Abstract:
[This paper is an abbreviated version of the 20th Annual Trendall Lecture, delivered at the University of Queensland, Brisbane, 30th January 2018.]
In early Greek society, when literacy was rare and memory essential for defining and recording the cultural identity, it was tradition that set the parameters of the world view. This is seen most clearly in the Homeric epics, for these reflect a long-standing oral poetic tradition in which, for the contemporary hearers of the bards’ performances, the shaping of the narrative sequence was conveyed as much by the form as by the content of the poetry. As is now well documented in oral-traditional theory, the traditional bards drew upon a massive repertoire of formulaic phrases, set-piece situations and story patterns, all well-familiar through generations of repetition, which through recurrence over time had acquired laminations of extra-contextual associations that vastly enriched the listeners’ reception process and response to the story as it unfolded.
In this article, the initial objective will be to demonstrate that the black-figure vase-painting of Athens in the 6th century BC was just as much governed by its painting tradition as oral epic was by its poetic tradition: the painters were equipped with a repertoire of figure-forms, iconographic motifs and scene-types, each of which increasingly over time developed associative significations over and above the overt content of the scene. Thereafter, the focus will shift to the tension between the constraints of the tradition and the urge for creative innovation, exploring how new ideas could be visually expressed within the traditional horizon of viewer-expectations. (Any venture to push beyond that horizon in a traditional context would almost inevitably lead to rejection by the tradition-trained recipients.) Close analysis of some examples of scenes that might initially appear to challenge traditional patterns will reveal that they are in fact largely built up out of pre-existing elements, each bringing its own traditional associations, and that the originality of the painter consisted in drawing upon those associations innovatively to evoke an exceptionally rich viewing response.