BMCR 2009.05.62: Papadopoulos on Langdon, Art and Identity in Dark Age Greece, 1100--700 B.C.E

Susan Helen Langdon, Art and Identity in Dark Age Greece, 1100--700
B.C.E.  Cambridge/New York:  Cambridge University Press, 2008.  Pp.
xviii, 388.  ISBN 9780521513210.  $90.00.

Reviewed by John K. Papadopoulos, University of California, Los Angeles
([email protected])
Word count:  2004 words
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In this bold, innovative, and highly original study, Susan Langdon does
away with many old, rather tired, and often labored ways of looking at
Greek "Geometric" art and in so doing breathes new life into the
iconography of the period between 1100 and 700 B.C. For too long the
study of Geometric art has been dominated by the shadow of Homer, a
tyranny of the text so pervasive that behind each image there had to be
some hint, however remote, of epic narrative.[[1]] Hence, a shipwreck,
no matter how anonymous, had to be that of Odysseus and his companions;
a chariot race could only be the funerary games for Patroklos or some
other hero, and a strange pair of "twins" on a trick vase in the
Athenian Agora were ingeniously interpreted, in 1936, a year after its
discovery, by Roland Hampe as the young Nestor battling the so-called
Aktorione-Molione twins described in Iliad XI.707ff.[[2]] This is not
to say that Langdon eschews Homer; she simply reads Homer in a
different, and I would argue, more enlightened manner.

Beginning in the 19th century, interpretations of scenes on Greek
Geometric pottery, bronzes, ivories, and other small finds flourished,
each one trying to surpass an earlier interpretation, each limited only
by the imagination of its author. A classic case in point is the
celebrated dinos in the British Museum (1899.2-19.1) depicting a ship,
with some 40 rowers at the ready to carry across the sea the
over-life-size man who grasps the arm of a similarly large woman
stepping onto the boat. The ways in which the iconography of this vase
has been interpreted by earlier scholars is a tale deftly told by
Langdon. Although originally considered by A.S. Murray in 1899--who
read the two sides of the vase together--as funerary activities
culminating in a ship race,[[3]] the couple was later variously
identified as Ariadne and Theseus, as Helen and Paris (or Menelaos), as
Jason and Medea, or even as Hektor and Andromache (p. 19). As Langdon
elaborates, more recent interpretations approach the scene in "real
life" terms, namely, as an abduction marriage or simply "a blameless
sea-captain taking leave of his wife", though she dutifully lists a
whole slew of doubters.[[4]]  Langdon goes on to relate Klaus
Fittschen's exhaustive discussion of the vase, and the passage deserves
to be quoted in full as it typifies Langdon's wonderful manner of
dealing, kindly yet firmly, with less-than-satisfying scholarship:
"....Fittschen's 1969 discussion of the krater remains unsurpassed for
thoroughness. He surveyed the range of mythical possibilities, testing
an exhaustive iconographic analysis against literary sources. His
process of elimination yielded only negative results. Because of
conflicting iconographic clues, he concluded, the ship scene cannot be
matched with any legend and must represent a contemporary
eighth-century departure of a man, with or without the woman, the
meaning of which is ultimately unknowable. It is hard to find a flaw in
this logic, or to be satisfied with the results. They offer little to
enlarge our understanding of Geometric art" (p. 21).

The beauty of Langdon's achievement lies in the fact that she looks
beyond the traditional focus on an Early Iron Age society dominated by
warrior males (a society so beautifully fashioned by Homer) as well as
elites and non-elites (Ian Morris's kaloi and kakoi), and the focus on
processes of change that emphasize class-based aspects. Instead,
Langdon brings in women and children, a simple yet radical departure
from earlier scholarship. By means of a combination of iconographic
analysis, well informed with gender theory, mortuary analysis, and
object biography, Langdon brings to the fore the manner in which
figural representation was used to mediate critical stages--what Van
Gennep's termed rites de passage[[5]]--in the life of both men and
women. By approaching Greek Geometric art as inventive and expressive,
Langdon succeeds in bringing us nearer to the experience of its
original audience (cf. p. 8).

