Suzanne Marchand

Suzanne Marchand (Ph.D.,  University of Chicago) is the Boyd Professor of European Intellectual History at Louisiana State University. She has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship as well as fellowships from the Wissenschaftskolleg, Berlin, the Max Planck Institute, and Harvard's Villa I Tatti. She is the author of Down from Olympus: Archaeology and Philhellenism in Germany, 1750-1870 (Princeton University Press, 1996) and German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Race, Religion, and Scholarship  (Cambridge University Press, 2009). 

The title of one of your essays asks the question "How Much Knowledge is Worth Knowing?" I think you are using "worth" figuratively, but I wonder, how much does economics play a role in the topics you study, whetherit's the "antiquities rush" of the 19th century or the history of porcelein, to take two examples from your current interests?

Interesting question!  This essay is about a new field of study known as "the history of knowledge," which considers the history of knowledge production very broadly, treating such as things as the knowledge of how to raise chickens, or how to fit saddles, or how to mix paints and mend clocks.  The contrast here is to histories of elite knowledge, such as the history of philosophy or the history of physics, as pursed largely by white, elite men (as women and non-white persons were typically excluded from these realms).  I am very interested in knowledge production generally, and I am in favor of democratizing our inquiries.  But I am a bit worried that we will get too local or even arcane in our pursuits, and take on studies such as the history of chicken raising in the 1830s in Prussia, without considering why that knowledge mattered or what its more general importance might be.  Perhaps it would be better to treat this material as social history, and place it in the context not of knowledge production, but of the history of the Prussian rural labor force, where a better case might be made for its importance.  In any event, by the "worth" of knowledge here I did not mean its economic value, but its scholarly worth: and it seems to me necessary that scholars make a good case for the importance of their studies, beyond the merely anecdotal or antiquarian interest they might have.

Much of your work focuses on Herodotus. What in your opinion is the most interesting work of art that depicts either Herodotus himself or an episode from his History? 

I would say it is a J. J. Rubens painting of Queen Tomyris, which dates to about 1630. 

Tomyris in The Histories is the queen of the Massagetae; after her son is tricked into captivity and suicide by the army of the Persian king Cyrus, Tomyris makes sure her warriors go after Cyrus. Once they have killed him, they send her his head, and as she dips it into a wineskin of human blood, she declares: "I give you your fill of blood!" Herodotus' account is the only extant one of this scene, and many thought it was not historically accurate. (Xenophon had a wholly different story about Cyrus' death.). But it was a favorite artistic subject, and Louis XIV even put this painting in his throne room, apparently to associate himself with Tomyris and her cool determination to revenge herself on enemies of her state and family, no matter how exalted.

You are a modern historian, but much of your work deals with ancient history. Which classicist has had the biggest influence on your own scholarship?

I would say that my fascination with the subject of the ancient world goes back to a trip my sister and I took with our parents to Greece and Italy in 1981, when I was 19 and she was 16. She became a classicist (archaeologist) and definitely of all living classicists she has had the biggest impact on me! In addition, I attended a terrific lecture series on the work of Heinrich Schliemann at Troy by the British classicist Anthony Snodgrass when I was in college, and that intrigued me greatly. Since that time, I have never stopped learning from classicists, and from Near Eastern specialists, religious studies scholars, art historians, archaeologists, and museum curators. One of my friends says of the university that it is intended to contain knowledge of the universe, past and present; and I say: learn from all!         

Tiffany Jenkins

Tiffany Jenkins (Ph.D.,  University of Kent) is the author of Contesting Human Remains in Museum Collections: The Crisis of Cultural Authority (Routledge, 2014) and Keeping Their Marbles: How the Treasures of the Past Ended Up in Museums and Why They Should Stay There (Oxford University Press, 2016). She has been the host of multiple BBC Radio 4 series, a columnist for The Scotsman, and an Honorary Fellow at the University of Edinburgh. Her essays are published on the Behind the Scenes at the Museum Substack.

With your book on the Elgin Marbles, I'm sure you knew that you would get a strong reaction no matter what position you took. What response has surprised you the most?

I was surprised to find that most of the reaction refused to engage with one of my main points, which is more analysis than polemic.   

