Taking the chair: the seated figure in the traditions of Attic black-figure vase-painting and Homeric epic

Abstract

The pictorial narrative tradition of Attic black-figure vase-painting has much in common with early Greek oral-traditional epic as represented by the Homeric poems, especially in regard to the traditional techniques and strategies by which narrrative meaning is constructed within a traditional framework, and so comparative analysis of the visual and verbal means by which narrative is expressed can inform the study of both. Oral-traditional epic is characterised by its formulaic repertoire of phrases and situations that consistently carry a significance reaching beyond the immediate context of occurrence, while in black-figure vase-painting, the meaning is constructed largely by combinations of formulaic signs of various kinds; as well as iconographic elements and scene-types, these can involve the pose or stance of individual figures, the relationship between figures, and figures’ position within a scene. Because the reception process of such depictions is less accessible to us now than is the case with later pictorial art, there is a need in the analysis of archaic painting for a specialised hermeneutics (as has indeed long been recognised). In this paper, which presents a part of a broader study of the various narrative techniques in the archaic painting tradition, the seated figure-type in black-figure scenes will be the focus, and it will be argued that within the tradition this figure encodes a special kind of intrinsic meaning, with variable nuances deriving from specific painted details as well as placement in the picture-field in relation to the other figures. Comparison with what seated figures signify in the Homeric epics will provide some confirmation of the propositions.