Classics transformed? Ancient figured vases as a test-case for the preoccupations of Classical Reception Studies

The articles collected in this themed issue explore a lesser-known fork in the path taken by the northern European reception of ancient Greek and South Italian vases over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The road better travelled follows their unearthing in increasing quantities, especially in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, and their appreciation and promotion by elite connoisseurs like William Hamilton and antiquarians such as Caylus, Passeri, and Winckelmann, whose labours of collecting and scholarship paved the way for the reception of ancient figured vases as fine art objects, testament to the superlative skill of Greek artists in disegno and worthy of display in private cabinets and public museums.¹ At the same time, however, such Enlightened interest in vases (which appeared for the most part as new and fresh as the recently excavated frescoes of Herculaneum to eighteenth-century audiences) opened an alternative route. Unlike ancient paintings, which (if indeed they survived excavation) faded quickly and often remained jealously guarded, the vases unearthed in southern Italy swiftly attained a wider dissemination; their portability, relative technical simplicity, and evident suitability as objects of domestic use as well as auxiliary elements in the decorative scheme of the gentlemen’s library invited attempts at reproducing and adapting them in cheap materials using new methods of industrial production.

The success of Josiah Wedgwood, Samuel Alcock, and other entrepreneurs in translating classical vases into batch-produced, industrially manufactured ceramics left a deep mark in British culture, even if tastes have changed and the days of mass-manufacturing in the Potteries are gone. Wedgwood’s blue-and-white jasperware is instantly recognizable and rich in nostalgic connotation even, I would wager, for many people who are entirely unfamiliar with the Portland Vase. Its attention to the processes of production, marketing, and consumption of classical vases in reproduction enables this themed issue to range well beyond the familiar story of the appeal of Greek vases to elite taste. If evidence of the purchase and enjoyment of neoclassical vases by working people remains hard (though, as Lewis and Morgan’s articles here show, not impossible) to uncover, it is clear that the factories of Wedgwood and Spode, Alcock and Dillwyn employed hundreds of men, women, and children, often possessed of little to no formal education, in the manual labour of working and shaping the clay, copying patterns and filling in colours (Hall, Petsalis-Diomidis). Such labour, carried out at varying levels of skill, generated a deep familiarity with the motifs, shapes, and iconography of classical vases. Consideration of design and marketing strategies also opens up new questions about the appeal of classical shapes, iconography, and ornament to a realm of middling and petty-bourgeois respectability in a manner that contrasts markedly with the neo-pagan, libertine sensibility ascribed to the Dilettanti.² Thus, as Morgan uncovers in her article, an eros, read as a cherub, might allow a vase of pagan subject matter to find its way into a respectable Dissenting home, while, with a little artful rearrangement, a scene of mythical rape was converted into a family picnic.³ Such accommodations of classical material to nineteenth-century standards of piety and domesticity are no less worthy of attention than the antics of the Monks of Medmenham Abbey.

In its focus upon the involvement of middle- and working-class Britons in the production and consumption of classical knowledge and forms, this themed issue belongs with recent works that have examined nineteenth- and twentieth-century middling- and working-class engagements with antiquity in various media. It could profitably be set in dialogue with recent studies of transformations of classical myth and history on commercial theatre stages (Bryant Davies 2018; Easterbrook 2019), of popular and commercial publishing (Thornton 2018), comics (Kovacs and Marshall 2011), children’s literature (Murnaghan and Roberts 2018), radio programmes (Wrigley 2015), and museums and other visitor attractions from a social- as well as a cultural-historical point of view (Nichols 2015; Baker 2019). Like the studies just mentioned, the articles collected here illustrate the range of sources and methodologies that may profitably be applied to the recovery and analysis of responses to classical material beyond educational and social elites. Day books, employment registers, correspondence archives, instructional manuals, diaries, and newspaper advertisements offer, to researchers able to access and patient enough to mine them, rich information about the actual, as opposed to merely implied or ideal receivers of classical vases in reproduction, as well as the processes of their creation.⁴ The four articles collected in Section One (Hall, Petsalis-Diomidis, Morgan, Lewis) all illustrate the rich micro-historiography that such sources can yield; Morgan’s additionally demonstrates how archival research can overturn traditional, often self-serving, narratives of invention and philanthropy offered in autobiographical narratives and other authorized sources. Petsalis-Diomidis’s discussion of Sarah Wedgwood exemplifies what recent monographs by Kate Hill (2016) and Amara Thornton (2018) have also demonstrated: that the study of unpublished sources, archives and correspondence is crucial to arrive at an adequate reconstruction of women’s contributions to British commercial, intellectual, and cultural life in eras when gendered social expectations placed them in informal or ancillary roles in commercial enterprises and public institutions, performing work that has left little trace in official or public-facing documentation such as registers of company officers, advertisements, and newspaper reports. Hall’s, Petsalis-Diomidis’s, and Morgan’s articles all demonstrate the potential of archives to illuminate the role of women and other subaltern actors in design and production processes—though it is sobering to note Morgan’s conclusion that nineteenth-century journalist William Turner’s account of the role of Bessie Dillwyn as the chief designer of Dillwyn’s Etruscan Ware cannot be substantiated.