One of the main arguments I make in Keeping Their Marbles is that whether its the calls for the return of the Elgin Marbles, the Benin Bronzes, or Aboriginal human remains, the clamour for repatriation is most often generated within institutions themselves –the activists are inside the museum, not outside. This is a result of museum curators’ own crisis of purpose, that is,  the pursuit of truth and its dissemination. I suggest that the foundational principles of the museum, to investigate and understand the world, have been scrutinized severely. Those in museum studies are schooled in post-colonialism, postmodernism, and the idea that the museum is just the agent of the elite. This has entwined with a retreat from social and political solutions to very serious problems, and has led to the targeting of culture as a way of making people’s lives better. 

But no one really responds to this analysis or engages with it. It’s like they haven’t read the book!

I saw your podcast about censorship in the arts. Is this a brand new and different sort of phenomenon, or is it similar to any trends or movements in the past?

Censorship in the present is different to that of the past. Firstly, because of who is doing it. It used to be the state that censored artists, but today it’s more likely to be artists censoring other artists. Secondly, historically, those calling for censorship were often concerned that an artwork—perhaps of a sexual nature—would have a coarsening effect and a negative moral impact. Today's activists often have a different rationale. They argue that they are the only ones who have the right to speak about the experience depicted—and thus, have the right to silence those who have no comparable experience. Thirdly, artists used to be the one’s trying to offend. Now they go out of their way not to.  This is because those doing the censoring pour over what artists have said or written, for 'problematic opinions' which creates a climate where artists self-censor for fear of what may happen if they speak their minds. Self-censorship is the real problem today. 

You might find this panel discussion about cancel culture of interest.

If you had an airport layover and had only a few hours to spend in a museum -- any museum in the world --where would you spend it?

I have never been to the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, and I am not likely to be able to do so soon due to the war, but I would love to some time in the future. Though given its collection includes 3 millions works of art, archeological artefacts, I may need more than a few hours….  

Jacqueline DiBiasie-Sammons

Jacqueline DiBiasie-Sammons (Ph.D.,  University of Texas at Austin) is Assistant Professor of  Classics at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, Mississippi. Her research focuses on ancient Roman graffiti. She served as the Field Director of the Herculaneum Graffiti Project.

Your dissertation was on graffiti in ancient Pompeii. Some would say graffiti is not art, but I'm guessing you'd disagree. So my question is: is all graffiti art? and does it depend on whether we mean graffiti in the ancient world or graffiti today? 

This is a fascinating question and I want to point you to a picture I took right outside the campus of UT Austin where I did my Ph.D.: 

The line between graffiti and art is very blurry. Many people do not consider tags on subway cars to be art, yet the graffiti of the artist Banksy are worth many millions of dollars. In my opinion, all graffiti have the potential to be art -- it is in the eye of the beholder. As my research is interested in the aesthetics of graffiti (their form, handwriting, medium, style, color, effect on the viewer) I consider each piece of writing as art. What does the way the author wrote the message tell us about what they were intending to convey? What is the effect of the way the message is written on me as a viewer? 

What is the most significant discovery about Pompeii and Herculaneum that we ahve made with the new technologies that have become available over the last twenty years?

One of the biggest advances in the last twenty years is the use of archaeological science to tell us more about the past. For example, researchers in Herculaneum have analyzed the sewers to understand more about ancient diets and trade. Other scientists have used computers to virtually scan and un-wrap carbonized scrolls from the Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum. Conservation techniques have also improved our ability to preserve these ancient sites for the next generations.

Before I saw the Ancient Graffiti Project website, when I thought of Roman graffiti, I thought of the famous scene from Monty Python's Life of Brian. Is most ancient Roman graffiti grammatically correct, or do you find lots of mistakes?

There are frequently mistakes in the graffiti: grammatical mistakes, spelling mistakes, and scratching out words. Other graffiti have what we call "substandard Latin" (sometimes also called vulgar Latin). These graffiti have spelling or grammar that are different than Classical Latin and show us the ways everyday people were speaking and using the language. For example, many Latin graffiti in Pompeii are missing the -m at the end of words, likely because it was not being pronounced. Graffiti provide testimony of bilingualism and regional variation as well.

