This book has been investigating select examples of Greek and Phoenician art, sometimes resulting directly from the interaction of Greeks and Phoenicians or their artistic traditions. Many other examples of art resulting from Mediterranean connectivity come to mind readily and raise questions of their own. Take for instance works of pottery that respond to the Athenian exports found throughout the Mediterranean and Black Sea regions (and sometimes beyond) in the fifth and fourth centuries. Whether or not we characterize these items in Phoenicia as “imitations” of Athenian pottery, as I have sometimes done myself, is significant.1 But is the Phoenician response to an Athenian cup that itself imitates some features of a Persian metal bowl necessarily “unoriginal”? Posing this kind of question always generates more, such as what precisely was appealing in the “original” pot—the object itself, its contents, its function, or its social capital—and to what extent any of these options depend upon an understanding or even awareness of the original objects’ makers and intentions.
It is my aim in this Conclusion to take on two topics, albeit briefly, that speak to these questions. I begin by asking what role is played by originality in our interpretation of the arts of contact and use these reflections to continue to characterize Phoenician art and challenge the idea that Greek art was somehow sui generis. Then we turn back to the idea introduced in Chapter 1 of art as a quasi-autonomous system. Doing so opens up some interesting avenues for future study of art outside culture history, an important prospect for those boundary objects that resist existing taxonomies. Lastly, I revisit the book’s starting principles and suggest objectives for future Greek and Phoenician art histories.
I wish to pursue further the idea of originality in art through two of its interrelated qualities, origins and creativity. One reason origins are contested is because they hold the keys to authority. In the nineteenth century, a major goal of scholarship was to disaggregate the parts of an object in order to determine who was responsible for what.2 Such taxonomies of course continue in the ongoing process of classification that employs and builds upon the established systems. Even this basic act of art history in effect entails high stakes, since, as Patrice Rankine points out, “the inventor retains first claims.”3 Rankine’s statement has two implications for this book. First, the recognition of originality or its absence is when the creative value of an object is assessed; this scholarly enterprise can be divorced from or directly contrasted with the values of ancient makers and observers. Second, the training of scholars has an enormous impact on their judgment of objects, whether or not in our case they emphasize classical or Near Eastern priorities and whether or not theory is a foregrounded part of the process.
Take, for example, the artist signature. There is a remarkable number of signatures in Greek art compared to Egyptian art, for example, even though most works went unsigned.4 In traditional views of Greek art a signature points to an individual and raises the status of the artist and his object. The signature is thought to simultaneously accompany the rise of the individual in late Archaic society and foreground the idea of the creative genius in Western art. Signatures in Greek art turn up mostly in three genres: on certain pots (e.g., Boiotian, Attic) beginning in the seventh century; on some statues beginning in the sixth century (maybe earlier); and on some gems from the Archaic, Classical, and Hellenistic periods.5 The chronological and geographical distributions of signatures are erratic, however, which argues against the idea that the signature is an expression of individualism born in the late Archaic Greek polis.6 While some signatures accompany works of great creativity or skill, such was not always the case, as is evident in pot painting and at least one low-quality mosaic mentioned in Chapter 2 (see Table 1).7
Although it is tempting to conflate the artistic signature with a declaration of originality, existing evidence cannot support the idea. But signatures do underscore artistic agency. It is possible to reject the idea that the signature heralds the rise of the individual even while acknowledging that the status of artistry changed from the seventh century—when signatures appear on the Euthykartides statue base and, perhaps, on the Aristonothos krater—to the end of the Hellenistic period, when the Arwadi artist Asklepiadēs signed his mosaic in the House of the Dolphins.8 We know that Greeks themselves were interested in the history of artists, beginning at least in the early Hellenistic period when Douris of Samos, one of Pliny’s sources, wrote his books on painting and metalwork.9 Yet the signature reminds us again how training, here, whether or not we subscribe to the cult of the artist (or of the polis), colors our reaction to the evidence.10 We can cite clear examples of signed Greek art that cannot live up to the expectations put on it by the Western tradition.
