Guest Lecture: Dr. Will Austin speaks about Greek vase painting
Guest Lecture: Dr. Will Austin speaks about Greek vase painting
Please join the Department of Classics and the Department of Art History and Archaeology in welcoming Dr. Will Austin, who will be delivering a talk entitled "From Paintings to Vases: Ornament and the Surface Decoration of Attic Decorated Pottery," on Thursday, September 19, at 5 pm.
Will Austin obtained his PhD from Princeton University in May 2024. He is currently a postgraduate research associate at that university, and a visiting assistant professor of art and design at the Pratt Institute. The Department of Classics at UMD is particularly happy to welcome him back, since he is also an alumnus of our graduate program (MA in Classics 2017).
Here follows an abstract of his talk:
Despite a recent claim that “ornament is back,” studies of ancient Greek art have been slow to follow this general trend. Primarily used as typological tool, ornament on Greek vases has seldom been treated as a functional historical phenomenon in its own right. With the decoration of Greek pottery traditionally interpreted as “paintings” and as evidence for the lost art of Classical wall and panel painting, ornament simply serves as a frame to the pictorial space of figural decoration. In this conception of ornament and figure in terms of frame and image, the importance of the three-dimensional vase in determining the form and placement of painted decoration is largely ignored. The vase itself becomes little more than a passive carrier for images not unlike the walls of a modern museum.
This paper proposes to reconceive what counts as frame and framed, with both ornamental and figural decoration serving as a frame for the functional vessel. Ornament, through its form and placement, materialized the presence of the three-dimensional vase by emphasizing and articulating the solidity of surfaces. In doing so, ornament embedded figures in the surface of the vessel as opposed to pictorial space. Rather than attempt to depict a framed window into an illusionistic world of pictorial space, vase-painters throughout the Classical period remained committed to their task of decorating an object, the purpose of which depended on the solidity of surfaces. In order to reveal the vase-painter’s commitment to surfaces, the discussion will focus on vases on which painters deliberately juxtaposed ornament with figures that explicitly take on certain formal characteristics of their surface-bound, ornamental surrounds. Rather than innovators in the depiction of dematerialized pictorial space, vase-painters such as the Berlin Painter, Polygnotos, and the Meidias Painter attempted to highlight the surfaces of the vessel through varied decorative schemes.