Victor Coonin

Victor Coonin (Ph.D., Rutgers University) is Professor of Art History at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee. He specializes in the field of Italian Renaissance art and is the author of From Marble to Flesh: The Biography of Michelangelo's David (The Florentine Press, 2014) and Donatello and the Dawn of Renaissance Art (Reaktion Press, 2019).

"Renaissance" means "rebirth." What, exactly, is "reborn" from the ancient world in the sculpture of someone like Donatello?

In my book on Donatello I argue that he actively helped create what we think of as the Renaissance and was not just a product of his times. He was good friends early on with the architect Brunelleschi and the painter Masaccio.  Together they revolutionized art, primarily by emphasizing an art based upon nature in the sense of prioritizing observation, rationality, science, etc., as opposed to abstraction and an art based on artificial stereotypes. Thus Brunelleschi introduces mathematical perspective, Masaccio shows rational three-dimensional space and figures in his paintings, and Donatello sculpts some of the most authentic-looking characters in the history of art, even if they are fictions.  His incredible depiction of Mary Magdalene comes immediately to mind:  

  

These artists sought to revive an aesthetic based on nature that they thought had been lost in the period we now think of as Medieval (though it wasn’t entirely true!).   

          

Your book on Michelangelo's David is so interesting. Is there a particular work from the ancient world that had an influence on him as he worked on that sculpture?

For Michelangelo the "rebirth" implied by the Renaissance, as seen in David, is that of the classical ideals of sculpture. This is both practical and theoretical in the sense that he sees his role as an artist as trying to make an ideal figure based on nature. The theoretical construct is that nature gives us all the clues of what a perfect being (human or otherwise) should look like but never actually accomplishes it. That's where the artist comes in as creator. Michelangelo's David is a rebirth of a classical premise that one can indeed sculpt an ideal male in terms of proportions, pose, expression, and other life-like forms.

Michelangelo was also up for the technical challenge of carving marble on a huge scale not accomplished since antiquity. Of course, today we are challenging these very notions of an ideal and I particularly like the contemporary riffs on the David that push back on assumptions such as gender, race, body image, pose, even scale. To get back to your initial question, Michelangelo is looking at loads of classical statues that embrace this ideal and if you wanted to choose one for comparison, the Doryphorus comes closest to a model, though Michelangelo would not have seen the versions typically pictured today. He had many more things to look at, however, than we commonly think. Remnants of the classical past were plentiful. Michelangelo was especially enamored of two sculptures that were in Rome: the Belvedere Torso and the Laocoön group, though the latter was discovered only after he had finished the David:

Which figures or episodes from ancient Greece and Rome seem to appear most frequently in the Renaissance art you study?

The various ideals of males and females predominate, whether they are in the form of a god or goddess, an athlete or other guise. The basic assumption was that there existed a common ideal of beauty, an assumption we vigorously challenge today. In the Baroque period that follows we find more interest in the bizarre or unusual but typically in the Renaissance the preferred aesthetic is for the ideal of nature.

Stephanie Pearson

Stephanie Pearson (Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley) is the founder and content creator of Museums.love, which draws on her years of experience leading tours of art museums in Berlin, where she has worked at the Pergamon Museum, the Altes Museum, and the Neues Museum. She is the author of The Triumph and Trade of Egyptian Objects in Rome: Collecting Art in the Ancient Mediterranean (De Gruyter, 2021).

Your website is a great resource for museum lovers. If I had just two hours I could spend at any museum in the world, where should I spend it if I wanted to have the best possible experience of classical art?

This turned out to be a surprisingly hard question! Trying to narrow down the options, the main factors I considered for my answer are (1) the objects themselves, (2) the educational presentation of the objects, and (3) the atmosphere of the place itself. Because I’m not usually wowed by blockbusters, and I don’t know any standouts in the educational aspect, I’ll focus on the atmosphere.

The Getty Villa in California is rightfully known as one of the most beautiful places to see ancient art, because the building and landscape are gorgeous. Moreover, they recreate something of the setting of an ancient Roman villa – so there is a great learning factor hidden in the scenery. The atmosphere is also fabulous in the Montemartini museum in Rome, where ancient marble sculptures are tucked among the industrial tanks and pipes of a onetime electrical plant. Like the Getty Villa, it’s stunning – but for totally different reasons!

