The Frame in Classical Art A Cultural History

The frames of classical art are often seen as marginal to the images that they surround. Traditional art history has tended to view framing devices as supplementary 'ornaments'. Likewise, classical archaeologists have often treated them as tools for taxonomic analysis. This book not only argues for the integral role of framing within Graeco-Roman art, but also explores the relationship between the frames of classical antiquity and those of more modern art and aesthetics. Contributors combine close formal analysis with more theoretical approaches: chapters examine framing devices across multiple media (including vase and fresco painting, relief and free-standing sculpture, mosaics, manuscripts and inscriptions), structuring analysis around the themes of 'framing pictorial space', 'framing bodies', 'framing the sacred' and 'framing texts'. The result is a new cultural history of framing - one that probes the sophisticated and playful ways in which frames could support, delimit, shape and even interrogate the images contained within.

Part I. Framing the Frame: 1. Framing the visual in Greek and Roman antiquity: an introduction Verity Platt and Michael Squire; Part II. Framing Pictorial Space: Introduction Verity Platt; 2. The frames of Greek painted pottery Clemente Marconi; 3. Unframing the representation: the frontal face in Athenian vase painting Guy Hedreen; 4. Framing the Roman still life: Campanian wall painting and the frames of make-believe Michael Squire; Part III. Framing Bodies: Introduction Michael Squire; 5. Framing Archaic Greek sculpture: figure, ornament and script Nikolaus Dietrich; 6. Framing and social identity in Roman portrait statues Jennifer Trimble; 7. Framing the dead on Roman sarcophagi Verity Platt; Part IV. Framing the Sacred: Introduction Verity Platt; 8. Framing divine bodies in Greek art Milette Gaifman; 9. How the Gauls broke the frame: the political and theological impact of taking battle scenes off Greek temples Robin Osborne; 10. Visual ontologies: style, archaism and framing in the construction of the sacred in the western tradition Jas' Elsner; Part V. Framing texts: Introduction Michael Squire; 11. Framing technologies in Hero and Ptolemy Courtney Roby; 12. Writing, reading, and seeing between the lines: framing late-antique inscriptions as texts and images Sean V. Leatherbury; 13. Envoi: framing 'antiquity' Rebecca Zorach.

Verity Platt is Associate Professor in the Departments of Classics and History of Art at Cornell University, New York. She has held fellowships at the University of Oxford, the University of Chicago, the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton University, New Jersey, and the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University. She is the author of Facing the Gods: Epiphany and Representation in Graeco-Roman Art, Literature and Religion (2011), as well as numerous articles on Roman wall-painting, ancient theories of the image and artists' lives. With Michael Squire, she is also editor of The Art of Art History in Graeco-Roman Antiquity (2010).
Michael Squire is Reader in Classical Art at King's College London; he has held fellowships at Cambridge, Cologne, Harvard, Munich, Stanford and the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. His books include Image and Text in Graeco-Roman Antiquity (2009), The Art of the Body: Antiquity and its Legacy (2011), The Iliad in a Nutshell: Visualizing Epic on the Tabulae Iliacae (2011) and an edited volume on Sight and the Ancient Senses (2016). He was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize in 2013 for his research into classics and art history.