Image and Text in Graeco-Roman Antiquity

by Michael Squire

Overview

The relation between the visual and the verbal spheres has been much contested in recent years, from laments about the 'logocentricism' of the academy to the heralding of the 'pictorial turn' of the multimedia age. This lavishly illustrated book recontextualises these debates through the historical lens of Greek and Roman antiquity. Dr Squire shows how modern Western concepts of 'words' and 'pictures' derive from a post-Reformation tradition of theology and aesthetics. Where modern critics assume a bipartite separation between images and texts, classical antiquity toyed with a more playful and engaged relation between the two. By using the ancient world to rethink our own ideologies of the visual and the verbal, this interdisciplinary book brings together classics and art history, as well as a sustained reflection on their historiography: the result is a new and explosive cultural history of Western visual thinking.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781107657540
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	02/05/2015
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	560
Product dimensions:	6.60(w) x 9.50(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Michael Squire is a Research Fellow at Christ's College, Cambridge, and concurrently holds an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship at Humboldt Universität, Berlin. He is also the co-author (with Nigel Spivey) of Panorama of the Classical World, 2nd edition (2004).

Table of Contents

Preface: kicking the habit?; Part I: 1. Words and pictures in a post-Lutheran age; 2. Towards an older Laocoon? Reviewing the 'limits' of painting and poetry in the Graeco-Roman world; Part II: 3. Materialising ecphrasis: image and word in the Sperlonga Grotto; 4. Speaking for pictures? Images, texts and modes of visual-verbal response in the 'House of Propertius' at Assisi; Part III: 5. Cyclopian iconotexts: the adventures of Polyphemus in image and text; 6. The art of nature and the nature of art: visual-verbal interactions in the consumption of Roman 'still-life' paintings; Envoi: the bigger picture.

Editorial Reviews

"This book is a major contribution to our understanding of image-text interactions in antiquity." —BMCR

From the Publisher