"Works of art offer a tantalizing window onto the world of ancient Greek theater, providing rich clues to the stories, music, costumes, masks, and actors of ancient tragedies, satyr plays, and comedies."
So says Mary Louise Hart, associate curator of antiquities for the Getty Museum, the blanket name that applies to both the Getty Center in Brentwood and the Getty Villa in the Pacific Palisades. This post is about a talk Mary gave yesterday at the Getty Villa called Art and Performance in Classical Greece, which compliments an exhibition they've got right now called The Art of Ancient Greek Theater, which Mary is curating. According to the Getty literature: "This exhibition explores the many ways Greek drama was interpreted by ancient Greek artists, whose works are frequently the only surviving evidence of the performing arts in antiquity. A wide variety of objects — including sculptures, painted vases, and a rare fragmentary papyrus — brings to life the rich history of ancient Greek theater."
It wasn't a very long talk as talks go. It wasn't like those Opera League seminars, which go for hours. It was about forty minutes crammed with a wealth of info about the origins of Greek drama. Mary described the role of your favorite god and mine, Dionysos, the god of theater, wine, and ecstatic transformation. She used a slideshow so we could see some of the objects she talked about, many of which are part of the exhibition.
Mary's boss Karol Wight, the Getty's senior curator of antiquities, came out first for an intro. She talked about how awesome it was to have a talk given by one of their own, which I have to admit is kind of rare. Better yet, Karol said she's known Mary since they were grad students at UCLA. Mary is editor and co-author of the exhibition's accompanying publication. As curator of the exhibition, she consulted with museum staff to organize all of the ancillary programs complimenting it. She taught art history at the University of Texas in Arlington and at the University of Missouri in St. Louis. Her fortes are vase painting and the art of iconography of ancient Greek myth, epic, and drama, as well as contemporary performance and perception. Mary's work takes her to Greece on a regular basis as a faculty member in the Forum of Ancient Drama in Epidaurus. Hers is an intensive course on the study and practice of Greek drama sponsored by the European Network of Research and Documentation of Performances of Ancient Greek Drama. Epidaurus is home to an outdoor theater built in the 300s BC that's still used today. Officially known as the Sanctuary of Asklepios, it's renowned for pitch perfect acoustics. It seats about fifteen thousand people, and no matter where you sit, you'll hear the dialogue and action just fine. Academics have studied what makes the acoustics so perfect and haven't been able to agree on any one thing. Either it's a fluke and the theater just happens to be the perfect shape surrounded by just the right type of landscape, or the Greeks really knew what they were doing. The theater is made of limestone, which filters out low frequency noises, like crowd murmur, while amplifying high frequencies from the stage. When they say Greeks invented theater, I reckon we should take that quite literally. Today the Sanctuary of Asklepios Theater is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
And with that, Karol made way for Mary, who made no bones about how much work it's taken to get here. She said this talk, the exhibition, and the exhibition's accompanying book are the culmination of years of study and research. She was thrilled at finally being able to talk about it to the public. That this talk was scheduled two months into the exhibition was intentional. Mary wanted the exhibition to be open for a while so she could work with it a bit before talking about it.
The first topic she delved into was the Acropolis. "It's always good to start with the Acropolis," she said. On screen she showed a photo of a theater carved out of the south slope of the Acropolis, the Theatre of Dionysos in the Sanctuary of Dionysos Eleuthereus. This theater is where plays debuted from some of the most awesome Greek playwrights ever. We're talking Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Menander. All those titans and many more got their starts at the Theatre of Dionysos. Mary said that renovation of the earlier theater was part of Pericles' massive Acropolis project in the 400s BC. Wooden seats were placed in the hollowed out hillside, an orchestra was set for the dancing of the chorus, and perhaps a skene, or stage building, was built to frame the performances of the actors.
What remains of the Theatre of Dionysos today, however, are the remains of the renovation that happened about a hundred years later, when marble was brought in. The exhibition includes a model of that "newer" theater. Watching a play at that time meant a lot more than it does today. Mary said the citizens would be joined in a visual, civic, and cult experience with statesmen, neighbors, and friends. Foreign visitors and tourists as well as women could also go to plays. Scholars have deduced the latter from the lathe adage of pregnant women miscarrying at the side of Aeschylus's "frightful Furies." A lot of the men in the audience would've been performers themselves. The chorus would often be made up of "citizen amateurs," as Mary put it. Pericles himself danced in a chorus in this theater.
And of course erected in the theater would be a nice image of Dionysos, "attending the rites over which he had dominion." On screen she showed the below vase, which she called pristine, as in "never broken and in excellent condition," which shows Dionysos having an epiphany. He holds a thyrsos, a flowering staff blooming with vines that have borne bunches of grapes. Mary said that since he's a fertility god, vines pretty much sprout and bloom wherever he goes. On the left you've got a comic actor reaching up to pick grapes while the comedian on the right is extending a large drinking cup. Mary said the height indicated here is important. As we're in the presence of a god, this scene is taking place high up in the ether.
To kick off the Dionysia festival, a huge festival honoring you know who, a wooden staff with a mask of Dionysos adorned in ivy was carried from the Athens suburb of Eleutherai, Dionysos' hometown according to myth, to the theater. They took their time carrying that thing so people could honor it as it passed through the city. People would pay their respects with choral dancing, recitations, and sacrifices. Its arrival at the theater marked the beginning of a four-day drama contest that served as the highlight of the Dionysia festival. Mary said since she was giving this lecture the day before Halloween, she couldn't help but feel the presence of Dionysos all around us, especially with all her talk of cults, masks, transformation, and sacrifices. "But he's much more serious than that," she quipped.
On each of the first three days of the contest, a tragedian (a playwright specializing in tragedies) would present a tetralogy of plays, three tragedies plus a satyr play to cheer everyone up. The fourth day would be the comedy competition. City leaders voted for their favorites. Marble monuments were erected both in the theater and in the streets just outside to mark the pride of success. On screen Mary showed the below relief of one such monument. You've got an actor or chorus man (all the performers were men) holding his tragic female mask by its strap.
While Athens was the heart of the theatrical universe, Mary said the Greek colonists in present day Sicily and southern Italy, a region known back then as Magna Graecia, also loved their theater. In fact, Mary said they were even more active in theater and represented Dionysos "just as profoundly" as the native Greeks did back in Athens. On screen she showed what she called a krater, a huge vase the Greeks used to mix wine with water.
Part of the exhibition and having never been on loan until now, this krater was excavated in the southern Italian city of Taranto and was painted by someone they call the Karneia Painter (named after the vase). You've got Dionysos and a retinue of two maenads and a satyr watching a third maenad reach what Mary called "an ecstatic moment in her dance." She said a krater like this would be the centerpiece of a symposium. Back then, a symposium had a slightly different meaning than it did today. Mary called the ancient Greek symposium "the cultivated man's drinking party." Eventually the kraters took on a funerary association when people started depositing them in tombs and graves. Mary posited that the Karneia Painter took full advantage of the Dionysian theme of ecstatic transformation to show off his painting skills, especially in the way he depicts movement in that third maenad who's having her transformation. Mary called Greek vase painting a "very still art form," but not when you're depicting someone having an ecstatic transformation right there in front of the god of transformation himself. She really gushed about this vase. "You can draw differently from this, but you can't draw any better than this."
From here Mary took us further back in time to the origins of Greek drama, when people were depicted "very differently." She said this so we wouldn't be "shocked" by what she was going to put on screen next. Choral performances flourished in Athens long before tragedians and their plays and the Dionysia festival came along. And there on screen came a set of vases dating from circa 560-480 BC that show different types of choruses. Together, they reveal the diversity of performance and its representation in pre-dramatic Athens. She said stuff like this could be viewed as the seed of the entire dramatic tradition that came later, the tragedies, the satyr plays, the comedies, all that. What tells you it's a choral depiction is the double pipe player known as the aulete, who stands there playing his pipe wearing garb that sets him apart from everyone else. One of the vases on the screen, which I can't seem to find on the Getty site, was dated to 560 BC, around the same time the Dionysia was established. It had groups of costumed and masked dancers with attached ears. She said the highlight of the group was the psykter (wine cooler), which I did find an image of.