Following a succinct Introduction (pp. 1-18), which lays out the
organization of the study, and "The Collaborative Enterprise of
Geometric Art", "Geometric Art and the Early Greek Community", and
"Listening to Homer", the first of five chapters is entitled "Art Made
to Order" (pp. 19-55). The chapter begins with the abduction dinos in
the British Museum already referred to, and turning to the theoretical
underpinnings and reasons for connecting Geometric pictures with social
rituals, Langdon neatly sets out the premises and methods of her
approach. Here context, and contextualizing imagery, loom large,
constrained, of course, by contemporary poetic evidence that provides a
glimpse, however fleeting, of a cultural "mentality". What also looms
large is the idea that "significant objects" involved collaboration
between patron and artist within the framework of a social occasion.
What Langdon uncovers is a growing expression of collective identities,
the very identities that bound communities and institutionalized roles
and inequalities. As she concludes the chapter, "Geometric art is busy
with agenda, mediating relationships, behavioral codes, a normative
view of men and women, families and communities. Elite self-definition
leads the way but does not oppose wider group interests. It will define
Greek culture for generations to come" (p. 55).

Chapter 2 (p. 56-125) entitled "Geometric Art Comes of Age: An
Archaeology of Maturation", looks at the evidence for maturation rites
that prepared boys for adulthood. This, together with the following
chapters, documents the creation of what Langdon calls "ideal" gender
types. She argues that the use of imagery in rites of passage offered
avenues for competitive behavior, as well as a means of ranking and
reinforcing a new ideal of masculinity. Here Langdon casts her net
wide; the list of chapter sub-headings gives something of a clue of the
wide range of themes covered: Children and Material Culture; Trial by
Amazon; Being and Becoming; The Case of Kato Syme; Geometric Centaurs:
Good, Bad, and Ugly; Gorgons and Medusa: The Maiden Behind the Mask;
Masking Rituals; and A Need for Monsters. The chapter begins with the
Tiryns bothros, a ritual context which brought to light the remarkable
terracotta shield depicting a male warrior brandishing his sword and
grasping the helmet of his opponent, a woman; an Amazon. In this
chapter, much of the focus is on context and the alternative meanings
that emerge when motifs are encountered in other contexts. Throughout
the chapter, Langdon is careful to avoid the pitfalls of the
anachronistic application of later texts and rituals to an earlier
period.

In Chapter 3 (pp. 126-196), Langdon turns to the construction, through
ritual and image, of the "virtuous" maiden as a social type and female
chastity as a community value. Entitled "Virgin Territory: The
Construction of the Maiden", the chapter opens with a dour Hesiod, for
whom maidens are constituted, first and foremost, by their bodies. It
is in this chapter where mortuary analysis plays a pivotal role,
particularly the rich corpus of female graves in Athens, especially
those of girls and younger women. From the Early Iron Age cemeteries in
the Kerameikos and the later Classical Agora, Langdon goes on to look
at how the maiden was visually constructed by Geometric artists.
Following the work of Ken Dowden, Langdon analyzes the physical
attributes that construct the maiden; beauty and fertility are seen
against the backdrop of other elements, not least Dowden's "sympathetic
landscape" of nymphs and maidens.[[6]] Throughout the various regional
styles of Greek Geometric pottery, the maiden row dance is a major
theme, and Langdon analyzes the act of dancing from a regional
perspective, beginning with the Argolid, and moving on to Attica and
other regions. Langdon returns to mortuary analysis with the
interesting iconography on the large cylindrical funerary urn that
contained the inhumation of a child: a classic example of enchytrismos.
The scene is interpreted against the backdrop of the Theban
Daphnephoria, embodying features of maturation ritual: separation,
liminality, age-group, and inversion, and from Thebes Langdon moves to
dancing at the early Argive Heraion. What is perhaps most startling
about Langdon's analysis is the simple realization that young "women
and girls are everywhere more visible in the early Greek archaeological
record than are young men" (p. 195).

In chapter 4 (pp. 197-233), "Maiden, Interrupted: The Art of
Abduction", Langdon explores developments in later Geometric
iconography that set the maiden into narrative situations involving
abduction, and these, she argues, foreshadow the marriage paradigm of
the Classical period. There is the abduction from the dance, as well as
abduction by centaur. We return, full-circle, to the London abduction
dinos, and related scenes that involve a couple and a ship. As Langdon
notes (p. 216), the ship motif has long been connected with possible
Bronze Age roots as a sacred hieros gamos theme of ultimately Near
Eastern derivation. Consequently, related iconography in Minoan glyptic
is scrutinized to see whether the abduction--marriage equation has a
prehistory. The smoking gun here is the manned getaway ship, which is
found in Minoan and Mycenaean, as well as Geometric and Archaic
representations, in a variety of media.

