BMCR 2009.04.43: Clary on Lowenstam, As Witnessed by Images: The Trojan War Tradition in Greek and Etruscan Art

Steven Lowenstam, As Witnessed by Images: The Trojan War Tradition in
Greek and Etruscan Art.  Baltimore:  Johns Hopkins University Press,
2008.  Pp. xiii, 230.  ISBN 9780801887758.  $50.00.

Reviewed by Todd Clary, Cornell University ([email protected])
Word count:  2601 words
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[Authors and titles are listed at the end of the review.]

Steven Lowenstam died of cancer in 2003 at the age of 57. As Witnessed
by Images: The Trojan War Tradition in Greek and Etruscan Art is thus
his final contribution to the fields of Classics and Art History. After
Dr. Lowenstam's death, as per his own request, his friend and colleague
T.H. Carpenter graciously saw the book through to publication; but the
manuscript and bibliography are essentially as they were in 2003 when
the author himself stopped working on them.

Near the end of an article in 1993,[[1]] Lowenstam envisioned a
comprehensive reconsideration of correspondences and discrepancies
between scenes represented both in Homeric poetry and in archaic vase
paintings. Given that the ever-expanding Beazley Archive now houses
about 1,000,000 vase records, and that a staggering number of these
records deal with Trojan War/Homeric material, the fulfillment of this
vision involves a monumental task beyond the capabilities of one
scholar, or even group of scholars.  As Witnessed by Images, a slim
volume of 229 pages housing 86 figures of Greek and Etruscan art, only
brings us a small step closer to this grand goal. In fact, another book
published in 2008, Homer: Der Mythos von Troia in Dichtung und Kunst
edited by Joachim Latacz,[[2]] an over 500 page tome with hundreds of
figures, clearly comes closer to accomplishing a comprehensive
comparison of poetry and art in the Trojan tradition. But Lowenstam's
most important contribution is not one of volume. It is rather the
illuminating methodological precedent he sets for comparative analysis
of poetry and art of the archaic and classical periods, a precedent
that facilitates a long overdue unification of the fields of classical
philology and ancient art history.

In his Introduction, Lowenstam makes it clear that As Witnessed by
Images does not follow prevailing methodological paradigms, which he
groups roughly into two categories. Philologically based paradigm 1
gives primacy to the Homeric poems by focusing on similarities between
visual art and presentations of similar scenes in the Iliad and Odyssey
as they have come down to us. Clearly this model is at a loss to
explain the pervasive and often significant differences between
artistic and literary scenes. More often than not its adherents end up
accusing the artists of ignorance of their own mythic tradition.
Paradigm 2, which might be termed the art historian's approach,
liberates vase painters and sculptors from slavish adherence to the
Homeric versions of myth by asserting an independent evolution of
visual themes. Artists may have known the Iliad and Odyssey, but in
presenting a particular scene largely disregarded that knowledge. A
corollary to the second paradigm is what has been called the 'folktale
model'. It assumes that artists, instead of drawing from Homeric, or
any other poetic sources, drew from mythological tales they had heard
as children. Lowenstam rejects paradigm 2 because, among other things,
it fails to explain why painters sometimes wrote snippets of lyric and
epic formulae on their works. Both paradigms generally work under the
assumption that the artists' only possible poetic frame of reference
was Homer. The many differences between Homer and art, therefore, mean
that art operates at a distance from poetry: the artists were either
ignorant or simply ignored the details of the oral and/or literary
traditions of their time.

