Visual Cultures of Antiquity
The aim of the project is the evaluation of the archaic pottery finds of the excavation campaigns 2004-2013 (excavation director Prof. Dr. WD Niemeier) and 2014 (excavation director Prof. Dr. Katja Sporn) of the German Archaeological Institute, Athens Department, from the sanctuary of Kalapodi (Phokis) under typological as well as statistical aspects.
For more information on the Kalapodi project, see:
https://www.dainst.org/projekt/-/project-display/25884
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In addition to ceramic imports, especially from the major production centres of the Archaic period, Corinth and Athens, which are attested in the sanctuary, as well as isolated local imitations of imported wares, a high percentage of the material consists of simple, monochrome painted local wares.
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Exterior of the Attic black-figure bowl from Kalapodi
(around 490 BC) (Photo: M. Stark) |
Local skyphos from Kalapodi (Photo: M. Stark) |
Within the framework of the evaluation of the material, the relationship between imported and local pottery is to be determined in order to gain indications of the regional and supra-regional importance of the sanctuary in archaic times. Another aspect is the question of the range of forms and types of vessels used in the sanctuary context and the ritual practice associated with them. Furthermore new insights into the development of local pottery production are to be gained in comparison with other find sites and neighbouring regions.
Contact Person: Dr. Michaela Stark
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The project is dedicated to the recording, analysis and evaluation of the use of group portraits as a tool of political discourse in the Roman imperial period. Three work packages are currently planned: a monograph on the representation of princes in the early imperial period; a diachronic study of group portraits in the political discourse of different societies; an exhibition on the functioning and perception of group portraits. |
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Augustus for Gaius and Lucius Vienna, Numismatic Collection, Kunsthistorisches Museum, ID56871 |
Contact Person: Prof. Dr. Katharina Lorenz
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The project is dedicated to the question of whether and with the help of which medial strategies the figurative representations on Roman funerary monuments initiate communication between clients and recipients. The narrative system and the strategies of guiding the gaze will be examined. The starting point of the study are the funerary monuments of the 2nd and 3rd century AD from the province of Gallia Belgica, which are particularly well suited for such a study due to their richness of figures and variety of representational themes. In addition to the striking richness of detail, the images are often characterised by the impression of constant movement. The themes of (trade)networks and the crossing of spaces or the bridging of spatial distances play a prominent role. Another narrative strategy that the study focuses on is the diverse use and function of framing elements for the narrative systematics: the scenes are framed on the outside by building ornamentation or figuratively and vegetatively decorated pilasters. The scenes themselves are framed in different ways by furniture, architectural elements or landscape elements. These frames fulfil different, sometimes contradictory functions. They divide and limit the space just as much as they expand and open it for the viewer's gaze, as the figures break through these boundaries in different ways.
This first part of the project is connected to the DFG project started in 2016 at the Institute for Archaeological Sciences at J.W. Goethe University Frankfurt:
Roman funerary monuments from Augusta Treverorum in supraregional comparison
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Payment scene of the so-called circus monument from Neumagen (© GDK/Rheinisches Landesmuseum Trier, Photo: M. Stark) |
Contact Person: Dr. Michaela Stark
On 17 December 2020, the virtual workshop "Visuality and Perception in the Greek World in the Late Classical and Hellenistic Periods" took place, organised by Katharina Lorenz and Claudia Schmieder (Classical Archaeology at JLU) with the support of Section 5 Media and Art of the Centre for Media and Interactivity and the assistance of Hilke Wagner and Tamara Ziemer. In five lightning talks , 10-minute presentations by individual researchers, thirty scholars from Germany, France, Great Britain, Italy, Luxembourg and the USA (Fig. 1) exchanged views on phenomena of vision and visibility in the material remains and literature of the "long" 4th century BC, and how such an examination allows conclusions to be drawn about practices of ancient perception in a time horizon marked by significant visual changes.
