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Emotions and Gestures in Greek and Roman Imagery

mit Prof. Dr. Salvatore Settis (Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa).

Ort:   Leucorea, Wittenberg

Datum: 15.-17.11.2019

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Emotions and Gestures in Greek and Roman Imagery

Late-Medieval and Renaissance artists found in Classical art a fully articulated ‘vocabulary’ of gestures, that lavishly inspired and transformed their representational strategies. The very act of borrowing from the Antique a number of bodily stances and attitudes for expressive and narrative purpose has been considered by cultural historians a constitutive feature of the Renaissance, meant as (literally) Wieder-Geburt der Antike. On the other hand, art historians conveniently compared the conventional and iterative nature of artistically crafted gestures,  especially those labelled Pathosformeln by Aby Warburg, to that of literary topoi, and therefore categorized them as a quasi-linguistic element. In Gertrud Bing’s words, «In der Rhetorik wird eine zur Konvention gewordene Form, die laufend verwendet wird, um eine Bedeutung oder eine Stimmung mitzuteilen, Topos genannt. Warburg stellte das Vorhandensein von etwas Analogem in der bildenden Kunst fest.»

Yet a much closer analysis is required in order to weigh and assess the implicit assumption that Greek and Roman artistic and cultural practices entailed full awareness of a gestural ‘language’, or rather of a repertoire of expressions at hand. If, for instance, Polygnotus was praised as worthy of imitation «for his akribeia and his pathos and ethos, as well as for the schemata he employed» [Aelianus, Varia Historia  IV,3], does this mean that the Greek painter developed a specialized vocabulary of iconographical schemata, or gestures, tailored according to a number of distinct meanings or emotions? Should we interpret in this sense Aristotles’ mention of Polygnotus among artists able to «imitate various forms of ethos» (Polit., 1340a)? How far did theatrical conventions influence artistic practice in fixing meaning for each and every schema, as apparently implied by a scholion mentioning Aeschylus’ characters «posing according to different schemata, either of pain, or wonder, or of another pathos» (Eustathius, in Odyss. ε 115)?

While the very notion of a (tendentially) systematic gestural lexicon betrays an intensely morphological orientation that appears foreign to antique experience, some level of mutual correspondence between basic human emotions (such as love, fear, anger,  shame, pain…) and bodily postures is evidenced by descriptions of artworks in Classical texts as well as by the repeated use of a number of well defined gestures, in full constancy of meaning, all throughout Classical art. Three questions stand up in this framework: first, to what extent, and when, may we assume that Greek (and Roman?) artists might have been aware of using, implementing, and handing down some sort of gestural vocabulary?

Second, how much the Greek opposition (and/or complementarity) of ethos and pathos can help us understanding the relationship between emotions and gestures in the Classical world? Third (but by no means least), given the culturally determined nature of whatever classification of emotions, how far are our own definition(s) and use(s) of emotions and gestures, and their mutual relationship, comparable to the Classical ones?

Salvatore Settis