European art. Images such as The Shield of Achilles in Twelve Tables, from Alexander Pope’s translation of the Iliad (1715–20), which depicts the shield as covered in a Classical figurative relief, is

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A Homeric Catalogue of Shapes

largely representative of traditional Homeric iconography. While visual representations of Homer and characters and events from the Homeric epics have changed over time (see Chapter  4), there is still no iconography of an oral-formulaic Homer. Since representational systems reflect and inform comprehension, this omission signals a growing separation between an academic and a popular understanding of these poems. My interpretive translation of Homeric poetics takes the form of a series of twelve composite object portraits of characters drawn from the Iliad and the Odyssey. In this context, the portrait format functions as a type of translation, informed by Hans-Georg Gadamer’s view of the ontology of portraiture, in which making a portrait is a form of translation into a different medium. A portrait is not like an image in a mirror, rather it involves ‘an increase in being’, which is an increase in being not only in the form of the new thing but also the original, apart from its own independent being . . . As a result, ‘a picture is not a copy of a copied being, but is in ontological communion with what is copied.24

This idea of a portrait – and by extension, a translation – as an increase in being in communion with what it represents, echoes Bakker’s description of the idea of a ‘transcendent’ Homer (see Chapter 6), where ‘Homer’ is not a person but a creative methodology. Bakker describes this idea as ‘a myth, a retrojection of the entire tradition, or system, to a mythical founder, or protopoet. Homer is the personification of the entire epic tradition with all its formulas, all its rhapsodes, all its performances. Any rhapsode that sing the Iliad becomes Homer, turning the myth into living reality.’25 The portraits that constitute A Catalogue of Shapes, function as reciprocally interrelated components of a single symbolic system comparable to a Homeric catalogue. The Homeric catalogue amplifies many of the core attributes of the creative methodology underlying the epics such as a tendency towards a compressed form of verbal narrative expressed as a paratactic sentence structure. The parataxis of Homeric composition echoes the juxtaposition of apparently unrelated parts in sculptural assemblage. Both compositional approaches facilitate the syntactic ambiguity required to create syntheses of disparate elements. In addition, repetition, distillation, juxtaposition and allusion are all characteristic of the Homeric catalogue.

Introduction

11

Correlations between the structure of Homeric narrative and catalogues have been drawn by various scholars (such as Gisela Strasburger (1954), Charles Rowan Beye (1958), Julia Haig Gaisser (1969), Tilman Krischer (1971), Egbert Bakker (1997) and Margalit Finkelberg (1998)) with the result that catalogues are no longer conceived of as distinct from (or even alien to) the main text.26 Benjamin Sammons (2010) analysed Homeric catalogues in terms of their contexts to understand how and why both the poet and his characters deploy catalogues. He notes that while catalogues are, on a formal level, sufficiently similar to Homeric narrative to coalesce with it (as in Agamemnon’s Catalogue of Objects (Il. 9.10-57)), catalogues more often fail to transform into narratives. Instead, they assume a distinctively rhetorical function (as a type of internal critique) in relation to narrative. Barry Powell (1978) identified an ‘unusually firm structural substratum’ underlying the Catalogue of Ships which serves as an organizing principle in the absence of a guiding plot or narrative action. This structure consists of three basic patterns underlying each of its individual entries. In terms of content, such repetition allows catalogues to serve a paradigmatic function (in terms of theme and narrative). However, as Sammons notes, the paradigm established in a catalogue is more likely to contradict than to affirm the narrative: the world of the catalogue seems always to differ in crucial ways from the world constructed by the poet in his narrative; there is a kind of displacement between the world of the catalogue and the main narrative with which it is juxtaposed. It is here that we have located the poet’s rhetoric. For through these differences he brings to light the peculiar virtues of his story and his vision of the mythical world: a world in which a great chasm separates the lot of the gods and the tragic lot of mortals.27

In these terms, the catalogue is also a complex extension of the Homeric practice of reciprocal characterization. Homeric compositional methods such as polysemy, comparative reciprocity and the catalogue format, enable the poet to construct multi-layered texts that are intended to provoke multiple readings and to stimulate constant reinterpretation. While the Homeric Kunstsprache suggests a closed system with its own grammar, syntax and rules of composition, the inherently allusive nature of the epics, and the extent to which characters, themes and even the epics themselves are defined in terms of opposition and/or similarity, suggests

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A Homeric Catalogue of Shapes

a powerful and sophisticated art-form uniquely adaptable to changing contexts. In contemporary multicultural environments, audiences are more likely to be familiar with, or receptive to, forms of expression that are stylistically diverse and conceptually ambiguous than has long been the norm. This suggests that Homeric artistry as described in modern scholarship can find both expression and an audience in formats other than conventional translations. The exploitation of formal components to achieve the complexities, ambiguities and allusions that prompt the sustained reinterpretation on which the preservation and transmission of the epics is founded, reveals the significant and necessary fusion of form with content in Homeric poetry. As a dynamic poetic system which evokes meaning by means of juxtaposition, inconsistency and ambiguity, a contemporary reiteration of Homeric poetics will require a creative methodology sufficiently variable and semantically open-ended to reflect the integration of its form with its content and continuous reinterpretation as a type of creation. Of the existing creative models, sculptural assemblage provides a methodology that is sufficiently similar. However, as a visual art-form, sculptural assemblage is so dissimilar to entrenched ideas of what Homeric poetry is, that an ‘aesthetic translation’ in this format could (through its sheer unexpectedness) enable a contemporary audience to see Homer differently.

1

Seeing Differently

In the invocation of the Muses at the outset of the Iliadic Catalogue of Ships (Il. 2.484-93), the poet contrasts the limitations of human knowledge with that of the gods by declaring that as the Muses are present at every significant event they know everything, whereas poets can only rely on their ability to hear the Muses’ account.1 Nagy regards this comparison as a veiled boast: a poet’s insight extends beyond human sensory and geographic limitations to an unlimited source of first-hand knowledge.2 This is demonstrated in the Odyssey by the Phaeacian singer Demodocus, whose portrayal of events at Troy brings Odysseus – who witnessed these himself – to tears. Like the Homer of popular imagination, Demodocus is blind. It is not known if the idea that Homer was blind derives from this character, but another Homeric association between poet and loss of sight is suggested by the figure of Thamyris, whose punitive maiming by the Muses (in the Pylian entry of the Catalogue of Ships) was already interpreted to include blinding in antiquity (they also took his voice and made him forget how to play his instrument).3 An association between an inability to see and the composer of the epics is particularly ironic in the context of the renowned ‘visuality’ of Homeric poetics. The vividness of the poems, as noted by critics from antiquity to modernity, reflects descriptive techniques premised on providing a bare minimum of detailed ‘visual’ information. Paradoxically, despite the absence of an exhaustive listing of the characteristics of people, objects and places, the audience is nonetheless convinced of the richness of Homeric descriptions. It has recently been proposed that the success of Homeric descriptive techniques derive from the extent to which they echo the complex processes underlying human perception. In their analysis of the paradoxical nature of Homeric vividness, Jonas Grethlen and Luuk Huitink ‘agree with Strauss Clay 13

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A Homeric Catalogue of Shapes

and others that the listener or reader is made to “perceive” the narrated world imaginatively’.4 But this perception is not premised on the narrator building an encyclopaedic ‘picture’. Instead, perception is based on the rapid provision of limited multi-sensory information to determine the formal and functional attributes of the perceived object and its spatial relation to the viewer. Grethlen and Huitink therefore retain the idea that the Iliad can be called a highly ‘imageable’ text, if it can be shown that it prompts the audience through verbal cues imaginatively to connect with the narrated world as they would perceptually connect with the real world [but] take issue with the claim that it is cognitively realistic to suppose that perception and the imagination primarily depend on building up detailed internal pictures which are read off by the ‘minds eye’ and with the corollary claim that detailed, ‘picturesque’ descriptions are particularly vivid.5

The notion that the creation of highly detailed images in the mind of an audience is an essential requirement for that audience to be able to imagine a scene, character or object, reflects long-held assumptions about human perception. Sight is associated with truth, reliability and reality. To see is to believe, while incredulity is characterized as the inability to believe one’s eyes. But in physiological and conceptual terms, visual perception is far more complex and subjective than it may seem. Human vision is not seamless, objective and photographic. In neurological terms, the eye does not capture and transmit whole snapshots to the brain for processing. Instead, as David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel discovered in the late 1950s and early 1960s, there are cells and columns of cells in the visual cortex which act as ‘feature detectors,’ specifically sensitive to horizontals, verticals, edges, alignments, and other features of the visual field. The idea began to develop that vision had components, that visual representations were in no sense ‘given,’ like optical images or photographs, but were constructed by an enormously complex and intricate correlation of different processes. Perception was now seen as composite, as modular; the interaction of huge numbers of components. The seamlessness of perception was not a ‘given,’ but had to be achieved in the brain.6

Metaphorically expressed, this notion of perception resembles an assembly line as opposed to a projector and a screen. The pictorialist theory of perception in

Seeing Differently

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which an image is ‘projected’ in the brain was based on scientific observations, such as Johannes Kepler’s discovery that the eye consists of a lens ‘that refracts light and imagery before projecting an image onto the surface of the retina. He left it to “natural philosophers” to determine how the retinal image subsequently appeared before the soul, but he described this image as something that is painted on the retina: “The retina is painted by the coloured rays of visible things.”’7 More recently, the ‘enactivist’ theory of perception as championed by Alva Noë suggests that humans construct an understanding of their environment largely in terms of embodied action, incorporating limited visual detail that is only mentally registered when required. Comprehension is not based on the mental construction of an all-inclusive highly detailed ‘image’ but a concise assessment of the spatial relationship of the viewer to the perceived and possible means of interaction (and utilization in the case of an object). In an enactivist model, perception is a process of rapid assignation of meaning that is informed by prior experience, and an ability to distinguish familiar shapes and make sense of unfamiliar ones. In extending the enactive model to the imagination, Grethlen and Huitink note that the ‘imageability’ of narrative texts does not require lengthy and detailed descriptions as these ‘contradict the economy and selectivity which are intrinsic to the normal perception attention which we give to the world around us’.8 The idea that humans see in pictures feels intuitively true in an environment where naturalistic – and more recently photographic – images are an established (and preferred) method of representation. However, as the processes by which such images are produced illustrate, representing the observed world in this manner is not as natural as an audience accustomed to it may assume it to be. One of the greatest challenges in learning to draw or paint from life is to surmount a persistent reluctance to pay deep attention to an object’s formal qualities beyond the moment where key identifying attributes have been mentally registered. Seeing something in terms of its complete visual minutiae is surprisingly difficult and mainly superfluous in an everyday setting. In addition, creating twodimensional illusions of three-dimensional objects in space involves complex technical expertise and the development of abstract systems such as linear perspective and technologies like the camera obscura. Photography likewise requires great skill and technological advances. Photographers do not just ‘point and click’ but select and manipulate environmental conditions (such as the

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A Homeric Catalogue of Shapes

addition of light) to minimize distortions, enhance specific features, and omit or diminish others. This process results in images that are not simply impartial visual records but expressions of the photographer’s formal and conceptual intentions. In the age of digital photography such manipulations extend beyond the moment an image is captured and can include everything from adjustments of contrast and colour to radical alteration of an image. A similar selectivity applies to perception. Once sensory inputs have been assembled, the process by which they are understood and contextualized is deeply idiosyncratic, yet (in an apparent contradiction) highly prone to social conditioning. A range of communal, cultural and personal factors determine which aspects of what is seen will be overlooked or acknowledged, and how the latter will be categorized. As group identity invariably incorporates shared habits of seeing, established iconographic and representational systems, cultural and social biases, and shared experiential associations will all inform interpretation. And if what is seen is partial and pre-determined, it follows that representation will be informed by ways of seeing. Artists and authors can draw on and exploit human perceptive habits in various ways. Homeric descriptions take multiple forms, ranging from immersive and direct portrayals of events and people as, where and how they occur, to more complex and allusive descriptive strategies such as the simile (see Chapter 6). While movement, sound and other such multi-sensory modes of perception are employed with great effect in these descriptions, their effectiveness derives from the extent to which they are sufficiently succinct and allusive to activate and draw on the audience’s own established repertoire of perceptive experiences. For example, in an analysis of Homeric similes, Oliver Taplin notes that a high proportion of them would be familiar to most audiences in most places and at most times, including most audiences still even today . . . The local and temporal non-specificity of Homer’s similes is worth elaborating. Not only is there no one single simile in Homer which can be tied to the poet personally, there are remarkably few that are fixed in time, or which refer to people placed within the continuum of time.9

The result is the establishment of a ‘range of similarities between the world of the poem and the world – or rather worlds – of its audiences. The similes act as a kind of conduit to the similarities’10 (for more on Homeric similes see Chapter 6).

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17

Systems of representation can conform to and confirm the belief that a specific way of perceiving and representing the world is the most logical and appropriate. Deeply entrenched ways of seeing reflect equally engrained ways of thinking, while imagery not only reflects thinking, but can shape it too. Noting the surreptitious influence of the canonical, but inaccurate, illustration of the evolution of species as progressively sequential, Steven Jay Gould warns that when ‘an iconographic tradition persists for a full century in the face of such disparate ideologies expressed in accompanying text, then we truly grasp the power of pictures and the hidebound character of assumptions that go unchallenged because they are unrecognized in icons rather than explicit in texts’.11 The values associated with one form of representation can obscure and even devalue other ways of seeing, to the extent that an observer’s expectations of what does and does not constitute meaningful representation can inform their understanding of related phenomena. For example, while attributes such as flexibility, openness and adaptability are often ascribed to modern art-forms, they can also be characteristic of so-called ‘traditional’ art-forms. The latter are commonly regarded as rigid and inward-looking, contributing to unacknowledged perceptions of forms of cultural expression that can significantly inform how artefacts are understood. One such example is an inscribed object from eighth century Greece. Interpretations of the ‘Nestor cup’ from Pithecusae largely assume that of the multiple visual elements on the cup, only the inscribed letters convey meaning (see Chapter 2). This oversight is understandable given the historical association between the Homeric epics and Classical art (see Chapter 4). However, as the South African examples below will show, oral poetics exist and develop alongside visual art-forms and share core attributes. While Homeric scholarship has long been rooted in an environment where illusionistic naturalism is the predominant representational system, the Homeric poems originated in a context where such a way of seeing and showing the world would have been wholly alien.

Illusionistic naturalism By the nineteenth century, European academies of art had been instrumental in codifying a very specialized visual representational system characterized by

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A Homeric Catalogue of Shapes

the construction of illusions of the physical world, achieved by means of such scientific approaches as geometry, anatomy, botany, optics, etc. Though stylistically varied, it was based on the depiction of recognizable scenarios, derived from actual exemplars, and was inherently illustrative, a ‘frozen theatre’ with actors dressed in costume, placed in a fitting environment, with thought and emotion conveyed through gesture and expression. The focus of this approach was the idealized human body, an idea that was developed during the Renaissance, derived from the combination of close anatomical observation and notions of harmonious proportion as supposedly exemplified in ancient Greek art. The history of Western art has long been premised on the idea that the art of the Renaissance represents a continuation of ancient Greek and Roman art after the hiatus of the Middle Ages. Michael Squire argues that in terms of how the body is represented, the aims and strategies of Renaissance art differ significantly from the Classical. Writing of such fifth-century bce sculptures as the Doryphoros and the Discobolos, he notes how modern critics have sometimes homed in on anatomy at the expense of the Doryphoros’ synthetic pose. True, the various muscular tensions and relaxations correspond in some ways to those of a real figure. This particular position, however, is an artificial construction: it brings together an assemblage of schematic parts, arranging them according to a physically impossible aesthetic of opposition.12

While Renaissance artists and theorists such as Leonardo da Vinci and Leone Battista Alberti emphasized the importance of understanding the internal structure of the body in order to represent it accurately, Squire notes that there were ‘very different conceptual frameworks at work in the fifth century [bce ] . . . Interested in both character and ornamental pattern, the ancient [vase] painter privileges external symmetrical surface, not the sorts of inner anatomy that modern viewer take for granted.’13 Ancient Greek artists developed representational systems that clearly incorporated close observation of the human body and the natural world. However, it is evident that in this system the observed environment functions as one of many useful references and that it is not regarded as a fixed model to be copied, but as a suitable subject for formal manipulation. The modern viewer’s assumption that ancient art was intended to be naturalistic is

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grounded in an understanding of artistic development as an intellectual and technical progression towards mimesis (more on this below). During the Renaissance and subsequent periods, the focus of illusionistic naturalism was predominantly on two-dimensional art, such as painting and sculptural relief, or sculpture designed to be seen from an ideal viewpoint. While techniques such as linear perspective allowed for the creation of convincing illusions of reality, everything that filled and populated these made-up worlds were imaginary constructs. A fantasy parading as plausible reality. Early Renaissance artists relied on geometry to create illusions of space, mathematics to construct harmonious compositions, and close study of anatomy and botany to render the human figure and natural world. From the fifteenth century in Flanders and the sixteenth century in Italy, artists began to use optical devices and instruments such as lenses, mirrors and camera obscura to create ever more realistic images.14 David Hockney traces the introduction of these devices to an abrupt change in representation: ‘I know from experience that the methods artists use (materials, tools, techniques, insights) have a profound, direct, and instant influence on the nature of the work they produce. The sudden change I could see suggested to me a technical innovation rather than a new way of looking that then led to a progressive development of drawing skills.’15 Not every artist used optics, but those who did had a significant impact on style and viewer expectation: ‘after 1500 almost all seem to have been influenced by the tonalities, shading, and colours found in the optical projection’.16 Hockney’s suggestion that innovations in representation derive from the use of mirrors and lenses drew a sharp response from many art historians. The theory was regarded as belittling the achievements of these artists by ascribing their genius to trickery, or as some phrased it, ‘cheating’. The argument seems to be that if these artworks were not created by people who naturally possessed an extraordinary ability to perceive and replicate the world as no-one else could, then their art was less valuable. This response will be familiar to Homeric scholars, as it echoes the critique of Milman Parry’s proposal that the Homeric epics were not produced ex nihilo in a moment of unprecedented creativity by a single genius, but evolved over generations by means of oral-formulaic composition.17 Intrigued by Hockney’s theory and Philip Steadman’s Vermeer’s Camera (2001), inventor and engineer Tim Jenison set out to test these ideas. His

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A Homeric Catalogue of Shapes

five-year quest to determine and possibly duplicate the methods used to create Vermeer’s The Music Lesson (1662–5) was documented in a film (Tim’s Vermeer 2013) by Penn Jillette and Raymond Teller. Jenison has little training in art practice or history. As an expert in computer graphics, his interest in Hockney’s and Steadman’s ideas stem from a fascination with intersections between art and science. After much trial and error, Jenison comes up with a technique that combines projection through a lens with a mirror which allows him to accurately apply colour in natural light. Reactions to the film, like Hockney’s book, are split. Some viewers were excited by Jenison’s findings, while to others the experiment is an attempt to reduce Vermeer’s genius to a mere mechanism or a trick. This is despite the film clearly illustrating just how laborious the process of making a painting using this technique is, and the exceptional degree of physical exertion, mental focus and practiced ability to accurately mix and match paint colours it requires. A review by film critic Manohla Dargis for example, is scathing: ‘what they seem to be asking, though no one in the movie is so gauche to say it bluntly: Did Vermeer cheat his way into history?’ She concludes that in watching the film, ‘you learn a little about art and a great deal about the familiar impulse to tame art and drain it of its mystery and power’.18 Objections such as these reflect a belief that art can only inspire awe if it is inexplicable and rare, and if the methods of great artists can be deduced and described, then they can potentially be replicated by everyone. And if anyone can make a Vermeer, then Vermeer is no longer special. In an analysis of the lives of various inventors, scientists and musicians widely regarded as geniuses, Michael Howe confirms that: ‘One of the reasons for people being reluctant to let go of the idea that geniuses are a race apart, distinct from everyone else due to their inherent qualities as well as their marvellous accomplishments, is the fear that geniuses will be diminished if we remove the magic and mystery surrounding them.’19 The shock that greeted theories such as Hockney’s, Parry’s and Jenison’s derives from the notion that since technique can be taught, it must be a largely irrelevant factor in the production of great art. This idea was developed in the academies of art that had by the nineteenth century come to dominate European art education. During the Renaissance, the use of what can be described as scientific methods in the development of illusionistic naturalism occurred in an

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environment where artists were aiming to achieve the status of intellectuals. Artists could demonstrate their knowledge of science, literature, history and philosophy in the artworks they created. The ability to mimic and ‘improve’ the physical world on a two-dimensional plane was increasingly considered a predominantly intellectual process. By the nineteenth century, academies were ‘adamant in their refusal to engage the actual conditions of artistic production’,20 leaving students to acquire technical expertise from observing painters in studio settings. The academies’ disinterest in technique derived from the importance ascribed to the notion of disegno. This term, which dates to the early Renaissance, describes a philosophical approach to art-making as not just a manual, but an intellectual activity.21 Expectations that artists should be familiar with theories of proportion, know history, mythology and literature contributed to the idea of the artist as distinct from the craftsman. In time, disegno came to signify an underlying unity of conception and design in art, irrespective of format or medium. Divorcing an artwork’s concept from its process means that the idea and design of an artwork is regarded as a cerebral exercise independent of understanding how to select and manipulate material, express form, mass and volume, establish rhythm, apply colour, etc. The Renaissance notion of the artist as an expert in combining these two sets of knowledge had, by the nineteenth century, become the genius whose inexplicable creative achievements cannot in any way be ascribed to technical ability without undermining their mythical status. This disjunction between the intellectual basis of illusionism and the near-mythical status of its makers is deeply ironic. Like Hockney and Steadman, seventeenth-century scientists such as Thomas Povey had already appreciated the scientific basis of this artform and used many of the same optical devices in their analysis of the natural world.22 This ‘dematerialized’ illusionism became closely associated with European definitions of what constitutes a civilized society. According to this notion, cognitive development of the human species is imagined as following a set trajectory comparable to an individual human’s growth pattern (from primitive/child to civilized/adult), and that where a society lies on this scale is observable in the accuracy with which its artists can copy the natural world and then use that skill to construct complex representations of culturally significant narratives and ideas. Not only was naturalism considered indicative

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of cultural sophistication, it was also regarded as proof of cognitive superiority. Nineteenth-century art historians such as Aloïs Riegl, for example, assumed that the failure of indigenous Africans and Australians to recognize themselves in drawings or photographs stemmed from an innate inability to interpret two-dimensional imagery. In this assessment, Riegl either ignored, or was ignorant of artistic traditions incorporating two-dimensional imagery spanning millennia on both these continents,23 and that these include abstract, organic and geometric designs alongside naturalistic depictions, particularly of animals. What scholars such as Riegl considered a cognitive inability to interpret photographic and naturalistic images, may instead have been a rejection by these viewers of the method of representation. Constructing an illusion of reality establishes a different relationship between a subject and its depiction, and a depiction and its interpreter, than abstraction. It is different from, but not necessarily superior to, symbolic forms of representation. Nor is it universally regarded as the most authentic method of depicting a subject. An anecdote of a visit by a naval captain to Picasso’s studio suggests that an image which records the physical appearance of a person as seen in a single moment does not automatically meet all viewers’ expectations of what a visual representation should convey about its subject: the sailor recounted how he had shown a photograph of himself to his African hosts. To his surprise, his audience were so unimpressed with the likeness between him and the image that someone offered to make a more accurate version. He ‘took a pencil and paper and proceeded to draw the naval officer, but he did a completely non-realistic image, placing, for example, the shiny buttons of the uniform around the face’.24 In contemporary art, such a depiction can be categorized as an example of a composite object portrait. While many modern examples developed from collage, earlier examples include the composite portraits of Milanese painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo (see Chapter  3). The African’s portrait reflects an understanding of the sailor as not just as his body, but also as a complex social construct, reflected in attributes such as the most conspicuous parts of his uniform. The range of detailed information regarding a person’s family, origins, relationships, status and other affiliations communicated by the various items worn and used within traditional South African cultures (see below) reflect the extent to which an individual is recognized not just by their physical

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appearance, but also by a comprehensive collection of social associations, attributes that a conventional photograph or naturalistic depiction of a person’s facial features cannot fully convey. Representation in this sense is not a process of imitation, but the careful selection and compilation of what is quintessential about a subject.

Representational systems Where illusionistic naturalism is considered the apex of artistic growth, every other visual representational system is understood as a phase on a linear developmental path, reflecting a perception that methods of visual expression are somehow pre-programmed to occur in conjunction with specific social and cognitive evolutionary stages.25 The perception of naturalistic illusionism as the most sophisticated of all known representational systems largely derives from the opinion that it is both the most difficult to achieve and the most efficient. This idea does not allow for the possibility that cultures develop various (and constantly varying) forms of visual representation to serve specific means. As the example of the sailor and his photograph demonstrates, what suits the needs and expectations of one group of people may be wholly unsatisfactory for another. Each of these systems meets culturally-defined needs and expectations. In this way, aspects of human life and thought can be expressed and communicated, and received and interpreted, in the manner that its primary audience is receptive to. Naturalistic representation allows for clarity and directness. And the greater the degree of illusionism, the more cogent the image. Human physiology, gesture, expression and costume; animals; plants; objects; and locations can be specified in the finest detail. An artist skilled in this art-form can convey ideas, events and records of subjects (actual and invented) with unparalleled precision. As it can be used to both record with accuracy and convincingly imitate reality, it is of significant value to historians and propagandists alike. In terms of interpretation, this system fosters a single viewpoint and a coherent message that is directed towards a largely passive audience. Historically in European art, even sculpture was expected to have a primary vantage point. Consequently, sculptural relief was regarded as providing a

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more pleasant viewing experience than sculpture in the round, which (unless placed in a niche or on a rotating base) requires circumnavigation from the viewer.26 In this understanding of art, painters and sculptors alike are makers of lucid and logical images, not objects. Any ambiguity, or potential for the audience to be confused as to what is depicted, or to interpret any meaning not intended by the artist, was to be avoided at all costs. As Charles Baudelaire approvingly notes when comparing painting to sculpture, sculpture has ‘a certain vagueness and ambiguity, because it exhibits too many surfaces at once. The sculptor cannot create a single viewpoint, for the spectator can choose a hundred viewpoints . . . Painting has but one point of view; it is exclusive and absolute, and therefore the painter’s expression is much more forceful’.27 By the eighteenth century the doctrine of the academies reflected this obsession with visual and conceptual clarity: in an ideal composition, ‘only one subject or event may be depicted, with nothing detracting from it; if many figures are required, they must all relate clearly to the main figure, which is to be the most prominent in the composition . . . [in d]rawing, the contours of the figures are to be well defined, the figures clearly placed in space’.28 A disadvantage of naturalism is that it can become prescriptive and didactic. It easily lends itself to literalness and illustration to the point where the image can only function in conjunction with the text to which it refers. This was one of the hallmarks of the ‘history paintings’ that were encouraged under the Academic style. So, if an artist were to depict a blonde girl and three bears, viewers familiar with the folktale Goldilocks will interpret the image in terms of the story. The artist’s rendering of the characters could potentially supplant or augment the audience’s own perceptions of what they look like. The image would encourage recollection of the story, but add little to someone’s preexisting understanding of it, while a person unfamiliar with the tale may miss out on the artwork’s meaning completely, or misinterpret it, as a depiction of something else (juvenile zoologist doing fieldwork?). By contrast, consider a different mode of representation: objects or elements (actual or two-dimensional depictions of these) that can be categorized as three variations on a standard (for example: small, medium, large), repeated in different iterations. The ‘average’ example in each set of three objects is gradually altered to appear unnerving or dangerous. Reflecting that it was Goldilocks’s

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consistent preference for the ‘safe’ option that means she is asleep when the bears return, such a representation is not a reminder of a narrative the viewer already knows but presents the story as a sequence of choices in which the safe option ultimately proves unsafe. For the viewer, decoding such an artwork may be perplexing and time-consuming. Some may reach the artwork’s core premise without realizing that it refers to a specific narrative, while others may see additional ideas and references in the work than the artist intended. This is undoubtedly a very different interpretive process to the passive reception of a coherent and clearly articulated message so characteristic of the Academic style. These different hermeneutic processes reflect the extent to which the methods by which knowledge is stored, transmitted and received, can differ from one culture to another. To some, ideas are best relayed in a well-planned lecture, essay or book, which the audience receives as a completed thought process, and then questioned or critiqued afterwards. To others, knowledge is arrived at collectively through an interactive interrogative process, much in the vein of Socrates.29 A system of representation that meets the expectations of one group, could thoroughly confound another. Changes in social conditions are reflected in shifting forms of expression. A representational system that had long enabled people to make sense of their world, can suddenly seem antiquated or unsatisfactory in an altered context. Throughout the nineteenth century the social fabric of Europe underwent radical social transformation and political and economic upheaval that spurred significant emigration to colonial outposts in Australia, Africa and the Americas that would continue until the mid-twentieth century. The influence of Christian missionaries, trading companies and colonial authorities over the previous centuries meant that when nineteenth-century arrivals encountered indigenous peoples, they were confronted as much by mediated aspects of their own culture as foreign ones. While European cultural chauvinism largely emerged emboldened from such contacts, beneath this self-confidence lay an uneasy realization that their new context was far more complex and multifaceted than the traditional European world-view allowed for, an understanding further supported by a growing body of scientific research and technological innovation. Artists devised various stylistic methods to reflect this fast-changing reality.30

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Following the invention of the camera, comparisons of the characteristics of photographs to those of paintings made the latter seem wholly contrived. And as ground-breaking scientific theories upended many long-held perceptions of the natural world, artists began to question the most basic premises of sight itself. At the same time, increased exposure to the multiple ways in which other cultures express ideas in visual formats revealed an irony at the core of the European representational system that had been in place since the Renaissance. Despite its illusionistic ability, two-dimensional naturalism offers a very inaccurate approximation of how humans see and understand their physical environments, particularly when that environment is in rapid flux. A two-dimensional illusionistic depiction of a subject as it would appear at a single moment, viewed from a narrow, fixed vantage point, is very different to how humans perceive and interpret objects in threedimensional space. Human vision is binocular, incorporates a wide perimeter, can distinguish an object from its background, and is highly attuned to determining depth and motion. In addition, recognition of subjects is based on broad generic types. As such, people are prone to interpret various forms (such as the human-like stance of a vertical pole) as the human body. Many artists began to exploit this interpretive impulse to create increasingly stylized naturalisms. The early Modernists aimed to establish a process of viewing and understanding an artwork that echoes their experience of the world as complex and confusing. By the beginning of the twentieth century, Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque actively experimented with new methods of representation that would completely replace the passive viewing experience of Academicism with a representational system that actively encouraged the viewer to mentally deconstruct and reconstruct an artwork to determine any of multiple possible meanings (see Chapter 3). A core characteristic of Picasso’s approach was the use of ‘visual punning’, where one object or element is assigned two different (and even contrasting) meanings within the same composition. Puns feature strongly in oracles, such as the ‘colonization oracles’ that are frequently included in the founding myths of Greek colonies. Instructions were issued in the form of riddle by an oracle (such as the Delphic) on where and how a settlement was to be established. Carol Dougherty argues that this enigmatic aspect of colonial oracles is understandable, as establishing a settlement on unknown

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territory raises the risks of applying conventional means of understanding to the wholly unfamiliar. This mediation between the known and the foreign is often expressed linguistically: in many examples, the native name for a geographical feature is identified with a similar-sounding Greek word for an animal or plant which the colonists recognize to solve the oracle’s riddle.31 To many casual observers, the ‘demotion’ of naturalism from the apex of artistic achievement to one of many co-existing representational systems32 is evidence of an alarming artistic decline, a perception in keeping with the idea that this one method of representation is the hallmark of an advanced culture. In this view, stylization and abstraction mark a retreat to primitivism, an antiaestheticism meant to shock and disgust, or an intentionally obtuse visual language designed to only appeal to an informed elite. Where contemporary art is located at varying degrees of remove from popular culture, it is because painters and sculptors no longer hold a monopoly over the production of expressive images and objects. Artists have devised various methods of functioning within this visual cacophony. One way to extend engagement is to present something that resists the viewer’s urge to quickly categorize or make sense of it. Another is to develop a representational system that is not premised on the literal documentation of the viewer’s world as it appears, but to employ visual elements that are both dissonant within the prevailing visual landscape and decipherable. The invention of the camera, aided by advances in printing and later in digital technology, saw an unprecedented democratization of the making and consumption of images. The more ubiquitous imagery that is rapidly created and interpreted becomes, the greater the incentive for artists to devise means of representation aimed at an audience that is largely conditioned to regard naturalistic images as immediately comprehensible. This endless stream of pictures – many of them self-portraits – are an integral part of millions of people’s everyday reality. If artists devise representational systems to express a world-view, then in the present context, amateur photography clearly cannot be ignored. A substantial portion of contemporary imagery – both selfgenerated and consumed – relates to the continuous definition and assertion of a person’s individual and group identities, none of which can be fully communicated in a single photograph. Which recalls the anecdote of the

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Africans who rejected the sailor’s photographic portrait, and then made him their version of an accurate one.

Dynamic traditions Art-forms identified as ‘traditional’, ‘folk’ and ‘tribal’ are not conventionally regarded as dynamic, adaptable or compatible with modernity. Traditional art has long been held as belonging in the childhood phase of human development and is consequently often conceived of as expressions of the unspoiled innocence of the ‘noble savage’ not yet corrupted by modernity. In museum and gallery settings, the quality and authenticity of traditional art is often negatively judged on the extent to which contact with other cultures may have ‘contaminated’ or ‘diluted’ it. While this idea allows for an aesthetic appreciation of traditional art, the characteristics ascribed to it are antithetical to the dynamism and clear evidence of development that is commonly ascribed to art produced by cultures deemed advanced. This perception of the one as static and closed, and the other as dynamic and adaptable, reflects a misunderstanding of how traditional art is created and how it functions. In Homeric scholarship the notion of tradition remains highly contested. Johannes Haubold, for example, argues that ‘Milman Parry not only invented the traditional [Homeric] text, but also supported his theory by contrasting tradition as he understood it with a process of creative reception which he associated with the canon of Western literature. Tradition was inscribed in Homer’s language and implied the absence of specific creative acts.’33 Haubold suggests that modern scholarship has not developed an understanding of tradition beyond Parry’s perception when he identifies a tension between the ‘unique qualities of Homeric epic as reflected in more than two millennia of creative reception’ and ‘its traditional aspects’.34 By contrast, Richard Martin describes a development of insight into tradition, citing as an example the evolution of George Derwent Thompson’s ideas on Homer as based on his observations of the oral traditions of the Irish Blaskets islanders in the early twentieth century. Thompson observed that the epic poems he heard performed in Ireland were of such quality that they seemed to be of single authorship. Instead, he found that they had been

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‘progressively shaped and polished by a sort of natural erosion’ by poets, who like the Homeridai ‘perfected the traditional material by infusing it with their own personal outlook’,35 an insight that Martin suggests prefigures the work of Gregory Nagy (for more on Nagy see Chapter  6). Thompson described the poems taking shape ‘out of a kaleidoscopic background of impromptu variations adjusted to the inspiration of the moment’.36 In this view, tradition is not closed or static, but constantly recreated by individuals in response to their changing contexts, an understanding of the ‘creative powers of discipline within tradition [that] would have been out of fashion in the mid-twentieth century, when modernist notions of difficult, unique poetic genius had become the norm’.37 The notion of individual expression within a traditional art-form is identifiable beyond the Irish epics studied by Thompson. As twentieth-century examples from South Africa will show, many traditional art-forms comprise both such innovation and the appropriation, transformation and integration of foreign elements.A capacity to creatively respond to social and environmental challenges is evident in various traditional South African art-forms. Historically, interest in the impact of contact between indigenous peoples and foreign occupiers was limited to a small number of scholars and amateur observers. Of these, the majority seem to have conceived of their activities as the documentation of vanishing cultures. Although European settlement of South Africa started in the mid-seventeenth century, it was as recent as the twentieth century that the largest of the mass forced dislocations of the region’s indigenous and mixed-race populations occurred. Legislation designed to achieve geographic segregation of South Africa’s race groups involved the large-scale removal of entire populations from economic and social centres.38 Despite the extent of social rupture and economic deprivation, traditional art practices did not decline, but were adapted to reflect people’s shifting realities. These changes occurred in a period where scholars were beginning to think about cultural development differently, and there were abundant opportunities to document and widely disseminate various forms of artistic expression. Of South Africa’s many contemporary traditional art-forms, the Ndzundza Ndebele style is amongst the most immediately recognizable. This type of pattern painting was originally applied to the walls of Ndebele homesteads and is characterized by symmetrical geometric shapes in vivid colour and outlined in black, with occasional incorporation of heavily stylized imagery. While

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derived from the subtle designs and earthen colours of traditional Ndebele beadwork and mural painting, the Ndzundza style is a largely modern phenomenon. Its bright palette was enabled by the availability of acrylic paints after the Second World War, enabling its primary function as visual branding. Neither Ndebele, nor other South African mural traditions39 had previously asserted cultural identity as forcefully before. Elizabeth Rankin points out that early records ‘suggest that the traditional forms of beadwork, such as women’s aprons were rather austere, a fabric of closely woven tiny white beads with occasional coloured motifs, in which the shape of the garment rather than patterning indicated the social status of the wearer’.40 The Ndzundza style reflected a dramatic shift that occurred when the Ndebele were forcefully dispersed and resettled in isolated groups. Women who had long used the decoration of their homesteads to reflect their personal and familial identities, and to celebrate important social events and milestones, adapted this tradition to more emphatically broadcast their tribal and political allegiances. It was now directed as much at an external as at an internal audience. The style signifies conformity: young women learn to paint from their mothers and grandmothers, while non-Ndebele brides are expected to learn the technique from their female in-laws (they may decorate the less visible sides of the house in the style of the tradition they were raised in). Failure to decorate one’s house annually and appropriately can lead to ridicule and allegations of laziness and unsuitability for marriage.41 However, these strong social expectations do not preclude, but rather encourage idiosyncratic expression, innovation and visual appropriation. Painting involves the development of an extensive personal visual vocabulary. ‘Ndebele women actively appropriate the diverse stimuli they encounter, including patterns they see on other homes that they admire. For Ndebele women, painting is a competitive endeavour, one in which the author can gain esteem and prestige from her peers.’42 The ‘active appropriation of diverse stimuli’ observed by Craniv Boyd is not limited to Ndebele art. The visual traditions of indigenous peoples across South African display a similar openness to assimilating unfamiliar elements. The nature and extent of these vary, but incorporation into these traditional visual systems always involves some transformation of the foreign component. Elizabeth Schneider observes that

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designs of both the beadwork and the homestead walls are adapted from many sources; blankets, yardage, and linoleum floors were a few mentioned by the artists. Sometimes the imagery is from printed sources, such as their identification papers or letters and numbers on automotive registration plates . . . Occasionally houses or buildings with chimneys, windows, and stairs are rendered.43

While non-representational geometric motifs predominate, the occasional incorporation of a stylized reference to objects associated with the city, such as lamp-posts, aircraft, potted plants, etc. signal that a woman has access to social and family networks in urban areas. As Chris van Vuuren notes, these images advertise that their maker has seen these things. ‘It gives her freedom and enhances her creativity, and she notifies the (male) world where she has been.’44 Some Ndundza painters are equally skilled at adapting the style to function within the context of contemporary art and design. Esther Mahlangu, for example, has created artwork for corporations such as BMW, British Airways and Fiat. Appropriation also extends to foreign materials and entire objects. The Ndebele, like the Sotho, wear blankets as cloaks. Married Ndebele women wear an Umbhalo, a blanket woven in brightly coloured stripes onto which are sewn multiple strips of patterned bead-cloth (strings of beads woven together). Neither the blankets, nor the individual beads are produced by the Ndebele themselves. But the use of a richly beaded blanket as clothing is regarded as wholly traditional. The people of Lesotho – a small autonomous kingdom landlocked by South Africa – also regard a specific type of woollen blanket as a deeply traditional symbol. Worn as cloaks by everyone from king to commoner, the blankets serve ritual functions associated with birth, death and significant events. Imported first from Britain, and more recently from South Africa, none of these blankets are, or have ever been made by the Sotho themselves. The most popular blankets feature designs known as Victoria England, Sandringham, Prince of Wales Crest, or motifs of edible plants, such as cabbage leaves and corncobs. The popularity of specific designs and rejection of others occurs through a process of associative metaphor-making. A pin-stripe, which originally resulted from a weaving flaw, is now a mandatory feature.45 The Sotho do not need to manufacture these blankets themselves. As they constitute the primary market for this object, the form that it takes is determined by their preferences. For example, the Mamohato (Queen) design resulted from

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suggestions provided by the Queen of Lesotho (Karstel 1995, 200). Aranda Textiles’ Victoria England Spitfire commemorates Lesotho’s gift of twenty-four Spitfire aircraft to Britain during the Second World War. This blanket recalls the origins of the Sotho blanket-wearing tradition both literally and metaphorically: the Sotho king received a blanket as a gift from the British monarch, and Queen Victoria was revered by the Basotho for ‘spreading the blanket of her protection’ against Afrikaner aggression by declaring Basutoland a British protectorate in 1868. Multicoloured glass and plastic beads are another staple of South African traditional art that have long been imported.46 Beadwork is amongst the most ubiquitous and important of the region’s art-forms. Ranging from single strands to complex ‘bead-cloth’ and bead-covered objects, the collection of beadwork worn by an individual can convey extensive and highly detailed information on everything from their relationship status or intent, number of children, social rank, family group, place of residence, etc. Depending on the region, such information is encoded in the pattern, the use of abstract or stylized motifs, sequences of specific colours, or combinations of these. Such is the social significance of these items that they can function as ‘valid legal documents produced as evidence in traditional courts to prove the existence of a relationship between a young woman and a man’.47 As the beads from which these items are made reflect centuries of profitable engagement with the wider world, this material became emblematic of wealth and status. Like Ndebele painters, contemporary bead-workers have adapted this artform to a contemporary context. The Siyazama project, for example, is a public health education campaign that began in 1999. The AIDS pandemic presented a challenge to health educators in the deeply traditional rural Zulu areas of South Africa where the behaviour of women is informed by conventions of etiquette which include a strict taboo on discussing sexual relationships, and by extension, sexually transmitted diseases. In Zulu culture ‘knowledge is traditionally imparted primarily through the performed media of song and dance, storytelling, and proverbs, taboo topics are expressed in the mediated form of beadwork, an intimate and detailed system of fixed communication describing, communicating, and facilitating ideas of an intimate and sexual nature’.48 Using an existing representational system allowed for the creation of a new art-form where women could express their experiences of HIV and AIDS.

