Artful Crafts: Metal Vessels and Painted Pots

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David Gill  was co-author with Michael Vickers back in the 1990s of a book on Greek pots, Artful Crafts: Ancient Greek Silverware and Pottery Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994. This emphasized that decorated Greek cermics owe a great deal to metal prototypes, indeed that the majority are skeuomorphs of vanished metal originals. The thesis was originally met with some opposition, though it is now more generally accepted that many pots were indeed copying metal prototypes. Recently there has been a meeting at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge as part of the 'Not praising, burying' event [details]. Gill's presentation is available online here. He says on "Looting Matters":

At the start of the day I will be reflecting on the central themes of Artful Crafts. It strikes me that one of the central themes has been the way that Greek pottery has been removed from its ancient context and placed in an artificial "artistic" world that has promoted "important" creators. And museums and collectors have sought to acquire works by major names: Artful Crafts preceded the return of material to Italy from North American private collections.

This of course is a key difference between archaeology (the study of the past) and art-history (the study of pretty things). In the antiquities trade items are taken from the archaeological record and commodified as "ancient art". All sorts of arguments are trotted out by dealers and collectors for consumption by the weak-headed, that these objects were "meant" to be seen, and "meant" to be taken to far off lands in the West to be admired. In the majority of cases such speculation can be shown to be ill-founded. Many of the items sold as "ancient art" were more or less utilitarian objects or had other functions quite separate from their aesthetic appearance (Egyptian shabtis are a good example, but then so are many dugup coins - Medieval hammered for instance). Gill discusses some of the reflections resulting from the multidisciplinary gathering in a follow-up post, there will also be a seminar next week.

Over on the coiney forums there was dissent with the views of Professor Gill. One amateur philosopher in particular tried to persuade some of his slack-jawed fellow coin fondlers that Gill's approach was somehow a textbook example of "ethnocentrism" and what he called "anti-transdisciplinarity". The meeting itself is presented to coineys not only as a "subterfuge" but one which is intended to target collectors. I think no comment is necessary, log on and read it for yourselves to get a view into the warped thinking of some coineys.

Obviously the problem is that the idea that we should reassess ideas about "ancient art" going back to Winckelmann and Lord Hamilton sits ill with the assertions of no-questions-asked collectors and dealers about why their careless collecting of decontextualised objects should be accepted on the grounds that it is through this "art" that one can approach its creators. The opposing view, that we can approach the creators of the objects through better knowledge of the context of the making, use and discarding of the objects and items associated with them, bothers them.

Vignette: The Hamilton Collection was initially thought to be of "Etruscan" vases, then when they worked out they and others like them were not, art historical reasoning dated some of them a century too late and it was only archaeological excavations on the Acropolis in Athens that sorted out the chronology for the collectors, who are now attacking archaeologists because they want to preserve sites rather than mine them for commercially-attractive geegaws to collect.