As you can see, it features members of a chorus riding dolphins. It's part of the exhibition, on loan from the Met in New York and dated to circa 530-520 BC. Mary said it's depicting a dithyramb, a choral performance featuring fifty dudes dancing in a circle with the aulete in the middle that would be staged in yet another competition at the Dionysia festival. The dithyramb was invented in Corinth by a poet and musician named Arion, most famous not for inventing the dithyramb but for getting kidnapped by pirates and rescued by dolphins, the most famous telling of which was by Herodotus, who mentions a statue being erected in Arion's honor inscribed with the words "epi delphinos" ("on a dolphin"). These are the words that would've been sung by this very dolphin-riding chorus. Mary said the guy who painted this psykter, Oltos, was among the best of his class, destined for the symposium. She said Oltos depicted a dance to "circumnavigate" the psykter the same way the dancers would go around in a circle. The particular shape of the psykter made it an effective wine chiller when submerged in ice-cold water. Oltos of course knew it would be used like that, so it's no accident the dolphins on the cooler would look like they're leaping over the wine-cooling water. As for how the costumes would look in reality, Mary cited a figurine housed in the Louvre that shows a Greek chorus guy with a dolphin costume strapped around his waist with fake legs that made him appear astride the dolphin.
From here she jumped to another image that I can't find on the Getty site. It's what she called a skyphos, which is basically a big wine cup (notice no matter what the vessel's called, wine always factors into it). It's dated to around 520 BC and shows hoplites, the citizen-soldier spearmen from the above dolphin psykter, wearing those same kind of dolphin costumes on one side and ostrich costumes on the other. You've got auletes with the dancers on both sides as well. The ostrich side showed "six young men moving toward the aulete," Mary said. She also said the most interesting figure on this skyphos was neither the spear-bearing chorus men nor the auletes, but that mysterious person between the chorus and the aulete. Mary said that figure is the earliest vase-painted depiction of a masked performer. While masked, he was otherwise dressed like the chorus and was interacting with the chorus "while not performing within it," Mary said, adding, "This little figure provides compelling evidence for the emergence of the actor." Basically, if this chorus is a funny chorus, then the masked figure is a proto actor. If it's a straight choral performance, the masked figure is an exarchon, the leader of the dithyrambic song. Since this skyphos was made in the age of Thespis, the guy who invented acting by slapping on a mask and delivering a prepared speech back to the chorus, the mysterious figure could indeed be the oldest surviving depiction of an ancient Greek actor.
Mary said that as comfortable as these vase paintings are with depicting choral performances, Athens was "reticent" about depicting drama, unlike Magna Graecia. Of course the performance context is the same for chorus and drama, and the people who painted the vases and their customers were the same people who attended the dramas and choral works. While Athenians had no problem with the world of theater and the actors who peopled it, they weren't so comfortable with the plays themselves. As one example, she cited an Athenian painter who was a contemporary of Sophocles and was noted for a wide diversity of iconography, including references to Sophocles' works. On screen she showed a picture of a pelike (wine storage vase) dated to 440 BC (Sophocles lived from 496-406 BC). It showed two people in the act of costuming for a performance. They're wearing knee-length peploi (plural of peplos), similar to what maenads wore. The guy on the right is pulling on his performance boots, what the Greeks called kothornoi. He's got a band around his head, which actors typically donned before putting on their masks. Mary implied the headband somehow made it easier, perhaps more comfortable, to wear the mask. This guy's mask was on the ground facing him. Meantime, the guy on the left has finished costuming. He's wearing a female mask with an open mouth and "dark hair bound with fillets," as Mary described it. He's holding a woman's mantle over the similar-looking mask on the ground. "His is the active pose of the choreut rehearsing the balance of his complex choreography," Mary said. She pointed out that the gazes of both choreuts are meant to draw your attention to that mask on the ground, what the Greeks called a prosopon, which can be translated as either mask or character. Mary said: "The symmetricality and parametrical composition focusing on the mask communicate that as the actor takes on the mask, he takes on the character." And she pointed out that since the mask on the ground wasn't being worn yet, the painter emphasized its lifelessness with a stroke of red over the eye. The eye of the mask being worn by the guy on the left, meantime, has no red on it. It's open and otherwise looks like your average eye.
Next she showed an Apulian krater on loan from Sydney depicting actors costuming for a satyr play. With his mask already on, Mary described the chorus man on the right as "alive and a fertile acolyte of Dionysos." The others, without their masks, look like zombies in comparison. Like the previous painting, this painting combines an activity the painter has observed with his expression as an artist of the "magic of theater." She wanted us to be sure that these painters knew it was all stage play. That guy Oltos who painted the psykter with the dolphin spearmen knew perfectly well those were actors wearing costumes strapped around their waists. He chose to portray them as riding real dolphins, leaping through the air, to convey the magic of theater to folks like us who didn't get the chance to see it firsthand.
And now Mary showed us the above vase, what she called the "most spectacular theater vase that has survived." It's called the Pronomos Vase because the aulete at the center of it is a fourth-century aulete from Thebes named Pronomos. Made in Athens, it was discovered in 1835 in an Italic, not Greek, tomb in the southern Italian town of Ruvo di Puglia. The vase is chockfull of detail. I know it's small, but you can still get a sense of all that's going on. Mary said that with all those masks, costumes, and theater production, the vase, all told, offers at a glance an incredibly rich window onto ancient Greek theatrical practice while giving us a "complex vision of the Dionysian festival." It's inviting us into the sphere of this troupe at the end of the festival, just as they're saying thanks to Dionysos and celebrating the victory Mary said was "immortalized by the three tripods on the vase." The painter put Dionysos right there among the actors in order to "make visible the presence of the invisible god." The vase plays with reality in other ways as well. First, you've got actual citizens with their inscribed names and masks in hand. Then you've got a dancing citizen, looking like a literal satyr, leaping out of the frame. One whole side of the vase is taken up by the troupe, which includes three actors, a dozen choreutai, two musicians, and the poet. Dionysos and his wife Ariadne chill out on the nearby couch. At the end of the couch, just to the right of the divine couple, sits an actor whose forte is playing female roles, which is given away by that very elaborate female headdress he's holding and the dress he's wearing. Meantime you've got the winged Eros, god of love, flittering in front of this guy's face offering to put a golden wreath on his head. Mary urged us to head straight to the exhibition after her talk to take an extra special long look at this sucker, because the more you look at it, the more you see. She called it "tragic fabric" with elaborate friezes of quadrigas, sphinxes, horsemen, wave devices, and palmettes. On a practical level, this vase calls out "textile production of a highly skilled nature." Extra cool is Ariadne's gown, woven out of golden thread. Further to the right, on the right edge of what the picture shows, we encounter an actor playing Heracles, who's the only character to have his name inscribed, which Mary called ironic since he's the last person ancient Greek audiences would've needed labeled due to how popular he was. They would've easily identified him by his bow and arrows and the lion skin. This of course suggests the play in question was about one of Heracles' famous adventures. He's standing with Seilenos, the father of the satyrs and head of the satyr chorus. Further putting it into context, Mary said this troupe would've just finished performing an entire tetralogy. We're talking a good eight hours on stage. But the painter is less interested in showing these guys on stage than he is showing them hanging out with Dionysos, having taken off their masks to relax and unwind. The only person still performing is that satyr dancing behind Pronomos. He's got his mask on and dances with one foot over the ornamental band connected to the back of Pronomos' chair as if he's jumping out of the picture. Under the handle on the left, Mary pointed out the young choreut holding his mask behind his back. She noted how the mask is pointed toward the other side of the vase, which you can't see in the picture and which depicts satyrs dancing in a sacred komos, a very lofty term for what is basically a drunken revelry. The features of real satyrs are identical to the masks worn by the drunk satyr chorus. In the komos you've got Dionysos walking among the four satyrs, three maenads, and a flying Eros. And so you've got two levels of representation on the Pronomos vase, the mythical and the mortal, bound together. The former features Dionysos, the maenads, and satyrs on the side of the vase we can't see, while on the side facing us we've got the all too mortal acolytes, the actors and musicians and the playwright.
The Pronomos vase provided what Mary called a convenient bridge to discussing the artistic relationship and differences between Athens and Magna Graecia, where Athenian theater was "extraordinarily popular and imported from Athens in high numbers." Aeschylus visited Sicily at least twice that we know of. The first time was in 470 BC when he traveled to Siracusa (Syracuse) to direct a version of his play The Persians. The second time was the last time he went anywhere. In 456 BC he traveled to Gela, Sicily, and apparently died, the story goes, when an eagle or some other bird of prey mistook his bald head for a stone and dropped a tortoise on it. He was in his mid seventies. Is that really how he died? That seems kind of hokey. At that age, wouldn't it be more likely he passed away of natural causes? Whatever the case, he died at Gela, and that's where he's buried. Aeschylus wasn't the only playwright the Sicilians adored. Mary said many a legendary story abounds about the Sicilian love for Euripides.