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As part of this project was aimed at enabling bead-makers to produce items for sale, the artwork they produce have both Zulu and non-Zulu audiences. The work consists of single figures (dolls) or tableaus of multiple figures dressed in traditional Zulu clothing, complete with elaborate beadwork. The beadwork is patterned in the same manner as actual clothing to signify social and marital status, but unlike traditional dress, text is frequently incorporated into the base of the tableau or the dolls’ clothing. Since most of the Siyazama bead-workers are illiterate, the use of text seems like an acknowledgement of the dolls’ nonZulu audience. However, the text is predominantly in Zulu, suggesting an adaptation of a foreign element that is both known to have an existing symbolic power and is a visual evocation of the spoken word. In rural areas in particular, the AIDS pandemic is closely associated with beliefs in the supernatural, including the idea that illness and death can be caused by the jealousy or ill-will of others. Taboos relating to speech, such as those governing women’s sexuality, reveal the potency that most of South Africa’s people ascribe to words. Although literacy is increasingly widespread, and all children are required to attend school, the region’s oral traditions have retained their vibrancy. The adaptive capacity that is evident in South Africa’s traditional visual arts also extend to the verbal. Following the forced relocation of entire social groups, oral traditions enabled the conservation of family and tribal histories that would ordinarily be linked to now distant ancestral grave sites. These were considered more reliable than written histories prone to manipulation by the apartheid authorities to justify the homelands policy and install compliant tribal leaders by intervening in the succession of chiefs and kings. Although printed periodicals featuring folktales, poetry, anecdotes and histories had been published in the languages of their authors – such as Xhosa – from as early as 1837, indigenous South Africans’ perception of written texts had long included a deep mistrust. Deborah Seddon points out that ‘in the metaphors used within nineteenth-century isiXhosa izibongo [poetry], the white man’s books and papers, particularly the Bible, are repeatedly associated with treachery, witchcraft, and the gun’.49 The very word used for ‘book’ by a Xhosa source is ‘incwadi’, which is also the name of a poisonous bulb that is layered like an onion.50 Unlike a book, an oral performance is subject to continuous review. It can only occur in the presence of an informed audience who can question the

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performer and interject if an action or a characteristic were to be ascribed to the wrong subject, or an event set in an inappropriate context. Because they are understood as verifiable, oral traditions enable a sense of social cohesion and continuity during an extended period of crisis and rupture. On the individual level, new oral forms emerged from the hardships and alienation of migrancy. With limited means of survival in the homelands, millions of people – mainly men – were forced to leave their homes and families in search of work. Whereas Xhosa migrants adapted their traditional praise poetry to express their experiences, entirely new poetic forms were created by Sotho migrants who drew on a variety of their own poetic traditions to create sefela, and the Zulu invention of isicathamiya, which incorporated musical styles ranging from Zulu traditional music to rock-and-roll, minstrel performances and gospel.51 Isicathamiya is performed by choirs while lifela [plural of sefela] are the preserve of solo singers. Performances of both are competitive, with financial rewards for the winners, but differ widely in the conditions under which they occur and how they are adjudicated.52 What they share is the attempted reconciliation of conflicting identities through the poetic assertion of a new self. David Coplan explains that there is a fundamental discontinuity between the structure of social relations, patterns of interaction, and cultural norms encountered at the mines and those governing social participation in Lesotho. Crossing the Caledon river into South Africa this symbolizes a conscious act of self-reformulation in conformity to mtheto, the culture of the mines. Lifela songs provide a powerful vehicle both for changing self-identity at the mines and for reconstructing an identity continuous with life in Lesotho upon their return.53

Individual expression through adapting traditional oral forms extends to modern South African poets. The political climate of the 1970s saw an upsurge in oral poetry, particularly in cities. Young poets, many inspired by the philosophy of Black Consciousness, were subject to censorship and the risk of arrest by police and security forces. Poetry composed for oral performance allowed for the safe transmission of prohibited ideas by established means in a format trusted by the intended audience. Subsequent publication of these poems, as pamphlets before the end of apartheid and as books more recently, contribute to a substantial canon of uniquely South African oral literature dating back to the early nineteenth century. It is now the norm for all important

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events – ranging from the inauguration of the state president, to political rallies, and civil, union and government gatherings – to incorporate various forms of oral performance. The image of the oral poet is so immediately recognizable to South Africans that an advertisement for local restaurant chain ‘Debonairs’ features a delivery man reciting praises to their ‘Beef Almighty’ pizza. Political emancipation is engendering greater cultural self-confidence, as the need for individuals to cultivate separate urban and rural identities dissipates. Popular culture (musical, performative and visual) in the region is expanding beyond imitations of European and American models to fusions of global contemporary forms with local traditions. In South Africa, oral poetry and performance adapted to dramatic shifts in social and economic conditions in concert with visual forms of communication and expression. As is evident from examples such as the Zulu taboos on certain forms of speech, and the Ndebele use of imagery to broadcast identity to disparate audiences, visuality and orality co-exist in supplementary formats. In addition, as representational systems, both the oral and the visual share core aspects of their interpretive processes. Neither are overtly literal, relying on metaphoric and symbolic association instead. The adaptiveness of both reflect an understanding of verbal and visual expression as the continuous transformation of something that already exists (a tradition or a foreign item/ element) to meet the requirements of present circumstances. Historically, the complexity and communicative and expressive range of Southern Africa’s traditional arts were often overlooked. Piers Carey notes how, of the various visual communication systems used in Africa, only those (such as the Ethiopic Christian alphabet) that conformed to European writing were recognized as meaningful. ‘Part of the problem stemmed from the use of substrates in African graphic communication, which were unfamiliar to colonial-era Europeans: The systems might have been inscribed on wood (carvings), the ground (sand diagrams), cloth, or the human body (as body painting, tattooing, or scarification).’54 Another part of the problem stemmed from the use of abstraction, stylization and apparent decorative nature of traditional arts. Beadwork is easily confused with conventional jewellery.55 Likewise, to an uninformed viewer, the decoration of homesteads, utensils, pots and other personal items was confused as simple embellishment. Perhaps most responsible for obscuring the significance of these visual formats is the

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expectation that a culture’s visual tradition includes clearly identifiable depictions of its heroes, gods, myths and rituals. This oversight has implications beyond the study of South African traditional art and poetry. In the next chapter I will demonstrate how an understanding of the expressive range of non-naturalistic art can alter how an object closely associated with Homeric poetry is interpreted.

2

A Homeric Object

In the 1997 film Hercules (directed by Ron Clements and John Musker) artforms such as Ancient Greek vase-painting and classical sculpture are fused with modern animation. The film’s blended visual language is in keeping with its depiction of the ancient hero in terms of modern celebrity. This look was achieved by a team of animators who transformed a series of ‘character treatments’ by illustrator Gerald Scarfe and black and red figure vase-paintings into a single cohesive style. Scarfe was selected based on his expertise in creating caricatures featuring ‘strong calligraphic lines [which] complemented the ancient Greek drawings the Hercules team was trying to work from’.1 He describes the aim of the project as creating ‘a modern version of ancient Greece, with references to what’s going on today’.2 The pairing of caricature and vasepainting allows the animators to draw on the exaggeration of physical features that characterizes both art-forms. Visually, the transition from an image on a vase or a sculpture (Caryatids and portrait busts) to an active character in various song sequences occur seamlessly as the animators can rely on the audience’s ability to recognize a well-established visual shorthand for ‘ancient Greece’. A trope drawn from such broad sources as art and architecture to product labelling and advertising, and even restaurant decoration. The latter largely derive from such Neoclassical models as Wedgwood ceramics (which were in turn translated into mass-produced biscuit and coffee tins, etc. in the twentieth century). While the dialogue established in Hercules seems to be between ancient and modern, it is rather an interaction of a modern art-form with a contemporary idea of an ancient aesthetic. Although this aesthetic is a compilation of artforms from multiple time-periods, its defining feature is that it omits the predominantly abstract art-forms of the Greek ‘Dark Ages’ (eleventh to eighth centuries bce) and only rarely includes aspects of Archaic Greek art (eighth to 37

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sixth centuries bce), and then largely as decorative patterning. In the popular imagination, ancient Greece is inseparable from figurative art, specifically from the fifth and later fourth centuries bce. Unless a conscious effort is made to clearly define a setting, this vision of ancient Greece serves as the inadvertent visual context in which events and ideas from antiquity are imagined. The epics that incorporate references to Heracles, such as the Iliad and the Odyssey, predate this Greece by centuries. The material culture of the people who crafted the poems that laid out the core attributes of most distinctive characters of Greek myth and literature differs significantly from the environment in which a modern audience would imagine them. As noted by Stephen Jay Gould in Chapter 1, the visual representation of an idea (such as the ‘ladder of evolution’) can have a significant and largely unacknowledged influence on how that idea is understood. To most of the audience for Hercules, setting this hero’s origin story within cities populated with marble temples and naturalistically painted vases and sculptures would seem perfectly logical. Such associations can even extend to scholarship: as Squire points out, the influential art historian Ernst Gombrich conceived of a ‘Greek Revolution’ which tied the invention of western naturalism to western narrative itself. Classical sculptors and painters are imagined as discovering the character of Greek narration not just in terms of the content of myths, but in their narrative unfolding.3 While Gombrich’s theory accounts for the chronological mismatch between the two art-forms from ancient Greece most admired by later audiences – the Homeric epics and visual art from the Classical period – it creates a problem: in this scenario, visual art is depicted as ‘catching up’ to an already perfected narrative art-form. This means that significant developments in narrative either predate the envisaged ‘revolution’, or intellectual and cultural changes were reflected in literature long before they informed visual art. Thematically, Gombrich’s idea seems evident, in that the Homeric epics (along with others from the Trojan Cycle) served as a rich resource for Classical and Neoclassical art. Compositionally, there is no reason why a visual counterpart to the Homeric should necessarily be purely figurative and illustrative. The long-held idea of Greek naturalism as a radical departure representing a monumental intellectual and cultural shift is premised on an association between the largely abstract and stylized art of the Geometric, Orientalizing and early Archaic periods with traditionalism, and correlating

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the figurative art that followed with individualistic self-expression. A more useful approach may be to view the emergence of the naturalism that would ultimately define Classicism as the result of a series of stylistic adaptations over an extended period. Examples of traditional art from Southern Africa clearly demonstrate that unpredictable stylistic variations and formal adaptations are a common feature in their development. Conceiving of ancient Greek art as traditional – like understanding the epics in the same light – means interpreting it in terms that may be alien to modern notions of style and expression. In addition, it suggests that ancient Greek art can be approached as a continuum in which abstract visual elements are as expressive as naturalistic ones. The Homeric epics are believed to have developed during the seventh and the eighth centuries bce into the format now recognized. While most of the material culture of eighth- and seventh-century Greece did not survive, what did suggests the existence of a variety of art-forms featuring culturally distinctive decorative patterns and metopes. For example, the roof, walls and columns on late eighth- and early seventh-century clay models of apsidal shrines or houses found in the sanctuary at Perachora and Argos, are elaborately painted.4 Analysis of trace elements of paint on ancient statuary and architecture by Vinzenz Brinkmann and Katerina Romaiopoulou revealed that buildings and statuary were not only painted, but richly decorated in motifs and patterns. Given the extent to which clothing on Archaic sculptures such as the Peplos Kore from the Athenian Acropolis, and the Phrasikleia was painted to represent richly decorated fabric, incorporating elements such as rosettes, stars, swastikas, meanders, etc. it is probable that earlier fabrics also incorporated patterning. In the Odyssey for example, Helen gifts Telemachus a ‘richly decorated/embroidered’ (poikilos) robe for his future wife that she herself had made (Od. 15.107). And in Il. 6.294 the women of Troy select a richly decorated robe to present to Athena. In the poems, producing cloth and clothing is the responsibility that extends to the highest-ranking woman in a household (Penelope, Arete, Helen, etc.). If the South African examples are instructive, then most of the visually communicative artefacts from the period when the Homeric poems originated would have been made from perishable materials, leaving only the most durable remnants for archaeologists to find. The exact characteristics of these items are extrapolated from occasional clues. However,

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the little that has survived – such as pottery – can provide an informative context for understanding the Homeric epics, not as isolated phenomena, but as products of larger cultural processes. Where a text occurs in close conjunction with contemporary imagery, interpretation of the one can benefit from an acknowledgement of the meaning of the other. One example of a rare meeting of eighth-century words and images occurs on the so-called ‘Nestor’s cup’ from Pithecusae. Since its discovery in the grave of a young boy on the island of Ischia in 1954, interpretations of this object have largely focused on deciphering the meaning of the text. Dated to the late eighth century, Nestor’s cup bears an inscription that appears to allude to the Homeric epics, potentially offering a rare connection between the poets who composed and performed the evolving Iliad and Odyssey, and the type of everyday objects that populated their world. In a modern literate context, the words on the cup have largely been analysed in isolation from the motifs and patterns over which they were applied. If the addition of the inscription is regarded as transforming this cup into something comparable to a collage or an assemblage, then none of its individual elements can be interpreted alone. A composite object’s meaning derives from the interplay and juxtaposition of all its constituent parts. In this scenario, the significance of Nestor’s cup derives from the dialogue between two visual representational systems – one established, the other emergent – that it embodies. Add to this the implied presence of a third – oral – communicative system and the cup becomes an even more compelling meeting point. If the South African examples are instructive, then within a culture, oral and visual forms of expression can share core characteristics.

The dialogue on Nestor’s cup ‘Nestor’s cup’ is a small terracotta skyphos of the ‘Rhodian’ bird-bowl type,5 decorated with black glaze in the ‘Orientalizing style’ and inscribed post-firing with a geometric ‘trellis-like’ pattern and three lines of early Euboean Greek text. This object is regarded as highly significant, since part of the inscription is hexametrical, and it includes a reference to a distinctly Homeric hero (Nestor) and a Homeric epithet for Aphrodite. The question of whether this

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item provides evidence of an early familiarity with the epics has informed interpretations of it. The ordinariness of the cup and the broad distribution of its type means that the material and decorative aspects of the object have inspired far less analysis than the inscription. As a result, the process by which the combination of cup and inscription occurred is predominantly understood in terms of how and why the text was composed. As the cup was broken (probably on internment), the text is incomplete, but can be reconstructed as follows: Nέστορός : ε.[. .]ι. : εὔποτ[ον] : ποτέριον. | ηὸς δ’ ἂν τοˉδε πίεσι : ποτερί[ο] : αὐτίκα κεˉνον | ηίμερος : ηαιρέσει : καλλιστε.[φά]ν.ο : Ἀφροδίτες

Which is variously translated as: ‘I am/this is Nestor’s cup good for drinking/to drink from. Whoever drinks from this cup immediately will be seized with desire for beautifully crowned Aphrodite.’ According to most scholars, in the imagined process by which the cup came to be inscribed, the selection of the cup is largely arbitrary and the act of inscribing of the phrase serves to produce either a memento of a drinking party, or a witticism for future guests.6 Since it was first published, the inscription has generally been considered an example of ancient humour, which includes the idea that it belongs in the context of the aristocratic male drinking club known as the symposium (Buchner and Russo 1955; Carpenter 1963; Hansen 1976; Powell 1989, 1991; Lang 1991; Murray 1994). This interpretation stems from the apparent juxtapositions established between an ordinary object and a mythical one, and the irony of sexual pleasure as punishment. The joke would make perfect sense to a modern audience who, as Stephanie West warns, may be reminded of a humorous coffee-mug.7 Like West, Christopher Faraone suggests an interpretation that ‘takes the inscription seriously’ in that the phrase may be an incantation, representing either erotic magic or a conditional curse.8 He notes for example, that Greeks of the archaic period held a ‘generally negative view of erotic seizure’.9 Even in this scenario, the inscribed (now magical) object still results from a relatively arbitrary selection of cup. It is chosen because it will hold the liquid that will deliver the potion. West and Faraone both mention the discovery in Eretria of another Orientalizing bird-bowl (in limited fragments) decorated and

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inscribed with similar lettering.10 However, West does not query what this might imply regarding the inscriber’s choice of cup, while Faraone suggests that the inscriptions are the result of one individual’s experimentation. The idea that the written component represents but one part of a dialogue, and that the cup was not ‘mute’ prior to its transformation, remains unexplored. Hesitation in ascribing any significant pre-inscription meaning to the cup may partly lie in its status as an ancient example of widely exported commercial ware, decorated in a ‘borrowed’ style. However, as examples from South Africa show, these attributes do not necessarily preclude meaningful and culturally specific expression of ideas. It is arguable that interpreting the significance of Nestor’s cup based on the inscription alone is comparable to deciphering the meaning of a Siyazama doll, based on the words in the beadwork, but not the colour combinations, emblems and patterns. The influence of an audience’s representational context can be demonstrated in how the imaginary ‘shield of Achilles’ has historically been imagined. This fictional object vividly illustrates how Homeric poetry is understood and visualized in terms of figurative Classical representational systems, as opposed to the representational systems of eighth-century Greece. Homer’s description certainly seems to suggest a surface covered in swarming figures, but as James Francis oberves, ‘the description of works of art was complex from the start. There appears to be no stage in which literature contented itself with any form of simple ekphrasis, the mere mimetic description of a visual artefact.’11 Described in minute detail in Il. 18.478–608, the shield is a prime example of the so-called ‘cinematic’ nature of Homeric poetry. As Umberto Eco notes, it has so many scenes that, unless we presume infinitesimally minute goldsmithery, it is difficult to imagine the object in all its wealth of detail; what is more, the portrayal does not concern space alone, but also time, in the sense that various events follow one another, as if the shield were a cinema screen or a long strip cartoon, with the same characters reappearing several times in different times and places (see for example Piero della Francesca’s True Cross cycle in Arezzo), but this is precisely why the shield should have more scenes than it could materially contain.12

The shield is clearly a poetic image, but generations of artists have nonetheless insisted on taking it literally. As Eco observes: ‘various artists have tried to

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reproduce Hephaestus’ work visually, but all they managed to do was make fairly cursory approximations’.13 These attempts all reflect Classical reliefs such as the procession on the Parthenon frieze. The assumption is clearly that the poet would have been familiar with such images and elaborated upon them. For most of its formative period, the poets who composed and performed the Homeric epic would have understood visual representation not in figurative terms, but as sequences of abstract signs and symbols. It is more likely that the shield is magic (not unusual for something crafted by Hephaestus) with a surface design that can induce the viewer to imagine the scenes described. To a modern audience, mental images of this kind are easily evoked through the decipherment of graphic marks known as writing. It is not inconceivable that to an ancient pre-literate audience a comparable interpretive process may have involved abstract symbols and patterns. Interpretation of Nestor’s cup seems to assume that the decorative scheme was largely applied by the potter as embellishment, to signal provenance and appeal to buyers. However, given the expressive role of motif and pattern in the South African examples, it is conceivable that the cup’s imagery is an example of a broader representational system and held symbolic and/or associative functions. In this scenario, whoever inscribed the cup would have expected for their contribution to become part of the cup’s meaning. The arrangement of the inscribed marks over the decorative scheme on Nestor’s cup suggest that its layout could have been informed by the structure of the cup and its existing imagery. On Nestor’s cup the decorative scheme occurs on the upper two-thirds of the outer body and consists of four metopes on each side containing crosshatched diamond shapes, ‘meander trees’14 and ‘broken meanders’ (or intersecting ‘L’ shapes). Below these are two sets of double horizontal lines interspersed with a horizontal zig-zag. The rest of the outer body is covered in a solid black glaze. The inscription begins next to the inscribed ‘trellis’ under one of the handles and runs from right to left in three lines across the horizontal bands and zig-zag. Two isolated letters appear above the end of the final word in the last line. Although the lower body of the cup is covered in a solid black glaze against which the inscribed marks would have been highly visible, the text has been applied over a section of the painted decoration, while a geometric ‘trellis’ pattern was placed directly below one of the cup’s handles. The first and

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third lines of text correspond with the two sets of horizontal bands which run along the base of the decorated panel below the metopes. The second line of text was scratched into the horizontal zig-zag that runs between the horizontal lines. Since the text reads from right to left, it is reasonable to assume that the trellis pattern to the right of the text is meant to be read first. The trellis consists of three vertical lines intersected by seven horizontal ones, creating seven sets of ‘boxes’ (the last set is open to the bottom). Situated beneath the cup handle, its two outer vertical lines slant outwards towards the top, following the widening of the bowl. The first line of text starts next to the third box from the top of the trellis, line two next to the fifth box, and line three next to the seventh. The resulting gap of one box between each line suggests a pattern. If this is a pattern, then the absence of text next to the first box either breaks that pattern, or the four metopal panels to its left might be regarded as its corresponding ‘text’. There are other indications that the inscription may have been tailored to the cup’s design. L. H. Jeffrey identifies various characteristics that are very uncommon for the period.15 These atypical features include the lettering which is small and neat, as opposed to tall, crude and spindly; the letters seem to be arranged partly stoichedon;16 and words are separated by means of punctuation marks. The neat ‘squat’ appearance of the letters are indeed very different to the scraggly elongated style of the period. The inscriber may have taken their cue from a detail on the third metopal panel from the right which comprises a ‘meander tree’. In this specific example, the triangle is flanked by two zig-zags, each resembling an N lying at 45°. It is unlikely that the inscriber failed to notice that the letter nu resembled these motifs in reverse. It is also unlikely that they would not have noticed that the sigma looks like a vertical zig-zag, or that the two vertically stacked boxes that comprise an eta echoes the square boxes of the metopes, and the trellis-like grid scratched below the handle. If these three letters are important, it is because their combined effect is to mark the beginnings and ends of each line with zig-zags and paired squares.17 In this context, the two isolated letters which occur above the last two letters of the last word in the last line seem to make sense: they comprise a nu with what looks like an incomplete eta to its left. The absence of a horizontal line at the base of what would be the letter’s lower square reflects the lowest – similarly left open – box on the trellis-like grid pattern below the handle. Unusual

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punctuation also appears to echo the composition of the cup’s existing imagery. Lines one and three are each divided into four sections, and line two into three. Likewise, there are four metopes, but three different motifs.18 The inscriber seems to have taken great care in arranging the letters, as the punctuation marks between the last two sections of lines one and two are vertically aligned. To a person accustomed to interpreting abstract symbols and motifs, scratching one set of marks over another and replicating some in the process, formal similarities would be apparent. The letters function as design elements, suggesting that an attempt was made at exploring, and emphasizing, visual echoes between two different communicative systems. Does this imply conceptual correspondence? On the one hand, it is plausible that the inscriber simply responded to occasional resemblances. On the other, it is possible that the inscriber constructed their text in a manner designed to establish a clear connection not just between letters and motifs, but also between the meaning of the text and the cup’s decorative scheme. For the latter to be the case, there would be an association between the subject-matter of the cup’s existing iconography and the inscription. As with any code, abstract symbols require a key for decipherment. Where no such key is available, the context in which these images frequently appear can provide some insight as to possible meaning, but a precise ‘translation’ is not possible. In the case of Nestor’s cup, all the motifs used are common in the Geometric and Orientalizing period. The symmetry of the two diamond motifs at the beginning and end of the series is echoed in the text, which begins with one name (Nestor) and ends with another (Aphrodite). In Greek Geometric art, the combination of the diamond with the two intersecting ‘L’ shapes,19 often appears in the ‘horseleader’ motif, commonly found on pottery produced in horse-breeding areas such as Argos, Athens, Boeotia, Euboea and Laconia. The horse-leader is usually a male figure holding one or two horses, accompanied by either a fish or water bird, and the previously mentioned collection of geometric shapes. Where human and animal figures occur in conjunction with abstract shapes, the assumption is that the figure and animals are significant while the shapes serve as filling ornamentation. But, such images may point to the co-existence of figurative and abstract representation, in which case both are meant to be read by the viewer. For example, in an assessment of the complex iconography of the Nabateans, Alpass argues that

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the problem of why some Nabatean depictions of divinities were abstract and others figurative exists only in the minds of modern observers, ‘the evidence suggests that Petra’s worshippers saw no conflict between anthropomorphic and aniconic . . . there is no evidence of conflict or competition between the two modes of representation. Rather, it seems that worshippers could and did draw on geometric and anthropomorphic forms to express their interpretation of Petra’s deities.’20 Susan Langdon (1989) traces the horse-leader back to similar Bronze Age types, and the ‘meander tree’ in the third panel is likely derived from an older ‘tree of life’ image. This motif is often flanked by animals, such as goats, contributing to the idea that it represents some type of vegetation. The shape also recalls images of the Minoan snake goddess in her wide skirt and raised arms, or the ‘mistress of the beasts’ (potnia theron) in which a female figure (often winged) is depicted with an animal or waterfowl at either side. Aniconic representations of female divinities persisted into the Classical period.21 In the eight century, each of the motifs on Nestor’s cup had an entire collection of established associations.

Nestor and Aphrodite Of the various heroes and gods in the Homeric epics, Nestor and Aphrodite are amongst those whose characterization easily enables abbreviation: Nestor is the aged advisor and teller of seemingly endless stories, whereas Aphrodite represents the power of sexual attraction to override rational behaviour. Since Nestor rarely occurs outside the Iliad and the Odyssey he is regarded as a predominantly Homeric invention. However, Douglas Frame (2010) argues that various episodes in the epics hint at obscured aspects of Nestor’s character. Frame connects Nestor to the twin gods of the Rig-Veda and the Greek twin heroes Castor and Polydeuces. Like Nestor, whose epithet is ‘Gerenian horseman’, both sets of twins are associated with horsemanship. The Vedic twins correspond with the rising and setting (or birth and death) of the sun, while the Greek Dioscuri spend alternate days alive and dead (Polydeuces shared his immortality with his mortal twin Castor). In this context, the appearance of the ‘broken meander’ alongside the horse-leader figure is

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evocative: it is conceivable that two horizontal lines with verticals extending upwards and downwards may represent the idea of twins alternating between Hades and Olympus. In Frame’s thesis, Nestor is a remnant of a similar set of horseman twins and his appearances in the epics often allude to elements of this mythic type. Nestor’s unusual cup appears at a crucial turning point in the Iliad: the old man evacuates the wounded healer Machaon (one of Asclepius’ twin sons) from the battlefield in his chariot and brings him to his hut where the old man’s maid serves them a blend of Pramnian wine (a dark, rich wine), grated goatsmilk cheese and white barley. This mixture is presented in a very elaborate bowl or large cup which only Nestor can lift when it is full. They drink and engage in conversation. When Patroclus arrives to find out who the wounded man is, Nestor tells a rambling tale of his own youthful exploits and convinces Patroclus to pretend to be Achilles by wearing his armour into battle. This advice begins the sequence of events that results in the death of Patroclus, which in turn brings the vengeful Achilles back into the war. At no point after bringing Machaon out of battle does anyone tend to Machaon’s injury (an arrow in the right shoulder). The wounded man drinks from Nestor’s cup and then engages in pleasant conversation with his host (Il.11:642–3). By contrast, when Patroclus leaves Nestor’s tent he encounters Eurypylus who was wounded during the same battle as Machaon and is clearly in great deal of pain. Patroclus cuts the arrow from the man’s thigh, washes the blood off, and applies a medicinal herb to stem both pain and bleeding (Il.11:843–8). A procedure that echoes the exact sequence of actions that Machaon is described as skilled at performing when the Achaeans urge Nestor to rescue him (Il.11:511–15). The cup-episode is bookended by two similar descriptions of surgical and medicinal healing. Machaon’s demeanour suggests that drinking a mixture of wine, cheese and barley from Nestor’s potentially magical cup has achieved the same effect without the normal procedures. On the one hand, the cup represents a positive attribute of Nestor as saviour, but the larger narrative in which it appears reveals another aspect of the old man: he sets in motion the death of Patroclus. In this scenario, Nestor’s cup evokes healing, pleasant socializing, and a type of death associated with year-gods and solar-cults. In most interpretations of the Nestor cup inscription, the reference to sexual arousal and Aphrodite are taken to mean that both the mythical and the

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actual cup be understood in the context of the symposium. However, Aphrodite is not just a by-word for sex, she is also associated with a cycle of life and death through her consort Adonis. The epithet used in the inscription and the ‘meander tree’ motif both point in this direction. The hexametrical part of the inscription states that whoever drinks from the cup will immediately be seized by desire for kallistephano Aphrodite (beautifully crowned Aphrodite). The use of the epithet may refer to the Odyssey where Aphrodite is eustephanos (wellgirdled or well-crowned). This Aphrodite is the more familiar seductress whose entrapment with her lover Ares by her husband Hephaestus is narrated as entertainment at a social gathering (Od. 8:266–366). But nowhere in either the Iliad or the Odyssey is Aphrodite kallistephano. This rare epithet instead occurs in the Homeric hymn 2 to Demeter. Disguised as a nursemaid, Demeter is called kallistephano when she begins the process of making the infant Demophoon immortal, a process that includes placing him in the fire at night. She is called kallistephano when she stops the immortalizing process and again, when her predictions of future turmoil for the people of Eleusis and her instructions to have a temple erected where her rites will be established, are relayed to the king. This epithet as used in the hymn relates to immortality, mortality and the establishment of the Eleusinian mysteries, which commemorate Persephone’s passage between life and death. These ideas seem far removed from Aphrodite as goddess of love, but they do evoke her close associations with deities such as the Sumerian and Akkadian deities Inanna and Ishtar, whose consorts Dumuzi and Tammuz both descend into the underworld on a cyclical basis.22 When Adonis, one of Aphrodite’s human lovers dies, she ultimately shares him with Persephone, goddess of the underworld. Meaning that Adonis, like Castor and Polydeuces, Dumuzi, and Tammuz spends part of the year alive, and another part dead. As figures of year-cults the iconography associated with these goddesses and their dead partners often feature vegetation and ‘trees of life.’ In this context, to be ‘seized with desire’ for Aphrodite is to be in some sense Adonis. The implications of such a reading for interpreting the Nestor cup’s inscription is that the cup may have been inscribed specifically as part of the funeral rites of the boy in whose grave it was deposited. Jasper Gaunt notes that this is the richest burial in the early cemetery at Pithecusae, and that there is something odd about it: ‘In a cemetery in which it would appear that only the elite were

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cremated, while children were generally buried, it is all the more remarkable that a young boy should be accorded the rites of cremation.’23 The image of the boy’s cremation recalls the scene from the hymn to Demeter where she places Demophoon in the fire to make him immortal. As the burial occurred in a trading settlement where Greeks, Etruscans and Phoenicians lived in proximity and intermarried, could the inscribed cup mark a confluence of widely shared ideas relating to cults associated with cycles of death and rebirth? Did the boy die on an auspicious day, and/or in an auspicious manner? Can the abundance of grave goods and the choice of cremation be explained by factors other than the wealth of the deceased’s family? If so, then the inclusion of the cup in the grave can be something other than a memento of a social gathering. It is also conceivable that the cup may relate to events that preceded the boy’s death. It is not known how he died, but it is possible that death may have been preceded by a period of illness, in which event there would have been an attempt to heal him. In this context, Nestor’s cup may be invoked as an object with known restorative powers. If the cup served as part of a healing ritual, then what to make of the reference to Aphrodite? Like most deities, Aphrodite took a variety of forms and functions throughout the ancient Mediterranean. On Cyprus, her cult was closely associated with that of the Phoenician Astarte (see Young 2005), while in Miletus (where the cup was likely produced)24 and its colonies, Aphrodite was not only a major deity (see Greaves 2004), but like Tannit, was a maritime goddess. As discussed, depictions of Tannit share attributes with both the ‘meander tree’ motif and the aniconic representation of Aphrodite at Paphos on Cyprus. Rüdiger Schmitt finds a correlation between the status of deities such as Astarte and Aphrodite and the function of healing: ‘In the westward Phoenician expansion she [Astarte] would become a more universal high goddess, merging with local deities and taking on similar political functions like Aphrodite/Kypris, thereby strengthening her aspect/ role/status as a major female deity. The high goddesses’ aspect as a healing deity would persist into the Hellenistic-Roman Period.’25 If Aphrodite can be associated with healing, then what can be deduced from the epithet applied to her in the inscription? Even though kallistephano Demeter fails to make Demophoon immortal, the fact that she has nursed him still makes him to grow at a supernatural rate. An image of rapid growth is suggested in the hexameter when it states that he who drinks from the cup will

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be seized by desire for Aphrodite. As the inscription specifies a male subject, ‘seizure’ probably means penile erection. This phrase may be metaphorical: a rapid change from limp to actively growing as symbolic of the recovery of a patient physically emaciated and exhausted by disease. Given the large number of metaphors and similes in ancient Greek poetry, it is not unlikely that this specific hexameter may be metaphoric. In Sotho oral poetics, metaphors are not just one tool amongst many, they are a defining characteristic of the artform. As Coplan notes, within ‘the essentially competitive structure of lifela performance, the ability to compose fresh, startling metaphors is a major evaluative criterion’.26 None of these observations can conclusively prove where, when or why the cup was inscribed. But they demonstrate that acknowledgement of the cup’s pre-existing markings significantly extends the range of motives, functions and associations that can be explored in the interpretation of the Nestor cup inscription. Recognition that the motifs may represent complex ideas that the inscriber could have associated with the names in the inscription can prompt a shift in how the interpreter visualizes Nestor and Aphrodite, and by extension, how they contextualize the conditions in which the cup was altered. Mental images of a chatty old man and a beautiful naked woman are unlikely to result in a similar interpretation of their meaning than abstract symbolic representations of collected attributes and functions. In the Homeric epics, the significance of Aphrodite and her human proxy Helen, extends beyond the supposed reason for the Trojan war as revenge for Menelaos losing his wife. The war represents a process by which the greatest heroes of the age can gain kleos (immortality in poetry) when they die for the sake of Helen’s return. This Aphrodite encompasses a completely different set of ideas than the figure that emerges from interpretations of the inscription on the cup alone. And it is arguably a better reflection of the thematic complexity of Homeric poetics. Much of the scholarship on ancient Greek poetry has historically originated within a culture where illusionistic naturalism has long been the predominant visual representational system. In this context, divinity is anthropomorphic, events from history, literature and fable are visually ‘acted out’ in images resembling scenes from a theatre or a movie-still. Complex ideas are expressed via allegorical or symbolic figures, settings or arrangements of objects. In Western culture, this way of seeing has become so normalized that its effect on

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thinking is largely undetected. However, it would have been as nonsensical to members of the culture that produced the Homeric epics as photographic portraits were to the nineteenth-century Africans in the story of the European sailor. Examples such as traditional South African visual and oral art-forms can alert scholars to the extent to which habits of seeing can influence interpretation. Analysis of representational systems that occur within oral cultures can provide significant insight into the interplay between visual and verbal forms of expression. While art-forms such as the Ndzundza style and illusionistic naturalism are different, they both derive from habits of seeing. Within any culture, its dominant representational system becomes definitive of perception. It is rare for a representational system to present itself as one method amongst multiple possible systems of expression and perception. Such artistic self-consciousness occurs where artists actively question the prevailing representational systems of their own culture, as was the case in late nineteenthcentury and early twentieth-century Europe. As these art-forms are premised on an active re-evaluation of representation, their meaning is informed by their methodology. In the next chapter I will discuss the creative methodology underlying sculptural assemblage and introduce the notion of the composite object portrait, which, I will argue, are uniquely suited to a visual translation of a formulaic Homer.

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Sculptural Assemblage and the Composite Object Portrait

Given the emphasis on methodology in the construction of meaning in contemporary applications of the theory of Homeric formulaic composition by scholars such as Gregory Nagy, Leonard Muellner, Egbert Bakker and Ahuvia Kahane, the integration of form and content in the sculptural technique of assemblage and the symbolic iconography underlying the composite object portrait provide appropriate means to construct a visual interpretation of Homeric poetics. Contemporary sculptural assemblage derives from a combination of developments in visual art that occurred during the early twentieth century. As discussed in Chapter  1, these stemmed from radical reconsiderations of how the world is perceived and represented. These developments include the Cubists’ transformative engagement with the systemic – as opposed to stylistic – aspects of Classical art, the appropriation and amalgamation of seemingly incompatible techniques, forms and materials, and the development of a dialectical hermeneutics. Art-forms premised on incorporating their means of construction into their meaning. One method of sculptural assemblage entails the representation of a person or persona as a collection of symbolic attributes, as opposed to a physical likeness. This notion of the composite object portrait can be traced to Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s unusual re-interpretation of the art and ideas of antiquity in the sixteenth century and the symbolic use of objects in modern collage and assemblage. The methodological, conceptual and hermeneutic attributes of sculptural assemblage as devised by Pablo Picasso and developed by artists such as Damian Ortega, Man Ray and Sam Smith provide a general framework for a comparison between oral and visual constructive methods. For the more specific aim of creating a visual translation of formulaic Homeric poetics, in 53

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my sculptural series A Catalogue of Shapes, this understanding of sculptural assemblage was combined with the notion of the ‘composite object portrait’ to create a series of sculptures based on twelve dramatic personae whose attributes and functions in the plot elucidate Homer’s principal heroes and their epics.