Lowenstam's own approach, paradigm 3, treads a middle ground between
the first two paradigms. This is essentially the same middle ground he
advocated before in several journal articles.[[3]] Paradigm 3 is
different from 1 and 2 in two ways. First, it does not assume that our
Iliad and Odyssey were canonical in the 6th and 5th cent. BCE; other
versions of Trojan myth were both circulating and influential. Second,
it asserts an interactive culture between poetic and visual mythmaking,
an intertext between poetry and art that does not demean the artists
any more than Virgilian intertext with Homer demeans Virgil. One
advantage of this approach is that it enables us to acknowledge
differences from Homer without feeling compelled to assert that the
artists were ignorant of their own mythology. Another is that it
accounts adequately for the fact that vase painting in particular was
both an art form and business. Hence, in Lowenstam's own words,
"artisans had to keep close tabs on their customers' knowledge....
Painters could not recast mythic narratives into completely new stories
that might not be understood by their viewers." (6). Paradigm 3
incorporates the best parts of the other 2 paradigms. Each visual
reenactment is simultaneously a deeply traditional, but not necessarily
Homeric, retelling of a mythic motif with many precedents and
multiforms, and an act of autonomous affiliation capable of reflecting
the values and tastes of the culture and time of the artists and their
clientele.

If paradigms 1 and 2 represent polar extremes, the absolute dominance
of Homer on one side and complete freedom from all poetry on the other,
Lowenstam does not always take a position in the exact middle of these
polarities. At times, he moves closer to a philological paradigm by
firmly asserting an alternate literary tradition behind vase paintings
at variance with Homer. The Thersites section in Chapter 3 provides a
good example of this. Here, he compares two red-figure Apulian vases, a
calyx krater, ca. 390 BCE, and a volute krater, ca. 340 BCE. On the
first, Thersites appears as a handsome young man in heroic pose with a
writing implement in his right hand. A comment by Trendall, desperate
to see some trace of Homer's negative portrayal of Thersites in this
scene, sums up previous schools of thought: "his right hand holds what
looks like a stylus, as if he were intending to take notes of the
proceedings, which might later serve his spiteful purposes."[[4]]
Lowenstam recognizes the desperation of this approach and rightly
asserts that the painter is following a different tradition that
portrays Thersites in a positive light. The second vase, on which
Achilles has killed Thersites, and Diomedes attempts to draw his sword
to avenge his cousin's murder, supports this thesis, as do Proclus,
Apollodorus, et al. Thus, the Thersites motif provides an excellent
example of relatively late artists following non-Homeric literary
sources. In the Exekias section in Chapter 1, on the other hand,
Lowenstam moves closer to paradigm 2. Here, he restricts discussion to
the black-figure painter's Vatican masterpiece (ca. 540 BCE). One side
of this vase depicts Achilles and Ajax playing a board game. Some have
thought that this episode must originate from a lull in battle in a
lost narrative. Lowenstam, however, asserts Exekias' independence. The
painter has invented the scene; the idea of Achilles and Ajax playing a
board game is not derived from poetic sources. The only connection to
poetic tradition is more abstract than that asserted for depictions of
Thersites on Apulian pottery; it is the judgment of the relative worth
of the two heroes. Inscriptions on the vase reveal that Achilles has
scored a 4, Ajax a 3; the point is to compare the two best Achaean
warriors with Achilles coming out on top, just as he does in Homer
(Iliad 2.768-69). For want of evidence to the contrary, however, the
type scene of two warriors at draughts developed independently in the
visual tradition.

Moving now to the overall organization of As Witnessed by Images, the
book consists of three chapters that accord to geographic and
ethnographic developments in painting and sculpture. Chapter 1 focuses
on the art of mainland Greece, Chapter 2 the Greek artists of South
Italy, and Chapter 3 Etruscan art in Central Italy. I take it to be no
accident that each chapter's sections alternate with some semblance of
symmetry between mythical type scene, on the one hand, and individual
piece, artist, style period, or artistic venue on the other. This
alternation reflects the delicate balance that Lowenstam strikes
between mythic tradition and artistic autonomy. Whether alternating
between the ransom of Hector theme and Kabiric perspectives in Chapter
1, the funeral of Patroklos and the Dolon Painter in Chapter 2, or
Achilles' immolation of Trojan youths and the Torre San Severo
sarcophagus in Chapter 3, he always asserts the individuality of the
artist or style period and the persistence of traditional motifs
simultaneously.

