Michael Squire, Ph.D.

Project

Vision and Invisibility in the Imagines of the Elder Philostratus

Die Bilder Philostrats des Älteren sind ein griechischer Text aus dem 3. Jahrhundert n. Chr., der sich mit dem grundlegenden Problem der Kunstgeschichte befasst: Wie kann man visuelle Bilder in verbalen Diskurs übersetzen und umgekehrt? Philostrat benutzt eine (vorgebliche) Galerie an der Küste Neapels, um die Mittel zu erforschen, mit denen wir Bedeutung in dem finden, was wir sehen. Die resultierende Abhandlung hat unmittelbare Bedeutung für den künstlerischen, kulturellen und intellektuellen Horizont der Spätantike (und auch der griechisch-römischen Archäologie davor). Aber sie besitzt auch unbedingte Relevanz für die Kunstgeschichte als wissenschaftliche Disziplin, denn Philostrat deckt die spielerischen Zwischenräume auf, die immer und notwendigerweise die Sphären des Visuellen und des Verbalen verbinden.
Ich möchte das Jahr am Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin dazu nutzen, eine thematische Monographie zu Philostrats Bilder zu schreiben, wobei ich ihre Bedeutung nicht nur für Klassische Philologen und Archäologen, sondern auch für alle diejenigen erkläre, die sich mit der Bildwissenschaft überhaupt beschäftigen. Mein Ziel ist es zu zeigen, wie Philostrats Unternehmen, Bilder in Worten heraufzubeschwören, einer überlegten Intervention innerhalb spätantiker Diskurse über Ikonizität, Form und Repräsentation gleichkommt - Debatten, die, wie die Bilder selbst, sowohl verbal wie visuell vermittelt wurden und die eine intellektuelle Bedeutung besitzen, welche weit jenseits ihres ursprünglichen kulturhistorischen Kontextes liegt. Das Buch wird einerseits historisch ausgerichtet sein: Es wird den Text innerhalb älterer Diskussionen um Bilder, Worte und dem Verhältnis zwischen den beiden verorten, wobei Philostrats beschriebene Malereien vor dem Hintergrund des Übergangs von mimetischen und naturalistischen Darstellungsformen zu den sehr stilisierten visuellen Ausdrucksweisen der späteren römischen Kaiserzeit gelesen werden. Andererseits wird die Monographie die Frage stellen, wie dieses Werk aus dem 3. Jahrhundert weitaus aktuellere Diskussionen um die Interaktionen zwischen Bild und Text bereichern könnte.
Das Buch wird genaue literarische und kunsthistorische Lesarten des Textes mit einer ausgewogenen Reflexion der Kunstgeschichte und ihrer Geschichte als Disziplin kombinieren. Dabei ist es meine Absicht, neue intellektuelle Brücken nicht nur zwischen den (allzu oft abgegrenzten) Fächern "Klassische Philologie" und "Klassische Archäologie", sondern auch zwischen den Klassischen Altertumswissenschaften und der Kunstgeschichte im Allgemeinen zu schlagen.

Lektüreempfehlung
Squire, Michael. The Iliad in a Nutshell: Visualizing Epic on the Tabulae Iliacae. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
- The Art of the Body: Antiquity and its Legacy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.
- Image and Text in Graeco-Roman Antiquity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Colloquium, 21.05.2013

POP goes the picture!

Sed quemadmodum si litteras pulchras alicubi inspiceremus, non nobis sufficeret laudare scriptoris articulum, quoniam eas pariles, aequales decorasque fecit, nisi etiam legeremus quid nobis per illas indicauerit: ita factum hoc qui tantum inspicit, delectatur pulchritudine facti ut admiretur artificem; qui autem intellegit, quasi legit. Aliter enim uidetur pictura, aliter uidentur litterae. Picturam cum uideris, hoc est totum, uidisse, laudasse: litteras cum uideris, non hoc est totum, quoniam commoneris et legere.