The first two contributions were devoted to the role of transitions in transmedial communication situations as an entry point for understanding the affordances acting on the recipients. In Light, Matter, and Medium in Posidippus' Poems on Stones , Verity Platt (Professor of Greek and Roman Art History, Cornell University) used an epigram by Poseidippus about a gem (Lithika AB 13, 3rd century B.C.) to demonstrate how ancient ideas about the functioning of individual sensory perceptions can be extracted from this literary description of the materiality and effect of a stone, which partitions its experience into sometimes contradictory individual moments. In Enactive Imagining and Enargeia in Hellenistic Poetry , Ivana Petrovic (Professor of Classics, University of Virginia) investigated Idyll 15 by Theocritus, a poet of the 3rd century B.C., and the role of motosensory stimuli in the form of the detailed description of materialities and the sequence of activities associated with them, which intensify the imagination on the part of the recipient. In his contribution Sight, Scene, and Unseen in Classical Painting , Nathaniel Jones (Associate Professor of Art History and Archaeology, Washington University St. Louis) continued questions of indexical communication in the context of material images and, using the example of a white-ground funerary lekythos by the Achilles painter (c. 440 B.C.), explored the visual tricks of viewer guidance in the representation of a discourse on making the invisible visible in the context of death.
Strategies of viewer guidance were also the focus of the two concluding contributions. In Visual Strategies in Late Classical Greek Sculpture and Theatre Architecture: The Interplay of Frontality and Multiperspectivity, and the Hierarchized Space , Nikolaus Dietrich (Professor of Classical Archaeology, University of Heidelberg) used the example of Hellenistic Priene to examine how the preferential elaboration of individual views in both sculpture and theatre architecture led to a new hierarchisation of the surrounding space, on which they had an aesthetic effect. In Landscape as Leitmotif - Landscape as Spatial Module: Enliving, Perceiving and Conceiving Hellenistic Sanctuaries , Asja Müller (Research Assistant for Classical Archaeology, FU Berlin) pursued the idea of space as an aggregate of different experiential situations, specifically using the example of the path of the foreign envoys through the Hellenistic sanctuary of Asclepius at Kos in the context of a religious festival (Fig. 2), in order to gain new parameters for the characterisation of the interplay between built and natural space, as they were concretised in the experience of the ancient users, especially at their transitions.
The lively exchange across the different fields of ancient studies and national research cultures and across the different media and ultimately a good three centuries of observation revealed common strands with regard to sensory-motor mediation and the transitions in transmedial experiential situations, which will be further examined in the future for their significance for an examination of the practices of ancient perception in the "long" 4th century BC.
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| Fig. 1 The virtual workshop during a discussion round. | Fig. 2 View of the Asklepieion of Kos by Paul Schazmann. University library of JLU Giessen. |
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The
ZMI Section 5
Media and Art
invited to a virtual workshop (in English) on: T
hursday, 17 December 2020, 7:00 - 10:00 p.m.
via Webex.