The preceding case studies have shown that originality is a, if not the, key issue used to separate our conceptions of Greek and Phoenician art. The practice is prejudicial and all the more questionable when we recall that such determinations are often made by Greek archaeologists and art historians. I have emphasized especially the extent to which Hellenization has effectively obliterated the idea of a Phoenician art industry after 500 right along with the possibility of originality in Phoenician art. Of course this problem is not restricted to the second half of the first millennium, as artworks from the Iron Age attributed to Phoenicians can be presented as equally derivative thanks to the Assyrian or Egyptian iconography and style used to identify them. Phoenician art has also been dubbed eclectic, but I think that idea is somewhat inapt owing to problems of attribution in the creation of a Phoenician art history, problems that should call into question the validity of the very concepts “Phoenicia” and “Phoenicians.” I have argued that Iron Age “Phoenician art” is not eclectic—it just isn’t, at least not at this stage of research. While it is possible to argue that “Greek art” did not yet exist in the Archaic period, as Hellas was very much still “in the making,”11 it is undeniable that there are works of Archaic art, notably the kouros and the architectural orders, that imply a sort of artistic cohesion among some of those we call Greeks.
The juxtaposition of the treatment of originality in Greek and Phoenician art is illuminating. So, too, is turning the idea of originality and reproduction back on Greek art itself.12 On the one hand, we can note that the kouros was an “endlessly repeatable schema”13 in which each part always referred to the whole. On the other, the kouros’ originality in the sense of its origin was always on display because it also “endlessly” repeated its referent, whether we understand that referent as the kouros type or as Egyptian elite statuary or both. Innovation, when it did occur, needed to be contextually correct, whether we mean the invention of monumental stone statuary itself or the attention paid to individual characteristics in any one kouros.14
Two examples of ancient attitudes toward the origins of Greek statuary come to mind in this context, albeit from very different perspectives. One describes how the emperor Tiberias was forced by popular demand to return a beloved Lysippan Apoxyomenos to public view in Rome despite having supplied a marble copy to take its place, possibly the well-known one now in the Vatican (Pliny HN 34.62).15 We must be content to study the copy, however, and we do so “in light of its adaptation of Polykleitan proportions, contrapposto, and movement.” Kenneth Lapatin points out that these were not the qualities that motivated Tiberias to remove the “original bronze” statue and fueled the public’s demand for its restoration.16 For “although the statue did not originate in Rome but had been taken previously from Greece or Asia Minor, the Roman populace nonetheless had assimilated the figure into their own history.”17 Another is the story of Antenor’s Tyrannicides statue group, said to have been captured in the Athenian agora by Xerxes and carted away to Susa. There it was recaptured by Alexander or a diadoch and restored to Athens where Kritios’s version apparently still stood (Arr. Anab. 3.16.7–8; Paus. 1.8.5; Pliny HN 34.70). If such a thing ever occurred, one can only imagine the impression given by the twin pairs, one visibly Archaic in its presentation of heroism, the other, especially if we follow Stewart’s argument, in what had been a brand-new, sober style meant to declare the new world order established by the Athenian victory in and recovery from the Persian Wars. (Never mind that Athens’s independence was drawn permanently to a close by the very Macedonian conquest that led to the “original” statue’s return.)
Originality, then, is yet another deeply subjective idea. While we can try to disaggregate arts of contact to understand their constituent parts, we will always stop the process only where we define the original element. Origins are important in Greek art, as for Greeks the ideal was nearly always in the past. If we are to push the question of origins hard in Greek art, however, we will inevitably end up elsewhere, most often in Asia Minor, the Levant, or Egypt. Contemplation of origins can be fruitful, as I have shown through readings of the kouros, the Slipper Slapper, and Phoenician coins, or merely disorienting, as are the many portable luxury objects associated carelessly with “Phoenicians.” Study of those Iron Age portable objects shows just how much the act of disaggregation can be distorted by ideology, dulling both terminology and evidence to the point of incoherence.