While Magna Graecia maintained close ties with the Athenian mothership, Mary said they had "very different artistic traditions concerning representation of performance." On the screen she showed the above krater, on loan from the Cleveland Museum of Art, which depicts the escape of Medea in a chariot. It was made circa 400 BC by someone they call the Policoro Painter. The scene comes from Euripides' tragic play Medea, written in 431 BC. The premise is that Medea is a foreigner married, and then wronged, by Jason, who has no idea of her superhuman powers. She unleashes her revenge by killing their two sons and taking off in a chariot borne by two serpents. Mary said that when they staged the play, the flight of the chariot would have most likely been achieved with a crane-like device called a mekhane. She said painters of kraters like this "approached their tasks according to a complex set of visual paradigms rooted in the traditional ways in which epic and mythic narratives had been depicted for generations."
Vase painters and artisans in general had to have some working knowledge of myths and legends in order to do their job, but Mary said any knowledge they had was pale compared to the walking encyclopedias that the poets and playwrights were. Since these were the people who wrote the stuff being performed, they stayed actively engaged with the production from start to finish. They were free to utilize any of the theatrical tools at their disposal--choreography, sets, props, masks, costumes, and music--to get their story told in the best way possible. After watching the production, vase painters had to take that entire sensory experience shared with thousands of spectators and convey it as a single scene on the curved sides of a vase, which would then be used in the intimate, private setting of a drinking party. To get the job done and done right, vase painters had to be practical and pick vases with shapes conducive to big scenes while "employing recognizable iconographic tools."
Mary made a really interesting point when she said that, while yes, it helps if we're at least a little familiar with the myths being depicted on these vases, what would help even more is if we understood how the live performances of these myths must have inspired and influenced the depictions on the vases. You take the Medea vase as an example. Obviously this is showing Medea's escape in the chariot, but what's strange is that she's leaving her two dead kids behind on an altar. In the play by Euripides, she takes the dead kids with her. So either the Policoro Painter saw a different version of this play, or s/he saw the Euripides version and decided to exercise some artistic license.
Next up, Mary talked about one of the most famous tragedies to come out of ancient Greece, the Oresteia trilogy by Aeschylus. It's the only trilogy of ancient Greek tragedies to survive wholly intact. On screen she showed the above storage jar showing a scene from The Libation Bearers, part two of Oresteia (part one was The Agamemnon and part three was The Eumenides). Here you've got Klytaimnestra about to get killed by her son Orestes. I'm not sure how much of it you can see, but the mom's on the ground exposing her breast. Apparently the dialogue she says at this point is pleading with her son to "take pity on this breast." In other words, this is the breast that gave you life, you idiot. Floating above and to the right is one of the Furies that will torment Orestes for matricide, waving snakes over his head. The violence of Orestes' act is also conveyed in his hat having fallen off. Mary pointed out that the Fury wasn't in the play, but the painter added it to convey the horror of the scene and the punishment that'll be due Orestes after the play's over. Discovered in Paestum, Naples in southern Italy, this is the only depiction of this scene that anyone knows of, while so far no depictions from The Agamemnon have been found.
Features unique to certain plays can be key to developing and understanding the iconography. As an example, Mary cited The Eumenides, part three of the Oresteia. A priestess of Apollo named Pythia comes upon the "slouching, stinking Furies. With charred skin, their eyes dripped a foul ooze." The Furies remind Pythia of something, but she's not sure what. She remembers a wall painting of harpies, and she thinks of the gorgons as well. The "horrid appearance of the Erinyes [the Furies]" and their pursuit of Orestes can help us identify the Oresteia in vase paintings, even though, in reality, they appear in The Eumenides as evil demons who chase Orestes to Delphi after he kills Mom. Mary showed us a painting that's one of many examples depicting the Furies in other parts of the story, not because artists didn't know Oresteia, but because they wanted to signal the viewer to the myth being adapted. This particular painting showed the Furies with Orestes at the Omphalos in Delphi. Above you've got Apollo holding a sacrificed piglet that drips blood onto Orestes. Mary explained that dripping a piglet's blood was part of the purification of Apollo. She also pointed out that this scene doesn't actually take place in The Eumenides. It's only mentioned early on. The most poignant part of the painting is Klytaimnestra's ghost trying to wake the sleeping Furies, but it's too late. They've become the title characters, the Eumenides, the Kindly Ones, presaging their transformation at the trial of Orestes in Athens.
Only one painter that we know of chose to depict a tragedy actually being performed on stage as opposed to depicting it with fantasy elements and artistic license. Active circa 330 BC, he was a Sicilian known as the Capodarso Painter. On the screen Mary showed the above krater fragment depicting actors on a stage set. You've got the main characters standing on a raised platform between four columns. On the left, an elderly man in traveling clothes and boots leans on a staff and gestures toward a tall, "ritually clad couple" in the center. The couple seems focused on what the elderly man is saying. Mary said the painter was emphasizing the "psychological power" of the scene by having the elderly man face us, the audience, as if he's speaking to us as much as the couple. She said it was no accident the elderly man's hand is framed by the column that holds up the stage set. It's also noteworthy that he's not wearing a mask so we can see his "anguished expression convey an event of great magnitude." The husband looks nonplussed. On either side of him are two female figures rendered in a much smaller scale, while the woman over on the right, presumably the wife, is raising her veil to her face with both hands as if in shock or awe. Behind the wife, on the right edge, you've got yet one more person turned away in anguish. Most scholars agree this fragment is depicting a scene from the Sophocles play Oedipus Rex (Oedipus the King, or in Greek, Oidipous Tyrannos, part two of his Oedipus trilogy). The husband is our man Oedipus. The elderly man is a Corinthian who's come to tell Oedipus that King Polybus, the man Oedipus thought was his father, was not only not his father, but is now dead. As Oedipus gets more information out of the man, his wife over there, Jocasta, puts two and two together and realizes that her husband Oedipus is also her son, hence her pulling the veil over her face in shock. Rather than tell her husband/son this awful truth, Jocasta leaves the stage and kills herself. Mary said most depictions of tragedy purposely avoid showing stage architecture, costumes, masks, and in general anything that betrays the artifice of theater. That's what makes this particular fragment special. The Capodarso Painter is betraying the stage architecture, but he's not depicting actors. He's got the actual characters from the myth playing out this tragic scene on the stage, yet he's given the characters "heightened expressions" to allude to the masks that the actors would've been wearing in the actual production.
Enough of that depressing stuff, let's get on to something more cheerful. That's what the ancient Greeks would've said too. In every tetralogy, the fourth and final play would depart from the tragic tone of the first three plays. It became necessary, in fact, to use the fourth play to show a more "Dionysian" kind of performance with a focus on the god being honored at the festival where the tetralogy was being performed. Hence, the satyr play, which subverted serious drama by inserting those awesome little satyrs into well-known mythical narratives. And here Mary showed the above framed fragment of a satyr play by Sophocles called Trackers, about Apollo's cows getting stolen and how a bunch of satyrs go looking for them. The thief turns out to be the god Hermes, who's been hiding the cows in a cave. When the satyrs reach the cave, Hermes is in the process of inventing the lyre. The sound of it terrifies the satyrs. They've never heard, or heard of, a stringed instrument before. They think it's a living thing, an animal with strings attached to its body.
Mary told us the vast majority of the hard copies of the plays depicted on these vases, kraters, psykters, and so on, are all gone, lost to history. The only complete hard copy that has survived in tact is The Cyclops by Euripides, which is represented on one of the vases in the exhibition. The second most preserved play is Trackers. That torn fragment is "good condition." Besides those two, Mary said we have plenty of references but very little actual hard copy text.
