The Afterlives of Greek Sculpture Interaction, Transformation, and Destruction

The Afterlives of Greek Sculpture is the first comprehensive, historical account of the afterlives of ancient Greek monumental sculptures. Whereas scholars have traditionally focused on the creation of these works, Rachel Kousser instead draws on archaeological and textual sources to analyze the later histories of these sculptures, reconstructing the processes of damage and reparation that characterized the lives of Greek images. Using an approach informed by anthropology and iconoclasm studies, Kousser describes how damage to sculptures took place within a broader cultural context. She also tracks the development of an anti-iconoclastic discourse in Hellenic society from the Persian wars to the death of Cleopatra. Her study offers a fresh perspective on the role of the image in ancient Greece. It also sheds new light on the creation of Hellenic cultural identity and the formation of collective memory in the Classical and Hellenistic eras.

Introduction; Part I. The Afterlives of Greek Sculptures: 1. Dangerous afterlives: the Greek use of 'voodoo dolls'; 2. Use and abuse: toward an ontology of sculpture in ancient Greece; Part II. Barbaric, Deviant, and Unhellenic: Damage to Sculptures and its Commemoration, 480–31 BC: 3. 'Barbaric' interactions: the Persian invasion and its commemoration in early classical Greece; 4. Deviant interactions: the mutilation of the herms, oligarchy, and social deviance in the Peloponnesian war era; 5. Collateral damage: injury, reuse, and restoration of funerary monuments in the early Hellenistic Kerameikos; 6. State-sanctioned violence: altering, warehousing, and destroying leaders' portraits in the Hellenistic era; Conclusion: the afterlives of Greek sculptures in the Roman and early Christian eras; Bibliography.

Rachel Kousser is Professor and Executive Officer of Art History at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She was educated at Yale University, Connecticut and at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, where she received her PhD in Greek and Roman art history. She has received fellowships from the Getty Research Institute, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Center for the Advanced Study of the Visual Arts, and the Mellon Foundation. Her first book, Hellenistic and Roman Ideal Sculpture: The Allure of the Classical was published by Cambridge University Press in 2008. She has also written for such publications as the American Journal of Archaeology, the Art Bulletin, and Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics. Her research interests include Greek sculpture, cultural exchange through art, and the intersection of monuments and memory.