Cubism, Picasso and sculptural assemblage During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the emphasis placed on the art and literature of antiquity by academies of visual arts meant that early Modernism was to a large extent based on rejection of the antique. As a bastion of Academic Classicism, the Homeric epic therefore might seem antithetical to assemblage as a product of the avant garde. However, the basic principles of assemblage derive less from a rejection of Classicism than from a transformative re-evaluation of the art of antiquity. Such analyses of antiquity were undertaken by early modernists such as Giorgio de Chirico, Fernand Léger and Pablo Picasso. Their engagement with the Classical differed from nineteenth-century Neoclassicism on a crucial point: for all of them ‘the art of antiquity had meaning only if it could be transformed, reinvented, revalued – and only if it could speak in the present tense’.1 Each approach differed, reflecting the major advances and shifts in knowledge of antiquity during this period. Most significantly, these artists differentiated between long-held assumptions regarding ancient Greece and Rome, and antiquity as described in emerging scholarship. This scholarship extended across archaeology, art history and Classics, and included a new recognition of the artistic and historical significance of the Cyclades, Minoans, Archaic Greece and Etruscans, amongst other sources. Picasso’s most evident exploration of Classicism occurs in what are termed his Neoclassical works (such as The Pipes of Pan 1923, Nessus and Dejanira 1920 and Head of a Woman 1931). In these works, as in those of Léger and De Chirico, stylistic references to ancient art-forms are clearly evident. Edward Fry (1988), however, argues that Cubism (which Picasso developed with Georges Braque) may be regarded as an engagement with the Classical that went beyond the level of style, to a transformative reinvention based on systemic attributes. In other words, not what it looked like, but how it was composed. This

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reinvention was less immediately apparent than the figurative reimagining of the look and subject-matter of the antique in works such as Drinking Minotaur and Reclining Woman 1933. The notion of a ‘systemic Classicism’ is premised on the insight that the stylistic naturalism of ancient Greek art is only superficially mimetic and is premised on an abstract assembly of features selected in accordance with symbolic associations and mathematical models. This is an inversion of the idea that Classicism is the result of a progression from abstraction to naturalism. It is instead a combination of a considered set of formal elements with an illusionistic naturalism, produced by a representational system that Erwin Panofsky describes as an ‘elastic, dynamic and aesthetically relevant system of relations’.2 Spivey cites intentional anatomical anomalies in works such as the Riace Bronzes as examples of artworks where an obsession with formal and relational compositional concerns has ‘overtaken the wish to “deceive” its viewers with an illusion of reality’. He warns that the ‘admission of such formalism in Classical sculpture adds a qualifying gloss to any idea that the Greek revolution was simply the triumph of naturalism’.3 Fry’s argument is premised on a supposition of ‘densely mediated relationships between thought and experience’ as a core feature of Classicism. He proposes that the ‘special achievement of Cubism, and above all of Picasso, was to reinvent classical, mediated representation, and in that reinvention also to transform it so as to reveal its central conventions and mental processes’.4 In this reading Classicism is not a precursor of the photographic image, since naturalism was not the aim, but an element subject to compositional demands. The gradual abbreviation from the Renaissance onwards of the Classical to a purely stylistic norm obscured the complex representational system from which it originated. Cubism rejected the idealized naturalism of Neoclassical iconography, but emphasized the relational combination of conceptually determined formal elements underlying Classical art. In this sense, Classicism is primarily understood as a compositional system. Defining the Cubist project as ‘reflexive self-demonstration’, Fry locates memory at the core of both traditional art and Cubism, but maintains that ‘in contrast to traditional painting Cubism replaces the role of remembered iconographic texts with the memories of perceptual and cognitive experience. This displacement of idea by process, experience, and memory . . . is then re-intellectualized as eidetic Cubist signs.’5 As the example of the Riace Bronzes demonstrates, this

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methodology is not based on establishing an antithetical relationship between abstract and recognizable elements, nor a transition from one to another, but on a synthesis of these. This idea of perception as a complex construct, as opposed to a seamless reception of a single coherent image, echoes what is now known of how the brain processes visual stimuli (see Chapter 1). In the Cubist project, formal description was not determined by the artist’s individual style, but by the problem of how to represent a specific subject.6 The naturalism of European art meant that the ways in which form is rendered – the artist’s style – served as the primary vehicle for individual expression. In the Academies, students were trained to copy the styles of the great masters, before developing their own. An artist’s style could mature over their career, but since artistic identity was synonymous with formal expression, significant stylistic deviation was rare amongst professional artists. By contrast, a systemic approach and an unconventional understanding, and application, of style are evident in the development of Picasso’s constructions, collages and assemblages. These developed from a realization that if style as a supposedly uniquely personal rendition of form can be appropriated and combined with other, dissimilar types, then an original image can be constituted of a limitless variety of forms derived from multiple sources. Picasso had first explored this notion in Les Demoiselles d’Avignon 1907 by imitating in paint various means of representing the human head as found in Iberian, African and Archaic Greek sculpture. This conspicuously stylistically composite figure has an ancient antecedent in ancient Roman portraiture. Sculptures such as the Copenhagen matron (c. 90 ce ), the Pseudo-Athlete from Delos (c. 100 bce ) and the statue of Trebonianus Gallus (mid-third century ce ) reflect the peculiarly Roman habit of creating full-body portraits where a ‘naturalistic Roman’ head is applied to a body derived from the ‘idealized Greek’ nude. As Squire notes, Roman viewers would not have regarded these portraits as incongruous, instead they could read it as much as a corpus of semiotic signs as a mirage of verisimilitude. Instead of simply mirroring the sight of a ‘real’ figure, the Roman portrait could simultaneously work in more symbolic ways, as a series of amalgamated parts that together add up to more than the whole . . . the Greek language of nudity was just one convention within a vibrant and varied visual Esperanto.7

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The result is a representation of a person that operates ‘on a different level, as cryptograms in multiple parts, each section separately interpretable . . . What’s most distinctive about the Roman art of the body then, is its uneasy oscillation between figurative and non-figurative modes. Representations prove at once realistic and rather more abstract, in a way thoroughly unfamiliar (even unsettling) to modern eyes.’8 In the Demoiselles one subject – the female nude – is depicted in different ways to combine multiple representational systems on one single plane. Representations of the female nude are often an excuse to provide a pleasurable viewing experience. One in which the viewer is acutely aware of the fact that that they are looking at something and enjoying it. In the Demoiselles, Picasso exploits the association between the female nude and this self-aware gaze to confront the viewer with the mechanisms underlying image-making. His first collage, Still Life with Chair Caning 1912, features a similar combination of stylistically disparate elements. Where the artist had appropriated these elements by imitating them in the Demoiselles, the collage incorporates industrially manufactured elements such as the cane-print oil cloth and rope into an oil painting. With its printed illusion of wickerwork, the oil cloth reflects Picasso’s imitation of sculptural form in the Demoiselles, and although an ‘alien’ intrusion into the unity of the image, the oil cloth still conforms to the notion of painting as the creation of an illusion. By contrast, the rope framing the image is an actual rope. Its representational function is highly complex as it can refer to a wooden frame, the rim of a tray or the edge of a café table. As a frame, it reiterates the image’s status as a two-dimensional artwork, but as a rim on a tray it denotes a three-dimensional object, while the canvas’ oval shape bordered by the rope suggests a round table seen in perspective, resulting in an artwork that combines image with object. The cardboard, sheet-metal and wire constructions (such as the Guitars and Violins) produced by Picasso in the same year, introduced a method of creating sculpture from pieced-together parts as well as developing the notion of reversible form. The cylinder used to indicate the sound hole in Guitar 1912 is the most famous example of Picasso’s reversible form in his constructions. This ambiguous double image is premised on the viewer’s movement, as it reveals itself the moment the work is viewed from a different angle. Other examples of reversible form are more contextually based, such as the rope that circles

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the image in Still Life with Chair Caning. As a result, the various materials (including prefabricated objects) from which the artwork is constructed serve both conceptual and formal functions. While the conceptual impetus for these innovations can be attributed to a systemic Classicism, the formal and material attributes of Cubist collage and Picasso’s assemblages represent the introduction of techniques and creative methodologies of artisans, and so-called ‘primitive’ and pre-Renaissance artists into Modern art practice. Such external and anachronistic appropriation is premised on a dialectical engagement between previously unrelated parties. Roxana Marcoci defines the reassessment of the art of one period by artists from another as a type of historical riposte. In this view, anachronistic appropriation is premised upon a reading of artistic predecessors as contemporaries.9 Marcoci suggests that the aim of this essentially subjective procedure is to extract ‘new practices of far greater critical and historical significance than might have resulted from an objective, historicist approach’.10 In this view, the engagement between old and new is premised on an understanding of the past as not fixed in history, but fluid and open to continuous re-interpretation. This reflects how human memory works, where the context in which recollection occurs significantly impacts on how it is interpreted, and the extent to which it changes. A similar situation is evident in the Cubist appropriation of techniques and materials that were alien to artistic practice of the period. Braque’s introduction of techniques used by decorators, such as stencilling and wood-graining, was not limited to borrowing alone, but reflected broader changes in how artists re-evaluated the work of artisans. James Hall cites Picasso and Braque as the most subversive examples of artists whose repudiation of easel-painting and migration to collage and constructed sculpture took the cult of the ‘worker-artist’ to extremes. As such, they ‘challenged received ideas about craftsmanship as much as they exploited them’.11 External and anachronistic acts of artistic appropriation (the seemingly illogical use of visual and material elements) may have conceptually ironic results, as is evident in an early pre-Modern example of sculptural assemblage, The Reliquary of Saint Foy (unknown artists, tenth to eleventh centuries with later additions). By the early twentieth century, the production of objects from prefabricated elements had become confined to folk artists and amateurs who lacked the artistic training required to achieve the naturalistic (observational

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and idealized) representations on which ‘high-art’ was based. A medieval object, such as the Reliquary of Saint Foy, therefore represents a seemingly ‘primitive’ anti-Classicism compared to the close correlation between formal mimesis and material uniformity of Post-Renaissance art. The symbolically allusive function of the objects and materials used in the reliquary’s construction is antithetical to the same illusionistic conventions of representation that the Cubists’ project criticized. The reliquary was constructed to contain a material remnant of the saint and provide the worshipper with a visual focus of veneration, and is characterized by significant disjunctions between its subject, form and medium. The reliquary is deeply ironic in that although it celebrates a saint (an entirely invented figure) who was supposedly martyred for refusing to worship images of pagan gods, it takes the form of an anthropomorphic icon that invites veneration (the figure is crowned and enthroned), and incorporates materials representative of pre-Christian worship. The head, for example, is believed to be a portrait of a late Roman Emperor sculpted in the fourth to fifth centuries, while the robe and throne are decorated with ancient Roman intaglios engraved with images of rulers and motifs from Classical mythology (the body was carved from yew wood in the ninth century when the reliquary was first assembled). Squire notes that the paradoxes of Christ’s body also held true for the ‘body’ of his Church. Among Christ’s early followers, denouncing the body became a bodily fetish in its own right. The Christian veneration of relics, increasingly important from the fourth and fifth centuries onwards, reflects the paradox. The more saints and martyrs relinquished the body – whether by adopting a life of extreme asceticism, or sacrificing their lives to ‘witness’ the faith – the more venerable their material bodies became.12

In a similar vein, the incongruous or paradoxical use of Roman or ‘pagan’ objects in Christian iconography during this era reflects the notion of anachronistic appropriation as a hijacking gesture that effectively displaces the source of the appropriated element from its prior and proper hermeneutic context. In the context of the medieval reliquary, the intaglios represent the Catholic Church’s attainment of the political authority that had previously been held by the Roman Empire. This symbolism is particularly evident in the example of the Cross of Lothar (tenth century, unknown artist/s, gold, silver, gemstones) where representations of worldly and spiritual authority occur

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separately on the front and reverse of a sculpted cross. It is difficult to assess the extent to which the artist/s that produced the reliquary was/were aware of the conceptual complexity of these assemblages, and by extension, whether the ironies evident to a modern viewer were intentional. It is arguable that the intaglios were part of a common symbolic currency, and widely understood as representative of power and authority. In the same manner, various material remnants of saints were believed to represent the earthly presence of spiritual beings. What is significant is the incorporation of emblems of antiquity into a Christian iconography, at a time when the cultural and religious values of ancient Greece and Rome, as expressed in these objects, were being condemned. Michael Squire identifies a similar dissonance in ideas relating to the supposed break between the art of ancient Greece and Rome and Christian art when he argues that ‘Graeco-Roman images helped determine not only what Christian images looked like, but also how they were understood. Indeed, the problematic Christian status of the image – the perpetual paradox of the ‘empty figure’ can only be understood in relation to the Graeco-Roman artisticcum-religious inheritance.’13 The ironic juxtaposition of seemingly incompatible elements is particularly characteristic of Picasso’s collages and assemblages. While Braque and Juan Gris preferred to use prefabricated objects literally (a mirror to represent a mirror, newsprint to suggest a newspaper), Picasso’s choices were more often driven by the conceptual potential of unexpected combinations and/or substitutions of material and objects. John Golding notes that ‘Picasso delights in using [fragments of collage] paradoxically, turning one substance into another and extracting unexpected meanings out of forms by combining them in new ways’.14 Christine Poggi argues that Picasso ‘delighted in confirming the essentially arbitrary nature of signs, since it is this principle which allowed him to reinvent the language of representation and its syntax’.15 Having determined the full extent of the symbolic malleability of ordinary objects and in exploring the tension that arises from the ambiguity of borrowed objects and materials, Picasso ‘did everything to take questions of material appropriateness to the point of absurdity’.16 In his sculptural assemblages such as She-Goat 1950, the constituent forms are largely derived from prefabricated objects that have been altered to varying degrees. She-Goat was constructed from the wood of a palm branch, a woven basket, metal strips, grape-vines, cardboard, pieces of wood,

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part of a lamp, a metal pipe, wire and two pottery milk pitchers. While the sculpture is constructed from disparate parts, the artist’s primary concern is the creation of a comprehensive whole. The sculpture did not gradually emerge from an ‘accidentalist’ process of accumulating random objects. Instead, Picasso started with a mental (and possibly also a sketched) image of a goat17 before proceeding to identify correspondences between various parts of the goat and the attributes of objects and materials from which to construct the sculpture. These are not ‘found objects’ in the Surrealist sense where an object’s selection is randomly determined. Each component was chosen specifically for the role it would play within the whole, with all elements ‘perceived in their reciprocity’.18 In addition to She-Goat, many of Picasso’s sculptural assemblages of the 1950s (such as Small Owl, and Baboon and Young) combine an overall formal coherence and a strong illustrative character that contradict the accumulative and abstract method of its construction. Defined by Spies as ‘veiled’ assemblages,19 the resulting interpretive process is premised on the recognition that two seemingly incompatible representational systems have been combined in syntheses of simplicity and complexity, and reality and abstraction. This is an inherently reflexive art-form that draws attention to its method of construction on the one hand, and the creation of a single cohesive whole on the other. As such, these works come close to the ‘elastic, dynamic and aesthetically relevant system of relations’ that Panofsky20 identifies below the naturalistic surface of ancient Greek sculpture. A similar concern with creating a cohesive whole is evident in the collages produced by Max Ernst (1891–1976). Unlike the intentional incongruity of Dada collages, Ernst’s work is distinguished by the formal consistency and logical cohesion of his imagery, and the transformation of his materials. Spies notes that in Ernst’s work ‘nowhere is visual material quoted unaltered . . . [as the] concept of reworking posits a distortion of original meanings’.21 In a series of images produced through the alteration of illustrations taken from a scientific catalogue of anthropological, microscopic, mineralogical and other objects, Ernst restricts his source material to a specific graphic type that, while still common in advertising, was increasingly being supplanted by photographs. His preference for such imagery as essential to his work was partly guided by technical considerations, as their strong graphic quality made them easier to

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incorporate seamlessly into collages, but also reveals a ‘fascination with the obsolete’ that explores the ‘tension between the Now of art and an outmoded, trivial Then’.22 While Ernst’s complete integration of his elements to produce an apparently seamless whole echoes the formal and stylistic unity of Picasso’s ‘veiled’ assemblages, his work lacks the spatial complexity and expanded potential for ‘visual punning’ that occurs when an object in an assemblage is read alternately as ‘itself ’ and as part of a whole. In the more recent example of Damian Ortega’s (1967–) Controller of the Universe 2007 the constituent elements are neither altered nor fused together. Yet, the work echoes Picasso’s and Ernst’s in significant aspects, by creating a coherent whole with a spatial interplay between two and three dimensions. The sculpture consists of a collection of suspended hand-tools, creating a single composition suggestive of an ‘explosion’ of tools. By using a limited category of elements, Ortega creates a sense of visual unity analogous to Ernst’s preference for a specific graphic type. The ironic juxtaposition of using handtools to create an artwork that is not ‘created’ in the conventional sense recalls Ernst’s evocation of the past in the present through his use of obsolescent materials. By constructing a disassembled assembly, Ortega emphasizes how the artwork as an apparently cohesive whole is constructed by establishing spatial, formal and conceptual relations between its individual components. Authorship in this sense is predicated less on unique origination than on the organization and manipulation of various elements. His use of physical proximity as opposed to physical attachment to create a cohesive whole evokes both the two-dimensional space where technical drawings such as ‘exploded views’ are constructed and the three-dimensional space in which the viewer encounters the work and notions of expanding space associated with the theory of the ‘big bang’.23 Similar to the co-existence of abstraction and illustration in Picasso’s ‘veiled’ assemblages Ortega’s objects are presented as occupying two incompatible modes of existence. On the one hand, the work refers to the scientific theory of the ‘big bang’ and on the other to demiurgic creation myths. The suspended hand-tools suggest creative production, but, suspended in their ‘impossible’ hybrid of two- and three-dimensional space, their creations remain figments of the viewer’s imagination. Ortega’s deliberate confusion of seemingly incompatible categories of ideas, methods of representation, and space, echoes core aspects of Cubism.

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The fracturing of pictorial space that the Cubists had experimented with in their analytic phase, had, as its corollary, a subversive interpretative shift from clarity to uncertainty: instead of enhancing comprehension, form presents a visual and conceptual puzzle to be solved for the content of the image to be revealed. In this sense, form and content are linked, hence Spies’s description of Cubism as a ‘linguistic system for establishing a relationship between form and content’ premised on a necessary iconographic reduction.24 In Picasso’s collages and assemblages, suggestion and association are reciprocal: material fragments allude to their previous identities, while concurrently acquiring new meanings through their incorporation into a new context. The resulting interpretive process is premised on the revelation that seemingly incompatible visual elements and representational systems have been combined in syntheses of simplicity and complexity, reality and abstraction. Poggi renders this representational strategy as a game and argues that in the collages and constructions the viewer (player) cannot ‘read’ all of the pictorial forms at once. As the interpretive strategy is continuously shifting, disclosure takes place over time.25 This is an inversion of the single idea and ‘forceful expression’ achieved by an ‘exclusive and absolute’ viewpoint as praised by Baudelaire (see Chapter 1). ‘The question of pictorial unity itself is thus displaced from the collage to the experience of the viewer, where it is suspended and dispersed in the time of interpretive analysis, like a series of moves on a board game’.26 The result is a representational system where the viewer is not a passive recipient of a fixed message, but an active participant in constructing meaning. Picasso’s ‘game’ is premised on a realization that the identity and meaning of the constituent parts of an image are potentially fluid and variable. Fluidity is achieved by the combination of elements through formal and conceptual reciprocity, differentiation through intentional stylistic variation, and the creation of ambiguous images by means of reversible form. Artists such as Man Ray (1890–1976) and Sam Smith (1908–1983) explore such conceptual play through sculptural assemblage. In Ray’s Gift 1921 an inversion of the functionalities of its constituent elements (a flat-iron and upholstery tacks) produces a new, and essentially useless, object. The title emphasizes both its pathos as inoperative and the aggressive or absurd act of bestowing a gift of an iron that will tear fabric, or upholstery tacks incapable of securing fabric. Smith’s sculptures incorporate a similar combination of

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humour, pathos and aggression. While Ray constructed Gift from prefabricated objects, Smith combines such elements with others he has carved from wood and painted. His largely figurative depictions of humans, animals and mythological beasts (such as Harpy Candleholder 1972) recall the embellished polychrome sculptures of the Greek Archaic period.27 Smith’s approach to sculpture reflects his experience as a handyman and toymaker, and recalls the Cubist appropriation of the techniques of decorative and folk art. While some components are painted in brightly coloured patterns, others feature naturalistic details (such as eyes, lips, skin tones and hair). Smith’s use of decorative colour and pattern is on the one hand closely associated with the visual languages of utility, entertainment, folk art and religious statuary, and on the other with Robert Rauschenberg’s (1925–2008) fusion of painting and sculpture in his combines. Rauschenberg’s combines such as Monogram 1955–9 reveal the extent to which the artist fused the material object with the pictorial surface to create a synthesis of sculpture and painting in which both art-forms remain clearly identifiable. Branden Joseph describes Rauschenberg’s works as hybrids existing ‘between (or as both) painting and sculpture, 2- and 3-D’.28 Smith’s visual paradoxes extend beyond form to subject-matter, by, for example, presenting a harpy (a creature which endlessly torments its victim) as an apparent source of visual and fantastical amusement, but also as a caricature which describes a human subject in terms of the attributes associated with a mythological concept. In combining art with craft, and humorous play with social commentary, Smith reflects the toy as a source of imaginative play and the sculpture as an object for contemplation evoking a sense of conceptual play. The constructive method, reversible form, and dialectical (playful) hermeneutics that are so important in Picasso’s work, also invite significant comparison with aspects of the so-called ‘composite portraits’ of the sixteenthcentury Milanese painter, Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1526/7–93). Each of Arcimboldo’s painted portraits consists of an assemblage of natural objects such as fruit or animals arranged in such a manner that the illusion of a human portrait is created. The composite portrait in turn, reflects the mythological exploitation of the poetic or visual personification of abstract ideas, such as the still prevalent representation of justice as a blindfolded woman holding scales.

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The composite object portrait In images such as Arcimboldo’s Seasons 1573 and the Elements 1563–6, complex sets of ideas are visually expressed through representations of portrait heads of various members of the Hapsburg imperial family (including the emperor) as the elements and seasons, composed of assembled symbolic elements. Arcimboldo established conceptual relationships based on obvious correspondences (such as birds and air), and traditional symbolic references (such as the peacock and eagle as emblematic of his patron). The artist also creates a series of complex visual and conceptual relations between the eight portraits that make up the series by pairing each season with an element that shares its characteristics.29 Characterization is achieved by means of allusion and the creation of a system of external and internal symbolic reciprocity. Sven Alfons proposed that Arcimboldo’s Seasons and Elements were created for the specific context of the Emperor’s Kunstkammer which housed his artistic and scientific collections. It was common practice during this period to depict symbols of the physical world as subjects of the monarch. Vasari had frescoed the walls of two apartments in the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence in 1555 ‘with parallel depictions drawn from Greek mythology and the family history of the Medici. In these frescoes as well, the four elements and the four seasons act as guards to the duke of Tuscany.’30 When read as imperial allegories, Arcimboldo’s images compress into single images of the complex ‘system of correspondences [in which parallels] were found between the parts of the universe, as for example between the greater world or macrocosm, the lesser world or microcosm of man, and the body politic’.31 In addition, many of the scientific, medical, alchemical and philosophical theories that characterized the intellectual climate of the Hapsburg court included an understanding of the elements and the seasons as transformative and relative to one another. As these ideas long predate the sixteenth century, Arcimboldo’s images reflect an approach to the development of new systems of knowledge as premised on the reconsideration (or anachronistic appropriation) of the old. In the poem Carmen, composed by Giovanni Battista Fonteo to accompany the series, a further correspondence is drawn between the images and Ovid’s Metamorphoses.32 Arcimboldo’s iconography incorporates a complex metaphoric code that is deciphered through the recognition of its various political, scientific and philosophical

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allusions, and a poetic interpretation that is premised on a non-illustrative exploration of Classical mythology, thereby fusing symbolic, iconographic and literary traditions to create a cohesive whole, albeit one that cannot be comprehended in a single viewing. As complex metaphors, Arcimboldo’s portraits represent an exploration of the relationship between nature and humanity, but they do not conform to a core expectation of a portrait, which is the representation of attributes characteristic of the sitter. In the Seasons, for example, age rather than appearance or personality was the main determinant in pairing each person with a season. Yet, despite their unique content and method of composition, Arcimboldo’s composite portraits still conform to the expectation that a portrait should refer to the human head. By contrast, Francis Picabia’s (1879– 1953) ‘machine-drawings’ provide a more abstract example of the composite portrait, while paying greater attention to the description of the core attributes of a subject’s character. In his 1915 ‘caricature’ of the photographer Alfred Stieglitz (Here, This is Stieglitz/Faith and Love), Picabia represented his subject as a camera-like contraption composed of various mechanical elements. While each element represents an aspect of Stieglitz’s personality, the relationships Picabia establishes between the machine’s deformed and inoperable components provide an underlying critique of his subject (hence Picabia’s labelling of the portrait as a caricature).33 The description of an individual therefore does not occur by means of creating an accurate physiological likeness, but instead through a symbolic evocation of characteristic personality traits. The process is dependent on the viewer’s ability to recognize the original function of each element, and to decipher the significance of that function within the context of the image. As noted above in the discussion of Ray’s Gift 1921, the disruption or defeat of an object’s functionality draws attention to its now confused identity and purpose. This can elicit an emotional response to an object (such as sympathy) from a viewer that is usually reserved for animate subjects. This approach evokes the use of objects in the Classical iconography of heroes and gods as markers of identity and function. Such objects could also symbolize more complex ideas. For example, the singer Thamyris, who was deprived of his poetic skills by the Muses in the Iliad (2.594-600), was frequently depicted in art and literature with a broken lyre. Zachary Biles argues that the association

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between Thamyris and the broken lyre had become so entrenched that Artistophanes’ metaphor of the playwright Cratinus as a broken lyre (Knights 531–3) caricatures an individual subject, while revealing ‘an interest in exploring and criticising the agonistic ethos as Thamyris came to epitomize it’.34 Similarly, Rozaitis argues that the depiction of Stieglitz as a broken camera forms part of a ‘significant exploration of the boundaries between art and antiart, but [is] also an experiment in satire, social commentary, irrationalism, nihilism, and the ready-made’.35 Picabia’s incorporation of Stieglitz’s profession as photographer into the symbolic depiction of his character is based on a fusion of Stieglitz’s personality with his activities. In Joseph Cornell’s (1903–1972) A Parrot for Juan Gris, 1953–4, one of the inventors of Cubist collage is represented in terms of his own, but also in terms of Cornell’s formal concerns. Diane Waldman for example, notes that Cornell appropriates details from Gris’s paintings to make his own statement about papier collé.36 While Gris’s work reflects a preoccupation with form, composition and a literal use of prefabricated elements (such as newsprint), Cornell’s work is distinguished by its playfulness and symbolic imagery. The rectangular box, image of a bird (a white cockatoo), maps, stamp, wooden dowel and toys (a cork ball, a folded handwritten note, and a metal ring to which a piece of string is attached, looped around a horizontal metal bar) recur in Cornell’s other works. Like his portraits of women (such as a collage for The Crystal Cage (Portrait of Berenice) c. 1942, and mixed media constructions Penny Arcade Portrait of Lauren Bacall 1945–6, Custodian II (Silent Dedication to MM [Marilyn Monroe]) 1963), and his Dovecotes series of the 1950s based on Emily Dickinson’s writings,37 the Juan Gris series was premised on a completely personal interpretive response to his subject. While each box isolates and compresses its contents to create a private poetic world, the majority formed part of a larger series of works. These were constructed over decades or more, included formal and thematic variation and repetition, and explored contemporary art, literature and media (such as the theatre and film) through the appropriation of seemingly sentimental scraps and fragments. Cornell’s interpretation of Gris makes no attempt to provide an objective depiction of a subject, but is based on an exploration of the influence of the subject on its interpreter. The artwork is therefore as self-reflexive as it is an exploration of Gris’s methodology. As such, it conforms neither to Arcimboldo’s

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almost complete submersion of his subjects into his metaphorical constructs, nor to Picabia’s symbolic and satiric depiction of his photographer subject by means of references to malfunctioning photographic equipment. Instead, Cornell combines a careful analysis and representation of Gris’s work with idiosyncratic features of his own (such as the box and the parrot). Although widely separated by history, aspects of Arcimboldo, Picabia and Cornell’s approaches are reflected in A Catalogue of Shapes, with the series of twelve composite object portraits constructed to create a visual translation of a formulaic Homeric poetics. These include references to Arcimboldo’s reciprocal system of individual, yet interrelated artworks; Picabia’s use of functional (and disfunctional) objects, such as machines, to express character traits; and Cornell’s exploration of another artist’s creative methodology in terms of his own. In the representational systems discussed, concept and form are interrelated, and include combinatory and organizational procedures. While each approach makes use of appropriated and/or naturalistic forms and objects, the resulting artworks are wholly fabricated in the sense that they comprise combinations of elements possible only within the context of the artwork. These methodologies involve the development of symbolic systems wherein each individual element retains a degree of autonomy while forming part of a larger whole. Elements within these systems are reciprocally related within the context of the work, as well as their previous identities, thereby creating complex series of internal and external allusions. The hermeneutics of these works are based on interactive and continuously shifting interpretive processes in which form and material are invested with meaning. As a symbolic representation of a subject, the composite portrait records a transaction between artist and subject. The viewer who interprets the artwork by ‘decoding’ its allusive iconography participates in, and extends, this dialectical engagement. The next chapter introduces a brief overview of traditional portraits of Homer and the representation of Homeric subjects, before describing the structure, construction and iconography of A Catalogue of Shapes, as a visual translation of a formulaic Homer using the understanding of sculptural assemblage discussed above, and the notion of the composite object portrait.

4

Homeric Iconographies As discussed in Chapter 1, visual representations of ideas significantly impact on how they are understood. This project is a continuation of a long tradition in the visual arts of depicting Homeric subjects and these images have both reflected and helped shape how Homer is understood. A Catalogue of Shapes deviates from that tradition by attempting to materially represent a contemporary understanding of Homer and the Homeric epics that is still largely devoid of an appropriate iconography. While this sculptural project lacks the figurative and/or illustrative attributes historically associated with representations of the Homeric, it draws on, refers to, and transforms aspects of artworks associated with the poems dating from the Greek Geometric period (c. 1050–700 bce) to the twentieth century.

Traditional Homeric iconographies Historically, the visual representation of subjects related to the Iliad and the Odyssey belong to either of two categories: one is the representation of the figure of Homer, the other is the predominantly narrative/illustrative depiction of scenes and events from the poems. Representations of the figure of Homer have historically provided an accurate reflection of prevailing notions of Homeric poetry. Graziosi, for example, draws a correlation between ‘ancient (and, indeed, modern) discussions of the figure of Homer’ and ‘the significance and meaning of the Homeric poems to specific audiences’.1 As stories relating to the life of the supposed author of the Homeric epics gained in popularity, visual representations of this figure became widespread. There is evidence from antiquity of multiple visual formats of Homer, ranging from free-standing and relief sculpture, paintings, mosaics and coins, to engraved cups and 69

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intaglios. As coins commemorated significant public monuments or myths relating to the place where they were issued, they can provide significant insight into representational trends. Katharine Esdaile compiled a comprehensive list of coins featuring images of the poet and identifies three stages in the development of the iconography of Homer on the coins which reflect that of other art-forms (such as sculpture and painting), and ‘correspond to all that we know from other sources of the development of Greek portrait art’.2 While the attributes of old age and blindness were well established characteristics of descriptions of Homer by the Hellenistic period, these are generally absent from portraits on coins of preceding periods.3 The persistence of these traits in the subsequent iconographic tradition reflects the influence of the increased interest in the figure of Homer stemming from Hellenistic scholarship and the Homeric biographical tradition. The Hellenistic cult of Homer claimed the poet to be the pre-eminent source of wisdom and knowledge.4 Visually expressed, a relief by Archelaos of Priene (discovered at Latium Italy in the mid-seventeenth century, possibly created in Alexandria, Egypt around 225–205 bce) depicts Homer as a cult statue, enthroned, bearded and bearing a strong resemblance to contemporaneous artistic and literary characterizations of Zeus. His reputation during the Hellenistic era had been expanded to such an extent that Homer was placed in a class entirely of his own. As Brink notes, ‘Homer had come to stand for poetry, not only one poetic genre’.5 This transformation from epic poet to transcendental source of all poetry resulted in ‘the creed of Homeric classicism’ according to which ‘what men were concerned to celebrate was the inspiration Homer had given, and was giving still, not only to epic poetry but to poetry and literature as a whole’.6 Froma Zeitlin attributes Homer’s superhuman status to the combination of uncertainty about Homer’s biographical data coupled with the immortality of his fame . . . While the epithet theios (godly) in good Homeric fashion is applied to Homer himself already in the classical period, as for example, in Aristophanes’ frogs (1034) and elsewhere, the poet is elevated in later times to veritable divinity . . . the apotheosis of rulers, introduced in the Hellenistic period, no doubt underlies such hyperbole, but the motive as well is one way of divinizing the glorious past and asserting dominance in cultural values.7

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This Hellenic construct proved to be highly durable: in J. A. D. Ingres’s painting The Apotheosis of Homer of 1827 the artist appropriated the ideological authority of Homer to great theoretical effect. Alexandra Goulaki-Voutyra traces the iconographic roots of this theme in British Neoclassicism to an Attic red-figure krater from Gela by the Peleas Painter (c. 440–420 bce) that was reproduced in Pierre Francois Hughues d’Hancarville’s Collection of Etruscan, Greek, and Roman Antiquities from the Cabinet of the Honble. Wm. Hamilton. The krater features a scene with a kithara player that both ‘D’Hancarville and Josiah Wedgwood interpreted as the Apotheosis of Homer. The reproduction of this subject on Wedgwood pottery and the drawing by John Flaxman contributed to its widespread popularity among classicizing artists, including Ingres.’8 By installing Homer as the embodiment of nineteenth-century Neoclassicism, Ingres cemented the association of the image of Homer with the ideals and aesthetics of academic Classicism. Subsequent artistic retorts to Ingres’s Apotheosis rejected his canon, but not the notion of Homer as its archetype. These include Walter Barnes’s photograph The Apotheosis of Degas 1885, Paul Cezanne’s planned Apotheosis of Delacroix, approx. 1860–90, Salvador Dali’s Apotheosis of Homer 1944–5 and Giulio Paolini’s installation of the same title of 1970–71. While all are direct responses to the theory of art expressed in Ingres’s painting, Dali’s ruined marble bust is the most direct reference to the standard Homeric type. Paolini’s installation of music stands, black and white photographs, and prints on paper seems radical, yet retains the association of Homer with cultural canonization. Depictions of events and characters from the Homeric epics historically exhibit greater iconographic variation than portraits of Homer. As is evident from the debate surrounding ‘Nestor’s cup’ (see Chapter 2), it is unclear whether art from the Geometric and Archaic periods could have been informed by artists’ knowledge of the poems. This debate has been informed by perceptions regarding how the epics were composed. Many art historians, such as Snodgrass (1998) for example, maintain that images from the eighth and seventh centuries could not have been influenced by the Homeric poems as he subscribes to the idea that the Iliad and the Odyssey were authored by one poet at some point during this period. Expectations based on familiar representations also play a role: Hana Bouzková and Jan Bouzek (1966) compiled a survey of various theories relating to correlations between early Homeric epic and art of the

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Mycenaean and Geometric periods. While these range from perceived similarities between the stylized descriptions of human bodies in art (with the poet’s emphasis on specific body parts) and parallels between structural and compositional patterning in decoration and the poems, to thematic resemblances, references to the epics are invariably sought in figurative art. Richard Kannicht, for example, notes how images on objects such as an Attic basin from Thebes dating from the third quarter of the eighth century and an Attic oinochoe in Munich which dates from the third quarter of the eighth century, both feature figurative decoration depicting what could be interpreted as scenes from the epics.9 He argues that the hermeneutic problem of these images is their openness to multiple interpretation and communication, meaning that attempts to conclusively classify them as depictions of Homeric themes will fail. The emergence of writing in the Archaic period enabled artists to designate their subjects as depictions of topics from the Trojan Cycle by means of inscriptions alongside images. From this point onwards, portrayals of scenes and characters that are clearly identifiable as derived from the epics, occur across art-forms. These range from illustrations of specific events, and general themes to artistic innovations (such as Achilles and Ajax playing a board game). Susan Woodford notes that, while no literary counterpart of Achilles and Ajax playing a game has been found, this theme (which first appeared in the mid-sixth century bce) became a popular topic for vase painters.10 The pairing of this image with a depiction of Leda, Tyndareus and the Dioscuri (Castor and Polydeuces) on an Attic black figure amphora of c. 540–30 bce by Exekias (?-c. 525 bce) has been interpreted as revealing the artist’s interest in the daily activities of heroes.11 However, it is arguable that instead of illustrating a scene from the narrative, the artist may have represented one of the primary underlying themes of the Iliad, which Nagy (1979) identified as the contest to be ‘the best of the Achaeans’. In Achilles’ absence, Ajax is the strongest Greek hero (Il. 2.768-70), but Achilles ultimately claims the title. As this rivalry does not take the form of these Greek heroes physically fighting each other, it cannot be visually expressed in this manner. By contrast, two heroes playing a game symbolises amiable contestation. In formal terms, this reflects the Homeric strategy of establishing ‘sympathetic antitheses’ to describe one character in terms of another.12

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Roman artists appropriated Homeric themes together with Greek art and literature. Works such as a series of wall paintings from a house on the Esquiline Hill in Rome, dating from the second half of the first century bce, reveal a detailed knowledge of the Odyssey. Known as the ‘Odyssey Landscapes’, the paintings take the form of elaborate landscapes populated with diminutive figures and feature extensive depictions of events that are only briefly described in the poem (such as the Laestrygonians of Od.10.82-199). By focusing on the exotic locales the hero visits on his journey home, the paintings transform the long corridor in which they appear into a mythical space through which the viewer travels. The identification of many characters in the painting with Greek script may suggest that the work is a direct Roman copy of a lost Greek original. However, as Mary Beard and John Henderson argue, the writing intentionally identifies the image as the Greek Odyssey and may consequently reflect the cultural interplay between Greece and Rome.13 Moreover, the formal treatment of the landscapes echoes the disruption of the conventional pictorial hierarchies of background and foreground, and the artist’s reorientation of the epic story itself, by encouraging the viewer to explore the significance of the minor events in the epic background.14 From the Medieval to the early Renaissance period, depictions of Homeric themes were largely confined to illuminations in manuscript editions of the poems (such as the translations by Leontius Pilatus (?-1366) done at the request of Petrarch (1304–74) in 1360–62). In Western Europe, the poems disappeared from popular culture, but the name ‘Homer’ did not. Philip Ford notes that although Homer’s poetry was lost to Western Europe, the name Homer remained a byword for the inspired poet.15 Renewed interest in Homer is evident in the work of early humanists such as Angelo Poliziano (1454–94) and the Byzantine scholar Janus Lascaris (1445–1534). Ford points out that while readers of the editio princeps of Homer, which appeared in Florence in 1488, admired the Iliad and the Odyssey as sources of all the arts, sciences and philosophical schools, they were nonetheless put off by the formal aspects of the poems – the use of epithets, formulaic expressions and repetitions.16 The association of Homer with scholarship, knowledge and rationality persisted throughout the Renaissance and well beyond, into the nineteenth century. Highly influential academies of art (such as the Roman Accademia di San Luca, the Florentine Accademia del Disegno, the Carracci Accademia degli

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Incamminati, the French Académie Royale and its successor, the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux Arts) were closely associated with the imitation of the antique (see Chapter 1). By the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, the core doctrine of the academy had been narrowed down to a canon of ‘select antique sculptures and in subjects culled primarily from the Bible and the classics on the assumption that this ideal, like these subjects, constituted the excellence and pre-eminence of Western civilization’.17 The manner in how approved topics, such as Ajax defying the gods as described in Od. 4.499-511, should be interpreted were cemented in the academy through competitions, such as the grand prix de l’Académie Royale, in which contestants were required to interpret a Classical theme in accordance with fixed criteria such as ‘action, setting, and psychological keynote’.18 The institutional interpretation of the Homeric, like the academic understanding of antique sculpture, was based on perceptions of the ancient Greeks as serious, dignified, and rational. Maria Koundoura defines such admiration of classical antiquity in eighteenth-century Britain as a process of self-improvement via the representation of another culture, ‘which in effect means replacing it with the self-generated images of otherness (and identity, in the case of Greece and philhellenism) that English culture needs to see itself in’.19 When Alexander Pope (1688–1744) created his 1715 translation of the Iliad for example, he was careful to conform to his audience’s expectation of a refined, dignified, and moralistic heroism. Pope’s Iliad was designed to be visually appealing and included two engravings in the classical style, a pictorial headpiece and elaborately designed initial at the beginning of each of its twenty-four books. Of these, many of the headpieces echo illustrations from an equally lavishly illustrated translation by John Ogilby (1600–76). Pamela Poynter Schwandt (1979) notes how, in the half-century before Pope began translating the Iliad, the Ancients–Moderns controversy had produced many complaints against Homer, with the Greek poet often unfavourably compared with Virgil. This reflected a broader shift from ancient Greece to Rome as a moral, cultural and political model. Krishan Kumar argues that as its empire grew beyond largely British-settled communities to encompass India and large parts of Africa, the inability of Britain to culturally assimilate all of its colonies into a ‘Greater Britain’ comparable to a ‘Greater Greece’ saw the conception of empire founded less on Grecian cultural assimilation than

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Roman conquest, which aimed – as expressed in the Aeneid – to ‘rule peoples with imperium and accustom them to peace, to spare the conquered and to put down the proud’.20 Pope consequently approached the problem of producing a translation that would meet the tastes and expectations of his audience by ‘using many of the same techniques by which Virgil had adapted Homer’s epics for the Aeneid and often working his way down to eighteenth-century England by way of Paradise Lost and Dryden’s Aeneid. The narrative style, the heroes, and the gods all became more Virgilian than Homeric.’21 Pope’s most significant changes involved Homer’s less ‘dignified’ extended similes where insects, dogs, donkeys and other ‘base’ references occur. The combination of such ‘corrections’ to the most visual aspect of the text with illustrations in the Classical style as developed by the academies of art further entrenched the association between the Homeric epics and this specific form of representation. Honoré Daumier’s (1808–79) irreverent representations of Homeric characters such as Helen and Menelaus in his Ancient History series of 1842 appear to reflect the aspects of Homeric poetics that his contemporaries found unpleasant. However, Daumier’s burlesques are less an interpretation of Homeric poetics than a satirical denunciation of academic Classicism. In addition, the illustrative style used by Daumier reflects a tendency largely inspired by Pope’s Iliad of producing beautifully illustrated editions of the epics. Seth Schein notes that when Curtis Conway Felton produced an edition of selected books from the Iliad for use as an undergraduate textbook (1833 with a revised edition in 1848) he included ‘many of Flaxman’s illustrations, which he argued, though modern, represented the spirit of the Homeric age and showed artistically what Homer’s language revealed literally. The study of art and literature together, he claimed, would help students to understand Homer “in a liberal way.” ’22 As discussed in Chapter  3, early Modernists such as Giorgio de Chirico, Fernand Léger and Pablo Picasso rejected academic Classicism while reevaluating, transforming and reinventing the art of the antique. The systemic Classicism of the Cubists explored the underlying systemic and methodological – as opposed to the stylistic – attributes of ancient art. Although Milman Parry devised the theory of formulaic composition during the early part of the twentieth century, this understanding of Homer had little influence on popular

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culture, where ‘Homer’ remained a by-word for academic Classicism and notions of Greek rationalism.23 Cy Twombly’s (1928–2011) interpretation of Homeric poetry in Fifty Days at Iliam 1977–8 is primarily based on Pope’s translation of the Iliad, and extends the Modernists’ transformative reinvention of ancient art to ancient literature. Fifty Days at Iliam is composed of ten individual paintings,24 installed in a single room, to form an immersive environment. Rebecca Resinski suggests that the spatial arrangement of the canvases comprising Fifty Days at Iliam may also function as a spatial equivalent to the effects of Homeric repetition by creating ‘ricochets of visual echoes’ in which the viewer is ‘both pulled through a narrative and prompted to jump out of narrative sequence to trace a shape, name, color or theme through other paintings’.25 Twombly’s engagement with the Iliad is neither figurative nor illustrative. Characters and events are represented by means of words, shapes, colour and rapidly made (and frequently erased) marks and scribbles. Pope’s influence is particularly apparent in Twombly’s choice of inscriptions and imagery such as clouds to represent the ‘shades’ of the deceased and his interpretation of Homeric similes.26 But, whereas Pope’s translation is premised on expressing an eighteenth-century view of a heroic masculinity, Twombly responds to this ideal by emphasizing its underlying savagery. In many respects, the contrast between the highly emotive impact of Twombly’s expressive mark-making and Pope’s elegant verse echoes Daumier’s rejection of the grandeur of academic Classicism by invoking its antithesis. While text, in the form of letters, words, names and phrases form part of Twombly’s work from the mid-1950s, this aspect of Twombly’s engagement with the Iliad signals the extent to which the artist approaches the Iliad as a founding text of the Western literary canon. The crudely scribbled names and words in Fifty Days at Iliam function both as text and motif, particularly when Twombly combines stylized chariots in the form of disks and triangles with letters to write names such as ‘Achilles’. In this approach Twombly explores a similar combination of visual representational systems that I propose co-exist on the ‘Nestor cup’ from Ischia in Chapter 2. Richard Leeman points out that Twombly’s analysis of the origins of writing, graphic art and the glyph replicates his interest in ancient surfaces and textures, and that writing represents a manifestation ‘of the “directness” that Twombly saw in “the primitive, the ritual, and fetish elements” ’.27 This interest in early

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writing recalls the complex relationship between the development of the textual format of the Homeric epics and historic changes in the reception of the poems. The prevalence of scriptio continua and boustrophedon lettering in early inscriptions of Homeric verses reveal a lack of concern for consistency in the graphic orientation of letters that seems ‘to testify to a creative, original, and governing idea behind this writing: to translate directly into visible symbols what is heard’.28 Lawrence Campbell identifies a similar relationship in Twombly’s work when he suggests that the artist uses text because he likes the sound of the words and not because they are descriptive. The ‘evocation’ occurs between the sound image of the word and the visual image of the painting.29 Fifty Days at Iliam reinterprets the notion of the Homeric epic as a monument of civilized art and thought by returning to its first rudimentary inscriptions. As an antithetical inversion of the idea of a ‘transcendent’ Homer and its associated iconographies, Twombly’s Homer therefore retains its core attributes: his Iliad remains a text, albeit a raw and primordial Urtext. By contrast, an iconography of an oral-formulaic Homer cannot be premised on expressing a phase in a process of textual origination, enhancement and corruption. The aim instead is to visually describe the Homeric epics as the products of a creative methodology that incorporates the transformative manipulation and organization of disparate elements.