On screen she showed a vase with a satyr chorus that's become one of the most famous depictions of this kind. It's never been exhibited and was found covered in old overpaint. Jeff Maish from the Getty Villa's conservation crew cleaned it up. On the shoulder, five members of the satyr chorus dance toward two musicians. The chorus men are wearing identical satyr masks with large ears, perizoma (shorts), false phalluses, and bushy horse tails. Mary reminded us that satyrs are hybrids of horses and humans, not pans and humans. Through depictions of carefully choreographed movements like stepping, bending, crouching, and kicking, the vase painter aimed to "convey the vivid appearance of a satyr dance." As they dance, each satyr holds a leg to a piece of "elaborate" furniture, most likely legs and crossbars from a symposium couch or throne for Dionysos. The satyr on the far right is setting his leg down in front of a piper, whose "elaborate robes billow while he taps his foot to the music."
Mary emphasized that while satyr plays contain scenes to make us laugh, they're not comedies per se, which is a common misperception by folks like me. She said "its form kept within the closed world of tragic drama." The misperception stems from how vase painters would show only the comedic elements of the plot and character interaction. On screen she showed the above vase. It's part of the exhibition on loan from a private collection in Rome. She called it the most elaborate depiction known of a stage set. Center stage you've got two comic actors wearing phlyax costumes, which are short, padded tunics that expose large, attached genitalia, saggy leggings, and "outsized, grotesquely comic masks." They're playing pipes in a sanctuary in front of an altar. The artifice of the wooden stage is betrayed by both the steps leading up to it and the columns supporting it. The area beneath the stage, a repository for costumes and scenery, is concealed by a curtain adorned with southern Italian geometric designs. While it's meant to appear that they're playing pipes, in reality they're not. It would've been impossible for the pipes to fit through the masks' mouthpieces. The music would come from that piper hidden behind the tree to the right who "correctly wears his pipe" with a mouth strap called a phorbeia. Mary made an interesting point when she said this type of "meta theatricality, typical of comic depictions, is wittily engaging, and just as complex to entangle as the iconography of the tragic vases. In some ways more so because in some cases, as here, it only appears to be so real." Cool, huh? Since we don't have the hard copies of the plays, we can't say what the plots were, how these scenes fit into the larger context, but we can still see that successful comic themes relied on parodies of the gods.
Next up on the screen she showed this vase. It's from the Vatican collection and formerly of the collection of 18th century German painter Anton Raphael Mengs, which gives it a "provenance that goes back at least three hundred years." It's evidence of the only painter we know of, Asteas from the fourth century BC, to have depicted both tragic and comic scenes. While this vase is not in the exhibition, another piece is, The Madness of Heracles on loan from Madrid. Mary called this vase, which shows Zeus and Hermes "out on the town," a classic example of old comedy, parody, and foolishness. On the right you've got Hermes wearing a traveler's cap over his bald head and carrying his oil lamp upside down. On the left you've got old man Zeus wearing a silly crown and sticking his head through the ladder he's carrying to the window of Alcmene, who looks down at them like a common prostitute, complete with fingertips on the window sill.
The next artifact was the "most valuable ancient Greek comic vase," showing a scene known as The Punishment of the Thief, based at the Met in New York. It dates to around 450 BC and was painted by the Tarporley Painter, the same guy behind the satyrs costuming for a play above. This vase is very important for scholarship because the Tarporley Painter was an Apulian vase painter (southern Italy) while the inscriptions on the vase are Athenian, painted as if issuing from the mouths of the actors. For this reason, the vase has been accepted as depicting a comedy that originated in Athens and was later imported to Magna Graecia, where the Tarporley Painter lived and worked. You've got a man in the middle looking toward an old man who's got his hands up in the air. Letters come out of the old man's mouth, which Mary translated as, "He's bound my hands up above me." The man in the middle, interestingly, has letters coming out of his mouth, but they don't form words. This was meant to show that this guy doesn't speak Greek all too well. The Greeks hired Scythians to be their police force now and again. Scythians came from present-day Iran and so couldn't speak the best Athenian dialect. Across the top in Greek it says "The Tragedian." Now why would it say that on a supposedly comic vase?
That led her to show us a detail from another vase featuring the same Scythian from the above vase. The mask is exactly the same, with the dark curly hair and the face of a young man. He's got a large lower jaw with a large lower lip jutting out. As for the strange costume, Mary called it a stage naked costume. It's meant to be a joke at the expense of the "beautiful torsos of the athletic, young Athenians" that you'd see in something like "The Agrigento Youth," a sculpture the Getty Villa just installed three days ago, on loan from a museum in Agrigento, Sicily until next April. She said aristocratic young men gain their civic, idealistic nobility by exercising so they have perfectly toned bodies. "And how you make fun of them is showing them like this," she said, nodding at the Scythian with the stage naked costume, a saggy costume with long arms and legs, a big belly, big breasts, and long genitalia. "This is what a heroic kind of nude looks like in comedy."
The next slide showed both vases with the Scythian, viewed in full side by side. Not only is the Scythian in both, but so is the old man. This exhibition marks the first time these two vases have been viewed together. Mary said when they had a symposium here a few weeks ago, all the scholars were thrilled to see the two vases together, since most of the time one is in storage in Boston while the other lives at the Met. They could look back and forth at the vases and confirm the characters are the same. That second one, of which she showed us the detail above, has an old woman standing on a dais with dialogue translated as "I shall hand him over to you." The old woman's got a dead goose on the stage with her along with a basket containing two live baby goats. On the vase on the right, behind the old man, is a live goose and yet another double yolk basket with young game. So at some point between the vase on the right and the vase on the left, the goose was killed, and clearly this old woman's pissed off about it. What's interesting is that the vase on the right was made about twenty years after the one on the left. At any rate, we can safely deduce that these comedies were popular, that they were performed repeatedly, and that artists liked to adapt them for vase painting as a matter of course.
And so that brings us full circle, Mary said, "from the genesis of drama in Athenian choral dance to the continued pervasive influence of Athenian comedy on productions in south Italy two hundred years later. To understand that, in order to comprehend ancient Greek theater, you have to comprehend the art of ancient Greek theater."
Below are a few more pieces from the exhibition. They weren't part of Mary's lecture but thought it might be nice to include them here. The exhibition was quite comprehensive. Taken together, the pieces in this post represent a small fraction of what I saw, but along with Mary's lecture, they should give you a good idea of the exhibition's overall theme. The descriptions are verbatim from the Getty site.
Mixing Vessel with a Satyr Chorus
Three members of a satyr chorus wear the typical perizoma (shorts) laced at the front, with a false phallus and horse tail attached. Ornamenting the garment is a wheel-like motif often found on satyr costumes.
Facing each other as if in conversation, the two men on the left hold their bearded masks. Having put on his mask and assumed his character, the figure on the right dances. Behind him lies a decorated tympanon, a hand drum frequently associated with the world of Dionysos.
Pitcher with a Bird Chorus
A piper wearing a himation (cloak) plays the aulos, a double pipe made of reeds, for two chorus men dressed as birds. They wear animal skins and tight-fitting, stippled costumes that cover all but their hands, feet, and heads. Wings are attached to their arms, and purple crests and beards animate their masks. The tradition and representation of bird choruses continued into the late 400s B.C., when Aristophanes' comedy Birds was produced.
Ancient Greek theater was first and foremost musical theater, more akin to opera than any kind of modern performance. Because of its musical range, the aulos provided the sole accompaniment for every choral, tragic, satyric, and comic performance. Vase paintings such as this one show that auletes, or pipers, wore elaborate robes that set them apart from the other performers.
Incense Burner in the Shape of an Actor as a Slave on an Alter
Slaves, often in trouble because of their pranks, were popular characters in comedy. They are frequently shown perched on a sanctuary altar, escaping punishment and plotting future intrigues. The figurine displayed here features the typical slave costume: a short tunic over a long-sleeved garment, leggings, and laced sandals.
Other characters popular in comedy were shameless prostitutes, greedy brothel keepers, boastful soldiers, and parasites--sycophants or spongers who use flattery to exploit the hospitality of a wealthy patron.
Statuette of an Actor as a Musician
This musician wears a festival floral wreath and a short pink chiton. His cloak is tied around his waist, leaving both arms free to perform. Given the position of his hands, he may have held a tympanon (hand drum) or a pair of cymbals.
The musician was a popular character in New Comedy (320-290 B.C.), dominated by the playwright Menander, whose plays dissected Athenian mores of family and society. In Menander's plays, a plotline can be turned upside down by the sudden appearance of professionals such as soldiers or musicians. These characters energize the plot by initiating farcical situations by means of their nefarious misdeeds or by bringing surprising news.
Menander's characters are known primarily through masks and figurines, such as this one, produced in great numbers throughout the Mediterranean. Performed for centuries after his lifetime, Menander's plays were highly influential to the development of Roman comedy, especially that of Plautus and Terence.
