Image and Text in Graeco-Roman Antiquity

The relation between the visual and the verbal spheres has been much contested in recent years, from laments about the 'logocentricism' of the academy to the heralding of the 'pictorial turn' of the multimedia age. This lavishly illustrated book recontextualises these debates through the historical lens of Greek and Roman antiquity. Dr Squire shows how modern Western concepts of 'words' and 'pictures' derive from a post-Reformation tradition of theology and aesthetics. Where modern critics assume a bipartite separation between images and texts, classical antiquity toyed with a more playful and engaged relation between the two. By using the ancient world to rethink our own ideologies of the visual and the verbal, this interdisciplinary book brings together classics and art history, as well as a sustained reflection on their historiography: the result is a new and explosive cultural history of Western visual thinking.

Preface: kicking the habit?; Part I: 1. Words and pictures in a post-Lutheran age; 2. Towards an older Laocoon? Reviewing the 'limits' of painting and poetry in the Graeco-Roman world; Part II: 3. Materialising ecphrasis: image and word in the Sperlonga Grotto; 4. Speaking for pictures? Images, texts and modes of visual-verbal response in the 'House of Propertius' at Assisi; Part III: 5. Cyclopian iconotexts: the adventures of Polyphemus in image and text; 6. The art of nature and the nature of art: visual-verbal interactions in the consumption of Roman 'still-life' paintings; Envoi: the bigger picture.

Michael Squire is a Research Fellow at Christ's College, Cambridge, and concurrently holds an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship at Humboldt Universität, Berlin. He is also the co-author (with Nigel Spivey) of Panorama of the Classical World, 2nd edition (2004).