Developing an iconography for an oral-formulaic Homer A Catalogue of Shapes 2010–13 consists of a collection of twelve sculptural assemblages. Attributes, such as spatial composition, visual and conceptual patterning, rhythm and cross-references, detail the characterization, narrative and thematic content, as well as the formal, structural and experiential aspects of Homeric poetics (for individual discussion of each sculpture see Chapter 5). The construction and iconography of the artworks reflect on the creative methodology and aesthetics of the Iliad and the Odyssey, as understood in contemporary Homeric analyses, to function as an exploration of the integration of form and content in constructive art-forms, such as sculptural assemblage and formulaic composition. The theory of formulaic composition

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is underpinned by the notion of an ‘immanent’ or implicit Homer as the personification of the entire epic tradition (as opposed to a single historical, and creatively unsurpassable, originator). The iconographic separation of the relatively stable figure of Homer from the more varied depictions of Homeric subjects is therefore not compatible with an understanding of ‘Homer’ as a poetic system underlying the Iliad and the Odyssey. Although neither the individual performer, nor the eponymous poet of the Homeric poems explicitly identifies themselves in the Iliad or the Odyssey, the combination of an elaborate invocation of the Muses with the story of Thamyris in the Iliadic Catalogue of Ships appears to represent an example of artistic selfawareness in the poems. The catalogue format functions as a complex extension of the Homeric practice of reciprocal characterization. An example of this comparative juxtaposition is the story of Thamyris which occurs in the Pylian entry of the Catalogue of Ships (Il. 2.594-600). This episode, in which the Muses deprive the singer of the ability to perform for having claimed that he could beat them at singing, is antithetical to the poet’s description of a productive Muse–poet relationship in the invocation. As a theomachos (one who fights the gods) Thamyris’ behaviour is more in keeping with heroes such as Diomedes and Achilles than the ‘blind, old, feeble, “non-self-destructive” figure of poets and singers as they are portrayed elsewhere in Homeric poetry and in the biographical tradition’.30 Many of the strategies employed in the construction of this ‘Homer– Thamyris complex’, such as the catalogue format, the establishment of comparative pairs, parataxis, allusion, the distillation of information and the individual contextually determined interpretation of traditional material, informed the composition of my collection of original sculptural images in A Catalogue of Shapes. Designed to function as a coherent unit, the twelve sculptures that make up A Catalogue of Shapes are arranged into two main categories (characters from the Odyssey and from the Iliad) and four subcategories: The Warriors; The Wives; The Deities; The Kings. This structure echoes Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s combination of the Seasons (1573) with the Elements (1563–6) as well as Cy Twombly’s ten-part painting Fifty Days at Iliam (1977–8) and is acknowledged in the spatial presentation of the collection (with paired sets located either alongside or opposite each other) and by means of iconographic correlation and visual cross-referencing (see Figs 2 and 3. The

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numbers in Fig. 2 correspond to the catalogue entry numbers in Chapter 5). The strategy of pairing heroes for thematic comparison is characteristic of Homeric style and echoes Exekias’ representation of the rivalry between Achilles and Ajax by depicting them seated opposite one another, engaged in a game. The selection of the dramatic ‘personae’ referred to in the artworks comprising A Catalogue of Shapes was thematically determined. The Iliad and the Odyssey constitute two distinct types of epic: 1.

2.

The Iliad, with Achilles as its main hero, is defined as a kleos epic in which the dramatic theme is established by the poetic immortalization of the hero by death in battle. The Odyssey, which recounts the adventures of Odysseus following the Trojan War, is a nostos epic, in which the hero’s poetic immortalization is achieved by a successful homecoming.

Odysseus and Achilles form the twin nuclei of my series. The twelve composite object portraits of A Catalogue of Shapes are intended to provide a

Fig. 2 Schematic representation of the spatial arrangement of A Catalogue of Shapes.

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catalogic translation, or glossary, of the characters whose attributes and functions in the plot represent Homer’s principal heroes and their epics within this series of sculptural assemblages.31 The Homeric catalogue format served as an important model as it is characterized by structural parallels, and subsets within larger sequences.32 The Catalogue of Ships, for example, is composed of three basic patterns (see Powell 1978), with one specific pattern characterized by paired heroes.33 Thematic relationships between categories of sculptures in the series are signalled by formal means, using symmetrical geometry in the physical layout of the group. The plinths supporting the twelve sculptures are identical in colour and design, excepting the small plaques inscribed with the name of the appropriate Homeric character, and an epithet on each plinth. Where possible, the names are in a less commonly used spelling than is used in contemporary scholarship (such as HELENA for the sculpture as opposed to Helen for the character) to differentiate between the Homeric characters and my interpretations of them. The plinths are arranged about a central square in a grid-like format in accordance with a series of overlapping linear, rectangular, triangular and hexagonal patterns. Each pattern denotes a specific set of thematic relationships: the masculine characters (Menelaus, Odysseus, Achilles, Telemachus, Hector and Nestor) provide the North–South axis, the feminine (Calypso, Circe, Penelope, Helen, Eris and Ate) the East–West, and are symmetrical inversions of one another (see Fig. 3). Axial, rectangular and linear arrangements are gender-specific, while triangular and hexagonal patterns are not. The structure does not describe the catalogue as a purely sequential listing of information, but as the manifestation of various patterns and relationships within a collection of autonomous elements. In this sense, the catalogue is not simply a repository of names, origins and troop numbers, but a considered arrangement of sets of allusions, events and characters, that compose a predominantly spatial and visual context within which epic narrative occurs. Benjamin Sammons, for example, argues that the poet displays an ‘all-encompassing view’ in the ‘geographical substrate of the Catalogue of Ships’, and that this catalogue ‘which may seem at first glance a mere introduction to the Iliad’s cast of characters, actually opens up our field of vision to a heroic world that goes well beyond that of the poet’s narrative . . . constructing a plausible epic world in which to situate his own story’.34 This visual construction of a navigable mythic space echoes the second century bce

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Fig. 3 Schematic representation of the primary interrelations between the sculptures comprising A Catalogue of Shapes.

‘Odyssey-Landscapes’ in the Esquiline house, where the viewer’s passage down the corridor evokes Odysseus’ journey home. The individual artworks in A Catalogue of Shapes employ assemblage as the primary method of construction and composition. Each sculpture is composed of carefully selected forms and objects. By using the formal and associative

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aspects of things to suggest certain ideas and/or experiences, the constituent objects, forms and fragments of objects contribute to the visual representation of attributes and functions. Depictions of gods, heroes and allegorical personifications (such as cities, rivers and seasons) in Classical art generally reflect objects as symbolic aspects of identity and function. In representations of the apotheosis of Homer, such as the example by Archelaos of Priene and the painting by Ingres, the Iliad and Odyssey are represented as female figures holding a sword and/or spear for the Iliad, and oar and/or rudder to symbolize the Odyssey. As the figures lack any distinguishing physical features other than age and gender, it is the objects associated with the human figures which serve to differentiate the significance of the features. The iconography of A Catalogue of Shapes is therefore based on the elimination of the figure and the development of a metaphoric ‘code’ of objects. Visual identification by means of objects echoes the symbolic function of material goods in the Homeric epic, where objects have the quality of an economic value (for characters in the narrative), as well as a poetic value understood by both characters and audience.35 This thematic ploy allows heroic characters to make rhetorical use of catalogues of objects to ‘impose an identity on another character or even an interpretation of the poem itself ’ while appearing to engage in straightforward economic transactions.36 The reciprocity of objects is therefore based on what they signify to both giver and recipient, and their function in the establishment of relationships. A similar dialectic occurs in composite object portraits where the subject’s attributes, as selected and interpreted by the artist, are represented by means of symbolic entities. The Homeric world is evoked by a selective and expressive language of formulae and themes, conventionally described as a manufactured language or Kunstsprache. This ‘special speech’ of gods and heroes exhibits two primary attributes: parataxis and metre. As discussed in the Introduction, parataxis is a compressed form of verbal narrative based on the additive placing of autonomous clauses without conjunctives. The absence of syntactical interrelationships such as subordination allows for the juxtaposition of apparently unrelated and independent parts in paratactic sentence construction and facilitates the co-existence in Homeric language of inherited formulae, archaic words and newer phrases in dialects from diverse regions and historical periods. This resembles the structurally expressive and

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contrived combination of previously unassociated objects in sculptural assemblage. Applying a strategy comparable to Homeric pairing, objects may also be defined in terms of adjacent forms and objects. In A Catalogue of Shapes, the structurally expressive and contrived combinations of previously unassociated objects occurs in the selection of objects that conform to a specific set of formal qualities, such as the materiality, symmetry and simple geometry of designed and manufactured utilitarian goods (these include objects such as fishing buoys, funnels, wheels, Bundt moulds, a colander, etc.). This predominance of symmetry and geometry is informed by the reductive abstraction and considered proportionality of the art of the Geometric period. Defined by Bernhard Schweizer as a feeling for accuracy (akribeia), balance (summetria) and rhythm (rhuthmos),37 the Geometric offers a representational system that Susan Langdon argues, rejects ‘the world of direct sense and experience in favor of the constructed, the imagined, the interpreted’, and is distinguished by the establishment of a ‘unified field of figure, object and ornament’.38 This understanding of Geometric art describes an approach where the artwork is not intended to create an illusion of reality, but a non-mimetic and apparently self-reflexive reality. The expressive and selective approach of Geometric art is characterized by a narrow repertoire of basic forms and motifs.39 In assembling the complex sculptural images comprising A Catalogue of Shapes, signifying details were achieved by the manipulation of component parts. Such manipulation ranges from reduction to embellishment, with the application of colour and pattern amongst the most frequently used means of adjusting meaning. As in examples of Greek sculpture from the Archaic period where pigmentation has been restored, combinations of bright colours flatten, emphasize and distort three-dimensional form.40 In A Catalogue of Shapes colour also allows for symbolic coding and the establishment of reciprocal interrelations between individual sculptures (for example, Humbrol’s paint colour ‘Mediterranean blue’ appears on every sculpture in A Catalogue of Shapes where it symbolizes the agency of the gods). By using colour coding to establish connections between classes of things that might otherwise not share characteristics, the Iliadic and Odyssean categories have been assigned colour values specific to their allusions. Orange predominates in

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the Odyssean group and yellow in the Iliadic. Thematic colours were determined by the core object in the first character in each group. A weatherbeaten orange-coloured fishing buoy was selected as the first object around which to construct the first sculpture of the series (ODYSSEUS ΜΗΤΙΣ). This object was chosen as it had clearly spent a long time battered around on the ocean and its colour reminded me of sun-damaged skin. The yellow buoy used for ACHILLEUS ΜΗΝΙΣ reflects his ‘golden’ hair but also his status as the gods’ ‘golden boy’. As the embroidery ring used in the first female character (PENLOPE ΑΡΕΤΗ) incorporates a white disk intended to simulate fabric, all subsequent female characters are distinguished by a central white disk (in KIRKE ΦΑΙΝΩ a central void serves as this disk), while two intermediate characters respectively feature a reduced palette (NESTOR ΝΟΟΣ) and an allinclusive palette (MENELAOS ΒΟΑΩ) (see entries 1, 2, 5, 8, 11 and 12 in Chapter 5). For this series of sculptures, a modified compositional template was devised to achieve a metrical format. The intention being to allow for an overall coherence, in which the smallest variation becomes significant. By creating two compositional registers (upper and lower, see Fig. 4) for each sculpture, identity is indicated by the register in which significant details and variations may be accommodated. This approach requires careful design as the simplicity of the metrical format, with an emphasis on symmetry and strong geometry, demands carefully considered proportionality and balance. Each sculptural image was originated on paper (as an example see Fig.  5). Scale drawings allowed for a preliminary assessment of how combinations of objects and forms would relate. As colour and pattern became increasingly important, these preliminary drawings allowed for the exploratory testing of potential combinations. An important consideration during the planning of the artworks was the establishment of visual and conceptual rhythms within the series. The consistent repetition of compositional features, form and colour within a clearly defined scope demarcates a visual environment in which every element is affected by adjacent detail, where previously utilitarian objects were poetically activated. John Bispham argues that the hypnotic effects of rhythm heighten experience and generate the feelings of ecstatic pleasure and social cohesiveness associated with ritual events.41 In epic performance, rhythm is instrumental in distinguishing the performance event from normal social and

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Fig. 4 Upper and lower compositional registers in A Catalogue of Shapes.

verbal interaction, delineating a distinctive space in which the epic poet invokes the mythic world. Bakker describes epic performance in terms of ‘a moment in the process of verbalization, the transformation of the stream of private consciousness into a stream of public and rhythmical speech’ and notes that the ‘usual account of speech as deriving from consciousness is insufficient

Fig. 5 Preliminary drawing of TELEMACHOS, ΟΦΕΛΛΩ, 2011.

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here, for the singer’s consciousness not only produces the speech but is also propelled forward by the rhythmical movement of the language’.42 The iconography of an oral-formulaic Homer developed for this project constitutes a catalogic system (A Catalogue of Shapes) incorporating twelve reciprocally interrelated elements (the twelve individual sculptures). The spatial arrangement and structure of the series, the appropriation and manipulation of objects, and the symbolic use of colour, pattern, form and material, allow the viewer to trace and identify interrelationships to construct a different catalogic sequence with each viewing. This multiform system reflects the dialectical hermeneutics of Homeric composition during performance. In the next chapter, I describe the subject, construction, composition and iconography of each of the individual sculptural assemblages comprising A Catalogue of Shapes.

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Fig. 6 Installation view of A Catalogue of Shapes. 88

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THE WARRIORS This category includes ODYSSEUS ΜΗΤΙΣ (1) and ACHILLEUS ΜΗΝΙΣ (2) as the main heroes of the Odyssey and the Iliad, while TELEMACHOS ΟΦΕΛΛΩ (3) and HEKTOR ΕΧΩ (4) reflect the Homeric strategy of defining a character in terms of a thematically similar or diametrically opposed ‘other’.

1. ODYSSEUS ΜΗΤΙΣ (2010) Fishing buoy, funnel, rotary breast-drill breast-plate, outdoor umbrella slider, vase cap, bell-shaped lamp holder component, ribbed rod, wood (Camphor, Jelutong, Obeche), enamel paint 51 × 30 × 20 cm 2010

Subject This assemblage is based on the character Odysseus, the hero whose quest to achieve a successful homecoming (nostos) forms the basis of the Odyssean narrative. Homer describes Odysseus as a successful and mentally dexterous warrior, adept at extreme endurance. In the Odyssey, Odysseus is the central character as well as a second (although unreliable) narrator.1 ΜΗΤΙΣ (metis) serves here as an epithet of Odysseus and refers to skill in counsel or device, astuteness, shrewdness, contrivance and scheming.

Construction In all works described, the component parts were either wholly retained or selectively manipulated to derive signifying details. The buoy and umbrella slider were chosen for their weathered state and left unaltered, except for the slider’s ‘foot’, which was painted a deep red. The circular concertina was carved from wood and painted a similar orange to the buoy, establishing it as an extension. The colour of the funnel was changed from grey to a weathered

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Fig. 7 Front view of ODYSSEUS ΜΗΤΙΣ , 2010.

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Fig. 8 Side view of ODYSSEUS ΜΗΤΙΣ , 2010.

Fig. 9 Back view of ODYSSEUS ΜΗΤΙΣ , 2010.

bronze. The C-clamp (including the arc, threaded rod and breast-plate) was carved from wood and painted blue. The wooden propeller was carved from wood and varnished. The rudder was carved from the same wood and in the same shape as the propeller’s blades. It received a semi-transparent coating of moss-green paint, as did the brass ribbed rod connecting the buoy to the slider.

Composition As the first in the series, and alluding to the primary Odyssean character, ODYSSEUS ΜΗΤΙΣ provides the basic template of a compositional division into two main registers (upper and lower). The upper section comprises a sphere with five attributes. The buoy ‘floats’ in space on a thin neck, indicating exposure, isolation and vulnerability. The umbrella slider provides physical and visual counterweight. Its narrow base and material qualities echo the sense of precariousness, wear and durability established in the upper section. The extended neck and concertina are offset by the rudder at the back of the neck.

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Iconography The sculpture reflects on Odysseus as an experienced and weather-worn seafarer, under extreme duress. The clamp alludes to the ocean and sky, and by extension the gods, as the source of this pressure. The concertina, propeller, rudder and umbrella slider suggest aspects of his voyage, while the arrow emerging from the funnel alludes to the bow of Eurytus2 and Penelope’s contest, but also suggests a tongue within a mouth. The traces of former rib connectors on the slider represent Odysseus’ lost crew.

2. ACHILLEUS ΜΗΝΙΣ (2011) Fishing buoy, spoked wheels, rotary breast-drill gear, Jamboli food press lid and handle, lid and threaded shaft, flame-shaped finial, Jaffle toaster mould plate, various bell and cup shaped lamp holder components, jingle bell, coffee press plunger shaft, cutting tool handle, anniversary clock base, linoleum tile, wood (Obeche), enamel paint 59.5 × 22 × 32 cm 2011

Subject This assemblage is based on the character Achilles, the hero whose quest for kleos forms the basis of the Iliad. Homer describes Achilles as a swift, temperamental warrior, and the best of the Achaeans. In the Iliad, Achilles’ anger is the catalyst for the events that make up the poem. Unlike Odysseus, Achilles trades his return home (nostos) for a death in battle that will win him poetic immortality. Achilles’ kleos is diminished by Agamemnon’s disrespect3 and his subsequent refusal to fight, but re-established when he avenges the death of Patroclus.4 ΜΗΝΙΣ (menis) serves here as an epithet of Achilles and refers to anger; wrath; and ire. It is also the first word and a core topic of the Iliad.

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Fig. 10 Front view of ACHILLEUS ΜΗΝΙΣ , 2011.

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Fig. 11 Side view of ACHILLEUS ΜΗΝΙΣ , 2011.

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Fig. 12 Back view of ACHILLEUS ΜΗΝΙΣ , 2011.

Construction Indications of function on the buoy were retained and its surface polished to enhance texture and colour. Some metallic components including the jingle bell, a section of the axe and girders between the gears and wheels were left unpainted. All other parts were painted to emphasize specific attributes. The lid of the food press was painted the same yellow as the buoy, while its handle was painted blue. To make the ‘shield’, the maker’s mark on the toaster mould plate was filed off to produce a smooth central plane onto which a solar swastika was applied. The ribbed interior was painted in alternating bands of grey and yellow with a red dot at the centre to simulate a target. While the brass rims of the wheels were left unaltered, the outsides were painted a soft green and the insides a deep purple. The ‘spear’ and parts of the ‘axe’ were carved from wood and painted.

Composition As the second image in the sub-category THE WARRIORS, but the first of the Iliadic characters, ACHILLEUS ΜΗΝΙΣ retains aspects of the template

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established in ODYSSEUS ΜΗΤΙΣ (1), but also diverges enough to establish the second major ‘type’. As ODYSSEUS ΜΗΤΙΣ and ACHILLEUS ΜΗΝΙΣ represent the nostos and kleos epics as two distinct aspects of Homeric poetry, they form a contrasting pair. While the basic design of the upper register refers to ODYSSEUS ΜΗΤΙΣ , in the lower register the single voluminous form of the umbrella slider is replaced with three light components comprising an outer symmetry (two wheels) and an inner axis. The structural anchoring weight needed is provided by mounting the lower section on a clock base. The width of this base exceeds that of the wheels and is an inversion of the narrow foot in ODYSSEUS ΜΗΤΙΣ .

Iconography The image of ACHILLEUS ΜΗΝΙΣ refers to the hero as one of the ‘SeaPeoples’ who according to one tradition was believed to have decimated the great Mediterranean cities of the Bronze Age (this idea has since been discounted). The wheels represent speed, the spear the weapon he alone could carry, the flame his temper and the axe his status as king of the Myrmidons. The plume on his helmet as a blue rotating handle is indicative of interaction with the gods and enmity towards his allies and enemies. The swastika on the ‘shield’ in ACHILLEUS ΜΗΝΙΣ reduces Hephaestus’ complex embellishment to a single image.5 The target on its rear confirms the death which Achilles knows will occur in battle.

3. TELEMACHOS ΟΦΕΛΛΩ (2011) Outside spring calliper, bobbin spools, cabinet door handle, anniversary clock weights, outdoor umbrella slider with rib connectors intact, coffee pot, ribbed lamp holder component, metal washer, wood (Pine), enamel paint 57.5 × 34.5 × 24.5 cm 2011

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Fig. 13 Front view of TELEMACHOS ΟΦΕΛΛΩ , 2011.

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Fig. 14 Side view of TELEMACHOS ΟΦΕΛΛΩ , 2011.

Fig. 15 Back view of TELEMACHOS ΟΦΕΛΛΩ , 2011.

Subject This sculpture is based on the character Telemachus, the son of Odysseus and Penelope in the Odyssey. Homer describes Telemachus as initially ‘uncertain and pensive’, but during the poem his physical and mental resemblance to Odysseus becomes apparent. In the Odyssey, Telemachus journeys in search of information on his father’s whereabouts, as Odysseus alone is absent from the nostoi (epic songs recounting the fates of the men who went to Troy). On his return, Telemachus is the first person on the island of Ithaca to whom Odysseus reveals his hidden identity and assists his father in killing the suitors. ΟΦΕΛΛΩ (ophello) serves here as an epithet of Telemachos. The word can refer to what one ought to do or be doing. It can also mean to become greater; to grow; or to increase.

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Construction The two circular frames were constructed from wood and assembled to suggest a sphere. A line runs horizontally around the faces and edges of the frames, demarcated with light-blue paint, while the inside edge of the square cut-outs at the centre of each frame were painted the same orange as used in ODYSSEUS ΜΗΤΙΣ (1). Unpainted wooden surfaces were waxed to emphasize the grain. The calliper was painted Mediterranean and Oxford blue. The spotting scope was constructed by removing the handle from a coffee pot and attaching the body to a lamp holder component. Cross-hairs were engraved onto the base of the pot to form the front of the scope. The projector consists of a cabinet door handle with a small circle engraved on its front and two bobbin spools on either end of a curved metal band. The neck was produced by vertically stacking three clock-weights and left unpainted. The umbrella slider was broken when found, and was re-glued, sanded, waxed, and the foot painted red. The rib connectors were cleaned, re-attached and painted black inside.

Composition As a part of the Odyssean category, the image of TELEMACHOS ΟΦΕΛΛΩ is a visual and conceptual response to that of ODYSSEUS ΜΗΤΙΣ . As Telemachus’ resemblance to Odysseus in the narrative increases with maturation, they function as a ‘complimentary pair’ in the sub-category THE WARRIORS. Devising Telemachus as an individual and as a reflection of Odysseus proved difficult. The buoy component is replaced with a structural representation of a sphere made from Pine, with a deep orange coloured grain, and a painted orange interior. In place of a C-clamp, TELEMACHOS ΟΦΕΛΛΩ includes an outside spring calliper. The cylindrical concertina in this work forms the neck, while the circular motion of the propeller is represented by film reels. The cone of the funnel on ODYSSSEUS ΜΗΤΙΣ is transformed into the cone of the spotting scope, while the arrow-head and cross-hairs represent archery and the name ‘Telemachus’.6 The worn umbrella slider in ODYSSEUS ΜΗΤΙΣ is replaced with a smaller, reconstructed version in TELEMACHOS ΟΦΕΛΛΩ , emphasizing the rib connectors, which are absent in ODYSSEUS ΜΗΤΙΣ .

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Iconography This sculpture invokes Telemachus as a potential Odysseus. The frames suggest a sphere under construction, the callipers and concertina allude to growth; the rib connectors to his ship’s crew (assembled by Athena). The spotting scope and projector describe Telemachos’ function in the epic as the audience searching for Odysseus’ as-yet-untold story, and as the primary verifier of his father’s existence.

4. HEKTOR ΕΧΩ (2011) Fishing buoy, funnel, fire sprinkler valve, gate valve hand-wheel, Electro Voice 630 microphone grille, threaded rod, metal helical ribbon, two coffee press lids, metal washer, wood (Oak), enamel paint 59 × 27.5 × 25 cm 2011

Subject This sculpture is based on the character Hector, the chief defender of Troy and primary opponent of Achilles in the Iliad. Homer describes Hector as an unwavering and intimidating warrior, but also as an inspiring leader, a kind husband and a skilled horseman. In the Iliad, Hector is the antithesis of Achilles. He lacks the latter’s divine parentage, and Achilles’ supra-human and sub-human excesses,7 is reliably loyal to his people and allies, and is of little significance to the gods (despite being a frequent provider of burnt offerings). In the poem it is Hector who explains that a hero’s kleos is marked by his victim’s tomb. His own death therefore forms part of the kleos of his killer (Achilles), while his funeral and the lamentations for him prefigure those of Achilles, as described in the Odyssey. ΕΧΩ (ekho) serves here as an epithet of Hektor and refers to holding; protecting; and preserving.

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Fig. 16 Front view of HEKTOR ΕΧΩ , 2011.

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Fig. 17 Side view of HEKTOR ΕΧΩ , 2011.

Fig. 18 Back view of HEKTOR ΕΧΩ , 2011.

Construction The original bright yellow of the buoy was adjusted to match the golden yellow of ACHILLEUS ΜΗΝΙΣ (2). The helmet was constructed from a tin funnel painted bronze, with a fire sprinkler valve for its crest. The hand-wheel and microphone grille were left unpainted, whereas the two shields are coffee press lids painted yellow and grey to resemble the profile of an axe and Dipylon shield. The walls were constructed from wood, waxed outside and painted purple inside. A horizontal relief of a black, yellow and red key pattern was applied to the lower outside part of the walls, while circles containing dots and crosses were painted onto the vertical sections between the struts.

Composition As representative of the Iliadic category, the image of HEKTOR ΕΧΩ is a visual and conceptual response to ACHILLEUS ΜΗΝΙΣ . And since Hector’s

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tomb will symbolize Achilles’ kleos, ACHILLEUS ΜΗΝΙΣ and HEKTOR ΕΧΩ form a contrasting pair. As the complementary characters that define Odysseus and Achilles in the sub-category THE WARRIORS, TELEMACHOS ΟΦΕΛΛΩ (3) and HEKTOR ΕΧΩ form a complimentary pair. Attributes on the upper and lower registers of the image of HEKTOR ΕΧΩ are thematic and visual opposites of the image of ACHILLEUS ΜΗΝΙΣ . The latter suggests motion, aggression and visual expansion; by contrast, the image of HEKTOR ΕΧΩ is constructed from objects used for containment, and from ‘anchoring’ forms such as the cone and the square. The cross-hairs on the scope, the unpainted wooden frames and the triangle of the calliper above the sphere in TELEMACHOS ΟΦΕΛΛΩ are echoed by the cross pattern on the microphone grille, the wooden walls and the helmet in HEKTOR ΕΧΩ . To reflect the Iliadic pattern of outer symmetry and inner axis, the weight of the buoy needed to rest on a long and fragile neck situated between the two wooden walls. Initially imagined either as a threaded shaft or a helical ribbon, the final sculpture combines both.

Iconography This sculpture alludes to Hector as protector (and personification) of the ancient cities which fell during the Late Bronze Age. The crest of the most visible component, his ‘shining helmet’, is a fire sprinkler valve (reference to the archaeological identification of catastrophic fire with cities destroyed by invasion). The green and purple helix suggests plants and the Homeric comparison of the human life-cycle to that of leaves.8 The microphone might suggest Hector’s function as the transmitter of Achilles’ kleos.

THE WIVES This category consists of two sculptures. PENELOPE ΑΡΕΤΗ (5) and HELENA ΑΕΘΛΟΝ (6) represent a pair of opposites personifying nostos and kleos, in the Odyssey and the Iliad respectively.

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5. PENELOPE ΑΡΕΤΗ (2011) Embroidery hoop, embroidery needle, bobbin spool, ribbed rod, funnel, vase cap, angle-grinder inner flange, drill chuck, hinge leaves, hollow soldered brass ball, lamp holder fastener, wood (Plywood), enamel paint 48.5 × 18 × 18 cm 2011

Subject This sculpture is based on the character Penelope, the wife of Odysseus in the Odyssey. Homer describes Penelope as intelligent and loyal to her husband, whom she equals in cunning. In the Odyssey, Penelope determines the success of Odysseus’ homecoming. If she were to choose a new husband, then Odysseus’ fate would echo Agamemnon’s who returned from Troy to be murdered by his wife and her lover. Conferring nostos, Penelope preserves the uniqueness of the Odyssey by clearly differentiating it from the Oresteia.9 ΑΡΕΤΗ (arete) serves here as an epithet of Penelope and refers to merit and good character. It is also the name of the Phaeacian queen whose support Odysseus must win if he is to be returned home by the Phaeacian ships.

Construction The area usually occupied by fabric in the embroidery hoop was filled with a round Plywood disc painted white. The wood of the hoop, the needle and the ribbed rod of the neck were left unpainted. The amphora was constructed from a variety of objects: a drill chuck for its collar; hinge leaves for its arms; a vase cap for its shoulder; its ‘belly’ is a hollow brass ball sitting in a funnel; while its ‘foot’ is an angle-grinder’s inner flange. It is painted in horizontal bands of pattern and colour, while vertical light-blue bands on either side feature a hexametrical sequence of 1s and 0s.

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Fig. 19 Front view of PENELOPE ΑΡΕΤΗ , 2011.

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Fig. 20 Side view of PENELOPE ΑΡΕΤΗ , 2011.

Fig. 21 Back view of PENELOPE ΑΡΕΤΗ , 2011.

Composition As limited to the Odyssean category, the image of PENELOPE ΑΡΕΤΗ is a visual and conceptual response to ODYSSEUS ΜΗΤΙΣ (1) and TELEMACHOS ΟΦΕΛΛΩ (3). As the first of a new type, PENELOPE ΑΡΕΤΗ provides a basic template which allows for adherence to established properties but diverges sufficiently to establish a new format (THE WIVES). The most significant change occurs in the upper part where the sphere is replaced with a disc, a transition informed by the image of TELEMACHOS ΟΦΕΛΛΩ where the sphere is constructed from intersecting frames. This reduction necessitated an adjustment in the suggestion of attributes in the upper section of the composition. The front and back attributes for ODYSSEUS ΜΗΤΙΣ and TELEMACHOS ΟΦΕΛΛΩ were consolidated into two parts of a single object (the needle). By using an embroidery hoop, the contraction mechanism (the C-Clamp and the calliper which formerly enveloped the core spherical objects) becomes the object itself. The lower part conforms to the

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Odyssean pattern of a single solid form on a narrow foot. The pierced arms of the amphora echo the rib connectors on TELEMACHOS ΟΦΕΛΛΩ , and the painted patterns reflect the traces left by the ‘lost’ connectors in ODYSSEUS ΜΗΤΙΣ .

Iconography This sculpture depicts Penelope as a repository. The embroidery hoop and needle refer to Penelope’s deception of weaving and unravelling Laertes’ shroud to keep her household intact. The amphora as storage for provisions, and as a funerary marker, reflects her role as either the custodian of Odysseus’ homecoming or as the potential instrument of his death. The needle in the embroidery hoop and the axes on the belly of the amphora evoke the archery contest.10

6. HELENA ΑΕΘΛΟΝ (2011–12) Circular tambourine, Propert Swift Whip rotary egg beater, pot lid, corkscrew, metal cap of a bath plug, wood (Plywood, Oak), enamel paint 49.5 × 8 × 17 cm 2011–12

Subject This sculpture is based on the character Helen, the daughter of Zeus, and the contested wife of Menelaus and Paris/Alexandros in the Iliad. Homer describes Helen as desirable and regarded as blameless by others, but she speaks of herself as responsible for the war. In the Iliad, possession of Helen (and all her property) provides the motive for the war. Participation in the fight for her translates into poetic immortality, while Menelaus (having regained his status as son-in-law of Zeus) learns in the Odyssey that he will achieve immortality through transportation to the Elysian Fields at the end of his life.

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Fig. 22 Front view of HELENA ΑΕΘΛΟΝ , 2011–12.

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Fig. 23 Side view of HELENA ΑΕΘΛΟΝ , 2011–12.

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Fig. 24 Back view of HELENA ΑΕΘΛΟΝ , 2011–12.

ΑΕΘΛΟΝ (aethlon) serves here as an epithet of Helen and refers to a prize awarded to a victor in a contest.

Construction The translucent membrane of the tambourine was removed and replaced with a Plywood disc. The disc was painted white and the frame a light yellow. The pairs of jingles were glued together to form single shapes and painted silver and blue. An additional pair of jingles was taken from another tambourine and inserted into the frame to produce an overall set of five (each jingle represents a year in the war’s ten-year duration). The neck consists of a thin rod inserted into a corkscrew. The egg beater was stripped of its handle, painted and mounted in the shallow bowl made from a painted pot lid with its handle removed.

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Composition As part of the Iliadic category, HELENA ΑΕΘΛΟΝ is a visual and conceptual response to ACHILLEUS ΜΗΝΙΣ (2) and HEKTOR ΕΧΩ (4); and since the image of PENELOPE ΑΡΕΤΗ (5) represents fidelity and that of HELENA ΑΕΘΛΟΝ instability, they form a contrasting pair in the sub-category THE WIVES. The upper register is reduced to a disc in a circular frame; the expansiveness of ACHILLEUS ΜΗΝΙΣ and the containment of HEKTOR ΕΧΩ are combined in locating the jingles equally inside and outside of their frame. In the lower part of the composition, the Iliadic pattern of an outer symmetry and an inner axis is reflected by the two beaters and the vertical gear. The inclusion of a small ‘mantle’ above the top of the gear interrupts the strong diagonal line of the conical narrowing of the section below the neck with a horizontal extension.

Iconography This sculpture alludes to Helen as a catalyst for the erotic impetus that generated the Trojan War, and the fatal attraction of kleos. The tambourine recalls Maenadic frenzy, while the egg-beater suggests dancing, the ocean’s waves that brought the Achaean ships to Troy, and the mingling of fluids.11 The choice of this specific beater was informed by its ball drive mechanism, with each sphere on the gear disc representing the buoys in THE WARRIORS.

THE DEITIES This category consists of four sculptures. KALYPSO ΚΡΥΠΤΩ (7), ERIS ΦΑΓΟΝ (8), KIRKE ΦΑΙΝΩ (9) and ATE ΠΑΓΙΣ (10) depict two opposing sets of (seemingly) matching pairs. These pairs represent thematic aspects central to the plot of each poem: obstruction and transition as thematically essential to nostos in the Odyssey, and the role of conflict and narrow selfinterest in the construction of kleos in the Iliad.

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7. KALYPSO ΚΡΥΠΤΩ (2012) Colander, Primus camping stove, brass washers, pulley, fish hooks, bobbin spool, lamp holder components, warming plate lid, wood (Cypress, Plywood), brass rod, enamel paint 51.5 × 31 × 20 cm 2012

Subject This sculpture is based on the character Calypso, the goddess who rescues Odysseus when he is thrown by a tempest onto her island of Ogygia and attempts to separate him from the world in the Odyssey. Homer describes Calypso as solitary and isolated from gods and men alike, with beautiful hair and a woman’s (as opposed to a goddess’s) voice. In the Odyssey, Calypso offers Odysseus immortality as her spouse, but at the cost of permanent separation from the world. As an obstacle and diversion, she is a threat to the hero’s nostos, yet spurs a supra-human transformation: Odysseus’s rejection of her offer of divine (but dark) immortality returns him to the mortal world of Ithaca, which secures his poetic immortality. ΚΡΥΠΤΩ (krupto) serves here as an epithet of Kalypso and refers to hiding; concealment; keeping something or someone from view or knowledge; or to shield or shelter it/them.

Construction White Plywood discs were applied to the interior and exterior of the colander’s base. The interior and exterior of the colander were painted with spirals and interlaced bands, surrounding the patterned perforations. Excepting the feet, the tank of the camping stove was stripped of external features, the resulting holes were filled, and the entire body painted. The frieze was carved into the podium in low relief and painted black. The wood was painted with a translucent layer of moss green and waxed to emphasize the grain.

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Fig. 25 Front view of KALYPSO ΚΡΥΠΤΩ , 2012.

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Fig. 26 Side view of KALYPSO ΚΡΥΠΤΩ , 2012.

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Fig. 27 Back view of KALYPSO ΚΡΥΠΤΩ , 2012.

Composition As part of the Odyssean category, KALYPSO ΚΡΥΠΤΩ is a visual and conceptual response to the images of ODYSSEUS ΜΗΤΙΣ (1), TELEMACHOS ΟΦΕΛΛΩ (3) and PENELOPE ΑΡΕΤΗ (5). As the first of THE DEITIES, KALYPSO ΚΡΥΠΤΩ introduces a basic template which allows for adherence to established properties but diverges sufficiently to establish a new type. Changes occur across all sections. In the upper part, the sphere and disc are replaced with a hollow hemisphere. The connection between sections is no longer a thin central neck but two symmetrical arms running from either side of the core object in the upper register to a central point in the lower register. A large colander was selected. Its perforated surface is reminiscent of the disc pierced by a needle in PENELOPE ΑΡΕΤΗ , and the projector spools and rib connectors in TELEMACHOS ΟΦΕΛΛΩ . The patterning was informed by the image of PENELOPE ΑΡΕΤΗ and the colours by those of ODYSSEUS ΜΗΤΙΣ and TELEMACHOS ΟΦΕΛΛΩ . The lower register

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comprises two main components, one of which is a square wooden podium. The podium intentionally creates a disproportion in scale between the colander and stove without a loss of overall height, as a symbolic differentiation between humans and gods,12 without losing cohesive scale within the series. Despite this shift, the single solid form of the stove tank on its three fragile legs (as opposed to a narrow foot) still refers to the Odyssean type. While the body is painted a flat grey, the patterning of the image of PENELOPE ΑΡΕΤΗ is reflected in the perforated and raised geometric pattern on the plate lid that occupies the area between the colander and the stove. The podium was made of unpainted wood to echo the wooden frames in TELEMACHOS ΟΦΕΛΛΩ , and the umbrella sliders in ODYSSEUS ΜΗΤΙΣ and TELEMACHOS ΟΦΕΛΛΩ .

Iconography This sculpture presents Calypso as a fishing-net made of long swirling hair, inspired by images of the Gorgon.13 The orange ovoid at the centre of the blue patterned disc is intended to suggest her remote island’s insularity, and the slender legged camping stove, perched on its podium, is based on images of the crouching Sphinx.14

8. ERIS ΦΑΓΟΝ (2012) Inside spring callipers, gas heater heat deflector dish, fan blade, table-tennis ball, sprue formers, fondue fork, anniversary clock weight case, wrist watch case back, wax-working tool, section of a brass nipple, filter parts from a coffee press, metal washers, glass marbles, brass rod, wood (Plywood, African Zebra), enamel paint 46.8 × 31 × 18 cm 2012

Subject This sculpture is based on the character Eris, the goddess of conflict in the Iliad. Homer describes Eris as a small insatiable creature who expands as her

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Fig. 28 Front view of ERIS ΦΑΓΟΝ , 2012.

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Fig. 29 Side view of ERIS ΦΑΓΟΝ , 2012.

Fig. 30 Back view of ERIS ΦΑΓΟΝ , 2012.

influence spreads, roaming the battlefield even when the other gods have left. In the Iliad, Eris functions as the personification of the self-generative, mesmerizing and consumptive aspects of conflict. According to tradition, she caused the Trojan War in response to exclusion from the wedding feast of Achilles’ parents.15 The dramatic function of Eris is to create and maintain the conditions for achieving kleos. ΦΑΓΟΝ (phagon) serves here as an epithet of Eris and refers to the act of devouring. In Homer it is used of the cannibal Cyclops; the monster Scylla; and of fish-eating corpses.

Construction The shield consists of a heat deflector dish. The heating device entry hole was filled using a wrist watch case back, and the dish was painted in radiating bands of black and gold with a red rim. The blade of a fan was flattened, painted in patterns resembling flames and/or eyes, with a small Plywood disc

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at its centre, painted white. The drumsticks are two halves of a table-tennis ball. The frame of the wheeled base is an inside spring calliper and a waxworking tool painted blue, and the wheels are filter parts from a coffee press, painted gold. The frieze was carved into the podium and painted yellow. The wood received a translucent layer of grey and was waxed to emphasize the grain.

