Papers by Nikolaus Dietrich
Achilles Beyond Fury: Other Faces of the Hero, 2024
Zeitschrift für archäologische Aufklärung, Heft 3: Gleichheit, 2025
This paper discusses the uses of comparison and visual resemblance as a fundamental methodologica... more This paper discusses the uses of comparison and visual resemblance as a fundamental methodological tool in archaeological image studies, and explores how evolving ways of depicting archaeological artefacts in drawing and photography adapt themselves to these epistemological needs. A basic distinction is proposed between comparison for sake of taxonomic classification, and comparison for the sake of characterisation of the individual artefact. My case-study is the 'classical' comparison between the Augustus from Prima Porta and the Doryphoros herm from Herculaneum.
A. Anguissola – A. Grüner (eds.), The Nature of Art: Pliny the Elder on Materials, Turnhout: Brepols, pp. 171–179, 2021
Pliny’s «ex uno lapide» is widely recognised as a characterisation of the Laocoon intended to con... more Pliny’s «ex uno lapide» is widely recognised as a characterisation of the Laocoon intended to convey great praise. Despite the fact that three sculptors cooperated in its production and it comprises three human bodies and two snakes, Pliny claimed the sculptural group was nevertheless carved out of a single marble-block. This assertion had, however, already been proven objectively incorrect in the Renaissance. Much less well-known is the fact that this same assertion can be found several times in Pliny’s digression on famous works in marble. Thus for Pliny, «ex uno lapide» clearly functions as a Leitmotiv of highly positive characterisation for outstanding achievements in marble. As none of these other works are materially preserved, it cannot be said whether Pliny’s claim may have been factually correct in all of these cases. What stands beyond any doubt, however, is that the monolithic production mode
is an important component of the technical mastery of Roman marble-working in general, in terms of both statues and architectural elements such as columns. In the following discussion, I would like to tackle two questions. Firstly, what makes the monolithic production mode such a praiseworthy characteristic of statues in Pliny’s view? Secondly, what is the relationship between Pliny’s view and the specific value that may be given to the monolithic production mode from an archaeological perspective?
Images at the Crossroads: Media and Meaning in Greek Art, 2022
This volume, Images at the Crossroads, began with the tenth biennial A. G. Leventis Conference he... more This volume, Images at the Crossroads, began with the tenth biennial A. G. Leventis Conference held at the University of Edinburgh on 9-12 November 2017. Our initial invitation to specialists of different media asked them to consider questions that cross the boundaries of conventional fi elds. While we had media in mind, our participants far surpassed our initial ambitions by considering many different themes of images at crossroads: images that stand at the cusp of narrative and non-narrative; images that refl ect social values by means of aesthetics; the relationship between images and the urban, largely religious, environment; the interaction direction or angle, and under which circumstances. The third part of this collection considers the border between image and reality, the relationship of images to reality, specifi cally the relationship of the physical city and the actual craftsmen to the pictures they create. In an
Zeitschrift für archäologische Aufklärung Heft 1/2024: Freiheit, 2024
In this essay, I try to show how the Athenian potter-painters' subordination under decorative pri... more In this essay, I try to show how the Athenian potter-painters' subordination under decorative principles ruling Attic vase-painting through largely predefined typologies of vessels and their decoration paradoxically opens up a field of freedom for the (artisan-) artists.
Museum Sinicum （《西方古典学辑刊》）, 2024
What is the point of imitating a functional object in an inadequate material that makes it unusab... more What is the point of imitating a functional object in an inadequate material that makes it unusable? This is the question that a simple 7th century BC clay ‘wool basket’ (kalathos) arises, which shall guide me through this paper. We deal with an object that imitates the form of its model (a wool basket in wickerwork) without conserving its material and functional affordances. This clay kalathos shall be discussed along other Greek vessels, while using J. Carelman’s falsely similar 'dadaist' objets introuvables (1969) as an analytical point of reference, in order to give a glimpse of the multifaceted Greek culture of ‘re-making the same thing in a different material’. As it will appear, this process does not necessarily result in unusable objects, but often in un-practical objects: objects that require a certain amount of adaptation from the side of the user within the network that links humans and things in every-day practice. Although the clay wool-basket, which was apparently made for its deposition in a grave or in a sanctuary, would never have really entered that network, it is still the entanglement of things and human activity that confers significance to this unusable object, be it only through the reference to wool work (the feminine activity par excellence) inherent to its form.