Origins are problematic in the interpretation of picture mosaics, too. I have argued that a misguided sense of the genre’s origins only in Greek painting and Greek pebble floors has contributed to the false idea of the picture mosaic as an indicium of Hellenization. Rather, I believe that the genre was one way of signaling participation in the Mediterranean sociocultural scene, similar to what Morris has called Mediterraneanization. Yet, it is not so satisfying to call works like the picture mosaic material expressions of Mediterraneanization.18 The term is “cumbersome.”19 And, like similar network theories, it is also frustrating in that it emphasizes interconnections without full regard for the agency of artist, patron, or art object. Mediterraneanization does not necessarily ask why receptivity is greater or lesser or simply different in different cases. It cannot explain the very important differences in the way that the kouros and the picture mosaic emphasize or not their artistic ancestry. Ideologically driven interest in origins can also lead to misinterpretation. I have argued as much for the kouros, the Slipper Slapper, and the Alexander Sarcophagus, albeit for different, if reliably Hellenocentric, reasons. In most scholarship semiotic readings have focused principally on the nudity of the kouros, a priority that speaks to the type’s perceived role in the Western tradition. Whereas statuary came from Egypt, the thinking goes, the nude body of the kouros was a rejection of its original Egyptianness. Yet it is possible to argue the opposite using the very same visual cues, namely, the sculpted male body. The kouros in my reading is not concerned with Hellenism, certainly not in an effort to declare its superiority over Egyptianism. Instead, the kouros celebrates the privilege of elite males among fellow Hellenes to claim some of Egypt’s social status.
In the Slipper Slapper, the referent to the Knidia is critical, but it has been used to dismiss the work as a tasteless genre piece that falls short of the original. More careful consideration of the reference, however, can help us understand what the statue does. In referencing the Knidia, the Slipper Slapper becomes a part of the cult of euploia and creatively completes Praxiteles’s narrative in terms meaningful to Beirutis operating in a middle ground. This reading of the group allows us to reintegrate it into the broader discourse of art and patronage of Hellenistic Delos, enriching our understanding of both. Its creative power is not dissimilar to the more famous, if also sometimes disdained, portraits of Italians from the island. The portrait on the Alexander Sarcophagus has encouraged scholars to treat the work as though it were made by a lesser diadoch, thereby emphasizing its strategic use of Macedonian imagery. The advantage of using postcolonial theory to read the tomb is that it forces us to consider how small a part that portrait, and the apparent reference to the lost painting of Philoxenos, played overall. This sarcophagus was made to address an elite Sidonian audience, as were its predecessors. Hybridity theory opens up the work to a number of new interpretations and reminds us that a Sidonian tomb is a different type of object from a painting commissioned by one of Alexander’s generals or a coin minted by a diadoch making a claim to his empire.
The Phoenician coins and anthropoid sarcophagi have their own originalities. Both put their reactions and appropriations in the foreground, the Tyrian owls pointing to, at minimum, Athens and Egypt, and, when paired with the archer riding the winged sea horse, also to Persia. The anthropoid sarcophagi, too, have multiple origins, in type (Egyptian), style (Greek), and iconography (Egyptian and Greek). As with the child statues and altar/Eshmun “tribune,” no attempt is made in the coins or tombs to modify these referents. Clearly quite the opposite, which suggests that an important element of Phoenician art, both elite sculpture and middling civic coins, was to signal its awareness of the artistic traditions with which its observers, patrons, and artists were in contact. Perhaps here we can find a conceptual thread between Phoenician and Greek art in that both looked backward even while they innovated. The Alexander Sarcophagus can be understood as a particularly lavish response to the same social values.
According to the terminology I explore in Chapter 2, the Slipper Slapper, the sarcophagi (including the Alexander Sarcophagus), the Umm el-‘Amed and Eshmun complex reliefs and sculpture, and Phoenician coins draw closely together the ideas of emulation and appropriation. It might be preferable to understand the many aggregations made plain in Phoenician art as appropriations, but doing so feels more defensive than illuminating. Alternately, it is possible to conceive of these ideas as points on a continuum, emphasizing the differences between wholesale appropriation and imitation. But I think it worth considering seriously whether or not we are capable of distinguishing emulation from appropriation in ancient art. Our own biases seem likely to overwhelm the evidence, but perhaps these ideas are simply not that different in a more fundamental way.