Composition As a member of the Iliadic category, ERIS ΦΑΓΟΝ is a visual and conceptual response to the images of ACHILLEUS ΜΗΝΙΣ (2), HEKTOR ΕΧΩ (4) and HELENA ΑΕΘΛΟΝ (6). And as the image of KALYPSO ΚΡΥΠΤΩ (7) represents cool isolation, and that of ERIS ΦΑΓΟΝ combustible integration, they form a contrasting pair in the sub-category THE DEITIES. The upper register is accordingly a hollow hemisphere, with its interior partly enclosed by the fan blade. The shield reflects the use of armour as primary signifiers in ACHILLEUS ΜΗΝΙΣ and HEKTOR ΕΧΩ , while the number and arrangement of blades echo the five sets of jingles in HELENA ΑΕΘΛΟΝ . The references to sound in the two-pronged (tuning) fork and drumsticks are reminiscent of the jingle bell in ACHILLEUS ΜΗΝΙΣ , the microphone grille in HEKTOR ΕΧΩ and the tambourine in HELENA ΑΕΘΛΟΝ . In the lower section, the Iliadic pattern of an outer symmetry and inner axis is achieved with the two wheels and a rear support. The wheels reflect ACHILLEUS ΜΗΝΙΣ , while the triangular frame recalls the helmet and walls in HEKTOR ΕΧΩ . As in KALYPSO ΚΡΥΠΤΩ this section includes a wooden podium, creating disproportionate scale between the shield above and the wheeled frame below, setting the divine apart from the human.

Iconography This sculpture depicts Eris as a self-fuelling inferno, invoking a war chariot, armour, marching and a call to war.

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9. KIRKE ΦΑΙΝΩ (2012) Bundt mould, outside spring calliper, Burmos camping stove, lamp burner border, ribbed and cup-shaped lamp holder components, brass washers, brass latches, wood (Obeche), enamel paint 50.5 × 24.4 × 18 cm 2012

Subject This sculpture is based on the character Circe, the goddess who, in the Odyssey, transforms Odysseus’ men into swine on the island of Aeaea and instructs him to travel to the underworld. Homer describes Circe as a dangerous and generous hostess, with beautiful hair and a woman’s (as opposed to a goddess’s) voice. In the Odyssey, Circe has a transformative power which Odysseus neutralizes with Hermes’ help.16 She sends Odysseus to the underworld to consult Teiresias, who reveals that the hero’s nostos is (and will be) hindered by angered gods, but that he will eventually be reconciled with Poseidon.17 Circe represents the Homeric concept of the conflicting capacity of the gods as equally helpful or harmful.18 ΦΑΙΝΩ (phaino) serves here as an epithet of Kirke and refers to the act of bringing something to light; making something known; or bringing something to action.

Construction The Bundt mould was painted to emphasize its moulded patterning. The screw and spring of the calliper were removed, and the arms painted green. Unlike the image of KALYPSO ΚΡΥΠΤΩ (7) the external features on the tank of the camping stove were retained and, with the exception of a horizontal painted band, the metal surface was left unpainted. The wood on the podium was waxed and the frieze painted black.

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Fig. 31 Front view of KIRKE ΦΑΙΝΩ , 2012.

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Fig. 32 Side view of KIRKE ΦΑΙΝΩ , 2012.

Fig. 33 Back view of KIRKE ΦΑΙΝΩ , 2012.

Composition As part of the Odyssean category, KIRKE ΦΑΙΝΩ is a visual and conceptual response to the images of ODYSSEUS ΜΗΤΙΣ (1), TELEMACHOS ΟΦΕΛΛΩ (3), PENELOPE ΑΡΕΤΗ (5) and KALYPSO ΚΡΥΠΤΩ (7); and as Calypso and Circe are described in similar terms in the Odyssey, they constitute a complementary pair in the sub-category THE DEITIES. The hollow hemisphere of the Bundt mould contains an inner shaft open at both ends, and the swirling spirals in KALYPSO ΚΡΥΠΤΩ are replaced by more rigid geometric shapes. The open space refers to the arrow in ODYSSEUS ΜΗΤΙΣ and the needle in PENELOPE ΑΡΕΤΗ . The calliper that forms the ‘arms’ is of the type used in the image of TELEMACHOS ΟΦΕΛΛΩ . The small rings at its tips are the same as those at the tips of the arms in KALYPSO ΚΡΥΤΩ . The lower register is a reference to the image of KALYPSO ΚΡΥΠΤΩ , with variations: the horizontal line created by the warming plate lid in KALYPSO ΚΡΥΠΤΩ (suggesting an island in the ocean) is described by a

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lamp burner border (suggesting solar radiation) in KIRKE ΦΑΙΝΩ . Retaining the external parts of the stove in KIRKE ΦΑΙΝΩ is intended to counteract the sense of withdrawal in KALYPSO ΚΡΥΠΤΩ (where these have been removed). The podium is of a similar wood, but without the translucent coat of moss green.

Iconography This sculpture refers to Circe as initially endangering, before enabling, Odysseus’ passage, and the transformation of his interaction with the gods. The geometric markings in the mould are reductively transformative, while the central open space suggests the possibility of transition. The red radiating disc with a yellow core represents Circe’s origins as daughter of the sun, and the stove marks her as Calypso’s Sphinx-like ‘twin’.

10. ATE ΠΑΓΙΣ (2012–13) Spring divider, Bundt mould, brass ball, knitting needles, Primus burner bell, filter parts from a coffee press, brass ring from a chandelier, 20 g weights, waxworking tool, wood (African Zebra), enamel paint 47.5 × 21 × 18 cm 2012–13

Subject This sculpture is based on the character Ate, the goddess who induces lapses in judgement in the Iliad. Homer describes Ate as an exceptionally fast runner (thus avoiding detection and retribution). She is banned from Olympus,19 making her victims exclusively human. In the Iliad, Ate personifies the fateful decisions that resulted in Achilles’ rage and the Trojan War itself. By diminishing the status of Menelaus and Achilles by their loss of Helen and Briseis, Ate disrupts the prevailing order and endangers kleos, but creates conditions for the attainment of kleos through retribution.

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Fig. 34 Front view of ATE ΠΑΓΙΣ , 2012–13.

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Fig. 35 Side view of ATE ΠΑΓΙΣ , 2012–13.

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Fig. 36 Back view of ATE ΠΑΓΙΣ , 2012–13.

ΠΑΓΙΣ (pagis) serves here as an epithet of Ate and refers to a snare (predominantly as used by women); and Odysseus’ scheme of the Trojan horse.

Construction The central shaft of the Bundt mould was enclosed at its narrowest point and painted to emphasize its moulded patterns. The exterior was painted in yellow, blue, red, green and purple common to the Iliadic type, while the interior was painted black and grey with a small yellow, grey and red target at the centre. The outer ring had its connector holes filled, and was painted red. The wheeled base consists of a spring divider and a wax-working tool painted blue. The wheels are coffee filter parts and 20 g weights painted grey and dark blue. The wood of the podium was waxed, and the frieze painted yellow.

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Composition As part of the Iliadic category, the image of ATE ΠΑΓΙΣ is a visual and conceptual counterpoint to the images of ACHILLEUS ΜΗΝΙΣ (2), HEKTOR ΕΧΩ (4), HELENA ΑΕΘΛΟΝ (6) and ERIS ΦΑΓΟΝ (8); and as Circe encourages comprehensive understanding and Ate narrow self-interest, they constitute a contrasting pair in the sub-category THE DEITIES. As Eris and Ate traditionally create and maintain the conditions for war, they form a complementary pair. In the upper register, as in KIRKE ΦΑΙΝΩ (9), the hollow hemisphere is a Bundt mould, but it is reversed (with the exterior at the front), while the small disc inserted at the far end of the shaft creates a deadend (as opposed to the open space in the image of KIRKE ΦΑΙΝΩ ). The red circular ring suspending the mould resembles the rim on ERIS ΦΑΓΟΝ and the tambourine frame in HELENA ΑΕΘΛΟΝ , while the small target evokes the shield in ACHILLEUS ΜΗΝΙΣ . The lower section formally echoes ERIS ΦΑΓΟΝ , with significant variations: the inside spring calliper in ERIS ΦΑΓΟΝ suggesting expansion is replaced by a spring divider; and the sharp edge of the wax-working tool on which ERIS ΦΑΓΟΝ rests, holds a small brass ball in the image of ATE ΠΑΓΙΣ . The podium is of the same wood but was not treated with a translucent grey.

Iconography This sculpture compares Ate to a carnivorous plant, with a petal pattern on the front exterior, and the central space as trapping mechanism. The target at the rear suggests the actual, initially unseen danger; and the black and grey interior, the mental delusion she causes. By fixing her victim’s focus on an object of desire, she conceals the context.

THE KINGS This category consists of two sculptures. NESTOR ΝΟΟΣ (11) and MENELAOS ΒΟΑΩ (12) form an opposing pair, representing constancy and change as fundamental aspects of form and content in the Iliad and the Odyssey.

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11. NESTOR ΝΟΟΣ (2013) Fishing buoy, brass lid of an urn, acanthus leaf-shaped finial, decorative lamp holder component, primus tank lid, hanging cheek snaffle bit, anniversary clock weight, brass ashtray, plastic lamp holder component, wood (Oak), enamel paint 44.2 × 32.1 × 21 cm 2013

Subject This sculpture is based on the character Nestor, the patrician advisor to the Achaean army in the Iliad, and host to Telemachus in the Odyssey. Homer describes Nestor as the oldest and wisest of the Achaeans, generally referred to as the ‘Gerenian horseman’. In the Iliad and the Odyssey, Nestor formulates his advice to heroes on comparisons of current situations to historical precedent on the basis that all things of the present are inferior to those of the past.20 ΝΟΟΣ (noos) serves here as an epithet of Nestor and refers to the mind; sense; perception; and counsel.

Construction An originally orange buoy was painted a greyish white with solid white, grey and turquoise details. An acanthus leaf-shaped finial was painted and secured to the rear of the buoy, while the tip of the brass lid of an urn was removed, and a painted lamp holder component was inserted to create the mouth. The joints of the snaffle bit were secured in place with epoxy glue and screws and painted Oxford blue. The ‘Cycladic vase’ consists of an upturned ash tray for its neck, its body was carved from oak and it is placed on a conical plastic foot. The neck is brass, the foot was painted, and the body was treated with the same translucent white wood stain used on the plinths.

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Fig. 37 Front view of NESTOR ΝΟΟΣ , 2013.

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Fig. 38 Side view of NESTOR ΝΟΟΣ , 2013.

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Fig. 39 Back view of NESTOR ΝΟΟΣ , 2013.

Composition As a visual and conceptual response to all the sculptures in this series, the image of NESTOR ΝΟΟΣ is part of both major categories (the Odyssean and the Iliadic); and as the first of THE KINGS, NESTOR ΝΟΟΣ provides a basic template which allows for the retention of established properties but varies sufficiently to establish a new type. While such changes have to this point involved the introduction of new attributes, in NESTOR ΝΟΟΣ , variation is achieved by combining components of established types. The intention was to develop a work which conformed to existing patterns while asserting a novel, autonomous, visual and conceptual identity. The upper section conforms to the upper sections of THE WARRIORS (in shape) and THE WIVES (in colour). Two attributes are indicated front and rear, and painted circles containing dots and crosses (similar to those in HEKTOR ΕΧΩ (4) and HELENA ΑΕΘΛΟΝ (6)) mark the top, base and sides. The tongue recalls the reference to sound in the images of ACHILLEUS ΜΗΝΙΣ (2), HEKTOR ΕΧΩ , HELENA ΑΕΘΛΟΝ , and ERIS ΦΑΓΟΝ (8), while the

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tendril-like quality of the tongue and the acanthus leaf echo the helix as lifecycles in HEKTOR ΕΧΩ . The link between upper and lower registers consists of two arms emerging from a central point on the lower part, reminiscent of THE DEITIES. As equestrian equipment, the bit evokes the horsemanship of Iliadic characters such as Achilles and Hector.21 The lower section consists of a single solid form on a narrow foot, specific to the Odyssean type. The pierced lugs on the vase recall the rib connectors in TELEMACHOS ΟΦΕΛΛΩ (3) and the arms of the amphora in PENELOPE ΑΡΕΤΗ (5), while its function as a container, combined with the acanthus leaf as a funerary symbol, reflects the amphora as signifier of life and death.

Iconography This sculpture depicts Nestor as an archaic prototype. Of his original warrior’s attributes, only two remain: his arresting voice (the tongue) and memories of the dead (the acanthus leaf). The bit represents the epithet of ‘Gerenian horseman’, and the Cycladic vase refers to the cup only he could lift as a member of the former generation of heroes.

12. MENELAOS ΒΟΑΩ (2013) Fishing buoy, lamp holder components, whistle, violin bridge, winding key, headphones, outside spring calliper, wreath-shaped finial, conical finial, bobbin spool, Rockler Power Bore bit, wooden handle of a brace drill, threading die, wood (Plywood, Camphor, Obeche), enamel paint 53.5 × 26 × 36.2 cm 2013

Subject This sculpture is based on the character Menelaus, the wronged husband of Helen in the Iliad, and the first to provide Telemachus with news of Odysseus in the Odyssey. Homer describes Menelaus as possessing a ‘loud war cry’, and the lesser of the two sons of Atreus, but as extremely wealthy and content by

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Fig. 40 Front view of MENELAOS ΒΟΑΩ , 2013.

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Fig. 41 Side view of MENELAOS ΒΟΑΩ , 2013.

Fig. 42 Back view of MENELAOS ΒΟΑΩ , 2013.

the time he returns home from Troy. Menelaus’ marriage and status are endangered in the Iliad, but exemplary in the Odyssey. ΒΟΑΩ (boao) serves here as an epithet of Menelaos and refers to the act of a person giving a loud cry or shout; and of things to roar or resound.

Construction An originally light-yellow buoy was painted and stained auburn. The cylindrical concertina was carved and painted red. The whistle was fixed to a spout constructed from lamp holder components and painted. The violin bridge was attached to a small conical finial and painted. The wreath was painted and attached to the buoy above, and the arms of an outside spring calliper below. At the tip of each arm is a headphone painted white, grey and blue. Although the headphones are located on either side of the buoy, they are not attached to it. The agitator consists of an axial drill bit and four vertically arranged wooden

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blades, mounted on a dome-shaped base in a shallow square pool constructed from wood and painted.

Composition As a visual and conceptual response to all the sculptures in this series, the image of MENELAOS ΒΟΑΩ is part of both major categories (the Odyssean and the Iliadic); and as NESTOR ΝΟΟΣ (11) represents stability and MENELAOS ΒΟΑΩ flux, they form a contrasting pair in the sub-category THE KINGS. As the opposite of the formal restraint of NESTOR ΝΟΟΣ , MENELAOS ΒΟΑΩ demanded greater visual complexity. In the upper register, the buoy with attached (and seemingly attached) attributes conforms to THE WARRIORS. The dark auburn is contrasted with the white in NESTOR ΝΟΟΣ and echoes the dark wooden umbrella sliders in the images of ODYSSEUS ΜΗΤΙΣ (1) and TELEMACHOS ΟΦΕΛΛΩ (3). The calliper arms which appear to connect the upper part to the lower, recall THE DEITIES, TELEMACHOS ΟΦΕΛΛΩ and KIRKE ΦΑΙΝΩ (9). The use of the circular wreath to achieve the actual connection echoes the rings on the snaffle bit in NESTOR ΝΟΟΣ . The round headphones suggest the drumsticks in ERIS ΦΑΓΟΝ (8), the white faces of the headphones refer to PENELOPE ΑΡΕΤΗ (5) and HELENA ΑΕΘΛΟΝ (6), while their apertures reflect the colander in KALYPSO ΚΡΥΠΤΩ (7). The lower section consists of four symmetrical objects and a central axis, reminiscent of the Iliadic type. The agitator mirrors the egg beater in HELENA ΑΕΘΛΟΝ , and the disruptive power of Eris and Ate. Its square base however, equates MENELAOS ΒΟΑΩ with the steadfastness of HEKTOR ΕΧΩ (4).

Iconography This sculpture depicts Menelaus as an ‘emitter’ and a ‘receiver’. The whistle refers to his epithet as ‘master of the war-cry’, the agitator provides the imaginary waves to carry ships to Troy, and the headphones represent the privileged information Menelaus obtained from Proteus.22

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A Composite Object Portrait of an Oral-Formulaic Homer

The theory of formulaic composition, as developed by Homeric scholars since first proposed by Milman Parry, is essentially a theory of creative practice. However, the constructive methodology it describes differs significantly from the notion of ‘originating authorship’ that informs modern editions and translations of Homeric poetry. The result is a separation between the reception of the poems by a modern audience and contemporary developments in modern Homeric scholarship. A key obstacle to assessing the viability of the theory of formulaic composition and the creation of a translation of a systemically constructed poem may be seen to lie in the theorized integration of form and content in Homeric poetry. One of the aims of this project was to argue that Homeric reification by means of a sculptural manifestation of Homeric formalism can elucidate interconnections between materiality and abstraction that underpin constructive art-forms. This approach includes the development of an autonomous sculptural extension of an existing tradition to provide a visual counterpart to the Homeric integration of the formal with the aesthetic (and the material with the abstract) as exhibited in the means of its production. The assembled sculptures may therefore be understood to function as a translation of specific conceptual and formal aspects of Homeric poetics. Translations play a significant role in shaping general perceptions of ancient works such as the Iliad and the Odyssey. But, changes in language, culture and modes of reception have made the possibility of constructing a comprehensive translation that faithfully expresses every facet of the Homeric epic impossible, a problem exacerbated by increased emphases on complex extra-linguistic facets such as the musicality of the epics, the participatory role of the audience, epic performance as ritual, and composition as occurring during performance. Whitaker notes that translators of Homer face the paradox of rendering 133

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‘an oral derived performance text into a very different, written/printed form which has its own stylistic pressures and demands’.1 Historically, translators such as Alexander Pope, E. V. Rieu, R. Lattimore, Christopher Logue, Robert Fagles and Richard Whitaker adopted diverse approaches to allow contemporary audiences an understanding of various characteristics of the Homeric epic.2 The results range from wholly interpretative extremes (such as Pope and Logue) to literal paraphrasing (Lattimore),3 reflecting a tension between creating a reiteration of the poem that can best convey its meaning, and faithfulness to Homeric form and/or content.

Aesthetic translation Given the significant formal and interpretive differences between literary texts and visual artworks, the approach adopted in this project does not conform to the expectation of direct translation as the conveyance of meaning in which the words of one language are replaced by words that express the same ideas from another language. This definition of translation privileges the content (as most closely allied to meaning) of a text over its form (as most closely allied to language) and poses a significant barrier to the translation of texts, such as the Homeric epics, in which form and content are integrated. However, translators such as the Pre-Raphaelite poet-painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–82) have proposed a method where ‘form and content are translated together to create a new thing of beauty’. Rossetti created a collection initially titled The Early Italian Poets (1861) (later retitled Dante and his Circle). In the preface, he stated that ‘a translation (involving as it does the necessity of settling many points without discussion), remains perhaps the most direct form of commentary’.4 Charles Martindale (2008, 88) terms such artistic reinterpretation of an existing work an ‘aesthetic translation’, with an emphasis on transmitting both meaning and artistry as inextricable from one another.5 Such a translation should be no less an artwork than the work of which it is an interpretation. This echoes the method of ‘anachronistic appropriation’, where artists engage in a non-objective historical riposte with their predecessors as though they were contemporaries. In the work of early Modernists (such as Picasso, Léger and de Chirico) their engagement with the antique was premised on the

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transformation, reinvention and re-evaluation of ancient works to create art within a contemporary context. While stylistic attributes provide fertile grounds for such engagement, the Cubists’ interests in the more systemic aspects of Classicism focused not on superficial attributes but on core underlying conventions and mental processes. Martindale suggests that the relationship established between an aesthetic translation and the work to which it refers should not be conceived of in hierarchical, but in dialectically reciprocal, terms. He cites as an example HansGeorg Gadamer’s view of portraiture as the establishment of an ontological relationship between a portrait and the person it evokes.6 Shearer West notes that portraits conform to conventional notions of art, but ‘are also a special class of object that can resist classification as art’.7 While the sitter historically precedes their portrait, the latter is both autonomous as an artwork, and relative to its subject as an interpretation of the sitter’s physiology, personality – and in most cases – their social context and status. Hermeneutically, in a viewer’s imagination, a portrait’s creative process is evoked as a transactional encounter between artist and sitter.8 In a similar vein, the translation of one artwork, by means of creating another, represents a process of transformative engagement. As this process is evoked by the responding work, the ontological relationship established between such an interpretation and its source reflects the unique status of the portrait as an artwork most fully comprehensible in terms of its relation to its subject. However, the composite object portrait expands the dialectical reciprocity that the conventional portrait establishes between artist and subject by introducing a predominantly metaphoric approach and the hermeneutics of collage and assemblage. On the surface, the absence of a physiological resemblance to the subject obscures the status of the artwork as portraiture. The abstract attributes such as character (or in the case of Cornell’s A Parrot for Juan Gris – their creative methodology) increases both the subjectivity and the complexity of the interpretation. A composite object portrait, as a collage or sculptural assemblage, provokes a certain kind of interpretive process. It tends to draw the viewer into the transactional encounter between artist and sitter. A conventional portrait records and evokes this encounter as having occurred at a set point in time, but the constantly shifting, reciprocally associative, and allusive functions of the disparate elements in a composite object portrait

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indefinitely extend the transactional event from an initial encounter between artist and sitter to each subsequent encounter between subject and interpreter. Martindale’s comparison of the ontological relationship between a text and its translation is premised on the conventional notion of a portrait as an ‘increase in being’. The composite object portrait entails both an increase in, and perpetuation of, being. As such, it replaces the largely passive process of viewing a seamlessly mimetic image of a person with an active process of decoding, connecting and reconstructing clues. The result is an interpretive engagement with the subject that echoes the artist’s own encounter with the sitter as a fluid accumulation of potentially informative and/or contradictory attributes. This echoes the conflation of performance with composition in the theory of formulaic composition, suggesting that the hermeneutics of the composite object portrait provide an appropriate conceptual model for an aesthetic translation of Homeric poetry. The examples of aesthetic translations cited by Martindale constitute responses to literary texts in a literary format, which is appropriate given that these were all produced by literate authors for largely literate audiences. By contrast, the persistent influence of the oral-formulaic foundations of Homeric poetry on its creative methodology, the multitextuality of its formative textual tradition, and core formal attributes such as the Kunstsprache (or ‘special speech’), parataxis, repetition and hexametrical format, deviate significantly from the grammar, syntax and articulation of modern literature. These differences suggest that while a literary translation is appropriate to the epics in their status as texts, many fundamental characteristics of the poems that reflect the oral-formulaic basis of the Homeric creative methodology are less suited to this format. These aspects play a significant role in a contemporary understanding of Homeric poetry which is premised on the integration of form and content as argued by scholars such as Nagy, Bakker, Muellner and Kahane. Therefore, a methodology offered by contemporary sculpture for the formulation of an approach to creating an aesthetic translation of these aspects of Homeric poetics may potentially be conducive to the expression of this understanding of Homeric poetry. The dialectical relationship between the Homeric canon and an interpreter may reflect the amalgamation of myth and ritual in the development of epic poetry.9 Laura Slatkin draws a correlation between the multiformity of

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Homeric epic and myth, noting that ‘no aboriginal prototype of a myth exists that can claim priority over other versions’ and that in the depiction of a hero, the Homeric poet ‘draws on the full mythological range of that character’s role and its relation to the poem’s central ideas’.10 In his exploration of the Homeric epic in terms of heroes’ myths and cults, Nagy (1979) proposed that a ‘ritualistic antagonism’ between a Homeric hero and a specific deity (such as Achilles and Apollo) informed the epic, particularly as it pertained to the hero’s death. The manner of death forms the basis of the hero’s cult, and is inferred, but does not occur, in the hero’s own epic: Xanthos predicts Achilles’ death at the hands of Apollo and Paris in the Iliad (Il. 19.404–22), but his death and funeral are described in the Odyssey (Od. 24.36–97), while Odysseus learns from the seer Teiresias that he will appease Poseidon and eventually die peacefully at home (Od. 11.119–37).11 A hero’s epic therefore evokes a constant awareness of his death, while providing a fictional world where he can always be alive. It is both the fulfilment of the poetic immortalization the hero aims to achieve and the constant reiteration of the process of attaining that kleos. A performance functions as an invocation of a deceased hero through the ritualized re-enactment of his myth.12 Bakker argues that it activates the mythic past in the present, and incorporates an understanding of this past not as a distant historical reality described by means of song, but in terms of a complete interdependence between past events and the song as sung in the present, where each exists because of the other.13 Performance of an epic entails the syntheses of various contradictions, such as the co-existence of the present in which the hero is dead and with the past, where he is alive. At the same time, the mythic world is invariably presented as superior to, and clearly distinct from, the banality of the present, emphasizing the incongruities of these combined realities. The repetition of actions and verbalized statements characteristic of ritual practices is premised on a notion of the ritual as both ancient and unchanging. However, ritual practices can combine a desire for stasis with an adaptive flexibility. Nagy, for example, warns that: The insistence of ritual on a set order of things should not be misunderstood to mean that all rituals are static and that all aspects of rituals are rigid. Even in cases where a given society deems a given ritual to be static and never changing, it may in fact be dynamic and ever changing, responding to the ever-changing structure of the society that it articulates.14

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A process of constant reinvention that gives an illusion of unchanging permanence resembles our own deceptive perceptions of how memory functions. Neuroscientist Steven Rose explains that ‘one of the problems of studying memory is that it is a dialectical phenomenon. Because each time we remember, we in some senses do work on and transform our memories; they are not simply being called up from store and once consulted, replaced unmodified. Our memories are recreated each time we remember.’15 In this sense, a memory is an interpretation of a previous interpretation of an event that gives the impression of being a fixed record of that event. Moreover, the context in which recollection occurs (such as the reason why a memory is recalled) significantly impacts on how it is interpreted, and the extent to which it changes. The adjustment of the past to the expectations of the present is appropriate to the Homeric as a performative art-form: Muellner warns that ‘one cannot separate out the diachronic from the synchronic when it comes to the study of Homer’ as the relationship is reversed in epic. ‘Performance traditions renew the old and replace the new with them and vice versa’16 Such synthesis of incompatible realities is echoed in the formal attributes of Homeric epic. As noted in the Introduction, the poems feature a stylized or ‘special’ form of speech that comprises the ‘normal’ discourse of gods and heroes. By adopting this artificial manner of speaking (Kunstsprache), the performer evokes its mythic speakers. In addition, the formulaic attributes of heroic verbal interaction allow the poet to emphasize the distinction between the mythic and the everyday worlds as simultaneous, but disparate. While its formal attributes (such as polysemy, meter, rhythm, parataxis, phonology, accidence, and the use of catalogues) are noticeably different from everyday speech, these nonetheless derive from specific features of normal verbal interaction (such as the description of observed and remembered events). Bakker (1997, 13) points out that Parry was a ‘direct heir’ to the approach that characterized Homeric language as artificial: Before Homeric style became traditional or oral, it was artificial. Philological criticism found in Homer an artificial diction that could never have been spoken in ordinary discourse at any time or place . . . The notion of Kunstsprache originated in nineteenth-century historical and descriptive linguistics [see Witte 1913 and Meister 1921] . . . and was based on a thorough investigation of the morphological, phonological, dialectical, and lexicographic

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features that distinguish Homer from other authors . . . The artificialities were seen as dependent on the exigencies of the dactylic hexameter.17

Comparative visualization The introduction of an untested extra-lingual method of translating the epics is premised on two processes: the first is the translation of the verbal into the visual, and the second, the comparison of the creative methodologies underlying Homeric formulaic composition and sculptural assemblage. Both these processes are characteristic of the poetic simile. Metaphor and simile allow for the transformation of words into mental and visual imagery and create meaning through the interrelation of disparate elements. The reader receives a metaphor with its constitutive parts collapsed into a single literary image, while the simile comprises two autonomous statements linked by a simile marker (such as the phrase ‘is like’). The reader therefore ‘unpacks’ a metaphoric image to determine its constitutive parts, while the two statements comprising a simile are mentally conflated to arrive at a composite idea. Both enable comprehension by means of associative image-making, but since the visualization procedure is more immediately apparent in the structure of the simile than the metaphor, the former will be used in the remainder of this discussion. While the sculptural assemblages produced for this study function as visual metaphors, the simile provides a more appropriate model for the comparative analysis of two unrelated forms of art-making that informed the production of these artworks. The implications for interpretation of the Homeric use of similes were explored by David Porter (1972) and Ziva Ben-Porat (1992). Both argue that far from providing a reprieve from ‘tedious narratives’ such juxtapositions (particularly in the similes) may have a significant bearing on how the poems are interpreted. Porter suggests that similes in which the savagery of war is juxtaposed with idyllic imagery intentionally question the heroic ethos of the Homeric epic by exposing the hero’s savagery and eliciting sympathy for his victim.18 Ben-Porat proposes a more complex scenario: noting how the poetic simile is ‘structurally characterized by a low degree of clarity, on the one hand, and a high degree of richness and concreteness on the other’. She identifies a

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deviant form of this poetic device (the multiplied simile) that allows the poet to fully exploit the ambiguity and abstraction inherent in similes.19 These similes pose particular problems to interpreters and translators. For example, the so-called ‘donkey-simile’ of Il. 11.558–64 directly follows a simile comparing Ajax to a lion (Il. 11.548–57). The combination of similes comparing the hero to a lion, and then a donkey, has long puzzled scholars.20 The complexity arises from the interpreter’s expectation that the second simile is structurally similar to the first and that the theme of comparing this specific hero to an animal is continued. Instead, the donkey simile incorporates two nuclear similes in which the Trojans can be understood to be either the boys beating back the donkey, or the donkey. Ben-Porat notes that ‘[u]ltimately, the nuclear simile that corresponds to the formal simile mentioned above (Trojans [are] like donkey[s]) is the polar opposite of the nuclear simile reconstructed by the reader in the interpretive process: Aias is like a donkey’21 and argues that such elements play a significant role in expanding an understanding of hermeneutic processes by demonstrating the ‘important roles that structural complexity and cognitive unclarity play in directing the interpretive process’.22 While a nuclear simile consists of the comparison of two different things, the ‘multiplied simile is an elliptical combination of two, superimposed comparative structures [and represents] an extreme actualization of the simile’s potential inconsistency’.23 The difficulty for the interpreter lies in making sense of the incongruity of two comparative statements that ultimately appear to equate complete opposites.24 In a multiplied simile a dialectical interpretive process is created wherein two characters are initially defined in terms of oppositional attributes and are then both associated with a seemingly incompatible shared characteristic (i.e. a thesis and antithesis are established, from which a synthesis is created). The ambiguity of related elements in a multiplied simile engenders higher levels of abstraction and figurativity than in a standard simile, as whatever fails to meet a similarity judgment is integrated to a more abstract frame. In this way the multiplied simile contributes to the actualization of the Iliad’s most basic – and most abstract – theme: the sameness of human nature and of human fate . . . On the miniature scale of the human perspective, distinctions between opposites are real: lions are unlike fawns, and Greeks

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stand in opposition to Trojans. But from the omniscient perspective – of the gods or the author – Greeks are indeed utterly like Trojans.25

The resulting text is multilayered and open to variable interpretations that may seem to conflict one another but can contribute to a deeper understanding of the epic’s primary theme and meaning. The simile (in particularly complex forms such as expanded and multiplied similes) significantly contributes to the frequently noted ‘visuality’ of the Iliad and the Odyssey. It is arguable that due to its structure and hermeneutics, the simile encapsulates fundamental structural and compositional aspects of the poems such as the use of formulae, parataxis, polysemy, catalogues and juxtaposed pairs. It also echoes sculptural assemblage. As a comparative poetic device, the simile establishes equivalence between clearly disparate objects as based on specific shared characteristics. In its basic form, two autonomous elements with pre-existing meanings and associations are joined or juxtaposed to create a reciprocal relationship between them. The audience’s ability to mentally visualize these juxtaposed components both separately, and in relation to each other, recalls the use of the formulaic phrase, plot or character in oral-formulaic poetry, and the use of appropriated elements and prefabricated objects in collage and assemblage. Representation does not occur by means of mimetic description, but through symbolic association. In complex examples, such as multiform similes, the absence of syntactic subordination characteristic of paratactic sentence construction, and a catalogic, as opposed to a sequential, narrative presentation of information allows for multi-layered interpretations that can even appear to contradict one another. The Homeric simile therefore elicits a continuously shifting interpretative strategy in which disclosure takes place over time, that echoes the game-like hermeneutics of Picasso’s collages. Albert Cook suggests that the perceptual process underlying an assemblage such as Picasso’s Bull’s Head is comparable to the literary evocation of mental imagery through the equation of attributes in a simile such as the comparison of arrows deflected by a shield to peas and chickpeas bouncing on a threshing floor.26 Cook describes the formal association between the ‘found object’ and the referent as a revelation proceeding from a ‘visual impulse’. However, an associative comparison can also incorporate more symbolic allusions. Many things can bounce off a

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surface, so the seemingly strange choice of chickpeas and beans on a winnowing shovel to describe a rebounding arrow suggests that the Homeric simile includes a deeper reference to the process of winnowing itself (perhaps as symbolic of divine selection). In Bull’s Head, the formal attributes of the artwork cannot be isolated from the viewer’s consciousness of the combinatory action underlying it. Its meaning is to a large extent derived from the semantic ‘irritation’ that arises from the persistence of an object’s functional value within a semantic transformation or re-evaluation.27 While correspondences based on shape and functionality may not constitute the nexus of a simile or an assemblage in its entirety, they provide an entry-point for more complex associations of attributes and meanings. The interpreter is required to recognize and visualize both the prior and altered form and/or function of at least one of the objects as it relates to others within the comparison for the allusion to be grasped, and the simile or assemblage understood. This aspect of the comparative device renders it an effective method for provoking a process in which various elements are continuously mentally disassembled, compared and re-assembled. The extent to which the constituent elements of a simile or an assemblage are ‘logically’ comparable has a significant impact on the interpretive process it provokes, and by extension, on its formal and conceptual complexity. Demonstrating the role of the poetic comparative device in Homeric reception, scholars such as Lorna Hardwick (1997) and D. F. Rauber (1969) have studied the similes of Derek Walcott (1930–2017) and John Donne (1572–1631) in relation to the Homeric extended simile. In Hardwick’s analysis, the relationship between Walcott and Homer is logical and clear, but while poets such as Walcott, Virgil, John Milton and Dante Alighieri are commonly associated with either Homeric style or subject-matter, Donne is not, and Rauber’s comparison appears curious. In Rauber’s analysis, Donne’s primary point of convergence with Homer is their frequent comparison of wholly dissimilar things (a kind of discordia concors of which his own comparison of Donne to Homer is an example). While the nexus in discordant similes appears ‘trivial’, a complex conceptual abstraction emerges upon analysis to illuminate themes of particular significance to the epic as a whole.28 In this analysis, Donne’s development of the discordant simile represents an inadvertent extension of the fundamental structure of Homeric poetics. This leads Rauber to suggest

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that a comparison of deep structural correspondences between two seemingly dissimilar types of poetry results in a deliberate paradox which enables ‘the critic to uncover areas of similarity which are likely to be missed by the ordinary machinery of criticism’.29 The relation between similes and broader themes in the epics has been discussed by scholars such as Carroll Moulton (1977), Timothy Hofmeister (1995), and Naomi Rood (2008). An example includes a series of ‘full’ similes of men falling like trees felled for the purpose of building oars, spears, chariot wheels, or ships which goes beyond a simple relationship of likeness. The parallel between tree and man spirals into a sequential narrative that brings out the parallel between craftsman and poet as men who shape natural material into something beautiful and cultural. The craftsman cuts down a tree and makes it into a cultural instrument – oar, spear, chariot wheel, or ship – that helps men fight the wars in which, in turn, they are cut down and made by the poet into cultural heroes.30

Rood proposes that this group of ‘technological similes is thus unique in the close and sequential relationships it presents among trees, craftsmen, and war instruments, on the one hand, and men, poet, and heroes, on the other’ and that this uniqueness is indicative of the ability of the simile to express the poem’s essential function.31 As discussed in Chapter 3, the creation of connections and establishment of complex relationships between previously unconnected and seemingly incompatible things are characteristics of Cubism, Cubist collage and sculptural assemblage. External and anachronistic appropriation are based on the transformative re-evaluation of both contemporary and historical techniques, methodologies, artworks and artefacts for the purpose of creating new methods of representation. This process does not include the juxtaposed elements’ broader cultural, philosophical and/or artistic frameworks. Instead, like Rauber’s ‘discordant similes’, appropriation is based on the identification of ‘trivial’ points of correspondence which are isolated and extracted from their normal context. Anachronistic appropriation is therefore a highly subjective and anti-historicist procedure in which the works of artistic predecessors are treated as though they were contemporary, while external appropriation is premised on the reconsideration of aspects of one discipline in relation to aspects of another. Both instances incorporate a process of decontextualization

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where the appropriated element functions as an allusive, yet autonomous, representative of its original context, while acquiring a new set of meanings within its current one. The comparison of seemingly highly dissimilar entities in this project therefore echoes the ‘discordant simile’. As such, the comparison is not comprehensive, but limited to deep structural correspondences with the aim to create complex conceptual abstractions. The syntactic ambiguity required to create such syntheses is facilitated by the paratactic nature of Homeric composition. As a compressed form of verbal narrative, parataxis comprises the additive placing of autonomous clauses in a sentence without using conjunctives. The result is a telegraphic shorthand that does not indicate syntactical interrelationships such as subordination. Parataxis is therefore premised on the juxtaposition of apparently unrelated and independent parts. While inherited formulae, archaic words and new words and phrases in multiple dialects cannot be seamlessly assimilated into an unambiguous and unified syntax, parataxis allows for the assembly of multiform combinations of dissimilar elements. Bakker argues that instead of conceiving of it as a primitive, preliterate type of syntax, the phenomenon usually denoted by the term ‘parataxis’ can be shown to serve a positive, deliberate purpose in the deployment of what might be called the syntax of movement. And since movement is action, we serve the restless processual nature of Homeric discourse better when we replace ‘parataxis’ with terms denoting not so much stylistic or syntactic properties of the text, as the narrator’s activities on the path of speech. Hence the word ‘parataxis’ may be reformulated as a continuation or progression, a new step on the path of speech.32

Bakker further draws a correlation between Homeric parataxis and the verbalization of an image (ecphrasis) where the consciousness of the speaker resembles that of the observer, who can only focus on one detail at a time, the area of foveal vision . . . the action or object seen is broken down into its component visual details, which are then presented in linear temporal order . . . the contention is that Homeric narrative is on the whole ecphrastic, and that in Homeric discourse narration and description cannot be separated: all narration is description.33

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Both narration and description in this sense constitute a process of listing observed attributes. As discussed in Chapter  1, these attributes are neither comprehensively detailed, nor exclusively ‘pictorial’. The vividness of Homeric descriptions derives from the extent to which they echo human perceptive processes. As the poet emphasizes in lines 2.489-9226, there is a difference between the comprehensiveness of the Muses’ account and that which the poet and the audience can practicably handle. Ben-Porat’s notion of a multi-layered epic applies, as the divine macrocosm possesses one understanding of events, and the human microcosm another. While the complete version of everything that happened at Troy exists and is available through the Muses, the poet cannot relay all of it, and must provide an edited account instead. In the invocation the poet decides on limiting the naming of participants to the leaders of the contingents who came to Troy and the number of their ships (Il. 2.493). This selection is a ‘part that stands for the whole – not a natural icon, which reproduces the vision of the battle as such, but a more arbitrary sign, the transformation of the vision into speech’.34 In the verses following the invocation (Il. 2.494–709), the poet’s interpretive distillation of a potentially overwhelming mass of information occurs in a catalogue – as opposed to a narrative – format. The structural characteristics of Homeric composition that most closely approach sculptural assemblage include the paratactic syntax of the Iliad and the Odyssey, the catalogue format, and Homeric polysemic vocabulary. The absence of syntactical subordination in Homeric parataxis allows for the inclusion and juxtaposition of unrelated and independent parts analogous to the construction of a sculptural assemblage from separate three-dimensional forms and objects. Reflecting the fundamental characteristics of parataxis, the Homeric catalogue format allows the poet to juxtapose a variety of items/ entries with no explicit relation other than a unifying rubric (such as the leaders of the Achaean contingents and their ships). The rubric establishes a context that determines which of the multiple possible meanings of the assembled elements will apply. In this view, elements within a paratactic structure are predominantly polysemic and comprehensible mainly in combination with proximate elements. Such structures allow for the establishment of associations that may be unexpected or even appear illogical

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but are more expressive and/or complex than conventional sets of semantic relations. Likewise, in the non-literal application of sculptural assemblage that evolved from Picasso’s approach to collage, the choice of component elements is driven by the conceptual potential of surprising combinations and/or substitutions of material and objects. In Homeric poetry, the composition undertaken by a performer, rhapsode, or a scholar compiling an edition of the Iliad or the Odyssey, is a reiterative transmission of an existing form, making composition and interpretation concurrent in Homeric poetics. In sculptural assemblage, composition consists of the selection and combination of previously unaffiliated parts to prompt a continuously shifting interpretive strategy. Structurally, the production of a sculptural assemblage resembles the accumulative development of the Homeric Kunstsprache. In this sense, the correlation is between the Homeric poetic system (as opposed to the individual performance that results from it) and a sculptural assemblage. While numerous twentieth- and twenty-firstcentury visual artists draw on, and allude to, classical mythologies on a thematic level, Cy Twombly’s Fifty Days at Iliam 1977–8 represents an example of a direct and sustained engagement with a specific classical text. Twombly’s ‘re-invisioned’ Iliad is itself based on a prior poetic interpretation of the epic by Alexander Pope. As already explained, the Homeric compositional system comprises an assemblage of often incompatible dialects, language usages, and vocabularies from various time periods and geographic locations, as well as narratives, characters, formulae and lines of poetry. These elements are selected, altered and adapted according to context, resulting in a dialectically reciprocal semantic system. In the same vein, a sculptural assemblage is composed of appropriated forms and prefabricated objects that are selected and altered specifically for the role they can play within the artwork as a whole. In both cases, the combination is ‘artificial’: although individual elements are drawn from everyday life, they are derived from different settings. The result is the co-existence of seemingly incompatible and previously unaligned things within a single context. Both art-forms combine ‘old’ and ‘new’: while their component parts are selected for, and characterized by, their predetermined origins, usage and associations, their transformative amalgamation into an unprecedented whole gives each of these elements a new context and meaning.

