We found a match
Your institution may have access to this item. Find your institution then sign in to continue.
- Title
Embodying the Dead on Classical Attic Grave‐Stelai.
- Authors
Squire, Michael
- Abstract
This essay examines ‘the embodied object in classical antiquity’ in relation to Classical grave-stelai, produced in Athens between the late fifth and late fourth centuries BCE. Situated above family periboloi, stelai probe the problem of transforming bodily loss into physical manifestation: on the one hand, they materialize questions about the ontology of the dead – about what the dead are, were, or have ceased to be; on the other, these objects mediate between the disembodied dead and the sensory bodies of the living. The essay begins by exploring Greek attitudes towards the dead, before attempting a brief survey of the history and scholarly historiography of Attic funerary memorials. It then homes in on some Classical examples, teasing out a number of recurring tropes. Fundamental to gravestelai, the essay argues, is the ‘interdimensional’ space of relief, existing between three-dimensional plasticity and two-dimensional surface. As present monuments to the absence of the deceased, Classical stelai frame the dead in an inherently ambiguous realm: the very medium of relief situates the figural subjects in a representational field related to but removed from the bodily dimensions of the living
- Subjects
ATTIKE (Greece); GRAVE stele (Archaeology); DEAD; HUMAN body &; society; GREEK sculpture
- Publication
Art History, 2018, Vol 41, Issue 3, p518
- ISSN
0141-6790
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1111/1467-8365.12386