So says Mary Louise Hart, associate curator of antiquities for the Getty Museum, the blanket name that applies to both the Getty Center in Brentwood and the Getty Villa in the Pacific Palisades. This post is about a talk Mary gave yesterday at the Getty Villa called Art and Performance in Classical Greece, which compliments an exhibition they've got right now called The Art of Ancient Greek Theater, which Mary is curating. According to the Getty literature: "This exhibition explores the many ways Greek drama was interpreted by ancient Greek artists, whose works are frequently the only surviving evidence of the performing arts in antiquity. A wide variety of objects — including sculptures, painted vases, and a rare fragmentary papyrus — brings to life the rich history of ancient Greek theater."
It wasn't a very long talk as talks go. It wasn't like those Opera League seminars, which go for hours. It was about forty minutes crammed with a wealth of info about the origins of Greek drama. Mary described the role of your favorite god and mine, Dionysos, the god of theater, wine, and ecstatic transformation. She used a slideshow so we could see some of the objects she talked about, many of which are part of the exhibition.
Mary's boss Karol Wight, the Getty's senior curator of antiquities, came out first for an intro. She talked about how awesome it was to have a talk given by one of their own, which I have to admit is kind of rare. Better yet, Karol said she's known Mary since they were grad students at UCLA. Mary is editor and co-author of the exhibition's accompanying publication. As curator of the exhibition, she consulted with museum staff to organize all of the ancillary programs complimenting it. She taught art history at the University of Texas in Arlington and at the University of Missouri in St. Louis. Her fortes are vase painting and the art of iconography of ancient Greek myth, epic, and drama, as well as contemporary performance and perception. Mary's work takes her to Greece on a regular basis as a faculty member in the Forum of Ancient Drama in Epidaurus. Hers is an intensive course on the study and practice of Greek drama sponsored by the European Network of Research and Documentation of Performances of Ancient Greek Drama. Epidaurus is home to an outdoor theater built in the 300s BC that's still used today. Officially known as the Sanctuary of Asklepios, it's renowned for pitch perfect acoustics. It seats about fifteen thousand people, and no matter where you sit, you'll hear the dialogue and action just fine. Academics have studied what makes the acoustics so perfect and haven't been able to agree on any one thing. Either it's a fluke and the theater just happens to be the perfect shape surrounded by just the right type of landscape, or the Greeks really knew what they were doing. The theater is made of limestone, which filters out low frequency noises, like crowd murmur, while amplifying high frequencies from the stage. When they say Greeks invented theater, I reckon we should take that quite literally. Today the Sanctuary of Asklepios Theater is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
And with that, Karol made way for Mary, who made no bones about how much work it's taken to get here. She said this talk, the exhibition, and the exhibition's accompanying book are the culmination of years of study and research. She was thrilled at finally being able to talk about it to the public. That this talk was scheduled two months into the exhibition was intentional. Mary wanted the exhibition to be open for a while so she could work with it a bit before talking about it.
The first topic she delved into was the Acropolis. "It's always good to start with the Acropolis," she said. On screen she showed a photo of a theater carved out of the south slope of the Acropolis, the Theatre of Dionysos in the Sanctuary of Dionysos Eleuthereus. This theater is where plays debuted from some of the most awesome Greek playwrights ever. We're talking Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Menander. All those titans and many more got their starts at the Theatre of Dionysos. Mary said that renovation of the earlier theater was part of Pericles' massive Acropolis project in the 400s BC. Wooden seats were placed in the hollowed out hillside, an orchestra was set for the dancing of the chorus, and perhaps a skene, or stage building, was built to frame the performances of the actors.
What remains of the Theatre of Dionysos today, however, are the remains of the renovation that happened about a hundred years later, when marble was brought in. The exhibition includes a model of that "newer" theater. Watching a play at that time meant a lot more than it does today. Mary said the citizens would be joined in a visual, civic, and cult experience with statesmen, neighbors, and friends. Foreign visitors and tourists as well as women could also go to plays. Scholars have deduced the latter from the lathe adage of pregnant women miscarrying at the side of Aeschylus's "frightful Furies." A lot of the men in the audience would've been performers themselves. The chorus would often be made up of "citizen amateurs," as Mary put it. Pericles himself danced in a chorus in this theater.
And of course erected in the theater would be a nice image of Dionysos, "attending the rites over which he had dominion." On screen she showed the below vase, which she called pristine, as in "never broken and in excellent condition," which shows Dionysos having an epiphany. He holds a thyrsos, a flowering staff blooming with vines that have borne bunches of grapes. Mary said that since he's a fertility god, vines pretty much sprout and bloom wherever he goes. On the left you've got a comic actor reaching up to pick grapes while the comedian on the right is extending a large drinking cup. Mary said the height indicated here is important. As we're in the presence of a god, this scene is taking place high up in the ether.
To kick off the Dionysia festival, a huge festival honoring you know who, a wooden staff with a mask of Dionysos adorned in ivy was carried from the Athens suburb of Eleutherai, Dionysos' hometown according to myth, to the theater. They took their time carrying that thing so people could honor it as it passed through the city. People would pay their respects with choral dancing, recitations, and sacrifices. Its arrival at the theater marked the beginning of a four-day drama contest that served as the highlight of the Dionysia festival. Mary said since she was giving this lecture the day before Halloween, she couldn't help but feel the presence of Dionysos all around us, especially with all her talk of cults, masks, transformation, and sacrifices. "But he's much more serious than that," she quipped.
On each of the first three days of the contest, a tragedian (a playwright specializing in tragedies) would present a tetralogy of plays, three tragedies plus a satyr play to cheer everyone up. The fourth day would be the comedy competition. City leaders voted for their favorites. Marble monuments were erected both in the theater and in the streets just outside to mark the pride of success. On screen Mary showed the below relief of one such monument. You've got an actor or chorus man (all the performers were men) holding his tragic female mask by its strap.
While Athens was the heart of the theatrical universe, Mary said the Greek colonists in present day Sicily and southern Italy, a region known back then as Magna Graecia, also loved their theater. In fact, Mary said they were even more active in theater and represented Dionysos "just as profoundly" as the native Greeks did back in Athens. On screen she showed what she called a krater, a huge vase the Greeks used to mix wine with water.
Part of the exhibition and having never been on loan until now, this krater was excavated in the southern Italian city of Taranto and was painted by someone they call the Karneia Painter (named after the vase). You've got Dionysos and a retinue of two maenads and a satyr watching a third maenad reach what Mary called "an ecstatic moment in her dance." She said a krater like this would be the centerpiece of a symposium. Back then, a symposium had a slightly different meaning than it did today. Mary called the ancient Greek symposium "the cultivated man's drinking party." Eventually the kraters took on a funerary association when people started depositing them in tombs and graves. Mary posited that the Karneia Painter took full advantage of the Dionysian theme of ecstatic transformation to show off his painting skills, especially in the way he depicts movement in that third maenad who's having her transformation. Mary called Greek vase painting a "very still art form," but not when you're depicting someone having an ecstatic transformation right there in front of the god of transformation himself. She really gushed about this vase. "You can draw differently from this, but you can't draw any better than this."
From here Mary took us further back in time to the origins of Greek drama, when people were depicted "very differently." She said this so we wouldn't be "shocked" by what she was going to put on screen next. Choral performances flourished in Athens long before tragedians and their plays and the Dionysia festival came along. And there on screen came a set of vases dating from circa 560-480 BC that show different types of choruses. Together, they reveal the diversity of performance and its representation in pre-dramatic Athens. She said stuff like this could be viewed as the seed of the entire dramatic tradition that came later, the tragedies, the satyr plays, the comedies, all that. What tells you it's a choral depiction is the double pipe player known as the aulete, who stands there playing his pipe wearing garb that sets him apart from everyone else. One of the vases on the screen, which I can't seem to find on the Getty site, was dated to 560 BC, around the same time the Dionysia was established. It had groups of costumed and masked dancers with attached ears. She said the highlight of the group was the psykter (wine cooler), which I did find an image of.
