Concepts of Time and Temporality in the Visual Tradition of Late Archaic and Classical Greece

335 Pages·2014·36.81 MB·English

Concepts of Time and Temporality in the Visual Tradition of
Late Archaic and Classical Greece

SeungJung Kim

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

2014
© 2014
SeungJung Kim
All rights reserved
ABSTRACT

Concepts of Time and Temporality in the Visual Tradition of Late Archaic and Classical
Greece

SeungJung Kim

This dissertation presents, for the first time, a freestanding account of notions of time and
temporality as seen in the visual arts of the late Archaic and Classical Greece and contextualizes
it within the larger cultural history of time. There is a growing consensus among scholars
regarding a societal shift in fifth-century Greek attitudes towards time, from the authority of the
past to the uncertainties and the immediacy of the present. This dissertation explores such
changing notions of time in the visual tradition in four different ways: firstly through the
personification of the key notion of kairos, which embodies on many levels the manifestation of
this new temporality; secondly by investigating the emergent interest of the “historical present” in
the artistic subject matter of the so-called Historienbilder; thirdly through a detailed investigation
of new pictorial strategies in Greek vase painting that carry specific temporal attributes, by
focusing on the motifs of jumping, lifting and dropping; and lastly, by dissecting the anatomy of
the popular motif of "erotic pursuits" in vase painting, which embodies the sensory nature of this
new temporality that hinges upon the notion of suspense and delay. These investigations employ
a new phenomenological framework that centers on the “embodied viewer”, connecting the
temporality as understood by the viewer with that which is portrayed in the object, bringing
together the visible temporality in art and the experienced temporality of the society, which the
viewer inhabits. This framework is first sketched out by offering a phenomenological reading of a
full 3-D digital reconstruction of the Lysippan Kairos. Such changes in the notion of time in the
visual arts, seen as early as the late sixth century BCE and fully manifest in the Classical period,
is also put into relief by a brief examination of analogous literary techniques, with a focus on the
case of Aeschylus.
Table of Contents

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ………………………………………………………iii
DEDICATION …………………………………………………………………….v
INTRODUCTION: Time in Greek Art………………………………………… 1

CHAPTER 1. On the Wings of Time: Kairos and the Lysippan Statue……….. 11
1.1 Kairos: A Time for the Arts ………………………………………………11
1.2 The Lysippan Kairos: Literary and Visual Sources ………………………22
1.3 The 3D Digital Reconstruction of the Lysippan Kairos ………………… 33
1.4 Putting Kairos in Perspective……………………………………………. 40

CHAPTER 2. The Art of Now: The Emergence of Historienbilder in Context…53
2.0 Anecdotal Proem…………………………………………………………53
2.1 Introduction………………………………………………………………56
2.2 Actuality into Myth? Resisting Assimilation…………………………….59
2.3 The Tyrannicides Sculpture Group………………………………………66
2.3.1 The Founders of Democracy: Making of Heroes,
Remaking of Humans……………………………… 69
2.3.2 The Sculpture Groups: Visual Evidence…………………….. 76
2.3.3 Viewing the Tyrannicides and Playing the Roles:
Harmodios or Hipparchos? …………………………82
2.4 The Marathon Painting in the Stoa Poikile………………………………93
2.4.1 Reconstruction of Francis and Vickers:
Fallible Pausanias………………………………….. 95
2.4.2 Reconstruction of Stansbury-O'Donnell:
The Triumph of Presentism…………………………113
2.5 Conclusion: Toward a Phenomenology of Historienbilder……………. 118

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CHAPTER 3. Caught in the Moment: Feeling Time Against Gravity………… 122
3.1 Introduction: The Pioneer Group in the History of
Greek Vase Painting ………………………………..122
3.2 Jumping Bodies ………………………………………………………... 130
3.3 Heavy Lifting: The Case of Euphronios……………………………….. 144
3.4 Dropping Objects ………………………………………………………158
3.5 Conclusion …………………………………………………………….. 169

CHAPTER 4. Catch Me If You Can: An Anatomy of Suspense in
Erotic Pursuits on Greek Vase Painting ………………………... 172
4.1 Introduction.……………………………………………………………. 172
4.2 Precedents for Red-Figure Erotic Pursuits.…………………………….. 178
4.2.1 Protocorinthian Pursuits……………………………………… 178
4.2.2 Red-Figure Preview: “Animation”……………………………181
4.2.3 Black-Figure Pursuits…………………………………………187
4.3 Red-Figure Pursuits……………………………………………………. 201
4.3.1 Basic Statistics……………………………………………….. 201
4.3.2 Gender Consideration…………………………………………205
4.3.3 A Visual Reading: From Politics to Phenomena.……………. 209
4.4 The Formal Structure of Pursuits………………………………………. 211
4.5 The Anatomy of Suspense………………………………………………219
4.5.1 The Paradox………………………………………………….. 219
4.5.2 The Chase……………………………………………………. 223
4.6 Aeschylus: Vision, Stagecraft, and Suspense………………………….. 228
4.7 “Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes”: The Gaze,
Kottabos, and Kairos………………………………………. 239
4.8 Conclusion………………………………………………………………251

