Visual Power in Ancient Greece and Rome by Hölscher Tonio;

Author:Hölscher, Tonio;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of California Press

ANALOGOUS AND CONVENTIONAL SIGNS

Language is a medium of conventional signs: The words híppos, equus, horse, cheval, and Pferd are totally different designations of the same object; they have no intrinsic, natural connection with the animal that they designate but are sounds that are conventionally assigned to the notion of it. By contrast, the image of a horse has essential traits in common with a real horse: it is to some degree analogous to the object it represents. Art theory is, to be sure, fully aware of this fact but nevertheless often emphasizes instead the fundamental divide between image and reality: the catchword is “aesthetic difference.”7

Indeed, a painted horse on an Archaic Greek vase differs substantially from a real horse in that it is immobile, flat, and bodiless; consists of a shining surface of black glaze; is articulated by linear incisions; and has a regularly stylized mane of parallel waves turned backward. These are conventions of technique and style, which we see as a realm of cultural creativity, transcending the constraints of pregiven reality. It is from such ‘productive’ cultural devices that we derive our understanding of the Greek concept of the horse in its various aspects. This conventionality, however, is not infinite: one can depict a horse through very different conventional designs, but not by a blue circle. No convention could define a blue circle as an image of a horse because of the lack of common essential traits. This does not mean to deny the creative artificiality of images, but to Greek viewers the coincident traits between the real and the depicted horse were quite definitely essential. Therefore, if modern scholarship focuses in particular on the “aesthetic difference” between art and reality, this springs from our own perspective; for antiquity we should develop a theoretical approach that not only includes but focuses on the nonconventional, reproductive aspects of figural art.

A specific aspect of the difference between language and image is the fact that language organizes the world into discrete units, words, whereas figural art is a medium of intermediates. Images imitate to some degree the visual world’s infinitely varied appearances of beings, things, actions, and their multiple, complex cultural significances. Language can designate a “horse” or a “house,” but images can depict innumerable forms of horses and houses. Language can define qualities, like “big” and “small,” “brown” and “black,” “standing” and “running,” with some intermediate or additional stages, but images dispose of an infinite spectrum of forms and sizes, colors and movements. Finally, language indicates inherent values of persons and actions by fixed terms like “dignity” and “vulgarity,” “heroism” and “cowardice,” “beauty” and “ugliness,” whereas images display an immense variety of forms that can be interpreted in various ways in terms of such qualifications. The relevance of these distinctions becomes evident in verbal transcriptions of the ideological programs of Roman state monuments in which the complexity of these concepts is poorly reduced to mere political catchwords.8

Semiotic theory has established—in part in the wake of Erwin Panofsky’s iconology—a model of

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