Polysemy in the Attic Black-figure Vase-painting Tradition

Abstract

This paper will argue that polysemy is an essential and pervasive characteristic of the Attic black-figure vase-painting tradition. As is now well recognised in scholarship, the sharp distinction between daily life and mythology is largely a modern construct. It is therefore unlikely to have been an issue for the painters and their contemporaries, whose semiotic register encompassed a seamless continuum from myth through cult activity to lived experience. The images on vases that are often classed as ambiguous or even indeterminable in the scholarship should therefore rather be analysed according to the principle that they could – and did – present themselves as the basis for diverse, and even contrastive, significations that were all simultaneously evoked by the image in its context within the tradition: this is not to imply alternative interpretations (which would constitute ambiguity), but rather, the images are polysemic, whereby the multiple meanings were simultaneously (re-)constructed and understood as conjointly expressing the ancient perception of a world in which the natural was perfused with the supernatural and entirely consonant with it. This concept is challenging to demonstrate, because it requires us to access a receptive and perceptive system that is alien to our tendency to expect an image from another culture to be a constant signifier with a relatively fixed and limited range of meaning: comparable is the notorious difficulty of translating a double entendre from one language to another (the double entendre is in fact often advanced to exemplify polysemy, where again the meaning arises precisely from the simultaneous recognition of two different significations from different registers). Nevertheless, there are some sets of examples in black-figure where the polysemic character can be demonstrated persuasively. The head cups of the second half of the sixth century are one such group, where the varying inscriptions on some vessels point clearly towards a polysemic character for all. A diverse selection of other types of black-figure depiction will be incorporated to indicate that polysemy is a widely applicable phenomenon in the black-figure tradition (and indeed it seems to have been generally inherent in the imagery of early Greece).