In Chapter 1, I pointed out a few methods that frame art as a social agent, even while cautioning there are many other valid approaches to object study. One of these was articulated in the work of Alois Riegl, among other turn-of-the-century art historians, especially through his theory of the “will to art,” or Kunstwollen. To be sure, Kunstwollen is not an easy concept, and it suffers further from its relationship with formalism, a practice deeply wedded to the theory of style and dependent upon ideological classification. That being said, I believe we can still find in Kunstwollen “critically suggestive” ideas about art’s affectiveness, recalling Bernal’s ongoing contributions to Greek social history.20 Kunstwollen simultaneously advocates for the more familiar understanding of a rational art that responds to its context and for the less familiar idea of art’s quasi-autonomy, always striving to express the ideal Zeitgeist.21 Kunstwollen offers an alternate route around the problem of cultural relativism. While we cannot view an Aštart throne as a Phoenician did, we can still see that it is sculpture and not an unworked stone. From that basic premise we can ask of the sculpture what it wanted to do.
The question of “what objects want” connects Kunstwollen to the currently popular anthropological approach to art explored by Chris Gosden (from whom I borrow the phrase), Bruno Latour, and others, Alfred Gell most of all. Gell’s art agency posits art objects as extensions of people, their makers or owners—what is called distributed personhood. The process of making is driven by a chain of agents that ends with the viewer. It moves from what Gell calls the artist to index and prototype to recipient, or what we can call the maker, the point of reference (what is being represented), the object itself (and all of its connections), and, finally, the viewer whom the object affects.22 The point of reference can itself be an art object, a key idea in the discussion of art produced by contact. It is also possible to plot the patron before the artist, as I have suggested a few times throughout this book. Patronage was certainly important in Near Eastern art, but nevertheless the object depends on the artist’s agency.
On its face, art agency seems to better fit some objects than others. Distributed personhood is easy to understand in portraits (especially photographs), elite gift exchange, or monumental objects that put the skilled work of the artist on display, such as the altar/Eshmun “tribune,” Alexander Sarcophagus, or Slipper Slapper. But it works also for mass-produced or mechanically produced objects like coins, as it is concerned with how relationships are made material and how objects affect their users. The points of reference in Phoenician coins are social, from city-state to its patron deity to its king to the individual who manipulates the coin in his or her hand. The pursuit of origins for any given object is likely to arrive at one or more points of reference that are themselves the result of a disorderly chain of agents and their inferences, a knot of connections between ever more ancient or distant people and their observations, aspirations, and creative capacities. The replications and recursions are limitless, rendering the totality of an object’s inferences unknowable.
Yet Gell’s approach does not concern systems. Gell was not interested in writing sociologies of art in the tradition of Bourdieu with its emphasis on institutions of production, reception, and circulation. Rather, art agency concerns the social nexus. One advantage is that it eschews essentialism. It is good at talking about how objects make people behave and getting at what people believed about the point of reference and its agents. Put differently, art agency explores how an object affects a viewer’s belief about how and why the object came to be. In art agency, we find a way or a reminder to question perhaps the biggest assumption about Phoenician receptivity to Greek art, namely, that what Phoenicians wanted was fundamentally aesthetic. For Gell the emphasis on aesthetics is a Western preoccupation,23 one that can be tied to the problem of proceeding from Boasian, reified culture. Here I will emphasis that the East/West language Gell is using does not map onto Phoenician/Greek. Instead, what he is getting at, and what I hope this book shows, is that conflating Greek art with the Western tradition is a distortion of history resulting from the reversal of cause and effect.
