May 23rd || Seth Estrin on “Between Pity and Rage: Constructing Emotion in Archaic Funerary Sculpture”

Assistant Professor of Art History and the College; Ancient Greek Art and Archaeology

The history of Greek art has traditionally been traced according to the development of artistic naturalism, and the possibility of emotional expression has usually been associated only with later periods of Greek art, in which this naturalism was fully achieved. In this paper, I look for emotion in an unexpectedly early era of Greek art—the later part of the so-called Archaic period (ca. 550-480 BCE), which produced sculptures normally seen as cold, stiff, and inexpressive. Focusing on a funerary monument for a man named Kroisos, I use the emotional language of the monument’s epigram –specifically, its invocation of pity and rage – as the basis for imagining alternative ways of visualizing the sculpture that accompanied it. In so doing, I seek to activate emotional dimensions of Archaic sculpture that would be otherwise invisible to modern eyes.