As you can see, it features members of a chorus riding dolphins. It's part of the exhibition, on loan from the Met in New York and dated to circa 530-520 BC. Mary said it's depicting a dithyramb, a choral performance featuring fifty dudes dancing in a circle with the aulete in the middle that would be staged in yet another competition at the Dionysia festival. The dithyramb was invented in Corinth by a poet and musician named Arion, most famous not for inventing the dithyramb but for getting kidnapped by pirates and rescued by dolphins, the most famous telling of which was by Herodotus, who mentions a statue being erected in Arion's honor inscribed with the words "epi delphinos" ("on a dolphin"). These are the words that would've been sung by this very dolphin-riding chorus. Mary said the guy who painted this psykter, Oltos, was among the best of his class, destined for the symposium. She said Oltos depicted a dance to "circumnavigate" the psykter the same way the dancers would go around in a circle. The particular shape of the psykter made it an effective wine chiller when submerged in ice-cold water. Oltos of course knew it would be used like that, so it's no accident the dolphins on the cooler would look like they're leaping over the wine-cooling water. As for how the costumes would look in reality, Mary cited a figurine housed in the Louvre that shows a Greek chorus guy with a dolphin costume strapped around his waist with fake legs that made him appear astride the dolphin.
From here she jumped to another image that I can't find on the Getty site. It's what she called a skyphos, which is basically a big wine cup (notice no matter what the vessel's called, wine always factors into it). It's dated to around 520 BC and shows hoplites, the citizen-soldier spearmen from the above dolphin psykter, wearing those same kind of dolphin costumes on one side and ostrich costumes on the other. You've got auletes with the dancers on both sides as well. The ostrich side showed "six young men moving toward the aulete," Mary said. She also said the most interesting figure on this skyphos was neither the spear-bearing chorus men nor the auletes, but that mysterious person between the chorus and the aulete. Mary said that figure is the earliest vase-painted depiction of a masked performer. While masked, he was otherwise dressed like the chorus and was interacting with the chorus "while not performing within it," Mary said, adding, "This little figure provides compelling evidence for the emergence of the actor." Basically, if this chorus is a funny chorus, then the masked figure is a proto actor. If it's a straight choral performance, the masked figure is an exarchon, the leader of the dithyrambic song. Since this skyphos was made in the age of Thespis, the guy who invented acting by slapping on a mask and delivering a prepared speech back to the chorus, the mysterious figure could indeed be the oldest surviving depiction of an ancient Greek actor.
Mary said that as comfortable as these vase paintings are with depicting choral performances, Athens was "reticent" about depicting drama, unlike Magna Graecia. Of course the performance context is the same for chorus and drama, and the people who painted the vases and their customers were the same people who attended the dramas and choral works. While Athenians had no problem with the world of theater and the actors who peopled it, they weren't so comfortable with the plays themselves. As one example, she cited an Athenian painter who was a contemporary of Sophocles and was noted for a wide diversity of iconography, including references to Sophocles' works. On screen she showed a picture of a pelike (wine storage vase) dated to 440 BC (Sophocles lived from 496-406 BC). It showed two people in the act of costuming for a performance. They're wearing knee-length peploi (plural of peplos), similar to what maenads wore. The guy on the right is pulling on his performance boots, what the Greeks called kothornoi. He's got a band around his head, which actors typically donned before putting on their masks. Mary implied the headband somehow made it easier, perhaps more comfortable, to wear the mask. This guy's mask was on the ground facing him. Meantime, the guy on the left has finished costuming. He's wearing a female mask with an open mouth and "dark hair bound with fillets," as Mary described it. He's holding a woman's mantle over the similar-looking mask on the ground. "His is the active pose of the choreut rehearsing the balance of his complex choreography," Mary said. She pointed out that the gazes of both choreuts are meant to draw your attention to that mask on the ground, what the Greeks called a prosopon, which can be translated as either mask or character. Mary said: "The symmetricality and parametrical composition focusing on the mask communicate that as the actor takes on the mask, he takes on the character." And she pointed out that since the mask on the ground wasn't being worn yet, the painter emphasized its lifelessness with a stroke of red over the eye. The eye of the mask being worn by the guy on the left, meantime, has no red on it. It's open and otherwise looks like your average eye.
Next she showed an Apulian krater on loan from Sydney depicting actors costuming for a satyr play. With his mask already on, Mary described the chorus man on the right as "alive and a fertile acolyte of Dionysos." The others, without their masks, look like zombies in comparison. Like the previous painting, this painting combines an activity the painter has observed with his expression as an artist of the "magic of theater." She wanted us to be sure that these painters knew it was all stage play. That guy Oltos who painted the psykter with the dolphin spearmen knew perfectly well those were actors wearing costumes strapped around their waists. He chose to portray them as riding real dolphins, leaping through the air, to convey the magic of theater to folks like us who didn't get the chance to see it firsthand.
And now Mary showed us the above vase, what she called the "most spectacular theater vase that has survived." It's called the Pronomos Vase because the aulete at the center of it is a fourth-century aulete from Thebes named Pronomos. Made in Athens, it was discovered in 1835 in an Italic, not Greek, tomb in the southern Italian town of Ruvo di Puglia. The vase is chockfull of detail. I know it's small, but you can still get a sense of all that's going on. Mary said that with all those masks, costumes, and theater production, the vase, all told, offers at a glance an incredibly rich window onto ancient Greek theatrical practice while giving us a "complex vision of the Dionysian festival." It's inviting us into the sphere of this troupe at the end of the festival, just as they're saying thanks to Dionysos and celebrating the victory Mary said was "immortalized by the three tripods on the vase." The painter put Dionysos right there among the actors in order to "make visible the presence of the invisible god." The vase plays with reality in other ways as well. First, you've got actual citizens with their inscribed names and masks in hand. Then you've got a dancing citizen, looking like a literal satyr, leaping out of the frame. One whole side of the vase is taken up by the troupe, which includes three actors, a dozen choreutai, two musicians, and the poet. Dionysos and his wife Ariadne chill out on the nearby couch. At the end of the couch, just to the right of the divine couple, sits an actor whose forte is playing female roles, which is given away by that very elaborate female headdress he's holding and the dress he's wearing. Meantime you've got the winged Eros, god of love, flittering in front of this guy's face offering to put a golden wreath on his head. Mary urged us to head straight to the exhibition after her talk to take an extra special long look at this sucker, because the more you look at it, the more you see. She called it "tragic fabric" with elaborate friezes of quadrigas, sphinxes, horsemen, wave devices, and palmettes. On a practical level, this vase calls out "textile production of a highly skilled nature." Extra cool is Ariadne's gown, woven out of golden thread. Further to the right, on the right edge of what the picture shows, we encounter an actor playing Heracles, who's the only character to have his name inscribed, which Mary called ironic since he's the last person ancient Greek audiences would've needed labeled due to how popular he was. They would've easily identified him by his bow and arrows and the lion skin. This of course suggests the play in question was about one of Heracles' famous adventures. He's standing with Seilenos, the father of the satyrs and head of the satyr chorus. Further putting it into context, Mary said this troupe would've just finished performing an entire tetralogy. We're talking a good eight hours on stage. But the painter is less interested in showing these guys on stage than he is showing them hanging out with Dionysos, having taken off their masks to relax and unwind. The only person still performing is that satyr dancing behind Pronomos. He's got his mask on and dances with one foot over the ornamental band connected to the back of Pronomos' chair as if he's jumping out of the picture. Under the handle on the left, Mary pointed out the young choreut holding his mask behind his back. She noted how the mask is pointed toward the other side of the vase, which you can't see in the picture and which depicts satyrs dancing in a sacred komos, a very lofty term for what is basically a drunken revelry. The features of real satyrs are identical to the masks worn by the drunk satyr chorus. In the komos you've got Dionysos walking among the four satyrs, three maenads, and a flying Eros. And so you've got two levels of representation on the Pronomos vase, the mythical and the mortal, bound together. The former features Dionysos, the maenads, and satyrs on the side of the vase we can't see, while on the side facing us we've got the all too mortal acolytes, the actors and musicians and the playwright.
The Pronomos vase provided what Mary called a convenient bridge to discussing the artistic relationship and differences between Athens and Magna Graecia, where Athenian theater was "extraordinarily popular and imported from Athens in high numbers." Aeschylus visited Sicily at least twice that we know of. The first time was in 470 BC when he traveled to Siracusa (Syracuse) to direct a version of his play The Persians. The second time was the last time he went anywhere. In 456 BC he traveled to Gela, Sicily, and apparently died, the story goes, when an eagle or some other bird of prey mistook his bald head for a stone and dropped a tortoise on it. He was in his mid seventies. Is that really how he died? That seems kind of hokey. At that age, wouldn't it be more likely he passed away of natural causes? Whatever the case, he died at Gela, and that's where he's buried. Aeschylus wasn't the only playwright the Sicilians adored. Mary said many a legendary story abounds about the Sicilian love for Euripides.
