This chapter investigates the hermeneutics of the signature in Greek and Roman visual culture. Ancient artists, it argues, exploited artistic agency as a meaning-making mechanism. The chapter focusses on the common practice of craftsmen working under the name of a more celebrated artist, taking as a particular case study the Iliac tablets. Created in the first century AD, several associate themselves with the ‘Theodorean techne’. This chapter argues that this is a form of pseudonymity: the creator wished to imbue his (...) work with the authority of an Archaic sculptor. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Klio Jahrgang: 98 Heft: 1 Seiten: 315-322.

Myron's bronze sculpture of a cow proved an extraordinarily popular subject for Greek and Latin epigram over an exceptionally long time-span (Palatine Anthology 9.713-42, 793-98, Posidippus 66 A-B, Ausonius 63-71, Epigrammata Bobiensia 10-13). But why the fascination? This article reads the image as an icon for the poetic simulations of ecphrastic epigram. First, it emphasises the ambivalence with which the poems celebrates the statue's verisimilitude: Myron's bronze cow at once convinces and fails to convince. Second, it relates the mimetic make-believe (...) of the statue to the illusionism of literary epigram, especially epigrams on artworks: the virtually real cow figures the various pretences of the genre, fluctuating between material image, epigraphic inscription, and anthologised text. The more poems added to the series, the more pressing the replicative agenda: Myron's reproduction of a cow keeps on reproducing itself, in ever more playful (and playfully contrived) ways. (shrink)

This article re-evaluates the 22 so-called Tabulae Iliacae. Where most scholars (especially in the English speaking world) have tended to dismiss these objects as 'trivial' and 'confused', or as 'rubbish' intended for the Roman 'nouveaux riches', this article relates them to the literary poetics of the Hellenistic world, especially Greek ecphrastic epigram. Concentrating on the tablets' verbal inscriptions, the article draws attention to three epigraphic features in particular. First, it explores the various literary allusivenesses of the two epigrammatic invocations inscribed (...) on tablets lA and 2NY; second, it examines the Alexandrian diagrammatic word-games on the reverse of seven Tabulae (2NY, 3C, 4N, 50, 7Ti, 15Ber, 20Par), relating these to the pictorial-poetic games of the Greek technopaegnia; third, it discusses the possible hermeneutic significance of associating six tablets with 'Theodorean techne' (lA, 2NY, 3C, 4N, 50, 20Par), comparing a newly discovered epigram by Posidippus (67 A-B). All of these allusions point to a much more erudite purpose and clientele: the tablets toyed with Hellenistic visual-verbal relations at large. (shrink)