Further collaboration between classical archaeologists and social and economic historians of later periods will indeed be necessary if these spotlight studies are to be developed into macro-analyses. As Lewis emphasizes, our picture of the economics of the pottery industry is far from complete; more research is needed into the sale market for manufactures (as opposed to the fine arts) and into ‘the movement between factories, retailers, and customers’ in order to flesh out even such plausible speculations as Morgan’s account of the Dillwyn enterprise’s failure. Although pots might seem the epitome of a tangible object, the material record too has its gaps: the study of industrially produced classicizing ceramics faces its challenges. How ephemeral, relative to their prized ancestors, were these cheap wares, the acquisition of which may have been accompanied by little fanfare, which may have broken in use and been discarded, disposed of by legatees or even the first owners, when fashions changed? Examples of Wedgwood’s famous jasperware are plentiful in museums of both fine and decorative arts. As Lewis notes, the same cannot be said of Dillwyn’s wares or even many Alcock vases.

The contributions in Section Two return us to territory more familiar within Classical Archaeology and Classical Reception Studies, moving as they do from reproductions to ‘originals’, from the factories of Staffordshire and Swansea to the socially authorized, aesthetic and scholarly spaces of the gentleman’s library and the public museum. Their focus upon the actual and anticipated activities of non-elite actors enables the contributors to perturb standard accounts of the norms that governed and constrained access to and engagement with classical vases in these spaces. While Meyer provides a new account of the genesis of the now all-but-ubiquitous ‘vitrinized’ display cases of the public museum in nineteenth-century concerns about how to display potentially unsuitable material to the uneducated visitor, Slaney and Baker provide two examples—one from the eighteenth and one from the nineteenth century—of what appear in the perspective of this themed issue as refusals to conform to norms of elite, educated, and masculine sophrosyne that were then being established for the proper ‘enjoyment’ of curated classical material. Meyer places classical vases at the centre of debates around the purpose and contents of the public museum, a cultural institution which—as Slaney and Baker also emphasize—was freighted with class-related aspiration and anxiety. Directors, philanthropists, and curators hoped to mould museums into places of intellectual and social betterment for women and the lower classes. But the museum could also be a space of moral hazard, particularly when it came to displaying pagan and licentious material of the kind found on many classical vases. Emma Hamilton’s unabashed appropriations of vases as theatrical props, and Maria Millington-Lathbury’s clothing of classical statues in tailor’s calico offer examples of confident and creative engagements that attracted contemporary derision on account of their unruly contrast with the disciplined, increasingly visually focused approaches licensed among archaeological specialists, but that Slaney and Baker re-describe positively as grounded in tacit, experiential knowledge of the everyday affordances of cloth and vessel. The comparison between Hamilton and the peripatetic women lecturers that Baker examines throws up a further parallel: the ‘women’s work’ they performed, like the embodied and experiential knowledge of the Stoke pottery workers, was devalued in its own day, passed beneath the regard of much contemporary commentary, and has now left only indirect traces. Jane Harrison’s museum lectures, no text of which survives, are performances almost as ephemeral as Hamilton’s unreproducible ‘Attitudes’.