Not only does the male capture the maiden, he also captures the oikos.
This is the theme of Chapter 5, "The Domestication of the Warrior" (pp.
234-291). The chapter relocates, as it were, the social actors, as
Langdon puts it, from the realm of myth into the "reality" of the Early
Iron Age oikos (p. 17). She begins by investigating the pictorial
construction of adult masculinity and then examines alternative
paradigms for marriage, including the ideological construction of
marriage as an increasingly androcentric institution. In addition to
the representational realm, Langdon focuses on the actual remains of
Geometric houses, with especial attention on the most fully
investigated Geometric settlement at the site of Zagora on Andros (pp.
263-276). By comparing representations of the oikos in the context of
ritual with actual changes in domestic space, Langdon succeeds in
providing a chronological dimension to the dichotomies evident in
pictorial representation.

There is a brief Epilogue (pp. 292-297). Here the focus is very much on
the climax of the Geometric period: the 8th century B.C. and Langdon
cogently questions the modern-day view of the 8th century
"renaissance", which may even obscure as much as it enlightens the
significant patterns of the period. Rather, Langdon views Geometric
material culture through a social lens that yields important insights
into art, society, and religion. A central tenet of her study is "that
societal change in early Greece was consciously or unconsciously
maneuvered through stages of maturation" (p. 293). Rather than limiting
the enquiry as it always was to two options: did Geometric pictures
depict everyday objects and happenings or were they expressions of a
mythic consciousness? Langdon suggests a third alternative: "As a true
representational system, the Geometric pictorial style constituted a
widely accepted means of depicting reality in terms that complicated
social life and created difference" (p. 293).

Envisioning Geometric pictorial representation as a highly social
phenomenon is not, as Langdon notes (p. 17), a challenging task. What
is more difficult is what Langdon tries to achieve: to return Geometric
art to the rituals of life. I suspect that some more traditional
Classical art historians may not warm to every aspect of this book, as
it unsettles the comfortable manner in which many scholars have looked
at image and text as analogues of one another. But this is the
challenge of Art and Identity: it shows us that many of the questions
previously asked, and indeed the very premises by which Geometric
iconography was approached, were off-track, if not flawed.

In short, this is a spectacular book and, to my mind, one of the most
intelligent analyses of Greek Geometric art ever written. Its
brilliance lies in its simplicity. Reading through it, it is remarkable
how many times I found myself thinking: "why hasn't anyone thought of
this before?!" Well conceived and thought through, thoroughly
researched, richly illustrated, and elegantly written, Art and Identity
is a "must-read" for anyone even remotely interested in early Greece.
It will quickly take its place as a seminal study, one that will
re-orient the way in which we look at pictures in the corpus of Greek
Geometric figural representation.


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Notes:


1.   See, most recently, A.M. Snodgrass, Homer and the Artists: Text
and Picture in Early Greek Art, Cambridge 1998.

2.   R. Hampe, Fruehe griechische Sagenbilder in Boeotien, Athens 1936,
87-88, fig. 31; for full discussion and references, see J.K.
Papadopoulos, "Tricks and Twins: Nestor, Aktorione-Molione, the Agora
Oinochoe and the Potter Who Made Them," in P.P. Betancourt, V.
Karageorghis, R. Laffineur and W.-D. Niemeier, eds., Meletemata:
Studies in Aegean Archaeology Presented to Malcolm H. Wiener as he
enters his 65th Year (Aegaeum 20), Lie\ge 1999, 633-640.

3.   A.S. Murray, "A New Vase of the Dipylon Class," JHS 19, 1899,
198-201.

4.   Including G.S. Kirk, "Ships on Geometric Vases," BSA 44, 1949,
93-153; S. Brunns[aring ]ker, "The Pithecusan Shipwreck: A Study of a
Late Geometric Picture and Some Basic Aesthetic Concepts of the
Geometric Figure-Style," OpRom 4, 1962, 232, note 3; K. Fittschen,
Untersuchungen zum Beginn der Sagendarstellungen beiden Griechen,
Berlin 1969; A.M. Snodgrass, An Archaeology of Greece: The Present
State and Future Scope of a Discipline Berkeley 1987, 166-169; T.
Rombos, The Iconography of Attic Late Geometric II Pottery (SIMA-PB
68), Jonsered 1988; G. Ahlberg-Cornell, Myth and Epos in Early Greek
Art: Representation and Interpretation (SIMA 100), Jonsered 1992.

5.   A. Van Gennep, Rites de Passage Paris 1909, though this seminal
work is not referred to by Langdon.

6.   See K. Dowden, The Uses of Greek Mythology, London and New York
1992; see further Dowden, Death and the Maiden: Girls' Initiation Rites
in Greek Mythology, London and New York.