At the beginning of Chapter 1 Lowenstam seeks to explain what he calls
an "astonishing event." At roughly the same time (mid 7th century BCE),
four separate painters, one Attic, one Peloponnesian and two Etruscan,
all depicted the blinding of Polyphemus. Romantic interpretations of
this coincidence view it as heralding the birth of Homer's Odyssey, but
Lowenstam finds nothing on these vases suggestive of any particular
knowledge of that poem. Instead, he attributes the popularity of the
Polyphemus scene at this time to the mindset of a Greek world involved
in exploration and colonization. He argues this possibility quite
persuasively and notes that, as a rule, visual representations of
Odyssean myth precede those of Iliadic myth during periods of
exploration and expansion. This conclusion typifies his emphasis on the
interface between poetic traditions and contemporary cultures. The next
section, Corinthian Perspectives, deals especially with portrayals of
Paris and Helen. Perhaps the most interesting analysis here occurs in
the discussion of a depiction of the marriage of Paris and Helen in
which one horse is named 'Polupentha'. Lowenstam notes that this "name"
is an epic word meaning 'much grief' and that the painter may have been
etymologizing the name to indicate the grief this wedding would
eventually cause. It is refreshing to see someone actually read vase
inscriptions philologically, given the tendency among scholars to
attribute illiteracy to painters at the drop of a hat, and chalk up as
non sequitur any inscription posing any sort of challenge.

In Chapter 2 Lowenstam moves to Magna Graecia, asserting that vase
painting there was at the same time deeply traditional and consciously
modernizing. We find the same myths repeated from the vases of mainland
Greece, but also find innovations, like parasols used to mark social
status, hippocamps, etc. Particularly notable is the treatment of the
funeral of Patroclus by the Darius Painter (340/330 BCE). While this
episode, taken in its entirety, is quite traditional, the central scene
of the vase depicts Achilles' sacrifice of Trojan youths. This
slaughter is well known from the Iliad, but we have no other
representations of it on ancient pottery. The scene does not
straightforwardly celebrate Achilles' heroism, but focuses on his
cruelty and the brutal killing of innocent youths, a theme appropriate
to a funerary context, perhaps of a young man killed before his time.
In general, Chapter 2 is quite strong in assessing the ways in which
the function of vessels, in many cases funerary vessels like the volute
krater or loutrophoros, influenced the representations of myth on them.


Lowenstam's application of paradigm 3 is an especially welcome addition
to scholarship on Etruscan visual presentations of Greek myth. Since in
this case we are dealing with non-Greeks, scholars have felt at liberty
to assume that Etruscan artists copied Greek originals without
understanding the myths behind the images. This has been called the
banalization of myth, a school of thought advocated in the 20th century
by Camporeale and Schauenburg.[[5]] Lowenstam is not the first to speak
against this school, but his analysis of Achilles' ambush of Troilus as
it appears in Etruscan painting demonstrates that the Etruscans both
knew this Greek myth in intricate detail, and actively incorporated its
elements to fit their own aesthetic sensibilities. In particular, in
emphasizing the presence of Apollo Lykeios in the episode they brought
to the fore the motif of human sacrifice. This motif is present on the
Greek side of the Trojan cycle, but doubly relevant to the Etruscans,
who, according to Livy (7.19.2-3), actually sacrificed prisoners. In
his analysis of animal imagery included in the arming of Achilles scene
on the Monteleone di Spoleto chariot, Lowenstam once again illustrates
Etruscan knowledge of the epic tradition. In the end, as Chapter 3
progresses, the idea that Etruscans had faulty knowledge of their Greek
models seems less and less plausible.

