From Temples to Museums: Post-Classical encounters with Classical antiquities
Caspar Meyer
For most of us museums provide the most common setting for viewing physical remains from antiquity, although none of the pieces we find there was originally made to be shown in such a place. The change in context has many implications for how archaeological objects are engaged with and understood by the viewer. While most modern museums purport to offer a ‘neutral’ viewing space (one that lets the object ‘speak for itself’) the creation of museum displays involves choices and decisions that inevitably shape viewer experiences and condition his or her interpretation of the object and its original cultural context. This module explores the many intended and unintended outcomes of encountering Greco-Roman antiquity through museums. We will examine the assumptions and didactic goals shaping modern display practices and try to understand how the resulting interpretative habits differ from those prevalent in antiquity. In so doing, we will explore some of the different ways by which objects acquire meaning. Our primary goal is to develop our capacity for interpreting artefacts by gaining a better understanding of the role of context and the strengths and limitations of different methods of analysis. Among the subjects covered in this course are: Display and the creation of meaning; Archaeology after
Winckelmann; Civilization as a museum narrative; Roman collecting and discourses of art;
Ancient viewing, from Pausanias to Christianity; Ancient antecedents of modern museums;
“How it really was”: the uses of dioramas and reconstructions; Between object and viewer: agency and affective viewing; Between the Greeks and us: understanding the classical revolution.
Preliminary Reading
A. Potts, Flesh and the ideal: Winckelmann and the origins of art history (New Haven and
London, 1994).
C. Whitehead, Museums and the construction of disciplines: art and archaeology in nineteenth-century Britain (London, 2009).
I. Jenkins, Archaeologists and aesthetes in the sculpture galleries of the British Museum,
1800-1939 (London, 1992).
J. Elsner, Art and the Roman viewer (Cambridge, 1995).
M. Beard and J. Henderson, Classical art: from Greece to Rome (Oxford, 2001).
M. StansburyO’Donnell, Looking at Greek art (Cambridge, 2010).
N. Merriman (ed.), Making early histories in museums (London, 1998).
R. Osborne and J. Tanner (eds.), Art’s agency and art history (Oxford, 2007).
V. Newhouse, Art and the power of placement (New York, 2005).
W.J.T. Mitchell,
“Nature and convention: Gombrich’s illusions”, in
Iconology: image, text, ideology (Chicago, 1986).