Greek Vase-painting and the Origins of Visual Humour

This book is a comprehensive study of visual humour in ancient Greece, with special emphasis on works created in Athens and Boeotia. Alexandre G. Mitchell brings an interdisciplinary approach to this topic, combining theories and methods of art history, archaeology, and classics with the anthropology of humour, and thereby establishing new ways of looking at art and visual humour in particular. Understanding what visual humour was to the ancients and how it functioned as a tool of social cohesion is only one facet of this study. Mitchell also focuses on the social truths that his study of humour unveils: democracy and freedom of expression; politics and religion; Greek vases and trends in fashion; market-driven production; proper and improper behaviour; popular versus elite culture; carnival in situ; and the place of women, foreigners, workers, and labourers within the Greek city. Richly illustrated with more than 140 drawings and photographs, as well as with analytical tables of comic representations according to different themes, painters, and techniques, this study amply documents the comic representations that formed an important part of ancient Greek visual language from the sixth through the fourth centuries BC.

A scholar of Greek art and archaeology, Dr. Alexandre G. Mitchell is an Honorary Research Associate at the Institute of Archaeology, University of Oxford.

Alexandre G. Mitchell

University of Oxford

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
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© Alexandre G. Mitchell 2009

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press.

First published 2009
Printed in the United States of America

A catalog record for this publication is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication data

Mitchell, Alexandre G. (Alexandre Guillaume), 1974–
Greek vase-painting and the origins of visual humour / Alexandre G. Mitchell.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978–0-521–51370-8 (Hardback)
1. Vase-painting, Greek. 2. Wit and humour, Pictorial.
3. Art and society – Greece.I.Title.
NK4645.M62 2009
741.5′938–dc22 2008050635

ISBN 978-0-521-51370-8 Hardback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of urls for external or third-party Internet Web sites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such Web sites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

À Lila, ma fille au doux sourire

Amis lecteurs, qui ce livre lisez,

Despouillez-vous de toute affection,

Et, le lisant, ne vous scandalisez:

Il ne contient mal ne infection.

Vray est qu’icy peu de perfection

Vous apprendrez, sinon en cas de rire,

Aultre argument ne peut mon cueur élire,

Voyant le dueil qui vous mine et consomme,

Mieux est de ris que de larmes escripre,

Pour ce que rire est le propre de l’homme.

(Rabelais, frontispice to Gargantua 1534)

Contents

List of Illustrations