Ultimately, though, one of my favorite places to experience ancient art are the tiny museums in the Mediterranean that no guide book would ever have you visit. In Turkey there is a little, unassuming, office-like building in every village of a certain size, and in that building are the ancient artworks that were found nearby. These buildings are usually empty of people, off on a side track. The quiet invites reflection. The immediate connection between the place you’re standing and the art you’re looking at is intoxicating. Also, the artworks are often pieces that don’t make it into textbooks or big museums, so you find crazy stuff that hasn’t been accepted into the canon.

          

What is a work of art that most people don't know about but probably should know about?

One of my favorite pieces to talk about with students is the statue of Hor-sa-tutu in Berlin’s Neues Museum:

 Although it’s highlighted by its position at the end of a long gallery, most people walk right by it. Hor-sa-tutu’s face is shown wrinkled and carefully individualized; we can easily imagine the man who sat for this portrait to be made of him. His hairstyle is also carved in the fashion of the day. Overall, the impression is of a fairly lifelike statue, like those of Roman emperors. Yet the dark stone used for the statue is not marble but granite, typical not of Roman but of Egyptian art. And if you walk around to the back of the statue, you see the remains of a back pillar and even hieroglyphs – also quintessentially Egyptian.

To me this statue is an amazing embodiment of how Greek, Roman, and Egyptian cultural traditions could flow into one another in a way that we modern people can hardly imagine. We think of these three cultures as being discrete, easily separable from one another; but to the ancient people living at their nexus, they were all just one entity called Life, or Me, or This Is Just How Things Are. Hor-sa-tutu chose the most effective way to present himself in statue form, which involved an individualized face combined with a hieroglyphic inscription. Although we call the former Greek or Roman and the latter Egyptian, he might not have differentiated these at all. Relativizing our own perspective like this is one of the main things I’d like people to get out of an encounter with ancient art.

You can probably think of works that are underrated or underappreciated. Can you think of any that are overrated? (Since the artists are dead, I guess you don't have to worry about offending them!)

You’re right – although I do worry about offending the researchers who so diligently study all the well-known works of art! For most of those works I can recognize their educational or aesthetic value for us today, even if they don’t strike me personally as all that great. And yet… Lots of excellent scholars have written about the Doryphoros and the Primaporta Augustus, which are certainly important statues, but really not interesting for my preferred explorations of antiquity (since both of those statues are primarily about idolizing men and their power). The one statue which I find bland beyond measure, and which I have seen world-class professors address with a glazed-over look, is the Apollo Belvedere:

The Apollo Belvedere: Overrated?

It’s a fine example of some principles of ancient art, but other statues would do just as well in a much more interesting way! I know I am making enemies among the Renaissance artists by saying that. They loved him….

Kate Nichols

Kate Nichols (Ph.D., Birkbeck College London) is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Birmingham. She has held postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Bristol, the University of York, and the University of Cambridge. She is the author of Greece and Rome at the Crystal Palace: Classical Sculpture and Modern Britain, 1854-1936 (Oxford University Press, 2015). 

What is the most memorable example of art with "classical form" and "biblical content" you have come across in your research?

I spent three years working on a project which explored the crossovers between the Bible and classical antiquity in 19th-century thought, and one of the most striking art works and the one which instantly popped into my head is the sculpture Lot's Wife, by Hamo Thornycroft (1877-78):

          

It depicts the biblical story from Genesis, where Lot and his family are fleeing Sodom and Gomorrah. Lot's wife looks back at the cities as they flee, and is turned into a pillar of salt. The sculpture shows her part way through this transformation. This biblical story is presented in a very recognizably classical manner. The figure wears a chiton and makes obvious visual references to figures K, L, and M from the East Pediment of the Parthenon (better known as the Elgin Marbles), which had been on display in London since 1816.

You have written about the reception of Greek and Roman art in modern Great Britain. Did you start by being interested in the modern period and then work your way back to the ancient world, or were you interested in antiquity and then discovered how Greek and Roman art was presented in later times?

I did my undergraduate degree in classical studies, but was encouraged throughout my undergraduate degree to explore how people today were able to access the classical past--to think critically about how post-classical people and societies have shaped the classical past. I wrote my undergraduate dissertation on the reception of the Parthenon Marbles in Victorian London, and ever since really have been convinced that the Victorians are absolutely crucial to how we understand Greek and Roman sculpture today--and not always in positive ways!