While Magna Graecia maintained close ties with the Athenian mothership, Mary said they had "very different artistic traditions concerning representation of performance." On the screen she showed the above krater, on loan from the Cleveland Museum of Art, which depicts the escape of Medea in a chariot. It was made circa 400 BC by someone they call the Policoro Painter. The scene comes from Euripides' tragic play Medea, written in 431 BC. The premise is that Medea is a foreigner married, and then wronged, by Jason, who has no idea of her superhuman powers. She unleashes her revenge by killing their two sons and taking off in a chariot borne by two serpents. Mary said that when they staged the play, the flight of the chariot would have most likely been achieved with a crane-like device called a mekhane. She said painters of kraters like this "approached their tasks according to a complex set of visual paradigms rooted in the traditional ways in which epic and mythic narratives had been depicted for generations."
Vase painters and artisans in general had to have some working knowledge of myths and legends in order to do their job, but Mary said any knowledge they had was pale compared to the walking encyclopedias that the poets and playwrights were. Since these were the people who wrote the stuff being performed, they stayed actively engaged with the production from start to finish. They were free to utilize any of the theatrical tools at their disposal--choreography, sets, props, masks, costumes, and music--to get their story told in the best way possible. After watching the production, vase painters had to take that entire sensory experience shared with thousands of spectators and convey it as a single scene on the curved sides of a vase, which would then be used in the intimate, private setting of a drinking party. To get the job done and done right, vase painters had to be practical and pick vases with shapes conducive to big scenes while "employing recognizable iconographic tools."
Mary made a really interesting point when she said that, while yes, it helps if we're at least a little familiar with the myths being depicted on these vases, what would help even more is if we understood how the live performances of these myths must have inspired and influenced the depictions on the vases. You take the Medea vase as an example. Obviously this is showing Medea's escape in the chariot, but what's strange is that she's leaving her two dead kids behind on an altar. In the play by Euripides, she takes the dead kids with her. So either the Policoro Painter saw a different version of this play, or s/he saw the Euripides version and decided to exercise some artistic license.
Next up, Mary talked about one of the most famous tragedies to come out of ancient Greece, the Oresteia trilogy by Aeschylus. It's the only trilogy of ancient Greek tragedies to survive wholly intact. On screen she showed the above storage jar showing a scene from The Libation Bearers, part two of Oresteia (part one was The Agamemnon and part three was The Eumenides). Here you've got Klytaimnestra about to get killed by her son Orestes. I'm not sure how much of it you can see, but the mom's on the ground exposing her breast. Apparently the dialogue she says at this point is pleading with her son to "take pity on this breast." In other words, this is the breast that gave you life, you idiot. Floating above and to the right is one of the Furies that will torment Orestes for matricide, waving snakes over his head. The violence of Orestes' act is also conveyed in his hat having fallen off. Mary pointed out that the Fury wasn't in the play, but the painter added it to convey the horror of the scene and the punishment that'll be due Orestes after the play's over. Discovered in Paestum, Naples in southern Italy, this is the only depiction of this scene that anyone knows of, while so far no depictions from The Agamemnon have been found.
Features unique to certain plays can be key to developing and understanding the iconography. As an example, Mary cited The Eumenides, part three of the Oresteia. A priestess of Apollo named Pythia comes upon the "slouching, stinking Furies. With charred skin, their eyes dripped a foul ooze." The Furies remind Pythia of something, but she's not sure what. She remembers a wall painting of harpies, and she thinks of the gorgons as well. The "horrid appearance of the Erinyes [the Furies]" and their pursuit of Orestes can help us identify the Oresteia in vase paintings, even though, in reality, they appear in The Eumenides as evil demons who chase Orestes to Delphi after he kills Mom. Mary showed us a painting that's one of many examples depicting the Furies in other parts of the story, not because artists didn't know Oresteia, but because they wanted to signal the viewer to the myth being adapted. This particular painting showed the Furies with Orestes at the Omphalos in Delphi. Above you've got Apollo holding a sacrificed piglet that drips blood onto Orestes. Mary explained that dripping a piglet's blood was part of the purification of Apollo. She also pointed out that this scene doesn't actually take place in The Eumenides. It's only mentioned early on. The most poignant part of the painting is Klytaimnestra's ghost trying to wake the sleeping Furies, but it's too late. They've become the title characters, the Eumenides, the Kindly Ones, presaging their transformation at the trial of Orestes in Athens.
Only one painter that we know of chose to depict a tragedy actually being performed on stage as opposed to depicting it with fantasy elements and artistic license. Active circa 330 BC, he was a Sicilian known as the Capodarso Painter. On the screen Mary showed the above krater fragment depicting actors on a stage set. You've got the main characters standing on a raised platform between four columns. On the left, an elderly man in traveling clothes and boots leans on a staff and gestures toward a tall, "ritually clad couple" in the center. The couple seems focused on what the elderly man is saying. Mary said the painter was emphasizing the "psychological power" of the scene by having the elderly man face us, the audience, as if he's speaking to us as much as the couple. She said it was no accident the elderly man's hand is framed by the column that holds up the stage set. It's also noteworthy that he's not wearing a mask so we can see his "anguished expression convey an event of great magnitude." The husband looks nonplussed. On either side of him are two female figures rendered in a much smaller scale, while the woman over on the right, presumably the wife, is raising her veil to her face with both hands as if in shock or awe. Behind the wife, on the right edge, you've got yet one more person turned away in anguish. Most scholars agree this fragment is depicting a scene from the Sophocles play Oedipus Rex (Oedipus the King, or in Greek, Oidipous Tyrannos, part two of his Oedipus trilogy). The husband is our man Oedipus. The elderly man is a Corinthian who's come to tell Oedipus that King Polybus, the man Oedipus thought was his father, was not only not his father, but is now dead. As Oedipus gets more information out of the man, his wife over there, Jocasta, puts two and two together and realizes that her husband Oedipus is also her son, hence her pulling the veil over her face in shock. Rather than tell her husband/son this awful truth, Jocasta leaves the stage and kills herself. Mary said most depictions of tragedy purposely avoid showing stage architecture, costumes, masks, and in general anything that betrays the artifice of theater. That's what makes this particular fragment special. The Capodarso Painter is betraying the stage architecture, but he's not depicting actors. He's got the actual characters from the myth playing out this tragic scene on the stage, yet he's given the characters "heightened expressions" to allude to the masks that the actors would've been wearing in the actual production.
Enough of that depressing stuff, let's get on to something more cheerful. That's what the ancient Greeks would've said too. In every tetralogy, the fourth and final play would depart from the tragic tone of the first three plays. It became necessary, in fact, to use the fourth play to show a more "Dionysian" kind of performance with a focus on the god being honored at the festival where the tetralogy was being performed. Hence, the satyr play, which subverted serious drama by inserting those awesome little satyrs into well-known mythical narratives. And here Mary showed the above framed fragment of a satyr play by Sophocles called Trackers, about Apollo's cows getting stolen and how a bunch of satyrs go looking for them. The thief turns out to be the god Hermes, who's been hiding the cows in a cave. When the satyrs reach the cave, Hermes is in the process of inventing the lyre. The sound of it terrifies the satyrs. They've never heard, or heard of, a stringed instrument before. They think it's a living thing, an animal with strings attached to its body.
Mary told us the vast majority of the hard copies of the plays depicted on these vases, kraters, psykters, and so on, are all gone, lost to history. The only complete hard copy that has survived in tact is The Cyclops by Euripides, which is represented on one of the vases in the exhibition. The second most preserved play is Trackers. That torn fragment is "good condition." Besides those two, Mary said we have plenty of references but very little actual hard copy text.
On screen she showed a vase with a satyr chorus that's become one of the most famous depictions of this kind. It's never been exhibited and was found covered in old overpaint. Jeff Maish from the Getty Villa's conservation crew cleaned it up. On the shoulder, five members of the satyr chorus dance toward two musicians. The chorus men are wearing identical satyr masks with large ears, perizoma (shorts), false phalluses, and bushy horse tails. Mary reminded us that satyrs are hybrids of horses and humans, not pans and humans. Through depictions of carefully choreographed movements like stepping, bending, crouching, and kicking, the vase painter aimed to "convey the vivid appearance of a satyr dance." As they dance, each satyr holds a leg to a piece of "elaborate" furniture, most likely legs and crossbars from a symposium couch or throne for Dionysos. The satyr on the far right is setting his leg down in front of a piper, whose "elaborate robes billow while he taps his foot to the music."