Perspective Actualité en histoire de l’art. Obscurités, 2023
This essay analyzes the contrast between the way art objects of ancient Greece are now displayed ... more This essay analyzes the contrast between the way art objects of ancient Greece are now displayed in the brightly lit spaces of museums, which (ideally) aspire to make them as visible as possible, and the contexts these objects come from. Although an attempt to achieve maximum visibility can be observed in many contexts of ancient Greece – especially public squares and sanctuaries full of statues erected under the “Grecian sun” – other ancient contexts that are just as essential for the “presentation” and use of object-images were characterized by a total absence of light and visitors (in particular, placements in tombs), or featured dim lighting that gave darkness a prominent role. The traditional idea of a luminous Greece, as opposed to other supposedly “darker” cultures of antiquity (such as ancient Egypt, the Etruscans, and the Byzantines), merits a reexamination.
M. Harari and E. Pontelli, Le Cose Nell'Immagine. Atti del III Colloquio AIRPA, 17-18 Giungio 2019, pp.17-40 , 2022
Experience, Narrative, and Criticism in Ancient Greece Under the Spell of Stories, ed. byJ. Grethlein, L. Huitink, and A. Tagliabue, 2020
Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxfo... more Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.
Enthüllen und Verbergen in der Vormoderne / Revealing and Concealing in the Premodern Period Henriette Hofmann, Gerald Wildgruber, Barbara Schellewald und Sophie Schweinfurth (Hg.), 2021
Mehrdeutigkeiten, Rahmentheorien und Affordanzkonzepte in der archäologischen Bildwissenschaft, 2021
This article discusses three aspects of ancient artefacts and building structures in relation to ... more This article discusses three aspects of ancient artefacts and building structures in relation to each other, namely their typology, their affordances, and their pictorial decoration, by taking examples from early Greek fine pottery and from Roman imperial domestic architecture as case studies. It appears that these three descriptive categories have a strong tendency not to coincide. While, for instance, the morphology of “Melian amphorae” points to the storage-vessel “amphora” from a typological point of view, its affordances rather indicate a use as a krater. Similarly, the frequent T+U-shaped floor mosaics in large rooms of Roman imperial houses point, from a typological point of view, to a use in the context of convivia, while the affordances of these rooms allow for a much broader array of functions. Instead of abandoning the traditional category of typology in favour of the rather new category of affordances in one’s thinking about Greek and Roman material culture, I suggest that we should understand such discrepancies between the formal type and the material affordances of Greek and Roman artefacts and decorated building structures as design strategies. Pictorial decoration may enter here as a third element that again often proves remarkably independent in its thematic choices from its material support. The complex interplay between these three aspects of artefacts and decorated building spaces may produce meaningful references to areas of particular cultural importance, such as the storage of goods (especially in early archaic Greece, but also beyond), the culture of conspicuous consumption in the context of symposia, or the convivium as by far the most paradigmatic performative context in every-day life within a Roman elite house.
in: A. Meriani and G. Zuchtriegel (eds.), La tomba del tuffatore: rito, arte e poesia a Paestum e nel Mediterraneo d’epoca tardo-arcaica, 2020, 167-187, 2020
This chapter focusses on the Tuffatore-fresco as a rare example of (what is usually called) a Gre... more This chapter focusses on the Tuffatore-fresco as a rare example of (what is usually called) a Greek painted landscape, employing it as a case-study for some reflections on the methodological problem of how to deal with exceptions in the archaeological record. Working with exceptional cases amounts to working without the heuristic tool of comparison, as it shall emerge from the analysis of this fresco. In my discussion I will point out how conferring on an object the status of an exception is itself a descriptive exercise; it is only by describing this fresco as a landscape painting that it becomes an exception. Finally, I will suggest that it might be classified rather as painted decoration, which helps to explain several peculiarities in its overall design.