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Structural resemblances between sculptural assemblage and Homeric poetry extend to their respective hermeneutics, as both provoke ‘constructive’ interpretive processes. In an assemblage such as ODYSSEUS ΜΗΤΙΣ, for example, the notion of ‘Odysseus’ provides the primary context within which each of the sculpture’s constitutive objects function to evoke formal and symbolic associations redolent of thematic, character, physical and narrative attributes. Unlike naturalistic sculptural representations of the hero, such as Pierre-Amédée Durand’s (1789–1873) Ulysses Recognized by His Dog 1810 and Jean Baptiste Carpeaux’s (1827–75) Ulysses Throwing the Discus 1871, the assemblage does not intend to provide a depiction of Odysseus’ physical and mental state at a precise point in the narrative, but is an abstract composite of visual cues from which a viewer can construct an understanding of Odysseus in terms of his overall conduct, character and thematic significance. The sequence in which these elements are interpreted, the extent to which allusions are grasped and pursued, and the significance attached to elements in relation to others will vary from one viewer (and viewing) to another. The artwork is therefore conceptually heterodox and open to multiple readings. Pamela Schwandt detects a similar parataxis in the image-making process underlying Homeric similes: The details which compose Homer’s similes often appear in random order, piled one on top of the other without the subordinate conjunctions that might make clear their relationships. Homer’s basic unit of composition is the formulaic phrase, two or three to a hexameter line, and each of his lines usually ends with some natural break in thought. He builds his similes out of an accumulation of formulaic phrases and of relatively self-contained lines, connected mostly by simple coordinate conjunctions. In the cauldron simile Homer begins with an image of a cauldron boiling, then moves to the flame which has heated it, then to the melting of the fat within, then to its bubbling, and last of all to the building of the fire.35

In the Homeric catalogue format it is similarly unclear whether a cataloguer constructs a collection of facts, or fragments as a whole into its constituent elements, and the interpreter is left to assume an underlying whole (an ontological vision of history or an argument) behind the assemblage of fragments of information, and work at reassembling something that was presented in a disjointed form.36 The notion of interpretation as reconstruction

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places a significant creative demand on the interpreter. The artwork is not conceived of as a clear and coherent message to be transmitted whole, but as a dialectical process where the interpreter actively participates in the work’s unravelling or re-articulation. According to the theory of formulaic composition, in early Homeric poetry, reiteration and interpretation are shared between a ‘transmitter’ (rhapsode) and an audience, so that a rhapsodic performance entails an active collaboration. For composition and performance to be aspects of the same process, it is necessary to relate authority in performance to the concept of authorship in composition. Therefore, as Nagy argues, ‘the poet’s song does not become authoritative until it is performed in an authorized setting. Only then does the song become real, authentic . . . the authorization of the composer is implicitly not enough because the transmitter as performer must also be authorized by his audience, who are presumed to be authoritative members of the song culture (Nagy’s italics).’37 It is assumed that this audience is sufficiently familiar with epic themes, plots and conventions to recognize its traditional allusions alongside deviations and innovations. The performer’s task is not to clarify the epic for the audience, but to select, distil and activate whichever part of it is contextually most appropriate to the immediate setting as determined by the audience and occasion.38 This creative and interpretive model poses significant problems to conventional methods of literary criticism. Frederick Combellack, for example, argues that Parry’s ideas removed both the artistry from features of Homer’s style and ‘all possibility of any certitude in the criticism of features of Homeric style’.39

Homer as creative methodology Depending on one’s point of view, Parry’s theories might be seen as either negating Homeric artistry, or providing the means for an entirely new conception of it. An oral-formulaic Homer presents the modern reader and translator, more accustomed to a notion of words as primarily signifiers, with a significant conceptual challenge. The contemporary nexus of Homeric studies is not an individual historical originator (such as the blind wanderer of the Homeric biographic tradition), but a language of objects, in which meaning

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is constructed by means of a grammar of formal elements. Bakker (2006) contrasts the traditional notion of an individual ‘transcendental’ Homer that exists outside of (transcends) poetry, with an ‘immanent’ Homer that is identified with the mechanisms underlying the development, transmission and survival of the Iliad and the Odyssey. As discussed in Chapter  4, the iconography of the figure of Homer from the Hellenistic period onwards conforms to a ‘transcendent’ understanding in which Homer is the pre-eminent source of wisdom and knowledge, while the epics, alongside other canonical works of antique literature such as the Aeneid and the Bible, served as sourcematerial for depictions of idealized heroism and Classical rationality. As an ‘immanent’ Homer is essentially the poetic system underlying Homeric poetry as described by Muellner,40 the visual representation of the oral-formulaic epic is an identical process to the visual representation of an ‘immanent’ Homer. While there is no known visual precedent for describing both the epics and their poet as one and the same, an ancient textual attempt at achieving this task may arguably exist in the form of The Contest of Homer and Hesiod (commonly referred to as the Certamen). While the extent to which a literal reading of the Homeric biographical tradition41 can provide factual information regarding the origins of the Homeric epics is questionable, the structure of the Certamen echoes important aspects of Homeric compositional and hermeneutic principles, and in a nonliteral reading may function as a conceptual portrait of Homer designed to elicit a playful dialectical hermeneutics similar to Picabia and Cornell’s composite object portraits. Unlike the Iliad and the Odyssey, whose allusions to now-lost epics cannot be conclusively proven, how the Certamen draws on the literary traditions of its period can be determined. Composed during the Antonine period (138–193 ce) the Certamen is generally regarded as a rather crude compilation of fragmentary information drawn from pre-existing texts. To a modern reader accustomed to a uniform authorial style and clarity of narrative, the extent to which the Certamen constitutes a catalogue of miscellaneous texts, fragments and anecdotes suggests an absence of the conceptual and formal cohesion that characterizes creative writing. However, ancient audiences were not unaccustomed to intentionally derivative forms of literary expression. For example, cento poems – usually hexametrical poems comprised of entire lines taken from famous poets such as Homer, Virgil and

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Ovid – reflected a common practice that would be developed into full narrative plays and poems by Christian authors in late antiquity. ‘Cento-like literary composition, for the most part humorous, had been in existence at least since Aristophanes, in whose Peace (1090–4 and 1097–8) Trygaeus utilizes Homeric lines.’42 James Uden suggests that although ‘the Contest of Homer and Hesiod preserves passages of greater antiquity than the Imperial era and of great interest to scholars, we ought not to lose sight of the compilation as a whole, the ideological context in which it was produced and the internal dynamics of the work itself ’.43 This emphasis on considering the aesthetic merits of the Certamen entails reappraising its means of construction, wherein the compilation format is not necessarily indicative of literary poverty, but may represent a creative strategy instead. Uden suggests that while there may be an expected hesitation to assess the effect of a compiled text as a whole, the compilation as a form should provoke interpretation. This is because the juxtaposition of narratives and authorities from different periods and cultural contexts allows the compiler to reframe already known material in new ways, thereby encouraging readers to make connections between sources and across time periods. These elements can be used to challenge, complement or contradict each other.44 The notion of a single identifiable authorial ‘voice’ which provides the conceptual criteria by which the Certamen has been edited and translated is premised on an understanding of individual creative expression as stylistically, formally and conceptually coherent. More recently, Paola Bassino proposes treating ‘the story of the contest between Homer and Hesiod as an ancient mode of literary reception’.45 She points out that biographies of poets such as Homer were subject to variation and modification both in terms of their contents and their textual transmission, resulting in numerous variants in the manuscripts of the Lives, suggesting that these stories were understood to be inventions and were therefore open to modification. She concludes that instead of searching for the correct original text, the aim of scholarship should instead be ‘to understand the value of variants as evidence for the flexibility of literary reception’.46 The Certamen that emerges from this understanding is not a serious attempt to establish a factual biography of a legendary poet, but a literary game where each contributing author appropriates the text as they found it and modifies the story in

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accordance with their own literary intentions. In this context, the authorial ‘voice’ does not necessarily lie in stylistic attributes, but in how each composer has exploited and interpreted this specific textual tradition. As Picasso demonstrated, formal description is not necessarily limited to an artist’s individual signature style, but by the problem of how to represent a specific subject. While style as a distinctive visual or verbal descriptive method constitutes an individual author’s unique form of expression, it may also be a property that has been appropriated and combined with other styles. While an originating author’s style is premised on a consistent, distinctive and novel descriptive method, the latter is recognizable through their preference for certain types of composite elements (such as Max Ernst’s preference for illustrations from scientific journals) and the specific manner in which those elements are combined (such as Picasso’s fusion of elements in his ‘veiled’ assemblages compared to Rauschenberg’s combines where the painterly and sculptural elements remain clearly differentiated). In such a reading, there is scope for the structure of the Certamen to irreverently exploit the reader’s assumption that encyclopaedic texts, catalogues, myths and oracles are authoritative sources of knowledge. Supposed errors can mask the intentional juxtaposition of seemingly incompatible ideas such as the names of scholars cited and ‘speaking names’ in the catalogues, and the substitution of an expected name with an unexpected one. For example, in the so-called ‘Hadrianic oracle’ the Delphic Pythia responds to the emperor’s inquiry regarding Homer’s origins with a cryptic genealogy that includes Telemachus and a mother named as Nestor’s daughter, Epicaste. Martin West is so certain that the oracle is intended to be taken literally and that ‘Epicaste’ is a mistake that he changes the text to read ‘Polycaste’ (Nestor’s daughter in the Odyssey) in his translation, commentary and edition of the Greek. His only acknowledgement of an alternative version of line 36 occurs in a footnote that refers to Nietzsche’s edition of the Certamen.47 The reader’s expectation of logical coherence and dependability from an oracle or a catalogue allows for the construction of a complex web of potential interpretations and misinterpretations. The assumption that ‘Nestor’s daughter Epicaste’ in line 36 is a mistake or corruption of the text is understandable, given that the narrator has already stated in the catalogue of mothers in

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line 25 that some claim Homer’s mother to be ‘Nestor’s daughter Polycaste’, while Telemachus was already included in the preceding catalogue of fathers. However, Polycaste and Epicaste appear in two different contexts, with the ‘incorrect’ version enjoying the narrator’s own endorsement. The context of an inquiry to an oracle regarding unknown parentage is most appropriate to the myth of Oedipus, as are the attributes of riddling and blindness. The theme of a story-gathering traveller applies to Telemachus, while Nestor represents durability and knowledge. The poetic contest between Homer and Hesiod that forms the narrative core of the Certamen echoes the poetic contest between Thamyris (a figure reputed to have his own ‘Oedipal complex’) and the Muses in the Iliad. Thamyris and Homer both lose, despite their skill, as their ‘war-poetry’ represents a risk to the ideal social order. The four oracles in the Certamen share the amorphous and subversive attributes of the riddle and the pun, where the questioner’s failure to imagine a meaning beyond the apparent message sets off a course of action which ultimately reveals the oracle’s initially undetected meaning. This aspect of the enigmatic oracle is prevalent in the foundation myths of the Greek colonies of the archaic period where linguistic ambiguity serves as a basis for oracular puns and word-play.48 Such punning relies on the flexibility of words and imagery to appear contradictory on one level, but make sense on another, and reflects Aristotle’s comparison of riddles with metaphors as the combination of things that are impossibly true.49 Ian Hamnett argues that the social and cognitive function of riddles is to categorize ambivalent words, concepts or items of behaviour within more than one frame of reference to allow for ‘a point of transition between these different frames of reference or classificatory sets. It can, indeed, mediate between sets that are not only different, but in many aspects opposed, and in this way it can form the basis for a differing system of classification, or allow contrasting classifications and conceptual frameworks to co-exist at the same time.’50 Solving a riddle is therefore dependent on the riddler’s ability to coerce their audience into conceiving of something as two different (or even contrasting) things simultaneously. Despite its encyclopaedic format, the Certamen’s seemingly dry accumulation of trivia masks a complex literary game of allusions, riddles and puns. Ultimately, it fails to provide any historical or biographical information about the poet, emphasizing the complex polysemic

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nature of the Homeric text and how it resists attempts at definitive interpretations instead. In the Certamen, Homer emerges as an elusive and protean fusion of characters that populate his epics – an abstract personification of the distinctive attributes of Homeric composition. In a similar vein, Scott Richardson argues that, in the Odyssey, the narrator shares Odysseus’ defining characteristics, but ascribes Odyssean characteristics to the narrator of the Odyssey as opposed to its author. Richardson therefore distinguishes the attributes of the epic from Homer as its author – which the Certamen conflates – to retain the notion of Homer as an objective author, separated from the epics by his own invention of a devious narrator.51 By contrast, John Miles Foley recounts how each of the Slavic singers (guslari) interviewed by Parry and Lord described a great Guslar whose existence is widely attested, but inherently inconsistent, and he concludes that this figure represents an anthropomorphization of the poetic tradition itself, ‘a story-based way to talk about the inheritance of oral epic’.52 If the reader accepts its inconsistent and ambiguous aspects as intentional juxtapositions, then the portrait of Homer that emerges from the Certamen is of a poetic system incorporating a similar allusive, reciprocally dialectical and game-like interpretive process that is evident in Picasso’s collages and assemblages.

Homer in a catalogue of characters As is expected of a biographical text, the question of Homer’s origins predominates throughout the Certamen, and is shared by the poet himself who – like Oedipus – consults an oracle on the topic. On the one hand, the Certamen fails as a biography by emphasizing the ultimate unknowability of an historical person named Homer, but on the other hand, it combines a number of characteristically Homeric features, such as catalogues, narratives, juxtaposition and polysemy, to create an abstract representation of Homeric poetics. A Catalogue of Shapes is premised on a similar contradiction. On the one hand, none of the twelve composite object portraits in the series describes ‘Homer’. On the other hand, the work draws on the expressions of artistic self-awareness in the combination of the invocation preceding the Iliadic Catalogue of Ships

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with the story of Thamyris, and the conflation of character and performer in moments of ‘primary action’ (see below). The invocation preceding the Catalogue of Ships incorporates the narrator’s self-description as having access to a direct eyewitness account but lacking the means to relay every detail. While the performer can determine which part of the known information will be communicated, the ‘authorizing’ audience expects core events to be described accurately, and for major characters to speak and behave in accordance with their primary characteristics.53 However, given the link between the fundamental facts of the poems and their characters, variations may be indicative of how performers used seemingly extraneous variations in conjunction with fixed elements to create narrative tension, amplify important themes, or even critique the epic tradition itself. Graeme Bird, for example, notes that individual performers ‘could and did choose to heighten the emotional level by means of things such as variation in word choice, and intertextual links to other Homeric episodes; since a line of verse does not operate in isolation (or a vacuum), “importing” it into what may appear to be a “new” location has the effect of bringing with that line all of its thematic connections and connotations’.54 On a few occasions in the Odyssey, for example, it is suggested by both gods and heroes that Agamemnon’s disastrous homecoming may serve as a potential precedent for Odysseus’ own return, while in Il. 9.142, Agamemnon’s offer of his daughter in marriage to Achilles (which is included in a catalogue of prospective gifts (Il. 9.120–57)) constitutes a ‘para-narrative’ that may offer a telling contrast or competing motif to the narrative in which it appears (see Sammons 2010, 125). The story of Thamyris as it relates to the self-description of the narrator in the invocation in Iliad book 2 constitutes such a para-narrative, the function of which may extend beyond comparing a constructive muse–poet relationship with an antagonistic one. Scholars such as Martin (1989) and Slatkin (1995) have argued that para-narratives locate the Homeric epics within a much broader poetic tradition (incorporating such epics as the Oresteia, the Oikhalias Halosis (the Siege of Oichalia), the Cypria, and possibly other poems known to ancient audiences that have since been lost). In this view, seemingly minor deviations from the main plot and narrative allow the poet to create complex networks of allusions against which the Iliad or the Odyssey may contextually be defined. Innovation is not vested in creating new characters and narratives,

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but in finding ways to give audiences new insights into what a well-known character or narrative can be made to mean through comparative allusion to other poems. Sculptural assemblage is premised on a similar approach: the sculptor does not devise new means of expressing form or describing action but establishes a network of reciprocal allusions where each element individually retains its original/most familiar meaning (to varying degrees), while concurrently taking on new meanings through incorporation into a new context. By exploiting viewers’ awareness of the provenance of objects and their normative use, the sculptor can draw from a well-established reservoir of social, cultural, and personal associations to create artworks that might initially appear obscure but are in fact sufficiently open to interpretation to allow several multi-layered readings. In KALYPSO ΚΡΥΠΤΩ, for example, the colander (unlike the less familiar camping stove below it) is an easily recognizable kitchen implement that most viewers will have either seen in use or used themselves. In the sculpture, alterations and additions to the colander emphasize those aspects of its usual context and function most relevant to the formal and conceptual requirements of the sculpture in particular, and the series of sculptures as a whole, to allow for the expression of Calypso’s more abstract attributes, including her personal characteristics and her role in the plot and theme of the Odyssey.55 How Homeric heroes are described, the actions they engage in and the speeches they make can also be reflexive. While the poet’s ‘presence’ is evident in passages such as the invocation preceding the Catalogue of Ships, and in apostrophe, key characters can also convey the narrative. Bakker (1997) for example, argues that in moments of ‘primary action’ (events of core thematic significance to the outcome of the poem) the character becomes the author of the epic tale. In this context, the epic figure serves as the agent directly responsible for the experience of the performance now, in performing a deed that bridges the gulf between the past and the present. The most obvious type of action that significantly contributes to the course of events as re-behaved and re-experienced in the performance is the very action of which the performance consists: speech. The epiphany of a god or hero in the epic performance is most direct and forceful when the hero is presented as doing what the performer does himself, when indeed the

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performer becomes the epic character, in uttering the authoritative speech of the latter. It has been suggested that the typical speech act of heroes, is itself a performance, designated by the term mûthos.56

This conflation of character and performer extends to the audience which takes on the role of the epic speaker’s own mythic addressees, allowing each interpreter to function as a type of therápon (ritual substitute)57 suggesting that such an evocation of the mythic past is immersively participatory. The twelve sculptures comprising A Catalogue of Shapes describe five individual characters central to the plot and theme of the Iliad and the Odyssey respectively, and two characters that play an equally significant role in both epics. As discussed in Chapters 3, 4 and in this chapter below, the plot and theme of the Odyssey is represented by Odysseus, Telemachus, Penelope, Calypso and Circe. The plot and theme of the Iliad is represented by Achilles, Hector, Helen, Eris and Ate. Two additional characters – Nestor and Menelaus – function as intermediate characters representative of aspects of both the Iliadic and Odyssean plots and themes. The attributes and functions in the plot of these characters elucidate Homer’s principal heroes and their epics. While the moments of ‘primary action’ which Bakker describes are set points in the narrative, the portraits do not aim to illustrate the characters as they appear or behave at a specific moment. Instead, the selection and representation of characters were determined by their overall contribution to the expression of the fundamental plot and theme of each epic. As the Odyssey is a nostos (homecoming) poem, the main character Odysseus is defined in terms of his familial relationships, with the core themes of isolation, obstruction, transformation and passage, all of which inform the inclusion of Calypso and Circe. In terms of the Iliad’s emphasis on conflict as a means to achieve kleos, Achilles is defined in terms of his main opponent58 and Helen as both source of the conflict and prize for the victorious side. The core themes of self-fuelling rage and catastrophic self-interest are represented by Eris and Ate. As in moments of ‘primary action’ in the epic, where character and narrator are conflated to create an immersive and participatory hermeneutics, the sculptures are intended to evoke Homer’s poetic world by means of a continuous and dialectical interpretive process. In an example of a composite object portrait, such as Joseph Cornell’s A Parrot for Juan Gris, 1953–4, the artwork is predominantly an expression of the

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reciprocal dialectic between a subject (Gris as inventor of a type of collage) and its interpreter (Cornell as an artist using a methodology that developed from Cubist collage). Anne d’Harnoncourt suggests that Cornell’s interest in Gris stemmed from a recognition of artistic correspondences, and ‘there is visual evidence that among the three great practitioners of Cubist collage Gris offered Cornell an aesthetic most harmonious with his own concerns . . . A latecomer to the Cubist field, Gris was rigorous in his desire to dissect and reconstitute visual reality with an almost mathematical precision, but he never relinquished his love of the object he was depicting.’59 As a viewer encounters Gris via a set of Cornell’s private associations, the extent to which each individual interpreter will be able to decode and unravel each of the multiple allusions and associations that make up the work will differ.60 The process is dependent on the viewer’s ability to recognize the original function of each element, and to decipher the significance of that function within the context of the image. This interpretive experience differs significantly from a conventional understanding of translation as making a foreign and/or ancient text easily comprehensible to a contemporary audience. Therefore, as the aim of this project is to convey an understanding of how the complexities of Homeric composition inform its content, the twelve sculptural assemblages that make up A Catalogue of Shapes do not present the viewer with an unambiguous ‘solved’ interpretation of the Iliad or the Odyssey. The result is a visual symbolic system in which the Homeric poetic system is expressed as a catalogue of composite object portraits. As in the Homeric epic, the interpreter is responsible for mentally reconstructing the relational, narrative and thematic significance of each catalogic entry as relative both to each other and to the series as a whole.

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The Iliad and the Odyssey originated in an oral poetic tradition that shaped its structure, syntax and vocabulary, and is detectable in its rhythms, similes and metaphors, but the survival of these poems is largely attributable to its various written formats. It is unlikely that Homer would be known today had the epics not been transmitted from one generation to another in copied texts and contemporary translations. As discussed, a translation cannot be a facsimile, but an expression of the primary characteristics of the original as mediated in terms of the expectations of its intended audience. Translations are essential for the continued survival of these texts. But, where scholarship leads, translation must follow. In the case of the Homeric epics, the shift in understanding how the poems were created, and by extension what they are, means that many characteristics of the poems that had previously been considered inexplicable inconsistencies and transcription flaws became core features instead. The result is a mismatch between the primary characteristics of the text and the expectations of the audience for whom contemporary translations are created. Barbara Graziosi’s observation as cited in the Introduction applies: readers still expect ‘the great work of the best poet’.1 This expectation is not just bolstered by centuries of scholarship and popular mythology, but by an iconographic tradition that locates the Homeric firmly in an idealized version of Classical Greece. As discussed in Chapter  1, how something is represented can have a significant influence on how it is understood. In the popular imagination, the Greece in which Homer composed the epics is not only conceived of as broadly literate, but that its art, thought and overall understanding of the world echo those of the cultures that grew from the European Renaissance.2 This understanding of Homer and Homeric poetry reflects an historicist approach to the Classical in the visual arts and the notion of a ‘transcendent’ Homer in 159

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scholarship. Hegel’s definition of Classical sculpture can be extended to how the figure of Homer is conceived of: an ideal actualized in history that is not susceptible to further revision and provides a standard type which can never be attained again.3 From this standpoint, engagement with antiquity involves a nostalgic re-creation of Classical forms to invoke the mythologized achievements and values of ancient Greece and Rome. The rejection of the Classical as a static paradigm antithetical to modernity by much of the avant garde in the early twentieth century, was consequently premised on theories described by Krukowski as self-consciously historical.4 Such definition of the Classic – and by extension the Homeric – as historically perfected, fixed, and resistant to revision, is intrinsically oppositional. It resists the dialectical engagement between the contemporary and the Classical required for a synthesis of the immediate and the inherited on which the notion of an ‘immanent’ oralformulaic Homer (that exists within the Homeric epics) is premised. My intention in creating A Catalogue of Shapes was not to suggest that written translations be supplanted, but to expand the Homeric iconographic repertoire to include a visualization of Homeric artistry as described in contemporary scholarship. Of all the core characteristics of Homeric poetics, its compositional methodology is the least represented in both literary translation and art. However, as Parry (1930) demonstrated, it is also the most significant determinant of the epic’s form and hermeneutics. The difficulty for the modern translator lies in finding a means to communicate this aspect to a modern audience. In Lorna Hardwick’s analysis of Derek Walcott’s use of Homeric poetry in his poem Omeros (1990) and his play A Stage Version of the Odyssey (1992), she proposes the development of a model of reception as simile, based on the premise that the structural role of the simile can contribute to the generation and transmission of the intertextual relationships between ancient and modern texts. ‘There is a wide spectrum of models which can be used to map the relationship between ancient texts and their reception in modern poetry and drama. Translations, adaptations, transplantations, versions – each term not only indicates a genre with its own conventions but also, more importantly, suggests a variety of aspects of the relationship between ancient and modern, including imaginative restructuring.’5 As discussed in Chapter 6, the simile is premised on a process of comparative visualization where one thing is understood in terms of another. As the

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examples of the ‘multiplied’ and ‘discordant’ similes demonstrate, this descriptive form can constitute an effective method for provoking a process in which various elements are continuously mentally disassembled, compared and re-assembled. On the surface, ancient Greek poetry and a modern from of abstract art have little in common. But Milman Parry lived in Paris from 1924–8 where Thérèse De Vet argues his ideas were influenced by thinkers such as Antoine Meillet, Lévy-Bruhl and Marcel Jousse.6 In the same time and in the same city, Pablo Picasso produced works of great significance to his sculptural development including the sheet-metal Guitar, several cardboard versions and a number of collages and assemblages. A ‘Tribute to Picasso’ was published in the June 1924 issue of Paris-Journal and more images of his work were published in magazines devoted to Surrealism in 1925–8, including the shocking Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. It is not known if Parry ever saw any of these publications or was in any way familiar with Picasso’s work, but what is known is that the Paris of this period hosted an unusually large number of artists and intellectuals who were actively questioning established norms and beliefs. While Homer emerged from ancient Greece, the version that developed from Parry’s theories has definite links to the radically creative intellectual climate of 1920s Paris. The theory of an oral-formulaic Homer has changed significantly since Parry’s definition of the idea, but his insight that the method by which the poems were created should inform how they are understood echoes a core principle of sculptural assemblage. The understanding of Homeric poetry that emerged from the theory of formulaic composition is of a constructive creative methodology underlying a dynamically adaptive poetic system encompassing textual multiformity, transformative re-iteration, and integration of form with content. The representational system underlying a formally disparate, yet visually cohesive, and predominantly metaphoric (non-literal) type of sculptural assemblage offers a useful contemporary parallel. Its interrelation of concept and form by means of combinatory and organizational procedures in assemblage invests both form and material with meaning, provoking an interactive and continuously shifting interpretive process. The ‘systemic Classicism’ underlying Cubist innovations in visual representation (see Chapter  3) exemplifies a transformative engagement with antiquity that echoes the Homeric composing performer’s reiterative interpretation of the epic. In A Catalogue of Shapes,

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assemblage provides a model for the creation of a contemporary interpretation of the Homeric as a poetic system. The sculptural technique of assemblage, which developed from Picasso’s Cubist collages, shares sufficient methodological, conceptual and hermeneutic traits with core aspects of Homeric poetics to allow for a process of comparative visualization, while the notion of the composite object portrait provides a model for an immersive and participatory ‘aesthetic’ translation of an oral-formulaic Homer. This project draws on core structural, compositional and conceptual aspects of the Iliadic Catalogue of Ships as a reflexive site of artistic self-awareness. The visual expression of Homeric formalism was addressed through the development of an iconography for the Homeric integration of form and content, the immediate with the inherited, and the fabricated with the prefabricated. The dialectical hermeneutics of Homeric composition during performance were explored through the application of sculptural assemblage as a multiform system of representation. The resulting catalogue of composite object portraits reflects a complex representational system, based on internal and external connotative allusions that are achieved by manipulation of symbolicallyinvested materials, objects and forms. While differences between visual and verbal expression may preclude the direct transmission of a text into an image, these are less prohibitive in an ‘aesthetic translation’. This approach constitutes the creative and contextual re-interpretation of attributes characteristic of the form and content of an existing text/artwork by means of creating another. The series of twelve sculptures that make up A Catalogue of Shapes is therefore both autonomous as an artwork, and an extension of an existing creative tradition. The reciprocal dialectic that is established in a composite object portrait between its subject and interpreter provides a model for the ontological relationship, created through this project, between Homeric poetry and a series of sculptural assemblages. Allusive and reciprocally dialectical image-making mechanisms underlying literary devices such as metaphors and similes allow for a process of comparative visualization that is premised on an individual interpretation of Homeric poetics. As an example of anachronistic appropriation, A Catalogue of Shapes reflects a subjective and non-historicist engagement with antiquity that draws on core attributes of Homeric composition in performance. A contemporary audience may be more familiar with the idea of a great poet called Homer who authored two seminal works of literature, than the

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complex notion of a sequence of composer-performers transmitting a constantly evolving tradition. While the theoretical minutiae of arcane offshoots of Modernism (such as sculptural assemblage) may baffle most nonspecialists, in the century since the invention of Cubism, contemporary audiences have nonetheless grown familiar with art-forms that are premised less on communicating a clear coherent message to a passive viewer/reader in a uniform medium and style, than multiform and multimedia arts that elicit active and participatory interpretive processes. Still, many readers and scholars of Homer are satisfied with translations that conform to an established (and reassuring) literary model that prioritizes content over form. In this context, Homer is a gifted author who crafts a compelling narrative with a cast of welldrawn characters. However, in a global and multicultural age there is a growing appetite for art-forms (including texts) that resist easy interpretation, challenge notions of what constitutes art and authorship, and reflect the ambiguities of a complex multifaceted world. This audience provides fertile ground for the notion of an oral-formulaic Homer.

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Notes Introduction 1 Milman Parry, ‘Studies in the Epic Technique of Oral Verse-Making. I. Homer and Homeric Style’, Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 41 (1930): 73–147, and Albert B. Lord, ‘Homer’s Originality: Oral Dictated Texts’, Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 84 (1953): 124–34. 2 David Hockney, Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters (London: Thames and Hudson, 2014), 13. 3 Wolf ’s explication of his radical Homeric theory, the Prolegomena to Homer, was first published in 1795 and led to the establishment of the study of Classics as a science or Altertumswissenschaft. With a preference for historical and philological arguments, Wolf viewed the epics as artefacts to be studied for the primary purpose of defining the means of their production. While a link between Homer and the ‘orality question’ was identified in the early modern period by thinkers and writers such as Robert Wood, Friedrich August Wolf, Jean Jacques Rosseau, and later Claude Levi-Strauss, it was Parry’s theory (first published in 1930) that the epics are neither text nor conventional literature, but recordings of oral poetry composed from formulae, that first fully addressed the question. See Eric A. Havelock, The Muse Learns to Write: Reflections on Orality and Literacy from Antiquity to the Present (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1986), 36–7, and James P. Holoka, ‘Homeric Originality: A Survey’, The Classical World 66, no. 5 (1973): 261. 4 After Parry’s death, Albert Lord extended his theories, producing a comprehensive reconsideration of the formalisms of archaic Greek poetic composition. Lord argued that oral performers’ decisions regarding how and when traditional motifs and formulae are used, allow for multiple original expressions of a shared tradition. In this context, defining the Homeric became contingent upon describing the poetic strategies of ancient composers. 5 Egbert J. Bakker, Poetry in Speech: Orality and Homeric Discourse (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 13. 6 Laura Slatkin, The Power of Thetis: Allusion and Interpretation in the Iliad (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 1–2. 165

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7 Gregory Nagy conceives of this process as ‘successive relays of continuators, each of whom becomes an originator for the next continuator. The continuators, of course, need a continuum – a continuous setting, to match any original setting.’ Gregory Nagy, ‘An Evolutionary Model for the Making of Homeric Poetry: Comparative Perspectives’, in The Ages of Homer, ed. Jane B. Carter and Sarah P. Morris (Austin: University of Texas Press), 216. 8 Barbara Graziosi, Inventing Homer: The Early Reception of Epic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 250. 9 Andrea Doyle, ‘Iliad’s African Odyssey’, The Mail and Guardian, 10 January 2013. 10 Deborah Seddon, ‘Written out, Writing in: Orature in the South African Literary Canon’, English in Africa 35, no. 1 (2008): 138. 11 Plaatje in Phaswane Mpe, ‘Sol Plaatje, Orality and the Politics of Cultural Representation’, Current Writing: Text and Reception in South Africa 11, no. 2 (1999): 80. 12 Ibid., 79. 13 Richard Whitaker, The Iliad of Homer: A Southern African Translation (Cape Town: New Voices, 2012), 63. 14 Doyle, ‘Iliad’s African Odyssey’. 15 Bakker notes that Parry was a ‘direct heir’ to the approach that characterized Homeric language as artificial: ‘Before Homeric style became traditional or oral, it was artificial. Philological criticism found in Homer an artificial diction that could never have been spoken in ordinary discourse at any time or place . . . The notion of Kunstsprache originated in nineteenth-century historical and descriptive linguistics [see Witte 1913 and Meister 1921] . . . and was based on a thorough investigation of the morphological, phonological, dialectical, and lexicographic features that distinguish Homer from other authors . . . The artificialities were seen as dependent on the exigencies of the dactylic hexameter’ (Bakker, Poetry in Speech: Orality and Homeric Discourse, 13). 16 These include the Ionic, Doric, Thessalian, Lesbian, Boeotian, Arcado-Cypriot and Mycenean. See also Ahuvia Kahane, Diachronic Dialogues: Authority and Continuity in Homer and the Homeric Tradition (New York: Lexington Books, 2005), 65. 17 Kahane, Diachronic Dialogues: Authority and Continuity in Homer and the Homeric Tradition, 67. 18 Ibid., 68. 19 Leonard Charles Muellner (2006), ‘Discovery Procedures and Principles for Homeric Research’, The Homerizon: Conceptual Interrogations in Homeric Studies, http://chs.harvard.edu/publications.sec/classics.ssp. Center for Hellenic Studies, Washington, D.C. (accessed 28 March 2011), 11.

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20 Espen J. Aarseth (Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 1) appropriates the term ‘ergodic’ (ergon and hodos – ‘work’ and ‘path’) from physics to describe a literature where ‘nontrivial effort is required to allow the reader to traverse the text’. These emergent forms draw on written formats familiar to the reader, which in the case of House of Leaves, include journal entries, letters, transcripts of a fictional documentary film, notes on these, and footnotes (with their own footnotes). Other literary devices such as multiple narrators – of which some are unreliable – are also used to great effect. 21 Leonard Charles Muellner, The Meaning of Homeric EUCHOMAI Through its Formulas (Innsbruck: Innsbrucker Beiträge zur Sprachwissenshaft, 1976). 22 Muellner, ‘Discovery Procedures and Principles for Homeric Research’, 2. Muellner notes that ‘an analysis of the formulas of the verb εὔχομαι [euchomai] makes it clear that its three different senses, “pray,” “say proudly and truly” (this is the meaning that is usually and incorrectly translated by the English word “boast”), and “assert/claim” (in a legal context) are as distinct in their formulas as they are in their contexts and syntax’. Muellner also observes a clear differentiation between secular and sacred euchomai based on various usages within set formulae. 23 E. Block, ‘The Narrator Speaks: Apostrophe in Homer and Vergil’, Transactions of the American Philological Association 112 (1982): 16, and Ahuvia Kahane, The Interpretation of Order: A Study in the Poetics of Homeric Repetition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 112. 24 Charles Martindale, ‘Dryden’s Ovid: Aesthetic Translation and the Idea of the Classic’, in Translation and the Classic: Identity as Change in the History of Culture, edited by Alexandra Lianeri and Vanda Zejko (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 92. 25 Egbert J. Bakker (2006), ‘Rhapsodes, Bards, and Bricoleurs: Homerizing Literary Theory: The Homerizon: Conceptual Interrogations in Homeric Studies’. http://chs.harvard.edu/publications.sec/classics.ssp. Center for Hellenic Studies, Washington, D.C. (accessed 28 March 2011), 8–9. 26 During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, catalogues were predominantly regarded as late insertions with little stylistic or narrative relevance to the epics (see Günther Jachmann’s (1958) critique of the Catalogue of Ships for example). Comparative research into oral literatures led C. M. Bowra (1933) to conclude that catalogues were more likely to be early components of epics. Edzard Visser (1997), John Crosset (1969) and Gregory Nagy (1979) proposed that the Catalogue of Ships serves a poetic (as opposed to geographical or historical) purpose, while J. K. Anderson (1995) taking a more literal view, cited the absence of kings and warriors mentioned in the Catalogue of Ships from the rest of the

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Iliad as evidence that it is alien to the main text, and argued for a factual basis for the information it contains. James Notopoulos (‘Studies in Early Greek Oral Poetry’, Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 68 (1964): 51) sees in the Catalogue of Ships a poet providing his audience with a means of identifying with the characters in the story through references to tribal ancestors. 27 Benjamin Sammons, The Art and Rhetoric of the Homeric Catalogue (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 208.

Chapter 1 1 In its first line, the poet directly addresses the Muses by asking for a revelation (‘tell me/reveal to me’, Il. 2.484) and indicates that this is a reasonable request by interposing the following statement: ‘you Muses who have your homes on Olympus are gods, are present everywhere and know everything’ (Il. 2.484–5) and contrasts this with his own situation: ‘we [poets] can only hear the kleos, we know nothing’ (Il. 2.486). 2 Gregory Nagy, Greek Mythology and Poetics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), 26. 3 Il. 2.594-600. In art, Thamyris is frequently depicted as blind with a broken lyre. An epigram by Honestus (possibly of a Tiberian date) describes a statue of Thamyris as muted and maimed but still able to hear the Muses (epigram published by Paul Jamot 1902: 155, no. 5). 4 Jonas Grethlein and Luuk Huitink, ‘Homer’s Vividness: An Enactive Approach’, Journal of Hellenic Studies 137 (2017): 68. For analyses of Homeric vividness see Jenny Strauss Clay 2011, 3, and see Rubin 1995 (62) for cinematic aspect. See also discussions on energeia by Webb 1997, Manieri 1998, Ford 1992 (49–56), Walker 1993, Zanker 1981, Meijering 1987, Calame 1991. 5 Ibid. 6 Oliver Sacks, ‘Scotoma: Forgetting and Neglect in Science’, in Hidden Histories of Science, edited by Robert B. Silvers (London: Granta Books, 1995), 153–4. 7 James Hall, The World as Sculpture: The Changing Status of Sculpture from the Renaissance to the Present Day (London: Pimlico, 2000), 71. 8 Grethlen and Huitink, ‘Homer’s Vividness’, 71. 9 Oliver Taplin, ‘Assimilations of the Homeric Simile’, in Homer in the Twentieth Century: Between World Literature and the Western Canon, edited by Barbara Graziosi and Emily Greenwood (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 179. 10 Ibid.

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11 Steven Jay Gould, ‘Ladders and Cones: Constraining Evolution by Canonical Icons’, in Hidden Histories of Science, edited by Robert B. Silvers (London: Granta Books, 1995), 60. 12 Michael Squire, The Art of the Body: Antiquity and its Legacy (London: I.B. Tauris, 2011), 57. 13 Ibid., 58. 14 In its simplest form a camera obscura is a darkened room with a small hole through which light enters and a surface opposite this hole where reflections of what lies beyond the room appear upside down. Kepler’s version included a convex lens which enhanced the image quality. 15 David Hockney, Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters (London: Thames and Hudson, 2014), 51. 16 Ibid., 17. 17 Much of the early opposition to the theory of formulaic composition was based on the threat it seemed to pose to the status of the Iliad and the Odyssey as works of art. For example, Frederick Combellack’s assessment of the implications of Parry’s theory for Homeric scholarship reveals that the idea of composition based on the use of pre-existing formulae appears incompatible with the predominant understanding of creative originality and authorial intent on which literary criticism was based: ‘The difficulty is not that Parry’s work has proven that there is no artistry in these features of Homer’s style, but that he has removed all possibility of any certitude or even reasonable confidence in the criticism of such features of Homeric style and has thus put this side of Homeric criticism into a situation wholly different from similar criticism of, say, Sophocles or Shakespeare. The hard fact is that in this post-Parry era critics are no longer in a position to distinguish the passages in which Homer is merely using a convenient formula from those in which he has consciously and cunningly chosen le mot juste’ (Frederick Combellack, ‘Milman Parry and Homeric Artistry’, Comparative Literature 11, no. 3 (1959): 196, 208). 18 Manohla Dargis, ‘Movie Review: Dutch Masterwork, under Reconstruction’, New York Times, 30 January 2014. 19 Michael J. A. Howe, Genius Explained (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 205. 20 Carl Goldstein, Teaching Art: Academies and Schools from Vasari to Albers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 225. 21 ‘Usually rendered in English as “drawing,” its connotations were broader than that, and more abstract. It was understood to comprise the common foundation of all of the arts – painting, sculpture, and architecture – to be the “father” of the arts and principally responsible for distinguishing them from the crafts. In Vasari’s

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words: “Disegno, then, is an ineluctably intellectualizing activity far different from, and not to be confused with, descriptive drawing” ’ (Carl Goldstein, Teaching Art: Academies and Schools from Vasari to Albers, 14). 22 See Lisa Jardine, Ingenious Pursuits: Building the Scientific Revolution (London: Abacus Books, 2000), 106–7. 23 Aloïs Riegl in Hall, The World as Sculpture: The Changing Status of Sculpture from the Renaissance to the Present Day, 332. 24 Ibid. 25 Popular misrepresentation, and a resultant misapprehension of the theory of evolution as linear progression, has had a significant influence on many ideas relating to human development. For example, despite an acknowledgement of the severe limitations of ‘the outmoded theory of recapitulation’ – a theory in which early human development is thought to resemble the stages by which children advance to adulthood – Mabel Lang nonetheless proceeds to argue that ‘recapitulation might indeed work if we were to compare the newly alphabetic child’s initial efforts with an illiterate population’s first writings’ (Mabel L. Lang, ‘The Alphabetic Impact on Archaic Greece’, Studies in the History of Art 32 (1991): 65). 26 In his review of Antonio Canova’s Cupid and Psyche (1787–93) which was specifically designed to be viewed in the round, ‘the German critic Fernow found every viewpoint unsatisfactory: “It is necessary to run around it, looking at it from above and then below, always losing one’s way” ’ (Hall, The World as Sculpture: The Changing Status of Sculpture from the Renaissance to the Present Day, 78). 27 Charles Baudelaire (trans. Jonathan Mayne), Art in Paris 1845–1862 (London: Phaidon, 1965), 111. 28 Carl Goldstein, Teaching Art: Academies and Schools from Vasari to Albers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 235–6. 29 Socrates (470– 399 bce) was a sculptor by trade but spent most of his time engaged in philosophical conversation with his fellow Athenians. He was a ‘rigorous thinker, and insisted on a methodical approach to the ethical problems in which he was chiefly interested . . . the “Socratic method” of question and answer was an important link in the chain of development that led to the emergence of the science of formal logic. The method was generally negative in outcome. It normally led to an impasse with no candidate hypotheses left in the field, and the company reduced to perplexity. Such a result was not unwelcome to Socrates, for he regarded it as the best way to disabuse people’s minds of false opinions and prepare them for real insights’ (J. V. Luce, An Introduction to Greek Philosophy (London: Thames and Hudson, 1997), 89–90).