Mary emphasized that while satyr plays contain scenes to make us laugh, they're not comedies per se, which is a common misperception by folks like me. She said "its form kept within the closed world of tragic drama." The misperception stems from how vase painters would show only the comedic elements of the plot and character interaction. On screen she showed the above vase. It's part of the exhibition on loan from a private collection in Rome. She called it the most elaborate depiction known of a stage set. Center stage you've got two comic actors wearing phlyax costumes, which are short, padded tunics that expose large, attached genitalia, saggy leggings, and "outsized, grotesquely comic masks." They're playing pipes in a sanctuary in front of an altar. The artifice of the wooden stage is betrayed by both the steps leading up to it and the columns supporting it. The area beneath the stage, a repository for costumes and scenery, is concealed by a curtain adorned with southern Italian geometric designs. While it's meant to appear that they're playing pipes, in reality they're not. It would've been impossible for the pipes to fit through the masks' mouthpieces. The music would come from that piper hidden behind the tree to the right who "correctly wears his pipe" with a mouth strap called a phorbeia. Mary made an interesting point when she said this type of "meta theatricality, typical of comic depictions, is wittily engaging, and just as complex to entangle as the iconography of the tragic vases. In some ways more so because in some cases, as here, it only appears to be so real." Cool, huh? Since we don't have the hard copies of the plays, we can't say what the plots were, how these scenes fit into the larger context, but we can still see that successful comic themes relied on parodies of the gods.
Next up on the screen she showed this vase. It's from the Vatican collection and formerly of the collection of 18th century German painter Anton Raphael Mengs, which gives it a "provenance that goes back at least three hundred years." It's evidence of the only painter we know of, Asteas from the fourth century BC, to have depicted both tragic and comic scenes. While this vase is not in the exhibition, another piece is, The Madness of Heracles on loan from Madrid. Mary called this vase, which shows Zeus and Hermes "out on the town," a classic example of old comedy, parody, and foolishness. On the right you've got Hermes wearing a traveler's cap over his bald head and carrying his oil lamp upside down. On the left you've got old man Zeus wearing a silly crown and sticking his head through the ladder he's carrying to the window of Alcmene, who looks down at them like a common prostitute, complete with fingertips on the window sill.
The next artifact was the "most valuable ancient Greek comic vase," showing a scene known as The Punishment of the Thief, based at the Met in New York. It dates to around 450 BC and was painted by the Tarporley Painter, the same guy behind the satyrs costuming for a play above. This vase is very important for scholarship because the Tarporley Painter was an Apulian vase painter (southern Italy) while the inscriptions on the vase are Athenian, painted as if issuing from the mouths of the actors. For this reason, the vase has been accepted as depicting a comedy that originated in Athens and was later imported to Magna Graecia, where the Tarporley Painter lived and worked. You've got a man in the middle looking toward an old man who's got his hands up in the air. Letters come out of the old man's mouth, which Mary translated as, "He's bound my hands up above me." The man in the middle, interestingly, has letters coming out of his mouth, but they don't form words. This was meant to show that this guy doesn't speak Greek all too well. The Greeks hired Scythians to be their police force now and again. Scythians came from present-day Iran and so couldn't speak the best Athenian dialect. Across the top in Greek it says "The Tragedian." Now why would it say that on a supposedly comic vase?
That led her to show us a detail from another vase featuring the same Scythian from the above vase. The mask is exactly the same, with the dark curly hair and the face of a young man. He's got a large lower jaw with a large lower lip jutting out. As for the strange costume, Mary called it a stage naked costume. It's meant to be a joke at the expense of the "beautiful torsos of the athletic, young Athenians" that you'd see in something like "The Agrigento Youth," a sculpture the Getty Villa just installed three days ago, on loan from a museum in Agrigento, Sicily until next April. She said aristocratic young men gain their civic, idealistic nobility by exercising so they have perfectly toned bodies. "And how you make fun of them is showing them like this," she said, nodding at the Scythian with the stage naked costume, a saggy costume with long arms and legs, a big belly, big breasts, and long genitalia. "This is what a heroic kind of nude looks like in comedy."
The next slide showed both vases with the Scythian, viewed in full side by side. Not only is the Scythian in both, but so is the old man. This exhibition marks the first time these two vases have been viewed together. Mary said when they had a symposium here a few weeks ago, all the scholars were thrilled to see the two vases together, since most of the time one is in storage in Boston while the other lives at the Met. They could look back and forth at the vases and confirm the characters are the same. That second one, of which she showed us the detail above, has an old woman standing on a dais with dialogue translated as "I shall hand him over to you." The old woman's got a dead goose on the stage with her along with a basket containing two live baby goats. On the vase on the right, behind the old man, is a live goose and yet another double yolk basket with young game. So at some point between the vase on the right and the vase on the left, the goose was killed, and clearly this old woman's pissed off about it. What's interesting is that the vase on the right was made about twenty years after the one on the left. At any rate, we can safely deduce that these comedies were popular, that they were performed repeatedly, and that artists liked to adapt them for vase painting as a matter of course.
And so that brings us full circle, Mary said, "from the genesis of drama in Athenian choral dance to the continued pervasive influence of Athenian comedy on productions in south Italy two hundred years later. To understand that, in order to comprehend ancient Greek theater, you have to comprehend the art of ancient Greek theater."
Below are a few more pieces from the exhibition. They weren't part of Mary's lecture but thought it might be nice to include them here. The exhibition was quite comprehensive. Taken together, the pieces in this post represent a small fraction of what I saw, but along with Mary's lecture, they should give you a good idea of the exhibition's overall theme. The descriptions are verbatim from the Getty site.
Mixing Vessel with a Satyr Chorus
Three members of a satyr chorus wear the typical perizoma (shorts) laced at the front, with a false phallus and horse tail attached. Ornamenting the garment is a wheel-like motif often found on satyr costumes.
Facing each other as if in conversation, the two men on the left hold their bearded masks. Having put on his mask and assumed his character, the figure on the right dances. Behind him lies a decorated tympanon, a hand drum frequently associated with the world of Dionysos.
Pitcher with a Bird Chorus
A piper wearing a himation (cloak) plays the aulos, a double pipe made of reeds, for two chorus men dressed as birds. They wear animal skins and tight-fitting, stippled costumes that cover all but their hands, feet, and heads. Wings are attached to their arms, and purple crests and beards animate their masks. The tradition and representation of bird choruses continued into the late 400s B.C., when Aristophanes' comedy Birds was produced.
Ancient Greek theater was first and foremost musical theater, more akin to opera than any kind of modern performance. Because of its musical range, the aulos provided the sole accompaniment for every choral, tragic, satyric, and comic performance. Vase paintings such as this one show that auletes, or pipers, wore elaborate robes that set them apart from the other performers.
Incense Burner in the Shape of an Actor as a Slave on an Alter
Slaves, often in trouble because of their pranks, were popular characters in comedy. They are frequently shown perched on a sanctuary altar, escaping punishment and plotting future intrigues. The figurine displayed here features the typical slave costume: a short tunic over a long-sleeved garment, leggings, and laced sandals.
Other characters popular in comedy were shameless prostitutes, greedy brothel keepers, boastful soldiers, and parasites--sycophants or spongers who use flattery to exploit the hospitality of a wealthy patron.
Statuette of an Actor as a Musician
This musician wears a festival floral wreath and a short pink chiton. His cloak is tied around his waist, leaving both arms free to perform. Given the position of his hands, he may have held a tympanon (hand drum) or a pair of cymbals.
The musician was a popular character in New Comedy (320-290 B.C.), dominated by the playwright Menander, whose plays dissected Athenian mores of family and society. In Menander's plays, a plotline can be turned upside down by the sudden appearance of professionals such as soldiers or musicians. These characters energize the plot by initiating farcical situations by means of their nefarious misdeeds or by bringing surprising news.
Menander's characters are known primarily through masks and figurines, such as this one, produced in great numbers throughout the Mediterranean. Performed for centuries after his lifetime, Menander's plays were highly influential to the development of Roman comedy, especially that of Plautus and Terence.