CONCLUSION: Toward a Temporal Revolution in Greek Art ………………256

Figures…………………………………………………………………………….. 263
Bibliography……………………………………………………………………… 325
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I must admit, rather wholeheartedly, and without hesitation, that composing a second
dissertation within one's lifetime is not for the fainthearted. But I am glad I did. And there are, of
course, numerous people I must thank, and I am afraid I shall have to do so here rather sparingly
and without doing justice to those who deserve more. I owe a great deal to my dissertation
supervisor, Prof. Ioannis Mylonopoulos, who adopted me immediately upon his arrival to
Columbia; his exceptionally generous spirit and passion for advising was nothing short of an
ideal role-model, especially as I now embark on the "real" academic path. I also thank Prof.
Francesco DeAngelis, who has helped me along throughout my career at Columbia and was,
among other things, an early advocate of my fascination with theory. I thank in particular
Professors Helene Foley and Deborah Steiner in the Classics Department, who were both very
influential and supportive for this project. I give thanks to my former advisor Prof. Clemente
Marconi for getting me to where I am, and Prof. Mark Stansbury-O'Donnell, who surprised me
by being such a fan of my ideas despite the fact that I had totally overlooked his own, highly
relevant work. Needless to say, his body of work has become the building blocks for a part of
this dissertation. I have had many a great teacher to look up to, and in the domain of the study of
Time, I must single out two that were both highly influential to the formation of this work: Prof.
Keith Moxey and Prof. David Albert, whose works on Time—from the philosophical to the
physical—will continue to inspire and spur me beyond my narrowly defined field of study.
Finally, I thank all my friends, colleagues and family who helped me throughout the process in
more ways than I can enumerate: my sister Miru, who continues to inspire me from the Middle
East, my composer brother Il-Jung at NYU, my parents back in Seoul, Korea, who are the most
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diehard fans of me and who are themselves the most amazing scholars I have ever known. I
finally thank Benjamin for his understanding and encouragement (as well as taking on the
daunting task of being the first to proofread these pages below).

And lastly, I thank the late Professor Natalie Kampen, whom I know is terribly proud of me,
right now, at this very moment. I dedicate this volume to her.

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DEDICATION

To Tally

v
Introduction: Time in Greek Art
“Painting in its co-existing compositions can only make use of one moment
of action, and must therefore choose the most pregnant one, by which the
past and future may be rendered most intelligible.”

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoön, p. 316

In G.E. Lessing’s seminal essay on comparative aesthetics, systematic distinction between
the ‘arts of time’ and the ‘arts of space,’ namely, poetry and painting—or more generally,
narrative and visual arts—gives fundamental structure to his exploration of the character of these
respective genres.1 In 1964, E. H. Gombrich, in his “Moment and Movement in Art,” comments
that Lessing’s dichotomy remained unquestioned for two centuries, accounting for the relative
neglect of temporal exploration in pictorial representations. To Gombrich the notion that a
picture represents a punctum temporis, or an instant, is “not only an absurdity logically, it is a
worse absurdity psychologically.”2 Building up from the days of Franz Wickhoff, who
systematically formulated the notion of "continuous narrative" in the context of Roman Art
(interestingly, just around the time of the invention of cinema), we have come to accept the
notion that the pictorial arts can never be divorced from time and temporality; even a

1 Lessing 1865.
2 Gombrich 1964, 297.
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photographic image, requiring various durations of exposure, is not exempt from the Zeno-like
paradoxical discourse.
The past several decades have witnessed an ever-increasing interest in the relationship
between time and image, whether it is philosophical or aesthetic in nature, or grounded in the
particulars of certain visual materials. The former may tap into the limitless historical discourses
on the philosophy of time,3 or modern cognitive sciences,4 while the latter usually concentrates
their efforts on visual narratives, exploring temporal relations within the perimeter of pictorial
narrations.5 The field of visual narratology, in close relation to literary narratology, is a growing
discipline associated most often with contemporary visual studies, as well as film studies. Many
of such studies, however, operate on the notion of image as an autonomous object that needs to
be scrutinized, implying a generic, passive viewer, assuming a static viewing position.
Specifically in the field of Greek art, there have been a number of exploratory efforts
during the last century on decoding pictorial narrative strategies, culminating with Stansbury-
O’Donnell's Pictorial Narrative in Ancient Greek Art (1999), which provides the most up to date
and comprehensive volume on visual narratology in the field.6 While based on Roland Barthes’
work on Structuralist Narratology in literary studies, Stansbury-O'Donnell attempts to create
from scratch, a self-sufficient system of formalist visual narratological elements as building

3 See Le Poidevin 2007; For anthologies on the philosophy of time, see Gale 1967, Le Poidevin and Macbeath 1993;
see also Turetzky 1998 and Wagner 2008.
4 e.g., Currie 1995.
5 See, for example, Brilliant 1984; Dehejia 1997.
6 For previous discussions on pictorial narrative strategies, see Weitzmann 1947; Shapiro 1994, 1-10; Snodgrass
1982.
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