The Image of the Artist in Archaic and Classical Greece

This book explores the persona of the artist in Archaic and Classical Greek art and literature. Guy Hedreen argues that artistic subjectivity, first expressed in Athenian vase-painting of the sixth century BCE and intensively explored by Euphronios, developed alongside a self-consciously constructed persona of the poet. He explains how poets like Archilochos and Hipponax identified with the wily Homeric character of Odysseus as a prototype of the successful narrator, and how the lame yet resourceful artist-god Hephaistos is emulated by Archaic vase-painters such as Kleitias. In lyric poetry and pictorial art, Hedreen traces a widespread conception of the artist or poet as socially marginal, and sometimes physically imperfect, but rhetorically clever, technically peerless, and a master of fiction. Bringing together in a sustained analysis the roots of subjectivity across media, this book offers a new way of studying the relationship between poetry and art in ancient Greece.

Author Biography

Guy Hedreen is Professor of Art at Williams College, Massachusetts. He is author of Silens in Attic Black-Figure Vase-Painting: Myth and Performance (1992) and Capturing Troy: The Narrative Functions of Landscape in Archaic and Early Classical Greek Art (2001). He has also published essays on Dionysiac myth and ritual, choral poetry, drama, the Trojan War, primitive life, the worship of Achilles, and the nature of visual narration. His awards include the Rome Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Arlt Award for his first book.