Drawing the Greek Vase

Another specialist subject area covered by SACRA members is one that crosses the disciplines of Classics, Archaeology and Art History. Several members across different schools work on visual and material cultural receptions of Graeco-Roman antiquity. One recent publication on this kind of reception is a volume of collected essays entitled “Drawing the Greek Vase” (2023), edited by Caspar Meyer (Bard College) and Alexia Petsalis-Diomidis (SACRA).

The volume asks how two-dimensional images of ancient Greek vases shaped modern perceptions of these artefacts and of the classical past? This is the first scholarly volume devoted to the exploration of drawings, prints, and photographs of Greek vases in modernity. Case studies of the seventeenth to the twentieth century foreground ways that artists have depicted Greek vases in a range of styles and contexts within and beyond academia.

Alexia has also recently co-edited “The Classical Vase Transformed: Consumption, Reproduction, and Class in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain” (OUP 2020) with Edith Hall. This collection of articles explores working-class and middle-class engagements with Ancient Greek vases in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain. It foregrounds the people who produced and used cheap ceramic reproductions of Greek vases, and the growing number of non-elite museum goers. It argues that bodily imitation of vases, such as paintresses in the Potteries copying Greek vase motifs, and Emma Hamilton performing her ‘Attitudes’ which draw on Greek vase iconography, should be valued as a form of embodied knowledge, alongside elite connoisseurial approaches.