Atividade

81655 - 1º Summer School da FFLCH: Visual Image and Written Text in Ancient World: Strategies of communication in Ancient vs. Modern Times

Período da turma: 29/01/2018 a 08/02/2018

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Descrição: The lessons (6 to 10, see e-mail) I would like to present at the Summer School Seminar concern an important, useful, and interesting but so far not deeply studied, aspect of Ancient History: the relationship between visual image and written text (cf. also the materiality of text) as a strategy of communication in the Ancient World, especially in Archaic to Late Classical Greece. It is a very innovative and promising way to analize a series of public and private documents from the Ancient world and to deepen our knowledge of some strategies of communication in antiquity, which also has an important lesson to teach to (/ and interesting parallels to modern society, where writing and images are a common and often exploited means of communication.
I would like to present this kind of analysis applied to some genres and documents of the Ancient World, especially, but not only, Archaic and Classical Greek inscriptions, namely texts written on a durable material, stone, pottery or metal, which are numerous and pertain to various categories (decrees and laws, private funerary texts, labels on vases, poetical dedications to gods etc.), thereby providing crucial information on historical, juridical, social, literary, linguistic questions.

What I find more intriguing, is that inscribed texts have the unique characteristic of being the interwined union of a material component, the physical monument, and an immaterial one, the literary text engraved upon it. Although when we go to museums we usually encounter statues severed by their bases and inscribed bases without statues inscriptions were originally conceived to be engraved on their support and, therefore, convey their message, through both their media: the visual medium and the literary component, i.e. the image and the text. This makes inscriptions an unicum in the field of ancient studies. In fact, image and text can exist indipendently: most works of art address their audience without necessitating another means; similarly, archaic literary texts were, to a certain extent (as for the performance, and this was also the case for the composition and transmission of the Homeric poems, until a certain stage),
not strictly dependent on their material support. In case of inscriptions, though, the only way to fully access their information is to take into account and to “listen” and interpret all three languages through which inscriptions spoke to their audience, that of art and archaeology (the physical support), that of epigraphy, namely the writing (form of the letters, layout of the text) and that of literature (in the case of poetical inscriptions, features of literary traditions).

The visual medium has always been a powerful way to communicate; this is probably one of the reasons why visual arts are often used to convey a political message. It is usually agreed “that architecture is the most political of all visual arts […]; public buildings represent the polis’ most permanent and official statements”: cf. ancient examples like the Parthenon, the sacred buildings on the Acropolis or modern examples, such as the National Memorials in every Capital of a State.

This of course applies also to Archaic Greek inscribed monuments: public monuments such as epigrams for the Persian Wars, and also more “private” inscriptions such as the commemorative erected by public figures, an epitaph by an aristocrat for his eromenos, dedications of wealthy craftmen, can be used to convey a “political” statement, they are a mechanism of “social” display: an intended recipient was the community of patron’s fellow citizens (or even a larger one). In the case of inscribed monuments the peculiarity is that their political message is conveyed through the union of the visual and literary component, the text and the image. This is remarkable for two main reasons: a) the visual aspect is primary in terms of time — it is the first encounter of the recipient / the audience with the monument — and in terms of level — it is immediately accessible also to individuals with a low level of literacy — while the text, i.e. the
literary component, often contains a deeper message. Moreover, b) in the case of (poetical) inscriptions the visual medium necessarily consists of two elements, 1) the monument itself with its shape, aesthetic features etc., and 2) the inscription(s) engraved thereon, namely the writing.

This is a substantial difference between architecture and inscribed monuments: an inscription can be engraved on a public building, but it is not intrinsic to architecture, especially to the architecture of the ancient world, think of the Parthenon (an exception was the thesauros of the Siphnoi), whereas it is to inscribed monuments. The role played by writing in this relationship between image and text is extremely interesting: writing can be an image in itself (cf. the hieroglyphics), writing can work as label to identify a figure on a vase, it can be ornamental, even to the point of playing with it as in poems in forms of images (“carmina figurata”). More relevant as to our subject, the visual dimension of writing gives it the potential to work as a message: “the
medium is the message”. For instance during the Achaemenid Empire (ca. 550-third quarter of the 4th BCE) more than 75% of the inscriptions in Old Persian were bilingual or trilingual (the other languages and cuneiform scripts employed being Akkadian/Babylonian and Elamite).

Notably, in these inscriptions the proportion between practical and symbolic/“political” function is clearly in favor of the latter. On the one hand, the text of a given edict circulated in the official chancelleries in Aramaic, the vehicular language at that time; on the other, most of the monolingual texts in Old Persian were written on small objects, vases, weapons etc. This means that, in the case of bilingual or trilingual royal inscriptions of the Achaemenid Empire, even the viewer who could not understand (and this was probably the norm) all three versions was in any case able to decode the primary message conveyed through the contiguity of the three versions (often also through the monumentality of the support): “this is an official edict by the King”.

