Verity J. Platt
Associate Professor, Cornell University, Department of Classics

“Matter in Mind: Graeco-Roman Painting between Production and Perception”

Focusing on Pliny's Natural History, this paper explores a series of anecdotes relating to the fourth century BC painter Protogenes of Rhodes. As verbal attempts to re-trace an artist’s specific entanglement with, approximation, and even transformation of the physical world, these episodes are informed by specific models of perception, cognition and representation. Drawing upon the materialist Stoic cosmology that informs Pliny's broader project, the Protogenes anecdotes are, I argue, especially concerned with the relationship between animus and res, or 'mind' and 'matter'. As such, they might be understood as paradigmatic explorations of the limits of the object - in terms of artistic technique, human perception, mimetic potential and physical corporeality.

Friday, March 27, 2015
4:00 p.m.
208A Cathedral of Learning