Item Infomation
| Title: | Looking for references to Sappho’s songs in Athenian vase paintings: preliminary comments |
| Publisher: | Harvard University, Center for Hellenic Studies |
| Description: | In this essay, I am not looking for references to the text of Sappho’s songs in Athenian vase paintings. Instead, I look merely for traces of pictorial references to the contents of these songs, especially as performed in the city-state of Athens during the classical period, in the fifth century BCE and beyond. In other words, I am looking for aspects of Sappho’s songs that Athenians of that era would have remembered from hearing these songs being performed at symposia and even at public concerts—especially at the festival of the Great Panathenaia. But we are faced with a problem whenever we consider more closely this kind of remembrance by audiences—and even by the painters who were surely part of such audiences. Just as the painters of classical Athens, masters of their visual art, would have tuned in, as it were, to the masters of verbal art who transmitted, in performance, the songs of Sappho, these painters would have been no different from the general audiences if they also remembered many other kinds of relevant songs besides those of Sappho, and their references to any and all such songs in any single painting would not need to be compartmentalized. So, whenever we happen to see in any given painting some detail that corresponds to a detail we read in a surviving text of Sappho—or even in some later text where Sappho is being imitated—we cannot really expect such painted details to be restricted to any single song attributed to Sappho or to any other maker of songs, as if such a song were merely a text. Instead, we do need to expect, in any given painting, a possible mixing of different details heard in different songs. Such mixing, however, would not disprove the reality of references actually made in visual art to specific details that would be heard in verbal art. As my first example of such a reality, I show here a close-up from an Athenian painting that dates back to the fifth century BCE. The Classics Version of Record |
| URI: | http://lib.yhn.edu.vn/handle/YHN/562 |
| Other Identifiers: | Nagy, Gregory. 2020.10.30 "Looking for references to Sappho’s songs in Athenian vase paintings: preliminary comments." Classical Inquiries. http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hul.eresource:Classical_Inquiries. https://nrs.harvard.edu/URN-3:HUL.INSTREPOS:37366770 |
| Appears in Collections | Tài liệu ngoại văn |
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