Overall, As Witnessed by Images is a well-organized, insightful and
relevant contribution to its field. The one substantive point of
contention I have involves Lowenstam's dating of our Iliad and Odyssey
to the 6th century BCE. Keep in mind that Latacz, in the edition
mentioned above which also purviews Trojan myth in art, sticks to an
8th century dating of Homer (43-7). In the end, the chronology of Homer
is uncertain, and likely to remain a topic of debate. Given this
uncertainty, I suppose one is free to date Homer to the 6th century,
but Lowenstam at times appears to rest too much of his methodological
paradigm on a late date. In his Introduction, he makes such statements
as "chronology constitutes the main issue in discussing the relation of
painters and poets" and "it all comes down to relative chronology" (7).
Granted, a few pages later he is more cautious, but by then the
impression has already been created that some part of his thesis rests
on a late date for Homer. Ultimately, there are two questions of
chronology at issue: one answers when our Iliad and Odyssey came into
existence, the other answers when Homer so thoroughly trounced rival
poets that his versions became canonical in art. If we allow ourselves
to imagine the Iliad and Odyssey in existence from the 8th to the 6th
centuries, perhaps even widely disseminated, but still only two epics
in a poetic culture teeming with other Trojan War poems, there is no
need to question the actual date of Homer based on discrepancies with
art. In other words, Homer cannot be canonical in the 5th century for
paradigm 3 to work, but he need not be non-existent. Lowenstam himself
does seem to acknowledge this at the end of his Introduction, so this
is not a major problem. I would just have recommended that he be a bit
less emphatic about the importance of relative chronology, and a bit
more unambiguous in stating that his paradigm does not depend on a date
for Homer that is later than many will be willing to admit. In the end,
it would be unfortunate if the issue of chronology detracted from the
contribution As Witnessed by Images makes to the unification of
classical philology and ancient art history, which is, after all, its
ultimate goal.

Turning to the more mundane matter of publication quality, note that
the images in the book are sometimes rather small, and in black and
white on regular, rather than photo-quality paper. In many cases they
still provide adequate points of reference to Lowenstam's discussions,
but at other times the reader will need to consult more detailed
publications to follow his analysis.

Table of Contents:
List of Illustrations ix
Foreword, by T. H. Carpenter xiii

Introduction 1
Paradigms and the Role of Poetry 4
Chronology 7
Purposes and Methodology 10

Chapter 1: Greece 13
The Franc,ois Vase 20
Corinthian Perspectives 27
Troilos and Achilleus 35
Exekias 39
Sirens 43
Ransom of Hektor 51
Fifth-century Portraits of Achilleus and Odysseus 63
Kabiric Vases 71
Conclusions 80

Chapter 2: Megale Hellas 84
Trojan Topics 91
The Funeral of Patroklos 93
Thetis' Touch and an Embassy to Achilleus 98
The Dolon Painter 103
Thersites 110
Lykaon 114
Conclusions 120

Chapter 3: Etruria 124
The Monteleone di Spoleto Chariot 128
The First Pania Pyxis 136
The Ambush of Troilos 139
Fifth-century Mirrors 148
Achilleus' Immolation of Trojan Youths 157
The Torre San Severo Sarcophagus 165
Aftermath and Conclusions 170

Conclusion 174
Notes 177
Bibliography 207
Index 223
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Notes:


1.   Lowenstam, S. 1993. "The Arming of Achilleus on Early Greek
Vases." Classical Antiquity 12.199-218 (page 216).

2.   Latacz, J, et al. 2008. Homer: Der Mythos von Troia in Dichtung
und Kunst. Basel and Munich.

3.   In addition to the article cited in note 1, see: "The Uses of Vase
Depictions in Homeric Studies." TAPhA 122 (1992), 165-98; "The Sources
of the Odyssey Landscapes." Echos du Monde Classique / Classical Views
39 (1995), 193-226; and "Talking Vases: The Relationship between the
Homeric Poems and Archaic Representations of Epic Myth." TAPhA 127
(1997), 21-76.

4.   Trendall, A.D. 1967. The Red-figured Vases of Lucania, Campania
and Sicily. Oxford (page 41).

5.   Camporeale, G. 1965. "Banalizzazioni etrusche di miti greci."
Studi in Onore di Luisa Banti, 111-23; 1968. "Banalizzazioni etrusche
di miti greci, II." Studi Etruschi 36.21-35; 1969. "Banalizzazioni
etrusche di miti greci, III." Studi Etruschi 37.59-76. Schauenburg, K.
1970. "Zu griechischen Mythen in der Etruskischen Kunst." Jahrbuch des
Deutschen Archaeologischen Instituts 85.28-81.