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Contact Persons: Prof. Dr. Katharina Lorenz and Dr. Claudia Schmieder
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Digital and immersive technologies have been playing a central role in research and knowledge transfer for several years. The Department of Classical Archaeology at JLU Giessen, which has already been intensively testing the use of digital interaction technologies in museum contexts and in teaching since 2018, is now also breaking new ground in research. In cooperation with the Department of Experimental Psychology, perception structures are being researched via eye tracking in a virtual reality experiment using 3D models of ancient sculptures. |
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When dealing scientifically with images, it can be interesting for a deeper understanding to also examine how viewers perceive representations and react to them. For classical archaeological research, which is centrally concerned with the visual culture of Greek and Roman antiquity, this is precisely a challenge, however, as the contemporary, ancient viewers can no longer be observed or questioned today. In a cooperative project between Classical Archaeology and the Perception & Action team of the Psychology Department at JLU, we are currently investigating the extent to which Classical Archaeology can adopt the methods of modern perception research in order to deepen our understanding of how people in antiquity saw their statues and thus also their world. The project focuses on sculpture from a time of elementary change in pictorial composition: in the Hellenistic period, in the 3rd century BC, not only did a new order emerge in the ancient Mediterranean world as a result of Alexander the Great's conquests, but people's view of this world also changed. This is suggested at least by the evidence of the three-dimensional large-scale sculpture of this time, which could no longer be grasped from a single view, but only by the fact that viewers dynamically moved around statues such as those of the so-called Gaul Ludovisi and combined what they saw into an overall impression. This multiple view ran counter to the compositional principles of sculpture in the period before and after the 3rd century BC: there, sculptures presented themselves as fully comprehensible from a single viewpoint and thus supported a static form of viewing that invited distance and reflection rather than an immersive experience, as seems to have been the case with the sculptures of the 3rd century BC. The project now investigates how modern viewers move around these multi-viewpoint statues and compares this with the movement and viewing patterns when encountering single-viewpoint statues. The aim is to find out whether specific patterns can be identified for the different types of composition and, at the same time, whether the multi-perspective of the statues of the 3rd century BC is generated by 'tipping points' in the composition - i.e. whether it is always specific points on a statue that cause viewers to move on or back. The underlying hypothesis is that - if clearly differentiated movement and viewing patterns between the types of composition are established - the evidence of modern viewing paths can also be postulated for ancient viewers. At the same time, the example of ancient sculpture offers an interesting subject for modern perception research to investigate the interaction of people with complex objects in space - and also how human perception structures are influenced by immersive technologies. |
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For the investigation, an experiment was designed in a virtual reality (VR) environment, in which the test persons each look at and walk around 12 statues of different, i.e. single- or multi-viewpoint, types, while their movements in space and the dwell time of their eyes are recorded by eye-tracking in order to identify prioritised views and potential 'tipping points' in the composition. The results are validated by comparing the data sets with photographs of the favoured sculpture views, which the test persons are allowed to take in virtual reality in a second step of the experiment. This experimental set-up makes it possible to analyse the subjects' behaviour in an environment they perceive as natural and, at the same time, to retain control over the environment as well as over the tasks set for the subjects without influencing natural human behaviour through a laboratory environment that is far removed from reality and highly impoverished. The evaluation of the data sets of a first test group of only three subjects has now already shown that clear differences can be observed between the perception of "single-viewpoint" and "multi-viewpoint" composed large-scale sculpture, not only with regard to movement in space, but also with regard to the time spent in front of different viewing sides of the statues. The visualisation of the superimposed subject movements on the right (see ill. above) shows the participants' engagement with a "single-viewpoint" statue. Here, the focus of observation is clearly on the front side of the statue. Whereas only one of the three participants walked around this statue quite briskly in a uniform movement, the visualisation of the superimposed participant movements on the left, which shows the interaction of the participants with a "multi-viewpoint" statue, presents a completely different picture. Here, too, the frontal encounter with the statue is favoured, but the spatial movement patterns of the participants are clearly more pronounced. Not only do all the participants circle this statue, but they also show increased interest in different views due to the intensive spatial exploration and the extended time spent there. The detailed evaluation of the tests currently being carried out is still pending, but at the same time the results so far indicate that the effect of the different types of composition can be clearly differentiated and thus potentially interpreted in a way that is meaningful in terms of cultural history. At the same time, the experiment yielded an important insight on another level that fits well with other experiences in the work of the Department of Classical Archaeology and that we now want to anchor even more comprehensively in teaching at JLU in the future: We have been using 3D models of ancient artefacts and sites in teaching and in the museum context for some time to promote immersive and intensive learning experiences in the context of merging objective and subjective approaches. In the current experiment, those test persons who belonged to the group of students of Classical Archaeology observed that they devoted themselves significantly more intensively to viewing the statues in the VR environment than is the case when they view such statues in two-dimensional photography - as is customary in their studies. Since image diagnosis is at the core of any classical archaeological work, technologies that increase the intrinsic motivation to do so must occupy a central place in the training of future scientific generations. |
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Contact Persons: Prof. Dr. Katharina Lorenz and Dr. Claudia Schmieder |
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