One shortcoming from the perspective of art history is art agency’s relative indifference to the artist, although Gell does not argue for the outright autonomy of art.24 Riegl’s Kunstwollen was likewise less concerned or unconcerned with individual artists, which was both its strength as a theory written first for a disparaged and anonymous late antique art and its weakness for those interested in the idea of artistic creativity, for whom the point of reference may be relatively unimportant. As Whitney Davis has argued, although it is rich with possibility, Gell’s approach to art as index can take us further away than we wish to be from the history of art.25 The limited, often contentious, engagement by classical art history with theory is in part in reaction to such approaches that are more processual or systemic than historical. Gell’s work is very provocative, inspiring an impressive amount of admiration, critique, and, at times, scorn.26 Yet art agency reminds us that there is clear benefit to exploring methods beyond culture history. If the goal of a study is to learn about production and circulation, it must use theories that explore systems.27 Likewise, if we are aiming to understand human behaviors, agency theories are needed (this is where hybridity properly fits). If we want meaning, semiotic-symbolic theories fit. And so on. Culture history is poorly equipped to speak to these interests. Each time we scale up analysis, from individual to family to tribe to city-state and beyond, we lose accuracy. What makes culture an especially difficult concept in the first-millennium Mediterranean is the extent of connectivity and the often rapid pace of social and political change. Both of these factors, connectivity and rapid change, make it problematic to approach art only through cultural categories. Even though we might wish to compare and contrast Greek and Phoenician art broadly, I find it helpful to try, insofar as any of us are able, to first ask particular objects what it is that they “wanted” before tying them to sometimes overbearing cultural labels. As Riegl’s Kunstwollen suggests, it is possible to move from art to broader ideas like culture.
That theories “travel” between and within disciplines is not novel,28 and examples of a desire to tie art agency and art history are growing even while tensions remain.29 Art agency encourages fresh approaches to the relationships between Greek and Phoenician art, both their similarities and their disjunctions. Further, the problematic carved ivories and metal bowls that form the basis of Phoenician art history might be meaningfully reconstituted through the theoretical approach to their agencies. Indeed, these works seem especially suited to Gell’s influential writing on the “technology of enchantment.”30 In this work, Gell proposes that art is a technical system in which greater formal complexity creates a greater sense of awe or enchantment. A theory of affectiveness can be used to explore virtuoso objects, even without requiring an understanding of the ethnic or cultural identity of individual makers. In this case we seem to have a theory, if a very complex one, that fits our imperfect evidence.
We began with Herodotos and the idea that Europe and Asia are “historically determined rather than essential” ideas.31 It seems a fine place to close. While there is a general trend toward deconstruction in history writing,32 one that is certainly evident in this book, I hope it is not the main idea readers take away. Rather, I would like to end with a few objectives that follow from Herodotos’s proem and the four “principles and aims” given at the outset of the book.
(1) Given that the first principle of this study was barbarians matter, the first objective is to continue to work toward producing scholarship that rejects the idea that Greece and “the East” are axiomatic. The same goes for the very ideas “the West” and “the East.” Doing so requires us to acknowledge that essential, I would say racial, ideals underpin the conception of Greek and Phoenician and that both conceptions are Hellenocentric. We cannot write their art histories without bringing along some of this ideological baggage, even though I have tried to distinguish between good and bad use of the terms. (The same problems dog the use of “koine.” Not only is it openly Hellenocentric, it also threatens to present the Hellenistic period as cohesively Greekish.) While it would be fair to ask why, if these collectivities are so poorly drawn, we continue to use them, I will confess that I am not yet ready to abandon either term. Instead, I feel that we must come to terms with our terms, recognizing that Greeks and Phoenicians are useful fictions for the enterprise of writing Mediterranean art history, that of the Greeks from around the beginning of the first millennium BCE, that of the Phoenicians perhaps only from about 500 years later. It is a good idea for us to grow more comfortable with inconsistency, to agree that history is supposed to become increasingly complicated as we deepen our understanding of it. Even while participating in rationalist exercises—when producing archaeological catalogues, for example—I want to advocate for more experimental approaches. My hope is for Greek art and Phoenician art to remain contested spaces.