Art Style, Art & Culture International Magazine 7, 2021
With Eduard Gerhard's Etruskische Spiegel (1843-1897), bronze mirrors come to be among the earlie... more With Eduard Gerhard's Etruskische Spiegel (1843-1897), bronze mirrors come to be among the earliest classes of objects to have been published in a systematic and extensively illustrated corpus within (classical) archaeology in the mid-nineteenth century. By making available archaeological material to scholars who had hitherto based their knowledge of ancient cultures mainly on written sources, such illustrated corpora constitute a kind of 'material turn' avant la lettre within classical scholarship. At the same time, however, these same corpora also initiated a process of de-materialisation of their objects: by substituting them for two-dimensional depictions, they often focused exclusively on areas with pictorial decoration, thereby turning functional material objects into sources for ancient art history. In a first part of this paper, I would like to follow these inherent dialectics in the publication of archaeological material by examining the example of bronze mirrors. In a second part, which is focused mainly on a mid-fifth century BC Greek caryatid mirror in New York (Metropolitan Museum of Art 1972.118.78), I try to 'restore' to these Greek mirrors the material aspects that were neglected in past scholarship, using these sophisticated instruments of female cosmetics mainly as sources for the reconstruction of the history of Greek sculpture. Without forgetting the place of mirrors in Greek literature and philosophy, the discussion shall focus on the material affordances of mirrors, and above all their power of reflection and ability to produce an image. The (syn-) aesthetic experience of seeing oneself, put back on centre-stage, will thereby shed new light on those mostly erotic iconographies with which mirrors were adorned.
N. Hosoi – E. Lehoux – V. Zachari (Hrsg.), La Cité des regards, Presses universitaires de Rennes 2019, 2019
De manière générale, notre connaissance des sociétés antiques se fonde sur l'interprétation de so... more De manière générale, notre connaissance des sociétés antiques se fonde sur l'interprétation de sources fragmentaires-qu'il s'agisse de textes littéraires partiellement transmis par retranscriptions successives, de textes épigraphiques fragmentaires, de structures archéologiques partiellement conservées, fouillées et/ ou publiées ou d'images fragmentaires. Pour remédier à ce problème, nous avons tendance en archéologie, à prendre comme point de départ de nos recherches les cas les mieux couverts par les différentes sources, en espérant pouvoir en déduire quelque chose sur les domaines les moins bien représentés. Par conséquence, un certain nombre de « paradigmes » se dégagent auxquels nous assignons une valeur explicative particulièrement grande, et dont nous nous servons de guide pour éclaircir d'autres domaines plus obscurs pour nous. Ainsi, la cité d'Athènes nous sert de modèle de cité grecque, non pas tellement qu'il s'agirait d'une cité typique (loin de là !), mais seulement parce que nous en avons une connaissance plus complète comparée aux autres cités. Ce même mécanisme est à l'oeuvre dans d'autres domaines. Par exemple, c'est par les quelques comédies d'Aristophane dont nous détenons le texte complet que nous nous représentons « la » comédie grecque. Ainsi, il arrive que souvent nous investissions d'une vertu explicative démesurément grande certains monuments isolés mieux connus que d'autres par le hasard de la transmission. Parmi les nombreuses korai de l'Acropole d'Athènes, c'est le cas de celle d'Anténor. C'est elle qui nous sert souvent de clé de lecture à l'interprétation de ce type de statue, pour la simple raison qu'avec celle-ci nous pouvons faire le lien entre la figure et la base inscrite.
Le danger d’une perspective biaisée dans nos théories et nos interprétations par un petit nombre de cas déclarés paradigmatiques au gré du hasard de la transmission, a depuis longtemps été identifié, et la critique en a déjà été faite à maintes reprises. Si l’archéologie continue tout de même à travailler selon cette « méthode paradigmatique » et de construire ses modèles à partir des domaines mieux représentés, c’est parce que ce choix méthodologique reste le meilleur compte tenu du caractère fragmentaire de nos sources. Je n’ai ainsi pas l’intention de dénoncer dans son ensemble ce choix méthodologique dicté par le bon sens. Néanmoins, je voudrais montrer à partir d’un exemple de tesson
d’une coupe attique à figures rouges de la collection de l’Institut archéologique d’Heidelberg, que le fragment loin de constituer un obstacle à la connaissance, recèle un potentiel heuristique qui lui est propre.
Homo pictor: Image Studies and Archaeology in Dialogue, Heidelberg: Propylaeum, 2020 (Freiburger Studien zur Archäologie und visuellen Kultur, Band 2), 2020
Ziel dieses Aufsatzes ist es, die in der Klassischen Archäologie, wie mir scheint, zu einseitige ... more Ziel dieses Aufsatzes ist es, die in der Klassischen Archäologie, wie mir scheint, zu einseitige Auffassung dessen, was der Kontext eines archäologischen Artefakts sei, zu erweitern. Als Beispielbefund soll ein ikonographisch wenig außergewöhnliches attisches Schalenfragment des Phintias um 500 v. Chr. aus der Heidelberger Antikensammlung dienen, welches 1970 aus dem Kunsthandel erworben wurde, ohne dass sich seine Herkunft weiter zurückverfolgen ließe. Obwohl seine Fundzusammenhänge unbekannt sind, erlaubt der Gegenstand, wie ich zeigen möchte, eine Vielzahl von methodisch fundierten Aussagen, die jedoch auf andere Kontexte Bezug nehmen als denjenigen, den man archäologischen Kontext zu nennen pflegt.
