Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum.

Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum. The guidelines for the compilation of volumes in the CVA seriesenjoin To direct, require, command, or admonish.Enjoin connotes a degree of urgency, as when a court enjoins one party in a lawsuit by ordering the person to do, or refrain from doing, something to prevent permanent loss to the other party or parties. a certain restraint on the part of their authors. They lay downquite clearly that what is required in the text is a bare description,dimensions and the minimum of comment. Dyfri Williams' new volume,which deals with some Athenian pottery drinking cups in the BritishMuseum British Museum,the national repository in London for treasures in science and art. Located in the Bloomsbury section of the city, it has departments of antiquities, prints and drawings, coins and medals, and ethnography. , provides the now customary illustrations and drawings to anextremely high standard: the profile drawings demonstrate with admirableclarity the skeuomorphic details of junction rings and grooves, whilethe photographs have been expertly taken in order to avoid flares fromthe metallic sheen of the vessels. These records are invaluable to anyscholar wishing to make sense of the material.But Dr Williams offers more than a plain presentation of his pots: hehas taken the opportunity to restate the beliefs of a group of scholarswho, following the lead of the late Sir John Beazley Sir John Davidson Beazley (Glasgow, Scotland, 1885 - Oxford, England, 1970) was an English Classical scholar.Beazley attended Balliol College, Oxford, where he was a close friend of the poet James Elroy Flecker. , continue tomaintain that it is a worthwhile task not only to ascribe Greek paintedpots to particular named or postulated individuals, but to discuss thesocial habits of those entities. Hence his inclusion of a series ofintroductory passages summarizing the characteristics of typologicallysimilar' products in terms of 'painters' and their'schools'. It may not be apparent to a casual reader, guidedonly by this text and its bibliographies, that such touching attempts toreplicate the methodologies of Renaissance art history (though withoutits essential documentary sources) rest on no discernible foundations.The uncritical consensus which used to prevail among the small communityof scholars Noun 1. community of scholars - the body of individuals holding advanced academic degreesprofession - the body of people in a learned occupation; "the news spread rapidly through the medical profession"; "they formed a community of scientists" concerned with such matters has long since come to an end.Since Dr Williams has chosen to cast his observations in the phraseology phra��se��ol��o��gy?n. pl. phra��se��ol��o��gies1. The way in which words and phrases are used in speech or writing; style.2. of an earlier generation of scholarship, it is incumbent on a revieweryet again to point out some of the realities of the way pottery was usedin the ancient world.Such a picture can only be derived from the evidence of ancientwriters (and it is perhaps symptomatic that Dr Williams makes noreference to any textual source earlier than J. de Witte, who wrote in1836). A revealing insight into ancient attitudes towards table ware isto be found in Theophrastus' characterization of the MistrustfulMan. Apart from asking his wife after he has gone to bed whether she haslocked up the money chest, whether the cupboard has been sealed andwhether the front door has been locked, he is the sort of person who,'whenever someone comes to him to borrow drinking cups he prefersnot to give them at all, but if it is a relative or close friend hemakes them a loan only after practically testing their composition,weighing them, and nearly asking for someone to guarantee replacementcosts' (Characters 18.7). Purity, weight and value arecharacteristics of metalwork, not pottery. A character inAristophanes' Banqueters owes a debt of 200 drachmas and repays itwith a silver drinking cup (and gold and silver plate was regularly madeup in round figures in terms of contemporary currency standards). It hasbeen estimated that the c. 860 grams of silver in this vessel could havebought several hundred kilograms of painted pottery, even vessels by the'greatest' artists. For there is no apparent differentiationbetween the ancient prices for vessels decorated by 'good'painters and those for 'bad', or even between figure-paintedand plain black-gloss wares. The money asked for this volume, forinstance, would in antiquity have bought more than 200 pelekaiattributed to Beazley's 'Achilles painter'.One of the beliefs of the Beazleyite school is that the inscriptionson pots in some sense reflect the world of the potter, and this despitethe 'signatures' of one craftsman on the work of another.'Signatures' are in fact very rare, and occur on far fewerthan 1% of extant pots. They can thus hardly have been used foradvertising purposes, and the more frequent 'nonsenseinscriptions' (jumbles of meaningless letters: pp. 54, 63, 65, 66,70) suggest that letters on pots might rather be a carry over fromdesigns of the kind we know were made for the crafts of silversmithingand tapestry weaving. To use them as a secure basis for the re-creationof the world of the potter must be an exercise in imagination ratherthan reconstruction. The evidence of price inscriptions shows that thevessels in question cost very little, and what is known of thelifestyles and patterns of expenditure of the elites who wereuniversally assumed to have enjoyed the use of painted pottery, suggeststhat ceramic -- no matter how well crafted -- would not have figuredlarge in their everyday experience. Such elites, so far as we can tell,used gold and silver at their festivals and banquets; pottery was acheap surrogate and most surviving pieces were deposited in tombs bysocieties who preferred to keep the family silver above ground for theliving whose need was greater. If the pots and their decoration aresometimes of exceptionally fine quality, this may be put down tofunerary fu��ner��ar��y?adj.Of or suitable for a funeral or burial.[Latin fner decorum DECORUM. Proper behaviour; good order. 2. Decorum is requisite in public places, in order to permit all persons to enjoy their rights; for example, decorum is indispensable in church, to enable those assembled, to worship. rather than competitive connoisseurship.The reassertion of a traditional picture, with no hint thatscholarship may have moved on, is sadly characteristic of a disciplinethat has become stuck in a groove. It is only the highly introvertednature of classical archaeology 'Classical archaeology' is a term given to archaeological investigation of the great Mediterranean civilizations of Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome. Nineteenth century archaeologists such as Heinrich Schliemann were drawn to study the societies they had read about in Latin and as it is still commonly practised --isolated as much from the realities of the ancient world as it is fromother forms of archaeology -- that allows such phantasies Not to be confused with Phantastes, the novel by George MacDonald.Phantasies is the name of a series of animated cartoons produced by the Screen Gems studio for Columbia Pictures from 1939 to 1946. to berepeated. While genuine art history is both a lively and serious form ofscholarship, the quaint gentility of the study of what Stuart Piggotthas called 'twee Victorian vases' surely deserves its ownmonument, viz. the Corpus Idearum Antiquarum.MICHAEL VICKERS Ashmolean Museum, Oxford