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30 Attempts at finding a more suitable visual language ranged from the rational restraint of Neo-Classicism, the emotive excesses of Romanticism, the emphasis on every uncomfortable detail of Realism, to the nostalgia of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. 31 Carol Dougherty, ‘When Rain Falls from a Clear Blue Sky: Riddles and Colonization Oracles’, Classical Antiquity 11, no. 1 (1992): 29. 32 In the context of Modernism and Post-Modernism, the clarity and certainty of illusionistic naturalism offers an alternative idea of naturalistic art as separate from reality, an ideal vehicle for Surrealism, or for promoting notions of political and social cohesion, such as Socialist Realism and Norman Rockwell’s gentle depictions of middle America. By contrast, Edward Hopper’s eerily desolate visions of America, the machine-like meditation on the aesthetics of mundane objects and places of Photorealism, or the creation of a reality more real than actual experience allows for in Hyperrealism, are all based on an understanding of illusionistic naturalism as a special type of looking. One that is wholly distinct from normal perception. 33 Johannes Haubold, ‘Homer after Parry: Tradition, Reception, and the Timeless Text,’ in Homer in the Twentieth Century: Between World Literature and the Western Canon, edited by Barbara Graziosi and Emily Greenwood (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 46. 34 Ibid. 35 Richard Martin, ‘Homer among the Irish: Yeats, Synge, Thompson, and Parry,’ in Homer in the Twentieth Century: Between World Literature and the Western Canon, edited by Barbara Graziosi and Emily Greenwood (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 88. 36 Ibid., 89. 37 Ibid. 38 These laws included the 1913 Natives Land Act, the 1950 Group Areas Act, and the Black Homelands Citizenship Act, which in 1970 enabled the creation of tribal ‘homelands’ or ‘Bantustans’, comparable to the reservations created by the United States for its indigenous population. The homelands, which comprised only 13 per cent of the Republic of South Africa to house a significant majority of the regional population, were predominantly non-arable and economically underdeveloped. 39 In rural areas, women have traditionally been responsible for the construction and decoration of houses. A woman’s house is an extension of herself, expressed in the decoration of its walls. Mural art ranges from patterns incised in the wet clay of mud-brick to painted patterns using natural pigments and commercial paints. Such mural traditions differ from one cultural or regional group to another.

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40 Elizabeth Rankin, ‘Black Artists, White Patrons: The Cross-Cultural Art Market in Rural South Africa’, Africa Insight 20, no. 1 (1990): 33. Ndebele architecture also saw a significant change. The layout of late Nguni settlements began diverging considerably from the typical Nguni style with the ‘introduction of large courtyard walls (iirhodlo) and square and rectangular houses forms (called iirhaesi, derived from “house”)’ (Chris J. van Vuuren, ‘Features in the Intangible Domain of Ndebele Earthen Architecture’, in Terra 2008: The 10th International Conference on the Study and Conservation of Earthen Architectural Heritage, edited by Leslie Rainer, Angelyn Bass Riviera and David Gandreau (Los Angeles: The Getty Conservation Institute, 2008), 141). Culturally, these shifts are fundamental. Across rural Southern Africa, the clothing and socially significant items a woman produces for herself and her family, and how she builds and decorates the walls of her house, is an outward expression of her, her family and her community’s identity. 41 Elizabeth Ann Schneider, ‘Ndebele Mural Art’, African Arts 18, no. 3 (1985): 64. 42 Craniv Ambolia Boyd, ‘Ndebele Mural Art and the Commodification of Ethnic Style during the Age of Apartheid and Beyond’ (Masters Dissertation, Freie Universitaet Berlin, 2017), 13. 43 Schneider, ‘Ndebele Mural Art’, 60. 44 Van Vuuren, ‘Features in the Intangible Domain of Ndebele Earthen Architecture’, 145–6. 45 The blanket must be worn with pin-stripes running vertically as it is believed that if they were horizontal it would stunt the wearer’s growth. 46 Like the shells widely used in African jewellery, beads were initially found washed up on beaches, or acquired through southward trade from Portuguese sources. Over twenty-six-thousand glass, and twelve-thousand gold beads were excavated from an elite burial site at Mapungubwe Hill, while the oral history of Sekgobogobo as recorded by Van Warmelo (1940) features a similar very valuable heirloom pot of beads. And amongst the Xhosa peoples, by the early nineteenth century ‘beads and buttons were second only to the currencies of iron and cattle’ and ‘between 1932 and 1955 the world’s major bead manufacturer, which by then had a virtual monopoly, exported to South Africa about half of all the beads sold in Africa, which consumed more beads than any other continent’. See Gary van Wyk, ‘Illuminated Signs. Style and Meaning in the Beadwork of the Xhosa- and Zulu-Speaking Peoples’, African Arts 36, no. 3 (2003): 19–22; Thomas Huffman, ‘Mapela, Mapungubwe and the Origins of States in Southern Africa’, The South African Archaeological Bulletin 70, no. 201 (2015): 18; and Maria H. Schoeman, ‘Excavating Ephemeral Remains of a Life in a Time of Witchcraft: New Insights into the Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Occupations at Leokwe and Nyindi

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Hills in the Sheshe-Limpopo Confluence Area, South Africa’, International Journal of Historical Archaeology 17, no. 4 (2013): 621. 47 Wolfgang Wickler and Uta Seibt, ‘Syntax and Semantics in a Zulu Bead Colour Communication System’, Anthropos 90 (1995): 392. Boys and men will wear beadwork crafted for them by their girlfriend, betrothed or wife. As these beads are often one of a set, with the female partner wearing the matching one, they can function as ‘valid legal documents produced as evidence in traditional courts to prove the existence of a relationship between a young woman and a man’. 48 Kate Wells, Edgard Sienaert, Joan Conolly, Fokosile Ngema, Nzama, Celani Njoyeza, Bongani Ximba and Beauty Ndlovu, ‘The “Siyazama” Project: A Traditional Beadwork and AIDS Intervention Program’, Design Issues 20, no. 2 (2004): 76. 49 Deborah Seddon, ‘Written out, Writing in: Orature in the South African Literary Canon’, English in Africa 35, no. 1 (2008): 134. 50 Ibid. 51 Veit Erlmann, ‘ “The Past is Far and the Future is Far”: Power and Performance among Zulu Migrant Workers’, American Ehtnologist 19, no. 4 (1992): 688–709. 52 Lifela poets either perform alone and will expect a financial reward from the audience or in the more common occurrence of a poetic competition in which ‘two or more poets put equal sums into a kitty in support of their claims to eloquence, winner take all. Length of uninterrupted extemporization, musical (rhythm and sound) patterning, verbal aptitude, figurative inventiveness, and the ability to transform experience into aesthetic communication through the affective deployment of cultural knowledge are the main criteria of evaluation. Though veteran performers serve as judges when there is money involved, poets insist that the victor is obvious to everyone, even the vanquished. These competitive performances are organized in an informal, sometimes even impromptu manner. While they occur most commonly in the mine compounds, where coteries of performers gather on weekends to risk their money and reputations, they may take place whenever singers meet in Lesotho as well’ (David B. Coplan, ‘Eloquent Knowledge: Lesotho Migrants’ Songs and the Anthropology of Experience’, American Ethnologist 14, no. 3 (1987): 417). By contrast, isicathamiya involves choirs who perform in organized competitions that can last an entire night (starting at around 10 or 11 p.m.). Competition involves two stages with very different performance styles: Prakhtisa (practice) consists of ‘short stage appearances which, upon payment of a “request fee,” allow each choir to run through a number of songs and dance routines while warming up for the final contest. Prakhtisa differs from khompithi [competition] in a variety of ways, but most notably perhaps in musical style, dance, dress, and degree of audience participation. In the former, most songs are sung in Zulu and are accompanied by

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vigorous dance routines collectively referred to as istep.’ Prakhtisa is also the part of the proceeding where audiences can show support for their favourite choirs ‘by allowing fans to put up the request fee and by encouraging female supporters to join the men on stage and to engage in a complex ritual of symbolic gift-giving and gestures’. Kompiti is a more formal affair: no dancing or audience participation is allowed. This competition is usually judged by a non-Zulu (to prevent the paying of bribes or regional favouritism) and the winning choirs receive cash prizes (Veit Erlmann, ‘ “The Past is Far and the Future is Far”: Power and Performance among Zulu Migrant Workers’, American Ethnologist 19, no. 4 (1992): 691–2). 53 Coplan, ‘Eloquent Knowledge: Lesotho Migrants’ Songs and the Anthropology of Experience’, 419. 54 Piers Carey, ‘From the Outside In: A Place for Indigenous Graphic Traditions in Contemporary South African Graphic Design’, Design Issues 27, no. 1 (2011): 56. Credo Mutwa (1998) catalogued approximately 250 symbols that had historically been employed in various visual formats throughout sub-equatorial Africa. These symbols display considerable variation, ranging from complete abstraction to stylized pictorial designs. Their use declined across the region after the introduction of European languages, but as Carey notes, ‘some clearly do still have currency in isiZulu-speaking culture [where] they are familiar to many, particularly in the more remote rural areas, where the population remains substantially separate from Westernized South African culture’ (Ibid., 60). 55 European traditions of using specific items of jewellery (such as wedding and engagement rings), and specific gemstones and/or metals to convey information were well established into the Victorian period (and some still exist), but these rarely rely on patterns and complex sequences of colours and emblems to convey an extensive range of information regarding the wearer.

Chapter 2 1 Ron Dreher, ‘Hercules’ is a bit Hipper This Time Out,’ Sun-Sentinel, South Florida, 22 June 1997. 2 Ibid. 3 Michael Squire, The Art of the Body: Antiquity and its Legacy (London: I.B. Tauris, 2011), 45. 4 The patterns on the roofs may suggest thatch, but the sequence of incised triangles and painted meanders on the walls clearly echo patterns found on pottery. John

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Boardman’s assumption that this scheme ‘may just be borrowed from pot decoration’ overlooks the possibility that the model may echo decorations applied to larger architectural structures (John Boardman, Greek Art. Fourth Edition, (London: Thames and Hudson, 1996), 47). 5 Bird-bowls and their associated jugs were imported to and imitated by manufacturers in Greek settlements across the Mediterranean from about 700 to 630 bce. Two types are identified: the most often found is the ‘regular’ type which features stylized images of birds, while the rarer Orientalizing (also called Sub-Geometric) type is decorated with abstract geometric designs. Initially believed to have originated on the island of Rhodes, analysis of trace elements suggests that manufacture of the regular type largely occurred in the north Ionian region (Clazomenae or Teos), while Orientalizing bird-bowls were most likely products of Miletus (Handberg and Jacobsen 2005). On the Greek mainland, the Orientalizing style is distinguished by the emergence of figurative representation, while in the eastern Greek settlements, Orientalization largely takes the form of abstract motifs and patterns that scholars have suggested derived from Asiatic fabrics. Early figurative decorations elicit speculation regarding their purported meaning, whereas abstract designs are more likely to be regarded as embellishment. 6 One imagined scenario is of a drinking game at a symposium, where revellers each write a line to prompt a witty response from the next, thereby accounting for the structure of the inscription as three separate lines instead of a continuous one. Hence the pun and the allusions to drinking and sexual arousal. Barry Powell sees the inscription as the result of a sophisticated literary game in which the cup is the butt of the joke: ‘The fashioner of this verse must have understood that Homer’s description [of Nestor’s cup] was parodic. Self-consciously he maintains the tradition. The next two lines are skilful hexameters cast in epic diction. We should recognize in them the verse-capping symposiastic skolion. One diner, parodying the proprietary formula, has set the game with his jape about the poetic Nestor, the first line. The second diner takes up the challenge by spinning out a perfect line of poetry, a parody of another genre of cup inscription, of the type “Whoever steals this cup, he will go to hell,” really a curse formula’ (Barry Powell, ‘Why was the Greek Alphabet Invented? The Epigraphical Evidence’, Classical Antiquity 8, no. 2 (1989): 339–40). Stephanie West agrees that ‘there is much to be said for the idea that this text is a collaborative effort, the creation of a witty trio whose skill in capping one another’s verses was judged worth preserving as a souvenir of a memorable dinner party, thus affording us a priceless glimpse of the manners and customs of Euboean émigrés in the late eighth century’ (Stephanie West, ‘Nestor’s Bewitching Cup’, Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 101 (1994): 10).

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Hansen notes that: ‘The reader, who can only be imagined as a guest in the owner’s house, found instead that the curse was directed against the one who used the cup. To this his reaction must have been one of surprise and dismay, since forbidding a guest to drink from a cup must have offended against all rules of hospitality. However, when he reached the second hexameter, he was once more surprised when learning that if he drank from the cup, he would not as the beginning suggested perish miserably or become blind or suffer some other divine reprisal; instead he would be seized by amorous feelings, neither an unexpected nor an undesirable result of using the cup for its intended purpose’ (P. A. Hansen, ‘Pithecusan Humour: The Interpretation of Nestor’s Cup reconsidered’, Glotta 54, no. 1 (1976): 41–2). See also Mabel Lang: ‘There is humor both in the suggestion that the precious but unwieldy cup that Nestor has to manhandle in the Iliad is good to drink from and in the contrast between it and this poor earthenware skyphos’ (Mabel L. Lang, ‘The Alphabetic Impact on Archaic Greece’, Studies in the History of Art 32 (1991): 71). 7 West, ‘Nestor’s Bewitching Cup’, 10. 8 Christopher A. Faraone, ‘Taking the “Nestor’s Cup Inscription” Seriously: Erotic Magic and Conditional Curses in the Earliest Inscribed Hexameters’, Classical Antiquity 15, no. 1 (1996): 97. 9 Ibid., 97. Identification of this early inscription with magic echoes associations of writing with witchcraft in nineteenth-century Xhosa poetry. 10 See Alan W. Johnston and Angeliki K. Andriomenou, ‘A Geometric Graffito from Eretria’, The Annual of the British School at Athens 84 (1989): 217–20. 11 James A. Francis, ‘Metal Maidens, Achilles’ Shield and Pandora: The Beginnings of “Ekphrasis” ’, American Journal of Philology 130, no. 1 (2009): 16. 12 Umberto Eco (trans. Alastair McEwen), The Infinity of Lists: From Homer to Joyce (London: MacLehose Press, 2009), 11–12. 13 Ibid., 12. 14 A ‘meander tree’ is a graphic symbol consisting of an upward-pointing triangle with a vertical line running from the apex of the triangle to the mid-point of a horizontal line above it. This horizontal line terminates at both ends in square scrolls (meanders). 15 L. H. Jeffrey (1961, 235 f.). Rhys Carpenter argues that the only explanation for these aberrations is that the inscription dates to the middle to late sixth century, as opposed to the late eighth or early seventh century (where its archaeological context places it). He does not consider these aberrations a consequence of the integration of the text with the decorative scheme, noting the inscriber’s ‘disregard of the ornamental painted bands girdling the vase’ (Rhys Carpenter, ‘Reviewed Work(s): The Local Scripts of Archaic Greece: A Study of the

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Origin of the Greek Alphabet and its Development from the Eighth to the Fifth Centuries B. C. by L. H. Jeffery’, The American Journal of Philology 84, no. 1 (1963): 83–5). 16 The epigraphic style of arranging the letters of a text on a grid so that letters align both vertically and horizontally. It was used predominantly for such inscriptions as public proclamations from about the sixth century bce onwards. 17 Line one begins and ends with a nu, line two ends with a nu, while line three ends on a sigma (four zig-zags). Lines two and three both begin with an eta (two paired squares). 18 The diamond shape is repeated in panels one and four. 19 Universal motifs, such as the diamond shape, have over time acquired multiple meanings. On the grille of a modern motor vehicle for example, a diamond shape identifies the manufacturer as Renault. However, where a visual element forms part of a repeated set or sequence of shapes, its meaning is more precise. For example, in the isishunka colour convention of South Africa’s Mchunu people, meaning is conveyed through sets of colours that function as ‘phrases’. While an individual colour may have multiple associations, within a fixed conventional set a specific connotation is clearly defined. See Wolfgang Wickler and Uta Seibt, ‘Syntax and Semantics in a Zulu Bead Colour Communication System,’ Anthropos 90 (1995): 391–405. 20 Peter Alpass, ‘The Basileion of Isis and the Religious Art of Nabatean Petra’, Syria 87 (2010): 110. 21 Tacitus (Hist. 2.2-3) noted that at her temple in Paphos, Aphrodite’s cult statue consisted of a conical stone, while the Phoenician goddess Tinnit, a variant of the goddess Astarte and protector of sailors, was depicted in stylized form as an upward-facing triangle surmounted by outstretched arms. 22 This theme was ascribed to various divinities across the Mediterranean, suggesting a widely shared set of beliefs relating to seasonal cycles of life and death. Anne Baring and Jules Cashford for example, note how: ‘The mourning passage in which Demeter tries to make a human child immortal by burning him in the fire is virtually the same as the mourning interlude in Isis, as told by Plutarch’ (Anne Baring and Jules Cashford, The Myth of the Goddess: Evolution of an Image (London: Penguin Books, 1996), 372). 23 Jasper Gaunt, ‘Nestor’s Cup and its Reception’, in Voice and Voices in Antiquity: Orality and Literacy in the Ancient World, vol 11, edited by Niall W. Slater (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 94–6. 24 As discussed in note 3 of this chapter, Orientalizing bird-bowls were more likely products of Miletus than Rhodes. In his analysis of the mythical roots of Nestor, Frame notes that the hero was a Neleid (son of Neleus), the mythical king to

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whom the ruling family of Miletus traced their origins. Nestor would not have been an unknown figure in the place where the cup could have originated. See Douglas Frame, Hippota Nestor (Washington D. C.: Center for Hellenic Studies, 2010). 25 Rüdiger Schmitt, ‘Astarte, Mistress of Horses, Lady of the Chariot: The Warrior Aspect of Astarte’, Die Welt des Orients 43, no. 2 (2013): 224. 26 David B. Coplan, ‘Eloquent Knowledge: Lesotho Migrants’ Songs and the Anthropology of Experience’, American Ethnologist 14, no. 3 (1987): 431.

Chapter 3 1 Christopher Green, ‘ “There is no Antiquity”: Modern Antiquity in the Work of Pablo Picasso, Giorgio De Chirico, Fernand Léger, and Francis Picabia (1906–36)’, in Modern Antiquity: Picasso, De Chirico, Léger, Picabia, edited by Christopher Green and Jens. M. Daehner (Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Museum, 2011), 2. 2 Erwin Panofsky in Nigel Spivey, Understanding Greek Sculpture: Ancient Meanings, Modern Readings (London: Thames and Hudson), 42. 3 Spivey, Understanding Greek Sculpture, 40. 4 Edward F. Fry, ‘Picasso, Cubism, and Reflexivity’, Art Journal 47, no. 4, Revising Cubism (1988): 296. 5 Ibid., 300. 6 The Cubism of Picasso and Braque differs from the ‘Cubist style’ of their contemporaries who adopted Cubist faceting as a recipe for stylization equally applicable to any of painting and sculpture’s traditional themes. André Lhote’s sketch detailing the procedure for describing a glass in Cubist terms demonstrates how easily analytic Cubism could be made into a unified set of purely formal conventions (see Herschel B. Chipp, Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968)). Their approach, which casts Cubism as a ‘general pictorial language’ (Werner Spies, Picasso: The Sculptures. Catalogue Raissonné of the Sculptures in Collaboration with Christine Piot (Stuttgart: Hatje Cantz Publishers, 2000), 65), conforms to traditional notions of style as the expression of artistic temperament. In the Demoiselles, Picasso had refuted the notion of style as a necessarily coherent method of describing form. Christine Poggi argues that with collage, Picasso continued subverting expectations of stylistic unity, making distinctive methods of describing form ‘a property that might be appropriated and satirized’ (Poggi, In Defiance of Painting: Cubism, Futurism, and the Invention of Collage (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 254).

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7 Michael Squire, The Art of the Body: Antiquity and its Legacy (London: I.B. Tauris), 152. 8 Ibid., 152–3. Although Squire dismisses Richard Brilliant’s definition of this phenomenon as ‘aesthetic assemblage’, as insufficient to ‘capture the stylistic discrepancies that such a compilation might involve’ (151), his own definition of how these artworks function conforms to the conceptual complexities of collage and sculptural assemblage as discussed below. 9 Roxana Marcoci, ‘The Anti-Historicist Approach: Brancusi, “Our Contemporary” ’, Art Journal 59, no. 2 (2000): 19. See also Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies (London: Verso), 95–6. 10 Ibid. The notion of innovation by means of a re-evaluative retrospection also echoes Karl Popper’s ideas on the relation between an institution, its doctrine and its heretics, where institutions develop to preserve and transmit specific interpretations of the world and members attempting to change the doctrine are expelled as heretics. ‘But the heretic claims as a rule, that his is the true doctrine of the founder’ (see Bryan Magee, Popper (Glasgow: Fontana, 1975), 63). 11 James Hall, The World as Sculpture: The Changing Status of Sculpture from the Renaissance to the Present Day (London: Pimlico, 2000), 193. 12 Squire, The Art of the Body, 172. 13 Ibid., 191. 14 John Golding, ‘Cubism’, in Concepts of Modern Art: Revised and Enlarged Edition, edited by Nikos Stangos (London: Thames and Hudson, 1990), 63. In conversation with Françoise Gilot, Picasso described his approach as follows: ‘If a piece of newspaper can become a bottle, that gives us something to think about in connection with both newspapers and bottles, too. This displaced object has entered a universe for which it was not made and where it retains, in a measure, its strangeness. And this strangeness was what we wanted to make people think about because we were quite aware that our world was becoming very strange and not exactly reassuring’ (Ibid.). 15 Christine Poggi, In Defiance of Painting: Cubism, Futurism, and the Invention of Collage (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 43. 16 Werner Spies, Picasso: The Sculptures. Catalogue Raissonné of the Sculptures in Collaboration with Christine Piot (Stuttgart: Hatje Cantz Publishers, 2000), 217. 17 Drawing served as an intermediate phase between the formulation of the idea and the sculpture. Spies (2000, 270) notes for example, that many of She-Goat’s characteristic features, such as its angular limbs, ears, full body and pointed teats, also appear in drawings Picasso made of goats in Antibes from 1946. 18 Spies, Picasso: The Sculptures, 272. 19 Ibid., 270.

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20 Erwin Panofsky in Nigel Spivey, Understanding Greek Sculpture: Ancient Meanings, Modern Readings (London: Thames and Hudson), 42. 21 Werner Spies (trans. John William Gabriel), Max Ernst Collages: The Invention of the Surrealist Universe (London: Thames and Hudson, 1991), 108. 22 Ibid., 78. 23 Commenting on Ortega’s Cosmic Thing, 2002 (which consists of suspended parts of a Volkswagen Beetle), Bruno Latour notes that: ‘For any piece of machinery, to be drawn to specs by an engineer, on one hand, or to remain functional without rusting and rotting away, on the other, requires us to accept two very different types of existence. To exist as a part inter partes inside the isotopic space invented by the long history of geometry, still-life painting, and technical drawing is not at all the same as existing as an entity that has to resist decay and corruption’ (Bruno Latour, ‘Can We Get our Materialism Back Please?’, Isis 98, no. 1 (2007): 139). 24 Spies, Picasso: The Sculptures, 65. 25 Christine Poggi, ‘Frames of Reference: “Table” and “Tableau” in Picasso’s Collages and Constructions’, Art Journal 47, no. 4 (1988): 311–22. 26 Ibid., 320. 27 While sculpture from this period has largely lost its colour and added elements in other materials (such as gold and silver jewellery on the korae and bronze weapons in depictions of gods and warriors) reconstructions based on traces of pigmentation suggest that these works were not only brightly coloured, but also combined naturalistic elements (such as facial features) with elaborate patterning. 28 Branden W. Joseph, ‘The Gap and the Frame’, October 117 (2006): 50. 29 Summer is paired with Fire as both are hot and dry; Spring and Air are hot and wet; Winter and Water are wet and cold; Autumn and Earth are cold and dry. 30 See Sven Alfons 1987, 72–3. 31 See Kaufmann 1987, 99–100. 32 See Falchetta 1987, 151–64. 33 ‘Picabia thwarted all attempts to create the appearance of normal perspective: the anomalous lever and crisscrossing frame-work are parallel to the drawing’s surface, but lens and the film box are twisted slightly toward the viewer, and the bellows is positioned impossibly within the film box itself. Given these distortions, the lens certainly will not slide easily into the box. Moreover, the bellows should connect the lens to the film compartment . . . [but it] has been severed from the lens, underscoring the incompatibility of the form to be photographed, the “ideal,” and the actual medium of artistic creation, the film. Cut from its moorings, the bellows sags limply to the left, suggesting a condition of mechanical and artistic impotence that is reinforced by the inability of the box and the lens to come together. Finally, the lever and handle that stand prominently in the background bear no apparent

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relationship to the operation of the camera . . . Paul Schweizer, an art scholar, first recognized these objects as a brake lever and an automobile gearshift. The brake is engaged while the shift is stuck in neutral, further affirming the impotence of this machine, its lack of power, and its inability to move or accomplish anything. This is no state-of-the-art machine. Clearly, this camera will not work’ (William Rozaitis, ‘The Joke at the Heart of Things: Francis Picabia’s Machine Drawings and the Little Magazine 291’, American Art 8, no. 3/4 (1994): 47–8). Zachary P. Biles, Aristophanes and the Poetics of Competition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 15. William Rozaitis, ‘The Joke at the Heart of Things: Francis Picabia’s Machine Drawings and the Little Magazine 291’, American Art 8, no. 3/4 (1994): 48–9. Diane Waldman, Joseph Cornell: Master of Dreams (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 2002), 100. The sparseness of form and colour in this work echoes Dickinson’s ‘short, often obscure, and deceptively simple poetry’ (Ibid., 85).

Chapter 4 1 Barbara Graziosi, Inventing Homer: The Early Reception of Epic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 2–3. 2 Katharine A. Esdaile, ‘An Essay Towards the Classification of Homeric Coin Types’, The Journal of Hellenic Studies 32 (1912): 325. 3 Esdaile notes that while the figure of Homer was closely associated with the attributes of age and blindness, the iconographic tradition does not always reflect this. The coins provide a wealth of information as to what the earlier (preHellenistic) Homeric type was like, as his head or figure appears on the coins of no fewer than eight Greek cities, ranging in date from c. 307 bce to the third century ce. It is noteworthy that, whereas most of the Hellenistic busts and reliefs represent the poet as bald with the pathos of age added to that of blindness, none of the coins represent him in this way (Esdaile 1912, 303). 4 See also Paul Zanker, The Mask of Socrates: The Image of the Intellectual in Antiquity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). 5 C. O. Brink, ‘Ennius and the Hellenistic Worship of Homer’, The American Journal of Philology 93, no. 4 (1972): 548. 6 Ibid., 552. 7 Froma I. Zeitlin, ‘Visions and Revisions of Homer’, in Being Greek under Rome: Cultural Identity, the Second Sophistic and the Development of Empire, edited by Simon Goldhill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 204.

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8 Alexandra Goulaki-Voutyra, ‘Ingres: Apollo, Mozart and Music’, Music in Art 40, no. 1–2 (2015): 243. 9 Richard Kannicht, ‘Poetry and Art: Homer and the Monuments Afresh’, Classical Antiquity 1, no. 1 (1982): 76. The images can depict either the abduction of Helen by Paris, Jason and Medea, or the departing Odysseus greeting Penelope on the basin, and Odysseus’ shipwreck on the oenochoe. 10 Susan Woodford, Images of Myths in Classical Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 116–19. 11 Ibid., 118. 12 The comparison of Ajax to Achilles occurs in the conclusion of the Catalogue of Ships where the poet asks the Muses to name the best of the Achaeans and their horses (Il. 2.761-2). By pairing an image of Achilles in competition with Ajax with a depiction of the demigod Polydeuces with his human twin Castor on the rear, Exekias emphasizes both the similarities and the differences between Achilles and Ajax on which their rivalry is premised. 13 Mary Beard and John Henderson, Classical Art from Greece to Rome (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 54. 14 Ibid., 53. 15 Philip Ford, ‘Homer in the French Renaissance’, Renaissance Quarterly 59, no. 1 (2006): 1. 16 Ibid., 2. The editio princeps contains the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Homeric Hymns, the Battle of the Frogs and Mice, the Herodotean and Plutarchian Lives of Homer, and an essay by Dio Chrysostom. An epistle by the editor, Bernardo Nerilo to Piero de’ Medici, represents the only significant Latin explanation of the manuscript’s contents. While not direct translations, narratives based on the Trojan War, such as John Lydgate’s fifteenth century The Siege of Troy were also produced. 17 Carl Goldstein, Teaching Art: Academies and Schools from Vasari to Albers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 251. 18 Maureen Mullarkey, ‘Review: Homer and the French Academy: “The Legacy of Homer: Four Centuries of Art from the Ecole Superiure des Beaux Arts, Paris” at the Dahesh and at Princeton’, The New York Sun, 13 October 2005. 19 Maria Koundoura, ‘Between Orientalism and Philhellenism: Lady Mary Wortley Montague’s “Real” Greeks’, The Eighteenth Century 45, no. 3 (2004): 259. 20 Krishan Kumar, ‘Greece and Rome in the British Empire: Contrasting Role Models’, Journal of British Studies 51, no. 1 (2012): 93. 21 Schwandt, Pamela Poynter. ‘Pope’s Transformation of Homer’s Similes’, Studies in Philology 76, no. 4 (1979): 387–8. 22 Seth Schein, ‘An American Homer for the Twentieth Century’, in Homer in the Twentieth Century: Between World Literature and the Western Canon, edited by

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Barbara Graziosi and Emily Greenwood (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 271. 23 In the mid-twentieth century, E. R. Dodds noted that both their critics and their apologists regarded the ancient Greeks as blind to the non-rational factors in human experience and behaviour. He cites the ideas of Paul Mazon, Gilbert Murray and C. M. Bowra as examples of scholars who define the Homeric epics as a ‘complete anthropomorphic system’ with no relation to religious beliefs or cultic practices (E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951), 2). 24 These are: Shield of Achilles; Heroes of the Achaeans; Vengeance of Achilles; Achaeans in Battle; The fire that consumes all before it; Shades of Achilles, Patroclus and Hector; House of Priam; Ilians in Battle; Shades of Eternal Night; and Heroes of the Ilians. 25 Rebecca Resinski, ‘Conversing with Homer and Twombly: A Collaborative Project on the Iliad and Fifty Days at Iliam’, The Classical Journal 101, no. 3 (2006): 315. 26 The fire that consumes all before it features the phrase ‘Like a fire that consumes all before it’ and refers to Il. 2.780 (‘And then they went as if all the earth were consumed by fire’). Pope translates this phrase as ‘They pour along like a Fire that sweeps the whole Earth before it’ and cites it in the introduction to his translation as epitomising Homeric artistry and inventiveness: ‘for Pope, the simile describes not only the Achaeans moving in battle formation but also the force of Homeric epic, carrying its audience along in its sweep’ (Ibid., 314). 27 Richard Leeman (trans. Mary Whittall), Cy Twombly (London: Thames and Hudson, 2005), 22–3. 28 Barry Powell, Homer and the Origin of the Greek Alphabet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 121. Scriptio continua consist of unbroken lines of letters which have little or no punctuation or accentuation, and function as phonetic markers representing not individual words, but a series of sounds interpreted upon vocalization as a complete phrase. Boustrophedon ‘as the ox turns’ inscriptions consist of a continuous line of writing in which letters appear in both conventional and in reverse format to indicate directionality. 29 In Leeman, Cy Twombly, 23. 30 Ahuvia Kahane, Diachronic Dialogues: Authority and Continuity in Homer and the Homeric Tradition (New York: Lexington Books, 2005), 199. 31 In Aristotle, a gloss (from glossa – ‘tongue’) is a foreign – as opposed to recognizable – word (this includes words from related communities, such as other Greek dialects) (Poetics 1457b3), while in Parry (‘The Homeric Gloss: A Study in Word-Sense’, Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association

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33

34 35

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59 (1928): 235) it is a word with ‘either no correspondence, or at best a remote one, with any element of vocabulary in the current language of an author’s public’. A glossary provides a descriptive translation of obscure words, originally in the margins of ancient texts. Parry proposed that Homeric audiences deduced the specific meaning or intent of a ‘gloss’ from its context during performance. This is reflected in the descriptive, allusive and contextual facets of this collection of sculptures. Stephen Scully, for example, notes that in ‘recounting to the Phaeacians the series of his adventures from Troy to Scheria, Odysseus makes us aware that he perceives within his travels a pattern of parallel, but diverging episodes, and he suggests that this pattern of observed correspondences is organically related to his understanding, or interpretation, of these experiences. Although the thirteen episodes of giants and monsters, intoxication and forgetfulness, demigods, and storms narrated by Odysseus to the Phaeacians (Books 9–12) may appear randomly collocated, his telling of these adventures indicates, to the contrary, that they are structured according to a cohesive, over-arching design. In commencing his tale, he does not simply proceed in chronological order, but prefaces the many adventures by doubling the two enchantresses Kalypso and Kirke . . . Odysseus’ comparison establishes at the outset a precedent for interpreting at least some of the adventures in relation to each other. It furthermore suggests that the hero is not simply recalling his experiences mechanically but that he is also recording them in his mind according to common principles, reliving and retelling them synoptically’ (Stephen Scully, ‘Doubling in the Tale of Odysseus’, The Classical World 80, no. 6 (1987): 401). See also Block (1982) and Kahane (1994) on the ‘sympathetic antithesis’ to the hero; and the hero’s alter in Crosset (1969). This pattern (II A, II B (1), II C (2) according to Powell’s system) consists of the following four entries: the Minyan leaders, Ascalaphos and Ialmenos (twins) in Il. 2.511-16; the Pylian leader Nestor and the singer Thamyris (storytellers) in Il. 2.591-602; the Koan leaders Pheidippos and Antiphos (brothers) in Il. 2.676-80; the Trikkean leaders Podaleiros and Machaon (brothers) in Il. 2.729-33. Benjamin Sammons, The Art and Rhetoric of the Homeric Catalogue (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 54, 20. The ‘gift-economy’ of the Homeric world in which relationships are established through the exchange of gifts is well documented (Donlan 1982 and 1989; Finley 1973). Other significant objects, such as the bow of Eurytus and the shield of Achilles allude to people, places and events (past and future), that are central to the Odyssey’s and the Iliad’s respective themes and narratives. Sammons, The Art and Rhetoric of the Homeric Catalogue, 132. Bernhard Schweizer, Greek Geometric Art (London: Phaidon Press, 1971), 16.

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38 Susan Langdon, Art and Identity in Dark Age Greece, 1100–700 B.C.E (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 1. 39 Ibid., 8. 40 Modern polychrome reconstructions by archaeologists such as Vinzenz Brinkmann and Ulrike Kock-Brinkmann are based on the scientific analysis of pigmentation found on ancient statues and textual evidence. 41 John Bispham, ‘Rhythm in Music: What is it? Who has it? And Why?’ Music Perception: An Interdisciplinary Journal 24, no. 2 (2006): 131. Bispham hypothesizes that MRB (musical rhythmic behaviour) is primarily rooted in providing a temporal framework, collective emotionality, a feeling of shared experience, and cohesiveness to group activities and ritualistic ceremonies. He cites evidence that effects of tempo on arousal levels, the consistent use of music in altering states and the clear relationship between rhythmic behaviours and physical action suggest that musical pulse is functional in regulating emotions and motivational states by means of affecting states of action-readiness. 42 Egbert J. Bakker, Poetry in Speech: Orality and Homeric Discourse (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 138.

Chapter 5 1 Odysseus himself recounts his adventures following the fall of Troy to his arrival on Scheria to the Phaeacians (Od. 9–12). The ease with which he makes up stories when in disguise (e.g. Od. 14.191-359) raises the possibility that the fantastical tale he tells his hosts may be untrue. 2 Odysseus acquired the bow (with which he wins Penelope’s archery contest and kills the suitors) from Iphitos, son of Eurytus (Od. 21.14-27). The bow’s association with appropriate and aberrant interactions between hosts and guests makes it a fitting instrument of Odysseus’ revenge. 3 Forced to return the daughter of the priest Chryses to appease Apollo (Il. 1.440-8), Agamemnon (justified by his superior rank) took Briseis from Achilles in compensation (Il. 1.317-25). 4 Patroclus was killed by Hector while wearing Achilles’ armour (except for the ash spear which only Achilles could carry) and fighting in the absent Achilles’ place (Il. 16.130-822). 5 Homer describes the god Hephaestus as decorating Achilles’ shield with depictions of the cosmos, and scenes of human conflict, justice, festivity and agriculture (Il. 18.478-606).

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6 The children of Homeric heroes are often named for their father’s characteristics. Nagy proposes that the name Telemachus (from tele ‘far’ and machos ‘fighting’) ‘may mean either “he who fights far away [at Troy]” or perhaps “he who fights from far away [with arrows]”; both characterizations are appropriate to the father’ (Gregory Nagy, The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), 146 n.2). 7 Achilles’ behaviour ranges from ‘godlike’ to ‘bestial’: Apollo expresses disgust at Achilles’ mutilation of Hector’s corpse and compares his savagery to that of a lion. Hera by contrast, argues that as Achilles is the son of a goddess he is superior to Hector, despite the latter man’s good character and piety (Il. 24.31-63). O’Brien argues that Achilles’ vengeful fury ‘resembles the cholos [lust for vengeance] and menis [wrath] of Hera’, an association expressed in the stated desire of both for ‘raw-eating’ their enemies (an act symbolic of extreme depravity) in Il. 4.34 ff. (Hera) and Il. 22.346 ff. (Achilles) (Joan O’Brien, ‘Homer’s Savage Hera’, The Classical Journal 86, no. 2 (1990): 107). 8 In Il. 21.461-7 Apollo compares human lives to the growth and death of leaves; while in Il. 6.144-51 Glaukos tells Diomedes that the generations of men are like leaves, with one coming into being as another dies. In both, the transience and vulnerability of human existence is emphasized. 9 If Penelope relents as Clytemnestra did, and marries a suitor, then Odysseus, like Agamemnon, will be murdered upon arrival. The hero of the ensuing epic will be Telemachus, as Orestes is hero of the Oresteia (see Od. 11.422-53). Homer is therefore careful not to let Telemachus equal his father: for example, in Od. 21.125-30 the younger man is prevented from stringing the bow of Eurytus, even though he was at the point of doing so. 10 At Athena’s instigation, Penelope proposed an archery contest to determine who would marry her. She set the archers the near-impossible task of shooting an arrow through the handles of twelve axes. This test was accomplished by Odysseus disguised as a beggar (Od. 21.1-434). 11 The word μίγνυμι mignumi means ‘to mix’ or ‘mingle’ (properly of fluids) and describes both contact between people and sexual intercourse in Homer. 12 In Il. 5.440-2 Apollo warns Diomedes, who has attacked Aphrodite, to retreat ‘as there is no likeness between gods and mortals’. 13 This image is based on depictions such as the West pediment of the temple of Artemis at Corfu, circa 580 bce (see John Boardman, Greek Sculpture: The Archaic Period, a Handbook (London: Thames and Hudson, 1996), 172; and John Griffths Pedley, Greek Art and Archaeology: Second Edition (London: Laurence King Publishing, 1998), 152); a polychrome clay relief from Syracuse, circa 600 bce (see

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John Boardman, Greek Art. Fourth Edition (London: Thames and Hudson 1996), 66); and on the body of the ‘Nessos’ late proto-attic amphora, circa 625-600 bce (Pedley, Greek Art and Archaeology, 130). 14 This image is based on depictions such as the Archaic sculpture of the Naxian Sphinx at Delphi, circa 560 bce (see Boardman, Greek Art, 81 and Pedley Greek Art and Archaeology, 181); and an Attic painting of Oedipus and the Sphinx on a bowl, circa 470 bce (see J. C. Cooper, An Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Traditional Symbols (London: Thames and Hudson, 1993), 157). 15 Eris reputedly threw a golden apple inscribed ‘for the fairest’ amongst the guests. When Hera, Athena and Aphrodite all claimed it, Zeus decreed that Paris/Alexandros should award the prize. Aphrodite promised him Helen (wife of Menelaus) should he award her the apple, thereby instigating the Trojan War. 16 Hermes provides Odysseus with an antidote – a plant (moly) that only gods can harvest (Od. 10.277-307). 17 Odysseus could not resist boasting about outwitting Polyphemos, thereby enabling the Cyclops to reveal his identity to Poseidon (Od. 9.500-5). Teiresias predicts Odysseus’ reconciliation with Poseidon: after his return home, Odysseus will take an oar inland, until it is mistaken for a winnowing fan. He will then plant the oar upright by its handle and sacrifice to Poseidon, return home, and sacrifice to the other gods (Od. 11.119-34). 18 Nanno Marinatos argues that the journey of Odysseus parallels the cosmic journey of the Egyptian sun god, and that Circe’s island which is described as ‘the House of the Rising Sun’ is a ‘cosmic juncture’ located in the East, and is divided into two halves: one part is in the upper hemisphere, while the other part ‘belongs to the path of night’. Circe sends the hero to the underworld, but also receives him back from it. ‘When Odysseus and his men return to life and light, she is naturally equated with dawn’ (Nanno Marinatos, ‘The Cosmic Journey of Odysseus’, Numen 48, no. 4 (2001): 399). Marinatos locates Calypso’s island of Ogygia in the West: ‘Given the fact, however, that she is the daughter of Atlas, who, according to Hesiod, stands in the far West (Od. 1.52-4; Hes. Theog. 517-20; 746-8; 779), she must be also located at the western juncture’ (Marinatos 2001, 397). 19 At Hera’s request, Ate induced Zeus to swear an oath that the child to be born (which he believed to be Heracles) would rule all men (Il. 19.100-13). Instead, Hera delayed the Eileithyiai (goddesses of childbirth) thus allowing Eurystheus to be born first (Il. 19.119-24). Realizing his mistake, Zeus permanently exiled Ate from Olympus (Il. 19.126-31). 20 Nestor represents a Hesiodic view, where each generation of heroes is inferior to the preceding one (see Nagy 1979, 213–21).