(2) To follow from the second principle, proper use of theory is our responsibility, I propose that we endeavor to make regular use of critical theory even though for most of us theory will never constitute the subject matter of our work. Of course, there are ways to use theory poorly that discourage its embrace by the field of Greek art history. Yet I continue to find strange the frequent complaints concerning the use of inaccessible jargon from classical scholars who are committed to subjects completely inaccessible to nonspecialists. I am convinced that the greater danger is in using theoretical concepts without attendant theorizing. The differences between acculturation and the alternatives I explore here are not merely superficial corrections to terminology. Nor do they threaten knowledge. Fundamental and open-ended debate signals confidence and encourages thought.33 No analytical vocabulary can fully circumscribe the complexity of studying the past, but it is possible to encourage changes in the way we think by changing the way we gather and characterize the evidence.
We are at a point in Greek art history where it is less important to say what things were than to study the arguments for and against interpretations of what they did. Objectivism, I contend, is not only an impossible pursuit; it is also not always trying hard enough. Thinking anew about terms and approaches can be very fruitful when it allows us to reconsider their implications. Take Antonaccio’s point that the now-popular use of hybridity “may be an unnecessary tool of analysis for Greek culture(s), if we accept [the idea] of cultures as open systems, constantly shifting.”34 Attentive use of critical terminology gives us the power to reflect and thence avoid reinscribing traditional hierarchies (which is my major complaint about current use of hybridity).35 Put simply, while only a very few scholars will ever be theorists, all of us should aim to use critical theory well.
(3)–(4) As Zainab Bahrani reminds us, comparative studies are neither new nor necessarily forward-looking.36 Bearing her caution in mind, the third and fourth principles concerning comparative study—contact makes critical contributions to the expressions of identity in Mediterranean art and art is where we might learn the most about collective identity, especially Phoenician—are where the last two objectives must come home to roost. The objectives here, then, are that in studies of art produced by contact, we must reject the premise that the artistic traditions are axiomatic, and, therefore, we must seek appropriate strategies to understand how the resulting artworks came to be and how they functioned. One of the persistent problems of Phoenician art, through its many references to arts and cultures more familiar, is that it coaxes us into thinking we understand it.37 Greek art is still more seductive, however, to Anglo-American and European scholars who have grown up on the idea that we are somehow still operating in the Greek tradition.
Even if we move to new terms to better reflect our interests—ancient Mediterranean studies, for example—they do not do us any good as proxies for the very ways of thinking we are trying to leave behind. Whatever our interventions, we will never grow immune to institutional epistemologies.38 I do not foresee in the near future Hellenists denying the privileged role of Greece in the foundation of Western civilization.39 These tensions contribute quite a lot to what makes Greek art history interesting to me in the first place, and I doubt that feeling is rare. So our goals must be smaller. Here I hope to have encouraged new ideas by leaving the subject of Greek-Phoenician arts of contact “open and un-finished.”40 I do so precisely because it is not easy to be vigilant of institutional frameworks, terminology, and so forth, and, at the same time, say something that does not reinforce just those things. Of course we do not all need to be engaged in an unending discourse about the discourse of art history—that would be quite tedious. But neither can we pretend conversations that do not interest us do not matter. Even if it is not the subject of our particular research, it is our responsibility to work out a point of view on what art is, what a Greek is, what a Phoenician is or is not, what culture is, and so forth. Our feelings on the subject are part of what we do, evident in our work and especially in the classroom. Put another way, we must not leave theory up to the theorists alone.
I claimed at the outset of this book that it is easy to confuse what is simple, best, or correct with what we value. Grappling with historiography and theory does not make that idea less true. But a refusal to value critical theory at all is self-deceptive. I agree that in art history the “stakes are always in part philosophical and theoretical, and never wholly empirical.”41 The problems with a sensible, Occam’s razor approach to writing art history are thus further exposed. The history of the art of contact, then, is not so much a history of facts and events as it an exploration of what we value about the past. Awareness of and critical engagement with those values are fundamental to what we do.