A more common function of writing is of course to convey the literary message, so to work as a medium, but as a visual medium writing does not need to be a “neutral”, “unmarked”, frequently quite the opposite: very often writing as visual image has the important function to attract the attention of the audience, since it was what a viewer firstly encountered in terms of time. In terms of level, sometimes there would have been little more than the visual image accessible to a non educated viewer, but to a reader, if interested and captivated by the aspect of the monument, the visual image could represent the first of two levels of exploration: the reader could go deeper
and receive the information embedded in the immaterial part of inscriptions, i.e. the literary text.

Over the lessons, I will give several examples of strategies to communicate via the epigraphic medium: particularly interesting, for example, are the disposition of the text on the monument and the signature of the artist, which show the interplay between the media of artarchitecture, epigraphy and language-literature and the different levels in which a message of the inscribed object is conveyed, from more immediate to more complex. For instance, in Greek (poetical) archaic inscriptions the signatures of the artists are usually separated from the text of the proper inscription through a variety of strategies, “archaeological” and “epigraphic”: on rectangular bases and pillars the signature is engraved on a side other than that which carries the dedicatory inscription; in cases in which both dedication and signature are engraved on the same side of a stone, a large blank space is left between the dedication and the signature etc.

There certainly was a “functional” principle at work: for instance, in dedications to
deities the separation had the function to distinguish the sphere pertaining to the god (the proper dedication) from the entirely “human” one (the signature of the artist). But there was certainly more. Since the commission of an artistic elaborated object to a sculptor was expensive, the signature was also symbolic, a message to both the god and the readers (certainly to the educated and, perhaps, also to some without a complete level of literacy): “this dedication — and, understood, I, the patron — is a prestigious and no ordinary one”. The “potential message(s)” embedded in the signature of the artist in an archaic inscription frequently go beyond this level.

A deeper level, accessible to whoever was able to read, was represented by the content which, by revealing the identity of the artist, had the function of conveying a supplementary information and, therefore, prestige to the dedicator, if for example the artist was a very famous one. It is basically a mechanism of social display, which is a fundamental function of private monuments.

Morevoer, there are several examples of how the layout of the text on a monument is used to attract the attention of the reader and also represents the primary level of communication. Usually, the direction of writing proceeds from functionality, cf. in modern times on the hood of ambulances the AMBULANCE sign is written specular so that it can be correctly identified by a driver in his rearview mirror. However, sometimes a more sophisticated mechanism is at play: a while ago the advertisement of a new piece of the famous actor Giorgio Albertazzi caught my attention. The advertisement read, “Dante reads Albertazzi”, and it was aligned vertically top to bottom. The trick of course is that it can be read from bottom to top resulting in the expected and
“logical” order “Albertazzi reads Dante”. In any case, the sign attracted my attention (phase 1); therefore I investigated and found an article in which Albertazzi declared that the order of the lines was altered on purpose: the sense of the inscription was precisely that Dante’s poetry is so modern that it is in actual fact Dante that can read, describe and “narrate” Albertazzi, a man of the 21th century, and not the other way around. This modern example shows that the elaborate visual image by a) playing with the standard (namely, in this case, reverting the standard and expected layout) achieved the goal to b) attract the attention of the viewer and c) prompted the possible, although not necessary, intention to delve deeper into the message. Notably, the further
and deeper message (in this case, the revelation of the “modernity” of Dante) could be conveyed only to an audience able to access the “literary” side of the “inscription”. Turning to Greek Archaic inscriptions, from a certain period onwards the direction of writing was established as left to right, and rare cases of writing from right to left in this period are usually explained a choice made for the convenience of a passer-by who would find these monuments on his right side as he walked. However, to my mind, functionality and accessibility to the reader do not seem to have been the only reasons which determined the direction of writing and the layout of texts:

in some other, more refined and often poetical, inscriptions the layout is deliberately nonstandard — in a few inscriptions the order of the lines is inverted from their “logical” order, i.e. instead of reading from top to bottom they read from bottom to top or right to left or with a pattern of "letter alternation" — to attract the attention of the viewer. A telling example is a 6th cent. BCE noteworthy monument, a tall column sormounted by a small statue, both finely crafted, where the layout of the text is “marked”: once the attention of the reader is capitaved the second level “kicks in” and the text reveals a poem and the signature of an artist, i.e. it reveals itselfs and its patron as extra-ordinary, with a mechanism similar to that of the Albertazzi's piece.

Over the lessons I will give several examples of how various ancient peoples, especially the Greeks (known as "masters of communication"), exploited the potentiality of this strategy of communication, achieved through the dialogue (with its different immanent levels) between visual image and written (literary) text. I find that it is also relevant to contemporary society, where writing and (especially lately) images are used as a way to convey (even surreptitiously) information.

Bibliografia (Bibliography)

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Carga Horária:

24 horas
Tipo: Obrigatória
Vagas oferecidas: 50
 
Ministrantes: Sara Kaczko


 
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