But if we were looking at beautifully written letters somewhere, it would not suffice for us to praise the hand of the writer - the fact that he has made them uniform, symmetrical and elegant - unless we were also reading what, through them, he has conveyed to us. In the same way, the person who views this deed [Christ’s miracle of the loaves and fishes] might be so pleased with the deed’s beauty as to admire the person performing it. Yet the person who understands it is, as it were, the person who reads. For a picture is looked at in one way, and letters are looked at in another. When you have seen a picture, the activity is complete: to have seen is to have praised. When you have seen letters, the thing is not complete: for you are reminded also to read. (St Augustine, Tractates on John’s Gospel, XXIV, ch. 2)


What does it mean to experience an image as compared with experiencing a text? How is "reading" like - as indeed unlike - "viewing"? And where do the (medial/ ideological/ cultural/ theological/ cognitive/ phenomenological) boundaries lie between visual and verbal modes of response?

Thankfully, perhaps, my colloquium won’t try to solve all these questions (after the Enlightened manner of Lessing’s 1766 Laocoon, or on the Boundaries of Painting and Poetry). In returning to such issues, my aim is rather a historicist one, albeit with transhistorical aspirations: on the one hand, to demonstrate the intellectual effervescence of such questions among ancient Graeco-Roman thinkers, above all in the third and fourth centuries AD (the period often dismissed as "late antiquity"); on the other, to relate such thinking to larger methodological challenges in the contemporary study of (inter alia) art history and comparative literature.

The talk itself will be a game of two halves. The first section will outline the problem of conceptualising visual-verbal relations, examining some of the various theoretical and cross-disciplinary stakes. This will lead to a brief introduction of my main WiKo project: a thematic monograph on the Elder Philostratus’ Eikones (more familiar by its Latin title, Imagines - referring at once to real and metaphorical sorts of "images"). Philostratus' text, written in Greek by a master rhetorician of the early third century AD, evokes a purported gallery of some 65 paintings; it is framed as a rhetorical exercise, addressed to a young boy and a group of elder male youths. Yet by speaking for pictures, the Imagines also acts out for them (and so in turn for us readers) the essential challenge of all pictorial description. Drawing on a Greek literary and artistic canon, as well as on contemporary theories of rhetorical visualisation, Philostratus teases out the collaborating and competing strategies of words and pictures - but always self-reflectively, and with a rhetorical glint in his eye.

This sketches the background for my second section, focused on a second ‘late-antique’ work. The Eikones might not be a household name. But a number of Fellows share my fascination with Philostratus’ text. To put us all on an equal footing, and to help us think harder about historical context, I therefore introduce a fourth-century Latin author who is virtually unknown (I hope) to even the most learned of classicists: Publilius Optatianus Porphyrius. For all their different contexts, remits and generic frames, Optatian's 31 poems share some remarkable affinities with Philostratus’ text, figuring poems as pictures and pictures as poems (in line with Horace’s famous declaration of ut pictura poesis - "as a picture, so is poetry"). Unloved and overlooked, this ludicrously ludic corpus interrogates the interface between literal and literary "seeing": POP's "calligrams" avant la lettre act out, in a unique way, a similar set of hermeneutic tensions between viewing and reading.

I end, as I begin, with a series of questions. How does such visual-verbal play relate to the broader cultural parameters of "late antiquity"? Why do these issues become so pressing an intellectual (and in turn theological) concern at this time? And what (if anything) might my case studies contribute to broader disciplinary - and indeed interdisciplinary - approaches to art and literature, across a much larger spatial-cum-chronological span?

Publications from the Fellows' Library

Squire, Michael (Berlin, Boston, 2018)

A picture of ecphrasis? : Re-viewing the Homeric shield of Achilles in the Younger Philostratus (Imagines 10)

Squire, Michael (Berlin, 2018)

Ornament and figure in Graeco-Roman art : rethinking visual ontologies in classical antiquity

Squire, Michael (New York, NY, 2017)

POP art : the optical poetics of Publilius Optatianus Porfyrius

Squire, Michael (Edinburgh, 2016)

Homer and the Ekphrasists : text and picture in the Elder Philostratus' 'Scamander' (Imagines I.I)

Squire, Michael (Napoli, 2015)

Morphogrammata

Squire, Michael (London, 2015)

Patterns of significance : Publilius Optatianus Profyrius and the figurations of meaning$dMichael Squire

Squire, Michael (2015)

Roman art and the artist

Squire, Michael (2014)

Der Körper des Princeps : zur Problematik eines monarchischen Körpers ohne Monarchie

Squire, Michael (2014)

Counterfeit in character but persuasive in appearance : reviewing the ainigma of the Tabula Cebetis

Squire, Michael (Cambridge, 2013)

[Rezension von: Prettejohn, E., The modernity of ancient sculpture]