Ephemeral but, as the papers demonstrate, not irrecoverable. While it is certainly to be hoped that Petsalis-Diomidis’s closing call for partnerships between classical archaeologists and nineteenth-century cultural, social, and economic historians will be heeded, these essays also show that such collaboration will be far from a one-way street. Several contributors deploy with evident profit phenomenological, haptic, and sensory approaches that are now fairly well embedded in Archaeology and Material Culture Studies but only now beginning to be discovered by social historians. Hall’s optimism that the relative scarcity of first-person accounts by pottery workers (though perhaps even here more archival material awaits discovery) need not prevent us from forming a picture of their world appears justified; this themed issue also shows that it need not be limited by the availability of written sources, nor by treating material objects—as even some traditions of archaeological scholarship have tended to do—by analogy with written texts.⁵ Formal education, presupposing literacy, was not the only means by which knowledge of classical myth and ancient history, let alone classical form and iconography, circulated among the middling and working classes: if Emma Hamilton received her classical education in Drury Lane and Covent Garden,⁶ Wedgwood’s biography also testifies to the capacity of men and women with little formal classical knowledge to be seized by and engage in sustained fashion with classical vases. This engagement is also evident in the work of a number of contemporary artists in our own day, such as the Scottish ceramicist Jessica Harrison or the 2003 Turner Prize-winner Grayson Perry.⁷

As much or more than their classical prototypes, then, classical vases in reproduction turn out to be ‘boundary objects’ (Baker), caught between aesthetic and scholarly hierarchies of fine art, decoration, and (merely) local interest. It is precisely this marginal status of the vase that has enabled the contributors to this themed issue to identify and challenge some notable blind spots in Classical Reception Studies’ visual field. In her introduction, Petsalis-Diomidis locates this themed issue alongside a profusion of work produced in Classical Reception Studies over the past decade that has been characterized as a ‘democratic’ or ‘popular’ turn.⁸ But she also argues that research on the reception of ancient material culture—which, she notes, has in any case lagged behind the literary and performance studies that gave much of the initial impetus to Anglophone reception studies in the 1990s—has been slow to move beyond elite tastes, and the ‘high’ genres of painting and sculpture, because of an inherited value scheme that ranks ‘art’ above ‘craft’ (and, one may expect, artisanal handcraft above industrial production). Upon reading this I was reminded of Marco Formisano’s observations, in the introduction to another recent collection, on Classical Reception Studies’ tendency to reinforce those dynamics of canonicity and marginality, significance and insignificance that have ‘marked the field of classics since its very origins as Altertumswissenschaft in the late eighteenth century’.⁹ If one path taken by classical vases after the eighteenth century led to the glass vitrines of the British Museum, the other—the one pursued in this themed issue—is certainly the road less travelled. Yet it is precisely by focusing on classical materials creatively reproduced and adapted by agents and for audiences less beholden to the tyranny of the elite and learned focus upon the authentic singular that this themed issue has brought to light a series of engagements and actors far beyond the collectors, antiquarians and entrepreneurs, the William Hamiltons and even the Josiah Wedgwoods.

Finally, however, the articles in this themed issue seem to me, when read together, to attest to the enmeshing and interpenetration the worlds of upper and middling classes, elite and (supposedly) unlearned. Meyer builds an argument about how, once women and the ‘lower’ classes were given access to classical vases, the characteristics imputed to these untraditional audiences generated concerns around the proprieties of display that eventually gave rise to glass vitrines. If such exhibition strategies sealed off objects from haptic engagement and use, this was compensated for, and in many cases funded by, consumption in mass reproduction. The symbiosis of commercial and aesthetic interests, elite and popular concerns, continues to underpin the worlds of research and engagement, scholarship and private collecting, the art world and the public museum today. This BICS themed issue goes to press just as the British Museum’s winter 2019/20 ‘blockbuster’ exhibition, ‘Troy: Myth and Reality’, is entering its third and final month. This exhibition, which takes a narrative approach in its early sections, is notable for the extensive use it makes of classical figured vases in order to present the Troy story to the general public: a mode of visual storytelling that—possibly unintentionally—echoes Jane Harrison’s strategy in her Myths of the Odyssey in Art and Literature.¹⁰ While the exhibition’s main poster boy is Albacini’s 1825 sculpture of the wounded Achilles, on loan from the sculpture galleries at Chatsworth and thus a potent symbol of elite neoclassical taste, another highlight object is Exekias’ famous black-figure amphora of Achilles slaying Penthesilea. This vase, from the Museum’s permanent collections, is presented out of narrative sequence behind glass, attended with the panoply of directional lighting that obscures all views except the frontal and befits an acclaimed masterpiece of ancient art. But the ordinary visitor can enjoy it again—should she so wish, even come to possess it—in the Museum’s gift shop, where it is displayed for her pleasure and purchase in multifarious, mechanically reproduced forms.

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