What work of art was the greatest loss when the Crystal Palace was destroyed by fire in 1936?

All of the objects in the Crystal Palace were plaster casts, rather than antiquities, but that doesn't mean they weren't import art objects in their own right. I personally think that the painted and restored version of the Parthenon Frieze in the Greek Court was a huge loss. It tells us so much about how some mid-Victorians (in particular the architects who built the Crystal Palace courts) conceptualized ancient Greece as a place aligned with artistic practices of painting sculpture in Egypt and the Near East, while others regarded it as isolated from non-European contexts, and to have been always white marble in its forms. It was a really scandalous experiment when it was first exhibited in the 1850s, and I would love to have seen what it looked like.

Elizabeth Vandiver

Elizabeth Vandiver (Ph.D., University of Texas-Austin) is the Clement Biddle Penrose Professor of Latin and Classics, Emerita, at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington. Her most recent book is Stand in the Trench, Achilles: Classical Receptions in British Poetry of the Great War (Oxford University Press, 2010). She has also recorded several popular courses for The Great Courses on Homer, Virgil, Herodotus, and classical mythology.

You have written a lot about Herodotus. What episode from his writings is the most popular among later artists?

Oddly enough, later artists don’t seem to have drawn on Herodotus to any great extent; there are nowhere near the number of paintings illustrating episodes from his work as there are illustrating stories from Ovid, for instance. It’s perhaps somewhat disturbing that the episode that does seem to have received the most artistic attention is that of the Massagetaean queen Tamyris being presented with the head of the Persian king Cyrus and/or plunging the head into a wineskin of blood (the story is at Herodotus Book I, chapters 205-214). Renaissance artists were intrigued with women from ancient literature (such as Judith from the Hebrew Bible) who triumphed over men, often in bloody ways, and Tomyris was one of that set. The most famous painting of her is probably this, by Rubens, in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston:

I'm interested in the sculpture on the cover of your book about British poetry and the classics. Is it supposed to be a modern representation of Achilles? 

The sculpture on the jacket of my book is the memorial for First World War soldiers in Cambridge, England. It isn’t intended to represent Achilles, but the idealization of the young man’s face did remind me of the idealized faces of the horsemen on the Parthenon frieze (now in the British Museum): 

And here’s the face on the Cambridge statue:

In the years immediately following the First World War, most towns in the UK put up memorials to their dead soldiers (as did towns in France and Germany, and probably in other countries as well). Even the smallest villages usually have a war memorial. Classical or classically-influenced figures were very common elements of these memorials, which often also included the inscribed names of the young men from that town who had died in the war. When my book was about to be published, Oxford University Press asked me to find an image to use on the dustjacket. I wanted an image that would epitomize the subject of the book — that is, one that would visually represent both the young men who fought in the First World War and the importance of classics for the poetry some of those young men wrote. This image (which my husband found for me!) seemed perfect to me, not just because of the very classical idealization of the young soldier’s face but also because of the laurel wreath on his rifle, which works as a visual reference to the ancient world and to poetry. The sculptor was Robert Tait Mackenzie and the statue is formally titled “The Homecoming.”

You can see the laurel wreath very clearly in this photograph:

If you could decree that all students of the classics read one book or article, what would it be?

Well, first I’d have to ask you if you mean a modern book, or an ancient one! You probably mean a modern one, and in that case answering is fiercely difficult. There are so many magnificent books about classics, and so many different aspects to the classical world (literature, history, archaeology, art, and more) that it’s just about impossible to pick ONE book that everyone should read. However, one strong candidate as a starting-point for non-specialists who are interested in classical authors and their continuing influence would be Christopher Pelling and Maria Wyke, Twelve Voices from Greece and Rome: Ancient Ideas for Modern Times (Oxford University Press, 2014). It contains essays on 12 different authors, starting with Homer and ending with Lucian, and it is fascinating, informative, and very readable.

If you were thinking of an ancient book, then that becomes a variant of the "desert island" question ("If you could have only one book on a desert island, what would it be?"), and for that, my answer has always been "The Odyssey, in Greek."