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21 Achilles owns two immortal horses. One of them (Xanthos) reveals that Apollo was responsible for Patroclus’ death and will enable a man (Paris) to kill Achilles as well (Il. 19.404-17). The description of Hector’s funeral (and the Iliad) ends with his epithet hippodamoio ‘tamer of horses’ (Il. 24.804). 22 Stranded on Pharos near the mouth of the Nile, Menelaus was advised to extract knowledge from Proteus (The Old Man of the Sea) by his daughter Eidothee. Proteus told Menelaus that his delayed homecoming stemmed from his failure to sacrifice to Zeus prior to leaving Egypt. Menelaus learnt of the failed nostoi of Ajax and Agamemnon, and that the Old Man had seen Odysseus trapped on Calypso’s island. Finally, Proteus foretold Menelaus’ own end in the idyllic Elysian Fields (Od. 4.351-569).

Chapter 6 1 Richard Whitaker, The Iliad of Homer: A Southern African Translation (Cape Town: New Voices, 2012), 62. 2 Pope’s translation of the Iliad was first published in subscription form from 1715 to 1720. His Odyssey (in collaboration with W. Broome and E. Fenton) was published in 1726. Pope adopted a Neoclassical approach that aimed at recreating the poetry of Homer primarily by means of formal devices and is considered more a poetic interpretation than an accurate translation: E.V. Rieu’s translation of the Odyssey was first published in 1946 and his Iliad in 1950. His prose versions follow the principle of ‘dynamic equivalence’ where the translator aims to communicate the content of the original, as opposed to its form; Richmond Lattimore’s Iliad, published in 1951 is a literal free verse line-for-line rendering that intentionally avoids a poetic dialect: Christopher Logue undertook a long-term project to transform the Iliad into a modernist idiom from 1959 to 2005. His interpretations included sound recordings and printed volumes of verse such as War Music: An Account of Books 16 to 19 of Homer’s Iliad, 1984: Robert Fagles published translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey in 1990 and 1995 that attempted a balance between modern English and the original verse, Richard Whitaker published a translation of the Iliad in 2012, and of the Odyssey in 2017, that aimed to give an impression of orality in a hybrid vernacular, particular to a contemporary Southern African context. 3 A. G. Geddes ascribes a literal approach such as Lattimore’s to a reluctance to ‘introduce anything which is not in the original’, but warns that it does not guarantee clarity of expression or meaning (A. G. Geddes, ‘Homer in Translation’, Greece & Rome, Second Series 35, no. 1 (1988): 11).

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4 Rossetti in Charles Martindale, ‘Dryden’s Ovid: Aesthetic Translation and the Idea of the Classic’, in Translation and the Classic: Identity as Change in the History of Culture, edited by Alexandra Lianeri and Vanda Zejko (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 88. 5 Charles Martindale, ‘Dryden’s Ovid: Aesthetic Translation and the Idea of the Classic’, in Translation and the Classic: Identity as Change in the History of Culture, edited by Alexandra Lianeri and Vanda Zejko (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 88. 6 Ibid., 92. 7 Shearer West, Portraiture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 44. 8 Ibid., 41. 9 The word muthos, from which ‘myth’ originates, occurs in Homer as a verb denoting an act of speech (mutheomai). In Richard Martin’s analysis of muthos in its various contexts, the word denotes ‘a speech-act indicating authority, performed at length, usually in public, with a focus on full attention to every detail’ (Richard P. Martin, The Language of Heroes: Speech and Performance in the Iliad (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), 12). 10 Laura Slatkin, The Power of Thetis: Allusion and Interpretation in the Iliad (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 6. 11 The thematic difference between the Iliad and the Odyssey is apparent in the symbolic function of the two heroes’ deaths: in the Iliad poetic immortalization (kleos) is won by death in battle at the instigation of an enraged Apollo (in Il. 9.410-16 Achilles recounts his mother’s prediction of two possible fates for him – to die young and gain kleos or live a long unsung life). In the Odyssey the primary threat to the hero’s myth is an anonymous death without a corpse to bury or witnesses to recount the event. His poetic immortalization is dependent on his successful return to, and recovery of, his home, family and human society at large (nostos). The reverence associated with a legendary hero and respected king’s much-mourned death in old age is, however, subject to his undertaking a further journey and conducting rituals (a sacrifice to Poseidon and the erection of a sailor’s tomb marker in Od. 11.122-30) to re-establish a respectful relationship with the gods. 12 In living epic performance traditions such as those of the Rajastani of India, ‘the central belief is that singing the hero’s story summons him . . . [and his] power is then present to protect the community. What gives the hero his ultimate power is the actual fact of his death . . . [which] operates as the “generative point” for stories in local traditions’ (Gregory Nagy, ‘An Evolutionary Model for the Making of Homeric Poetry: Comparative Perspectives’, in The Ages of Homer, edited by Jane B. Carter and Sarah P. Morris (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995), 168).

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13 Egbert J. Bakker, Poetry in Speech: Orality and Homeric Discourse (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 166. 14 Gregory Nagy, Greek Mythology and Poetics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), 10. 15 Steven Rose, The Making of Memory: From Molecules to Mind (London: Bantam Books, 1994), 91. 16 Leonard Charles Muellner (2006), ‘Discovery Procedures and Principles for Homeric Research’, The Homerizon: Conceptual Interrogations in Homeric Studies, http://chs.harvard.edu/publications.sec/classics.ssp. Washington: Center for Hellenic Studies, Washington, D. C. (accessed 28 March 2011), 11. A description of a subject as it exists in a specific time and place is termed ‘synchronic’, while ‘diachronic’ refers to an analysis of its development over time. 17 Bakker, Poetry in Speech: Orality and Homeric Discourse, 13. 18 ‘[I]f the technique of violent juxtaposition which I find in these similes is a familiar Homeric characteristic, so, I think, is the outlook toward war which I perceive behind that technique . . . Only a poet well aware of the tragedy of war could have told the story of the Iliad as Homer tells it, with a frequent emphasis not on the everlasting glory that can be won in war but on the horror and savagery it involves. This is not to say, let me repeat, that the Iliad is an anti-war document: clearly at many places the poet views war as inevitable, perhaps even necessary, and as the proving ground of valor. But I think it is also clear from the way he structures the poem as a whole, from the way he handles the motif of honor . . . that Homer was acutely conscious of the degradation and the waste that war inevitably entails’ (David H. Porter, ‘Violent Juxtaposition in the Similes of the Iliad’, The Classical Journal 68, no. 1 (1972): 19–20). 19 Ziva Ben-Porat, ‘Poetics of the Homeric Simile and the Theory of (Poetic) Simile’, Poetics Today 13, no. 4 (1992): 741. Other examples of multiplied similes in Homer include Il. 13.491-5; 15.271-80; 17.520-4; and 22.188-93. 20 Critics as early as Zenodotus – who athetized the lion simile – struggled to accept this juxtaposion. The Scholia (S A L 548, Erbse III 228) defended the inclusion of both on the basis that each expresses a different aspect of Ajax’s character, while modern scholars such as Moulton (1977: 387, 390), Scott (1974: 46, 61, 111) and Fränkel (1924, 61, 67, 84) have commented on the inappropriateness of comparing a hero to a donkey and the discrepancy between the animal’s satiated hunger and the hero’s half-empty hands (see also Ben-Porat 1992, 794). 21 Ben-Porat, ‘Poetics of the Homeric Simile and the Theory of (Poetic) Simile’, 749–50. 22 Ibid., 766. 23 Ibid., 748.

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24 ‘First, there is the incompatible formal simile, which likens Hektor not to the fawn, but to the pursuing dog: “as a dog” (1.189) – “so Hektor” (1.194). Secondly, there is an incongruity between the last clause of the BP [base point] whose grammatical subject is the dog, and the grammatical subject of the formal TP [target point] – Hektor. Here, the reader cannot enjoy the luxury of a smooth transition, which occurs when the argument of the second nuclear simile is introduced as such in the BP . . . Attentive readers cannot – or should not – ignore the clash between the three actualized nuclear similes: TD SM BD [target domain; simile marker; base domain] (1) Achilleus [is] like dog. (2) Hektor [is] like fawn. (3) Hektor [is] like dog.

25 26

27 28

Nor should they ignore the inevitable inference: if Achilleus is like a dog – and Hektor is like a dog – then Achilleus is like Hektor’ (Ibid., 757). Ibid., 766–7. Albert Cook, ‘Visual Aspects of the Homeric Simile in Indo-European Context’, Quaderni Urbaniti di Cultutre Classica, New Series 17, no. 2 (1984): 40. Cook draws a correlation between a Homeric simile (Il. 13.588-92) and Bull’s Head: ‘A particular kind of motion is discerned, in a way that a modern painter might admire, a “found” motion underlying the bounce of peas on a winnowing fan and the rebound of an arrow from a breast plate. The visual impulse is not so different, I mean, from that of modern “found” sculpture, when Picasso calls a bicycle seat and handlebars a bull’s head.’ Cook does not pursue this insight further and concentrates instead on finding parallels to Homeric imagery in ancient visual art-forms instead. Werner Spies, Picasso: The Sculptures. Catalogue Raissonné of the Sculptures in Collaboration with Christine Piot (Stuttgart: Hatje Cantz Publishers, 2000), 209, 216. D. F. Rauber, ‘Some “Metaphysical” Aspects of the Homeric Simile’, The Classical Journal 65, no. 3 (1969): 101. Rauber quotes Samuel Johnson’s famous dictum on the essence of ‘metaphysical’ wit as a ‘kind of discordia concors; a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike’. An example of such a simile is the comparison of the stones thrown by Achaians and Trojans at each other with a snowstorm sent by Zeus in Il. 12.278-89. He also notes that: ‘The separation of elements is here at a maximum. On the one side, an extremity of violent activity, a terrible battle to the death fought amid a mighty roar; on the other, an extremity of quiet, a scene with no human actor or even observer – with, indeed, no human element except the very oblique ἀνδρῶνπίονα ἔργα (line 283) [andron piona erga the cultivated fields of men]. Likewise, the

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nexus of “falling thick” is strange and extreme; it is almost deliberately paradoxical. The lacy snow falls slowly, silently, inexorably, and the whole movement is dominated by a largely tactile sensation of a frightening downward pressure. The tone is deeply melancholic, almost Vergilian in its pathos. The stones, by contrast, are solid and hard; they are hurled, and they smash and crash through bronze and bone’ (Ibid., 97, 99–100). 29 Ibid., 103. 30 Naomi Rood, ‘Craft Similes and the Construction of Heroes in the Iliad’, Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 104 (2008): 29–30. 31 Ibid. 32 Bakker, Poetry in Speech: Orality and Homeric Discourse, 62. 33 Ibid., 56–7. He defines the eye’s area of foveal vision as distinct from the total field of vision. ‘The former is the area of greatest acuity, is small in comparison to the total field, and is constantly shifting’ (see Bakker, Poetry in Speech: Orality and Homeric Discourse, 45). 34 Ibid., 58. 35 Pamela Poynter Schwandt, ‘Pope’s Transformation of Homer’s Similes’, Studies in Philology 76, no. 4 (1979): 415. 36 Benjamin Sammons, The Art and Rhetoric of the Homeric Catalogue (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 17, 16. 37 Gregory Nagy, Poetry as Performance. Homer and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 19. 38 The rhapsode, like the narrator in the invocation preceding the Catalogue of Ships, relates their own selection from an established, comprehensive and ‘ideal’ (in the Platonic sense) epic account to an audience which is sufficiently familiar with the conventions of the art-form to be able to relate the performed fragment to the absent whole. 39 Frederick Combellack, ‘Milman Parry and Homeric Artistry’, Comparative Literature 11, no. 3 (1959): 208. 40 Leonard Charles Muellner (2006), ‘Discovery Procedures and Principles for Homeric Research’, The Homerizon: Conceptual Interrogations in Homeric Studies, http://chs.harvard.edu/publications.sec/classics.ssp. Center for Hellenic Studies, Washington, D. C. (accessed 28 March 2011), 11. 41 Texts defined as Lives of Homer range from freestanding compositions to encyclopaedia entries and biographical information included as introductory sections in editions of the poet’s works or scholarly treatises on Homer. Of these, only the Certamen (c. 138–193 ce) and Pseudo-Herodotus’ On Homer’s Origins, Date and Life (c. 50–150 ce) appear to attempt a coherent narrative.

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42 Zoja Pavlovskis, ‘Proba and the Semiotics of the Narrative Virgilian Cento’, Vergilius 35 (1989): 71. Pavlovskis notes that in both Latin and Greek ‘the hexameter was the popular medium of the cento poet, partly because of the long established tradition of borrowing and permutation first developed orally by the Homeric rhapsodes, but also no doubt owing a great deal to the relative ease with which hexameters or portions of them can be paratactically joined, as well as to their traditional function as a medium for narrative, with the resulting accumulation of material available to cento writers’ (Pavlovskis, Proba and the Semiotics of the Narrative Virgilian Cento, 72). While long disparaged as an inferior art-form, interest in the cento format has greatly increased as exemplified by projects such as Der ‘Christus patiens’ und die Poiesis der griechischen CentoDichtungen at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum Wortmarke. 43 James Uden, ‘The Contest of Homer and Hesiod and the Ambitions of Hadrian’, Journal of Hellenic Studies 130 (2010): 133. Modern interest in the Certamen from Nietzsche onwards (such as N. J. Richardson (1981) and Ralph M. Rosen (2004) in particular), has centred less on the text’s own merits and curiosities, but more on whether similarities between it, the Michigan Papyrus and the fragment published by B. Mandilaras (1992) (see Rosen 2004) can prove a thematic link with the narrative section describing the contest between Homer and Hesiod, and Alcidamas’ Mouseion and Aristophanes’ The Frogs. 44 Ibid., 123. 45 Paola Bassino, The Certamen Homeri et Hesiodi: A Commentary (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019): 2. 46 Ibid., 2–3. 47 M. L. West (ed. and trans.), Homeric Hymns; Homeric Apocrypha; Lives of Homer (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 322–3. Zeruneith also substitutes the one name for the other when paraphrasing the oracle (Keld Zeruneith, The Wooden Horse: The Liberation of the Western Mind, From Odysseus to Socrates (New York: Overlook Duckworth, 2007), 33). 48 In her study of colonization oracles, Carol Dougherty points out that most enigmatic oracles are colonial. This enigmatic aspect of colonial oracles is understandable: the very process of making sense of the oracle’s obscure instructions in establishing a settlement on unknown territory raises the risks of applying conventional means of understanding to the wholly unfamiliar. This mediation between the known and the foreign is often expressed linguistically: in many examples, the native name for a geographical feature is identified with a similar-sounding Greek word for an animal or plant which the colonists recognize to solve the oracle’s riddle (Carol Dougherty, ‘When Rain Falls from a Clear Blue Sky: Riddles and Colonization Oracles’, Classical Antiquity 11, no. 1 (1992): 29).

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49 ‘The essence of a riddle consists in describing a fact by an impossible combination of words. By merely combining the ordinary names of things this cannot be done, but it is made possible by combining metaphors. For instance, “I saw a man weld bronze upon a man with fire,” and so on. A medley of rare words is jargon. We need then a sort of mixture of the two. For the one kind will save the diction from being prosaic and commonplace, the rare word, for example, and the metaphor and the “ornament,” whereas the ordinary words give clarity’ (trans. Fyfe, Poet. 22.1458a26-7). 50 Ian Hamnett, ‘Ambiguity, Classification and Change: The Function of Riddles’, Man, New Series 2, no. 3 (1967): 381–2. 51 Scott Richardson, ‘The Devious Narrator of the Odyssey’, The Classical Journal 101, no. 4 (2006): 353–4. 52 John Miles Foley, ‘ “Reading” Homer through Oral Tradition’, College Literature 34, no. 2 (2007): 6–7. Foley notes that ‘although he boasted a repertoire of songs many times larger than any ever observed during fieldwork, and although he was credited as the source of all the finest ones, none of the guslari who sang his praises ever actually met him. Again depending on the informant, the explanation given was that he lived in another village, or was always traveling, or plied his trade a generation or two earlier (“he was not even my father’s father,” said Stolac singer Ibro Bašić). Indeed, none of the Parry-Lord guslari had ever encountered him face-to-face. If we aggregate all of his often unverifiable, “tall-tale” bio-data, we gain a composite portrait of the master-singer or Guslar not as a historical person but as a legend. Moreover, it is a portrait that, like all legends, morphs to fit the local circumstances: real-life singers used the Guslar to establish their own bardic lineage and prominence, as well as to stamp certain of their songs as the best. The fact that they describe – and even name – the Guslar in mutually inconsistent ways is simply a function of the role such a figure plays for them.’ 53 The defining fact of Achilles is that he gains kleos by dying at Troy, and the defining fact of Odysseus is that he gains kleos by returning home (i.e. achieving nostos). According to the logic of the heroic world, the function of the epic performance is to perpetuate the poetic immortality of heroes. The existence of the Iliad and the Odyssey is therefore evidence to Homer’s audience that Achilles and Odysseus both succeeded in gaining kleos. The respective fates of these heroes constitute relatively fixed elements. 54 Graeme Bird, Multitextuality in the Homeric Iliad (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), 100. 55 The colander is an implement designed to facilitate the separation of a solid from a liquid, suggesting Calypso rescuing Odysseus from the sea, but also her own separation from the world. The interlacing patterns painted onto its interior and

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exterior link the form of the colander to spirals and guilloche patterns on ancient artefacts, fishing nets, ribbons, and Calypso’s epithet describing her flowing hair, all of which suggest concealment, containment and entanglement. The four fishhooks emphasize the colander’s connection with water, and by extension, with the fishing buoys used to construct three of THE WARRIORS and THE KINGS (see Chapter 5). 56 Bakker, Poetry in Speech: Orality and Homeric Discourse, 166–7. See also Richard P. Martin, The Language of Heroes: Speech and Performance in the Iliad, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), 12–37; 231–39; and Gregory Nagy, Poetry as Performance. Homer and Beyond, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 61. 57 Nagy developed the notion of the poet as therapon (ritualistic substitute) to the Muses. The word denotes an impersonating alter ego of a god or hero but is premised on their proximity to that god or hero (Gregory Nagy, The best of Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry, (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), 292–3). 58 While Achilles can more logically be paired with either Patroclus or Ajax, as closely allied or – in the case of Ajax – friendly rivals, and although it will be Paris (with the help of Apollo) who will ultimately kill him, in A Catalogue of Shapes Hector as Troy’s greatest defender is opposed to Achilles as the city’s greatest threat. 59 Anne d’Harnoncourt, ‘The Cubist Cockatoo: A Preliminary Exploration of Joseph Cornell’s Homages to Juan Gris’, Philadelphia Museum of Art Bulletin 74, no. 321 (1978): 9. 60 The transformation of one of Cornell’s favourite images – the parrot – in the Gris series illustrates the extent to which these allusions derived from Cornell’s own understanding of the artist. D’Harnoncourt points out how, in his notes, Cornell often associated Gris with the nineteenth-century opera singer Maria Malibran, who was described by many admirers as a ‘bird of song’ and suggests that the crisp white frontal image of the cockatoo seems appropriate to Gris’s passion for precision and clarity. The white parrot incorporates aspects of Cornell, Gris and Malibran in one image (Ibid., 12).

Conclusion 1 Barbara Graziosi, Inventing Homer: The Early Reception of Epic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 250. 2 To nineteenth-century Europe and America, the Classical was the antithesis of the ‘traditional’ and ‘primitive’, and that they ‘championed their idea of progress by

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6

Notes to pp. 159–161

aligning themselves with the great thinkers of the ancient world, a world which they saw as equal in ambition and innovation’ (Sara Cochran, ‘An Alternative to Classicism: Picabia with and against Picasso and De Chirico’, in Modern Antiquity: Picasso, De Chirico, Léger, Picabia, edited by Christopher Green and Jens M. Daehner (Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Museum, 2011), 32). Lucian Krukowski, ‘Hegel, “Progress,” and the Avant-Garde’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 44, no. 3 (1986): 283. Ibid., 279. Lorna Hardwick, ‘Reception as Simile: The Poetics of Reversal in Homer and Derek Walcott’, International Journal of the Classical Tradition 3, no. 3 (1997): 326–7. The problem of transmitting oral forms in literate formats is particularly urgent in an African context where many oral forms co-exist and even intrude into literate ones. Deborah Seddon notes that ‘In the South African context, I would thus concur with Duncan who asserts that “unless we are prepared to acknowledge that despite the ‘instabilities’ of transmission, translation and reception we are able to recreate something of the speaking voice, we are in danger of arriving at an impasse: a blocking of communication which is not inevitable but ideological.” Brown argues that instead we might “perceive the value of transfer from one signifying system to another to serve a purpose in a given context” ’ (Deborah Seddon, ‘Written out, Writing in: Orature in the South African Literary Canon’, English in Africa 35, no. 1 (2008): 146). ‘Parry, influenced by early structuralism through Antoine Meillet, adapted Saussure’s concept of langue/parole into the opposing pair (epic) langue and poet’s diction (parole). The use of this contrastive pair allowed him to emphasize the traditionality of the langue and the innovation of the diction. The langue was the common property of a race of singers, and the diction the property of just one. At the same time, the structuralist approach also favoured the exploration of the “oral” as the only true way to approach language study. Oral was seen as primary, as more pure than written. But because Parry had to overcome the separation in time between Homer (for whom we only have written records) and his contemporary subjects (the Yugoslav guslars carefully selected for illiteracy), he had to create a steppingstone which would allow the juxtaposition and comparison of the two. This he found in the work of Lévy-Bruhl and Jousse, who claimed to have found differences in mentalité between(contemporary) literate and illiterate subjects’ (Thérèse De Vet, ‘Parry in Paris: Structuralism, Historical Linguistics, and the Oral Theory’, Classical Antiquity 24, no. 2 (2005): 279–80).

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214

Index academic art 17, 20, 24–6, 54, 56, 73–4 A Catalogue of Shapes 68, 77–83, 86–131, 153, 156–7, 160–2 Achilles 4, 47, 72, 79, 93–6, 100, 103, 121, 128, 156, 185 n.3–4, 194 n.53 ACHILLEUS ΜΗΝΙΣ 84, 90, 93–6, 102–3, 110, 117, 124, 127 and Apollo 137, 186 n.7, 188 n.21 shield 9, 42–3, 185 n.5 aesthetic translation, see under translation Agamemnon 9, 11, 93, 104, 154 AIDS, see Siyazama project Ajax 8, 72, 74, 79, 182 n.12 allusion 11, 65 A Parrot for Juan Gris (Joseph Cornell) 67, 135, 156-7 apartheid 34 Aphrodite 40–1, 46, 48–50, 177 n.21 apostrophe 155 Apotheosis of Degas (Walter Barnes) 71 Apotheosis of Delacroix (Paul Cezanne) 71 Apotheosis of Homer (J. A. D. Ingres) 71 Apotheosis of Homer (Giulio Paolini) 71 appropriation 29–30, 34 anachronistic 58–9, 65, 134, 143 external 58, 143 Archaic period 37–8, 64, 71–2, 83 Archelaos of Priene 70 Arcimboldo, Giuseppe 22, 53, 64, 66, 68, 78 artistic self-awareness, see reflexivity Ate 121–4, 156, 187 n.19 ATE ΠΑΓΙΣ 110, 121–4 Athena 100 audience 9, 12, 22–3, 155, 157 authorizing 148, 154 collaborative 148 expectations 4, 6–7, 17, 151, 159 authorship 62, 71, 150–1 Bakker, Egbert J. 11, 53, 136–8, 144, 155–6

Basotho, see Sotho Bassino Paola 150 Baudelaire, Charles 24, 63 beadwork 30, 32, 35, 42, 172 n.46, 173 n.47 isishunka colour sequence 177 n.19 Ben-Porat, Ziva 136–40, 145 bird-bowl 40–1, 175 n.5 blindness 13, 152 Boardman, John 174–5 n.4 Braque, Georges 26, 54, 58, 60 Brinkmann, Ulricke Kock and Vinzenz 39, 185 n.40 Bronze Age 46, 96, 103 Bundt mould 118, 120–1, 123–4 calliper 96, 99, 114, 117–18, 120, 124, 128 spring divider 121, 123–4 Calypso 111, 114, 155–6, 194–5 n.55 KALYPSO ΚΡΥΠΤΩ 110–14, 117, 120–1, 131, 155 camera obscura, see optical devices Carpenter, Rhys 176 n.15 Castor, see Dioscuri catalogue format 6, 10–11, 78, 80, 82, 145, 147, 151, 153–4, 167 n.26 Catalogue of Ships 11, 13, 78, 80, 155, 162, 167–8 n.26 cento poems 149–50, 193 n.42 Certamen 149–53 chaîne opératoire 2 Circe 118, 121, 156, 187 n.18 KIRKE ΦΑΙΝΩ 84, 110, 118–21, 124, 131 Classicism 38–9, 54–5, 71, 74, 76, 160, 195–6 n.2 anti-Classicism 59 in art 17–18, 38, 42, 75, 135 Neoclassicism 37–8, 54–5, 71 systemic 8, 55, 161

215

216

Index

coins, see under Homer colander 111, 113, 155 collage 1, 22, 58 Cubist 57–8, 60, 67, 143, 162 Dada 61 Contest of Homer and Hesiod, see Certamen Cook, Albert 141 Cornell, Joseph 67–8 and Emily Dickinson 67 and Juan Gris 67, 135, 156–7 parrot 68, 195 n.60 Combellack, Frederick 148, 169 n.17 composite object portrait 10, 22, 53–4, 64, 136, 149 compositional system, see creative methodology Controller of the Universe (Damian Ortega) 62 creative methodology 2, 51, 54–5, 77 Certamen 149–50 Homeric poetry 1–3, 7–8, 10–11, 133, 146, 149, 160–2 sculptural assemblage 1–2, 7, 10 Cross of Lothar 59–60 Cubism 55, 59, 62–3, 135, 178 n.6 as iconographic text 55 Daumier, Honoré 75–6 Demeter 48–9, 177 n.22 Demodocus 13 devious narrator, see under Odysseus dialectic 8, 40, 58, 160, 162 Dioscuri 46, 48, 72, 182 n.12 discordia concors 142, 191 n.28 disegno 21, 169–70 n.21 Donne, John 142 Dovecotes (Joseph Cornell) 67 Doyle, Andrea 4, 6–7 drawing 22, 84, 169–70 n.21, 179 n.17 Eco, Umberto 42–3 ecphrasis 42, 144 Elements (Giuseppe Arcimboldo) 65 embroidery hoop 104, 106–7 enactivist theory of perception 15 encyclopaedic text 151–2 epithet 9, 48, 90, 93, 98, 100, 104, 109, 111, 116, 118, 123, 125, 130

Epicaste 151–2 ergodic literature 7, 167 n.20 Eris 114–17, 156, 187 n.15 ERIS ΦΑΓΟΝ 110, 114–17, 124, 127, 131 Ernst, Max 61–2, 151 Euboean text, see Nestor’s Cup evolution 38, theory of recapitulation 170 n.25 Exekias 72, 79 Fagles, Robert 134 fan blade 114, 116 Felton, Curtis Conway 75 Fifty Days at Iliam (Cy Twombly) 76–8, 146 fishing buoy 84, 90, 92–3, 95, 99–100, 103 125, 128, 130–1 Flaxman, John 71, 75 Foley, John Miles 194 n.52 Frame, Douglas 46–7 Frogs (Aristophanes) 70, 193 n.43 Fry, Edward 54–5 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 10, 135 genius 3, 19–21, 29 Geometric 38, 45, 71–2, 83 Orientalizing/Sub-Geometric 38, 40–1, 45, 175 n.5 Gift (Man Ray) 63–4, 66 gloss 80, 183 n.31 Goldilocks 24–5 Gombrich, Ernst 38 Gould, Steven Jay 17, 38 Graziosi, Barbara 4, 6, 69, 159 Grethlen, Jonas and Luuk Huitink 15 Gris, Juan 60, 135, 156–7 guslar 153, 194 n.52 Hadrian 151 Hardwick, Lorna 142, 160 Harpy Candleholder (Sam Smith) 64 hermeneutics, see interpretation Hector 100–3, 128, 156, 188 n.21 HEKTOR ΕΧΩ 90, 100–3, 110, 117, 124, 127–8, 131 Helen 39, 50, 121, 156 HELENA ΑΕΘΛΟΝ 110, 117, 124, 127, 131

Index Hellenistic period 70 Hephaestus 43, 48, 96 Heracles 38 Hercules (Clements and Musker) 37–8 Here, This is Stieglitz/Faith and Love (Francis Picabia) 67, 180–1 n.33 Hesiod 149–50, 193 n.43 hexameter 3, 6, 48–50, 104, 193 n.42 Hockney, David 2, 19–21 Homer 73, 152–3 apotheosis 70–1, 82 biographical tradition 78, 149–50, 153, 192 n.41, see also Certamen blindness 13, 70 iconography 69–71, 149, 181 n.3 immanent versus transcendent 10, 77–8, 149 Homeric poetry 39, 43, 54 artistry 1, 6–7, 12, 148 cinematic quality 42 language 6–8, 82, 138–9, 146, 148–9, 159, 166 n.15, see also Kunstsprache multi-textuality 4, 136 oral-formulaic 1–3, 19, 136, 169 n.17 representation 9–10, 71–3, 75–7, 81 scholarship 2–3, 7, 12, 17, 28, 50, 53, 77, 133, 159 Urtext 4, 77 horse-leader motif 45–7 House of Leaves (Mark Z. Danielewski) 7, 167 n.20 Howe, Michael 20 Hubel, David and Torsten Wiesel 14 iconography 17, 45, 48, 65, 68–70, 78, 82, see also representational systems Christian 59–60 Roman 59–60 Iliad 79, 90, 93, 100, 103, 107, 110, 114, 116, 121, 124–5, 128, 146, 152, 156 illusionistic naturalism 17, 21–4, 26–7, 50–1, 56, 59, 171 n.32 inscription, see Nestor’s cup intaglio 59–60 interpretation 22–5, 27, 68, 134–6, 140, 157 as construction 3, 12, 16, 147–8 dialectical 63, 148–9, 153 game-like 63–4, 149–50, 153

217

Jeffrey, L. H. 44 Jenison, Tim 19–20 juxtaposition 60, 62, 82, 144, 150, 153, 190 n.20 comparative relationships 9, 11, 78, 90 sculptural assemblage 10 violent 190 n.18 Kahane, Ahuvia 3, 53, 136 kallistephano 48–9 kleos 50, 79, 93, 100, 103, 110, 116, 121, 137, 156, 189 n.11, 194 n.53 Kunstsprache 6, 11, 82, 136, 138–9, 146, 166 n.15 Lattimore, Richmond 4, 7, 134, 188 n.2–3 Lesotho, see Sotho lifela/sefela 34, 50, 173 n.52 literacy, see writing Logue, Christopher 134, 188 n.2 Lord, Albert 2–3, 153, 165 n.4 Machaon 47 magic 33, 43, 47, 176 n.9 Mahlangu, Esther 31 Marcoci, Roxana 58 Martin, Richard 29–30, 154 Martindale, Charles 134–6 material culture 35, 38–9 materiality 21, 59, 64, 83 meander 39 broken 43, 46 tree 43, 48–9, 176 n.14 Medieval 18, 59–60, 73 Meister, Karl 6, 138 memory 58, 138 Menelaus 50, 121, 128–30, 156, 188 n.22 MENELAOS ΒΟΑΩ 84, 124, 128–31 metaphor 33, 35, 50, 66, 82, 135, 139, 194 n.49 Michigan Papyrus 193 n.43 Miletus 175 n.5, 177–8 n.24 mimesis 19, 21, 55, 141 Modernism 26, 54, 58, 134, 171 n.32 Mouseion (Alcidamas) 193 n.43 Muellner, Leonard 8, 53, 136, 138, 167 n.22 multi-sensory perception 14–15 multi-textuality, see under Homeric poetry

218 mural art, see under Ndebele Muses 13, 78, 145, 152 invocation of 13, 145, 153–4, 168 n.1 Mutwa, Credo 174 n.54 myth 10, 21, 137, 151, 189 n.9 Nagy, Gregory 3, 29, 53, 72, 136–7, 148 composition in performance 3, 136 ritualistic antagonism 137 therapon 156, 195 n.57 naturalism, see illusionistic naturalism Ndebele 29–31, 35 mural art 30–1, 171 n.39 Ndzundza style 29–31, 51 Umbhalo 31 Neoclassicism, see under Classicism Nestor 40, 45–6, 50, 125–8, 156, 184 n.33 Gerenian horseman 46, 128 NESTOR ΝΟΟΣ 84, 124–8, 131 Nestor’s cup 17, 40–3, 45–7, 49–50, 71, 76, 175–6 n.6 Noë, Alva 15 nostos 79, 90, 93, 103–4, 110–11, 189 n.11, 194 n.53 Odysseus 79, 90–3, 100, 104, 107, 111, 118, 121, 156, 187 n.17–18, 194 n.53 as unreliable narrator 90, 185 n.1 ODYSSEUS ΜΗΤΙΣ 84, 90–3, 96, 99, 106–7, 113–14, 120, 131, 147 and the Phaeacians 104, 184 n.32 Odyssey 79, 90, 98, 100, 103–4, 107, 110–11, 118, 120, 124–5, 128, 130, 154, 156 Odyssey-Landscapes 73, 81 Oedipus 152–3 optical devices 19, 27 camera obscura 15, 19 169 n.14 impact on painterly style 171 n.32 oracle 27, 151–2, see also riddle colonization 152, 193 n.48 Hadrianic 151 orality 4, 51 Homeric 196 n.6, see also Homeric poetry Irish 29 South African 29, 34–5, 51, 196 n.5 Yugoslavian 196 n.6 Oresteia 104, 154, 186 n.9

Index Ortega, Damian 53, 62, 180 n.23 Ovid 65, 150 Panofsky, Erwin 55, 61 parataxis 10, 78, 82, 144–5, 147, 193 n.42 Parry, Milman 2–3, 28, 133, 153, 160, 169 n.17 in Paris 161 and structuralism 196 n.6 Patroclus 9, 47, 93 Penelope 93, 104–7, 156, 186 n.10 and Clytemnestra 9, 186 n.9 PENELOPE ΑΡΕΤΗ 84, 103–7, 110, 113–14, 120, 128, 131 photography 15, 22–3, 26–7, 51, 55, 61 Picabia, Francis 66, 68, 149 Picasso, Pablo 8, 22, 26, 58, 153 Bull’s Head 142 collage and assemblage 56–8, 63 Les Demoiselles d’Avignon 56–7, 161 metal and cardboard constructions 57–8, 161 Neoclassical works 54–5 reversible form 57, 63 She-Goat 60–1, 179 n.17 Still Life with Chair Caning 57–8 veiled assemblages 61–2, 151 Pithecusae 17, 40, 48 Plaatje, Sol 5 playful hermeneutics, see interpretation Poggi, Christine 60, 63 polychromy 39, 64, 83, 180 n.27 Polydeuces, see Diosuri polysemy 6, 8, 153 euchomai 8, 167 n.22 Pope, Alexander 9, 75–6, 134, 146, 183 n.26 portraiture 10, 65–6, 135–6 potnia theron 46 Powell, Barry 11, 184 n.33 primary action 154, 156 Pseudo-Herodotus, see under Homer pun 26, 152, see also riddle, polysemy Rauber, D. F. 142–3 Rauschenberg, Robert 64, 151 Ray, Man 53, 63–4, 66 reader, see audience Reliquary of Saint Foy 59–60

Index reciprocal characterization, see under juxtaposition reception 133, 142, 150, 160 reflexivity 51, 55, 61, 67, 78, 83, 155 Renaissance 18–19, 21, 26, 55, 74 representational systems 2, 7, 10, 15–16, 18, 22–7, 42–3, 51, 56–7, 68, see also iconography aniconic 46 anthropomorphic 46, 50, 59 rhapsode 146, 148, 192 n.38 Rhodes 40, 175 n.5 rhythm 83–6, 185 n.41 Riace Bronzes 55–6 riddle 152, 194 n.49 Riegl, Aloïs 22 Rieu, E. V. 134 ritual 136–7 Roman 56–7, 59–60, 73 Rosetti, Dante Gabriel 134 Sammons, Benjamin 11, 80, 154 sculptural assemblage 1, 10, 12, 51, 53–4, 62, 143, 146, 155 veiled assemblage 61–2 sculpture 19, 23–4, 170 n.26 Seasons (Giuseppe Arcimboldo) 66, 78 Seddon, Deborah 33, 196 n.5 sefela, see under lifela Shakespeare, translation of, see Plaatje, Sol sight 13–16, 26, 56, 192 n.33 habits of seeing 16, 42, 50–1 simile 9, 16, 75–6, 139–43, 147, 191 n.26 discordant 144, 191 n.28, 161 extended 141 incompatible 191 n.24 multiplied 140–1, 161 nuclear 140 technological 143 Siyazama project 32–3, 42 skyphos, see bird-bowl Slatkin, Laura 137, 154 Smith, Sam 53, 64 Socrates 25, 170 n.29 Sotho 31–2, 34 blankets 31–2, 172 n.45 special speech, see Kunstsprache Spies, Werner 61 Squire, Michael 18, 38, 56–7, 59–60

219

Steadman, Philip 20, 21 style 39, 56–7, 151 sympathetic antitheses, see under juxtaposition symposium 41, 48, 175 n.6 tambourine 107, 109–10 Telemachus 39, 98–100, 125, 156, 186 n.6 in the Certamen 151–2 TELEMACHOS ΟΦΕΛΛΩ 90, 96–9, 103, 106–7, 113–14, 120, 128, 131 Thamyris 13, 67, 78, 152, 154, 168 n.3, 184 n.33 THE DEITIES 78, 110, 113, 117, 120, 124, 128, 131 THE KINGS 78, 124, 127, 131 THE WARRIORS 78, 90, 99, 103, 110, 27, 131 THE WIVES 78, 103, 106, 110, 127 Thompson, George Derwent 28–9 Tim’s Vermeer (Jillette and Teller) 19–20 tree of life 46, 48 tradition/traditional 17, 28, 30, 35, 39 arts and crafts 5, 22, 33, 39, 58, 64 perceptions of 28–9, 35 poetry 5, 33–4, see also orality translation 133–5, 140, 159–60, 196 n.5 aesthetic 2, 12, 134–6 Trojan Cycle 38, 72 Trojan war 50, 107, 110, 116, 121 duration 109 Twombly, Cy 76–8, 146 Uden, James 150 Urtext, see under Homeric poetry vase painting 37–9, 72 Vedic Twins 46 viewer, see audience Virgil 74–5, 149 vision, see sight visuality/visualization 9, 13–15, 42, 50, 139, 141 comparative 139, 162 Walcott, Derek 142, 160 West, Martin 151

220 Whitaker Richard 4–6, 133–4, 188 n.2 critique of 4, 6, 9 Wolf, Friedrich August 3, 165 n.3 writing 33, 35, 72, 76 boustrophedon 77, 183 n.28 punctuation 44–5

Index scriptio continua 77, 183 n.28 stoichedon 44 Xhosa 33–4 Zulu 4, 9, 32–5, 173 n.52

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