Cahiers des Mondes Anciens 13, 2020
This paper analyses the reception of the researches of the “Paris school” in the context of the G... more This paper analyses the reception of the researches of the “Paris school” in the context of the German “Klassiche Archäologie” which, more or less at the same moment, was also entering a period of renewal aiming at a conjunction of history and archaeology. Despite the initial enthusiasm, this reception was only partial. Indeed, the rethinking of the classical disciplines in France and Germany took diverging roads because of both the different respective traditions under discussion and their different goals. One can identify four major differences between the two projects: (1) the “Greek art” pays a much more dominant part in the “Klassiche Archäologie” than in the Greek archaeology in France; (2) Greek religion is at the heart of the anthropological approach of the “Paris school” while it is marginalized in the German classical archaeology; (3) political history is essential to the conjunction of history and archaeology in Germany, while the “Paris school” conceptualizes history in a different way, overlooking factual history and micro-chronology; (4) the utopian dimension of the Greek past, that the “Klassiche Archäologie” rejected though it was deeply rooted in his own tradition, while some kind of utopia was still operating in the “Paris school” whose researches put the emphasis on the alterity of a premodern society, freed from any normative value for the present time, and functioning rather as a critical discourse addressing the contemporary culture.
Ancient Mediterranean Painting (Vol. 2). Special Issue of "Arts", edited by R. Gee and V. Rousseau, 2019
This article engages with the interplay of two-dimensional and three-dimensional wall decoration ... more This article engages with the interplay of two-dimensional and three-dimensional wall decoration in Roman wall decoration of the so-called four Pompeian styles. Instead of describing the rapid changes in the use (or non-use) of techniques for creating perspectival depth in August Mau's four styles within an autonomous development of decorative principles, either favoring surface over depth, or vice versa, this article will discuss the imaginary space/surface on the walls in relation to the 'real' space enclosed by the decorated walls and-foremost-their inhabitants as the actual referent of the decoration. The discussion will focus on second-style wall decoration, with glimpses on the earlier first and later third and fourth styles in a final section.
When Classical archaeology deals with Ancient Greek images, it concerns itself with viewing, rega... more When Classical archaeology deals with Ancient Greek images, it concerns itself with viewing, regarding both its subject matter (images to be viewed) and its methodology (images analysed by viewing), one might think. But does the centrality of images and of viewing in the methodology of this subject area guarantee that Classical archaeology is able to reveal anything about ancient modes of viewing? Arguably, the material remains of ancient images -the main area of Classical archaeology dealing with "art" -tell us much more about the ancient production of images than about the ancient viewing of images.
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Papers by Nikolaus Dietrich
is an important component of the technical mastery of Roman marble-working in general, in terms of both statues and architectural elements such as columns. In the following discussion, I would like to tackle two questions. Firstly, what makes the monolithic production mode such a praiseworthy characteristic of statues in Pliny’s view? Secondly, what is the relationship between Pliny’s view and the specific value that may be given to the monolithic production mode from an archaeological perspective?
Le danger d’une perspective biaisée dans nos théories et nos interprétations par un petit nombre de cas déclarés paradigmatiques au gré du hasard de la transmission, a depuis longtemps été identifié, et la critique en a déjà été faite à maintes reprises. Si l’archéologie continue tout de même à travailler selon cette « méthode paradigmatique » et de construire ses modèles à partir des domaines mieux représentés, c’est parce que ce choix méthodologique reste le meilleur compte tenu du caractère fragmentaire de nos sources. Je n’ai ainsi pas l’intention de dénoncer dans son ensemble ce choix méthodologique dicté par le bon sens. Néanmoins, je voudrais montrer à partir d’un exemple de tesson
d’une coupe attique à figures rouges de la collection de l’Institut archéologique d’Heidelberg, que le fragment loin de constituer un obstacle à la connaissance, recèle un potentiel heuristique qui lui est propre.