Framing the Visual in Greek and Roman Antiquity

Abstract

The Frame in Classical Art is a book about the limits of visual representation. Contributors have been invited to explore the boundaries of what can be seen – the edges that defined, demarcated and contained the field of vision in ancient Greece and Rome. While the chapters that follow vary widely across time and place, all are structured around a common cultural histor-ical concern: to analyse the literal frames and metaphorical frameworks that surrounded images in classical antiquity. Despite its concern with ‘limits’, ‘boundaries’ and ‘surrounds’, our project is by no means marginal. Frames may seem an edgy – perhaps even fringe – subject for an edited volume: however assertively they exert themselves, frames all too easily lend themselves to overlooking; adumbrated by the framed object, cast to the interpretive sidelines, frames can prove all but invisible to modern eyes. Yet frames are indissociable from the objects that they surround, supporting particular modes of visual response. Although scholarship all too often bypasses frames, deeming them peripheral to the self-contained project of art history, framing can consequently circumscribe a set of wholly central topics. If frames enclose, they also open up, at once enwrapping and unravelling our view of (classical) ‘art’. Even as it demarcates the boundaries of representation, the frame is what makes representation possible in the first place: while frames bound ideas about the ontology of the visual (what images are), they also encompass the phenomenology of visual response (how images themselves frame their viewers). Of course, ours is not the first book to think about visual framing devices. Over the last twenty years, and not least in the wake of Jacques Derrida's seminal discussion in The Truth in Painting, numerous studies have appeared, reorienting art-historical enquiry from the ‘centre’ to the ‘margins’, and by extension from framed ‘art’ to the visual cultures surrounding the act of representation. Within the field of aesthetics – that is, the project of theorising, no less than problematising, the ‘artwork’ as an autonomous subject of philosophical critique – frames (and above all framed easel-paintings) have likewise come to play an important role.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 29 citations exist upstream.