Books by Patrick R Crowley
University of Chicago Press, 2019
Drawing from a rich corpus of art works, including sarcophagi, tomb paintings, and floor mosaics,... more Drawing from a rich corpus of art works, including sarcophagi, tomb paintings, and floor mosaics, Patrick R. Crowley investigates how something as insubstantial as a ghost could be made visible through the material grit of stone and paint. In this fresh and wide-ranging study, he uses the figure of the ghost to offer a new understanding of the status of the image in Roman art and visual culture. Tracing the shifting practices and debates in antiquity about the nature of vision and representation, Crowley shows how images of ghosts make visible structures of beholding and strategies of depiction. Yet the figure of the ghost simultaneously contributes to a broader conceptual history that accounts for how modalities of belief emerged and developed in antiquity. Neither illustrations of ancient beliefs in ghosts nor depictions of afterlife, these images show us something about the visual event of seeing itself. The Phantom Image offers essential insight into ancient art, visual culture, and the history of the image.
Papers by Patrick R Crowley
Effects, 2022
What would it be like to look at the face of a person who lived two thousand years ago? To behold... more What would it be like to look at the face of a person who lived two thousand years ago? To behold not a likeness, a mere representation in stone or paint or metal, but an actual person? This is, strictly speaking, impossible. But it is also the tantalizing promise of the death mask cast directly from nature, a resemblance guaranteed through the technical procedures of molding and casting. The evidentiary status of the mask is predicated on this apparent bracketing of human intervention from the equation, obtaining a glimpse of the real through the physical contingency of plaster coming into contact with the topography of flesh, as well as the resultant cast in wax, a material whose uncanny mimetic properties can induce intense responses of both attraction and repulsion. Amazingly, rare traces of such artifacts survive in the form of plaster molds for death masks discovered throughout the Roman empire. 1
The Nature of Art. Pliny the Elder on Materials (A. Anguissola and A. Grüner, eds.), 2020
Seeking Transparency: Rock Crystals across the Medieval Mediterranean, ed. Cynthia Hahn and Avinoam Shalem (Gebr. Mann Verlag), 2020
Classics and Media Theory (Oxford University Press), 2020
This chapter explores the media–archaeological foundations of trompe l’oeil painting in antiquity... more This chapter explores the media–archaeological foundations of trompe l’oeil painting in antiquity, specifically the famous contest between the Greek painters Zeuxis and Parrhasius as recounted by Pliny the Elder. The anecdote is well known: whereas Zeuxis had painted a picture of grapes that deceived the birds who flew up to peck at them, Parrhasius won the palm for deceiving his rival with a painting of a curtain that compelled Zeuxis to ask that it be raised and the picture shown for his appraisal. Modern accounts and even depictions of the contest have universally taken for granted the formal realism of this painting, its extreme illusionism, as the catalyst of its deceptive power. By contrast, this chapter examines Parrhasius’ curtain from a media–theoretical perspective, which considers the order of representation in relation to the experience of beholders in real space. In short, it argues that the success of Parrhasius’ picture had less to do with its technical virtuosity than its shrewd understanding of how to produce the conditions for depictive and bodily co-presence.
Seeking Transparency: Rock Crystals across the Medieval Mediterranean, ed. Cynthia Hahn and Avinoam Shalem (Gebr. Mann Verlag), 2020
The Burlington Magazine, 2019
Rock crystal, which the ancients believed was formed by excessively frozen ice, came into fashion... more Rock crystal, which the ancients believed was formed by excessively frozen ice, came into fashion in the early years of the Roman Empire, when skilled craftsmen began to push the limits of the medium to new, previously unimagined heights in the form of applied ornament, vessels, and even statuettes. Then as now, large chunks or unusual specimens constituted natural wonders in and of themselves. As the ancients themselves marveled, the perfection of crystal facets surpassed the very limits of a gem-cutter's skill, and rock crystal's unrivaled limpidity was broadly deemed to be superior to that of even the most splendid examples of colorless glass, itself a hallmark of Roman technical achievement. This article examines some of the ways in which the marvelous formation and celebrated transparency of crystal turned on the classical concept of the medium, which since Aristotle had been understood as an intervening space that separates an object of vision from its beholder. Given that a diverse range of substances could qualify as transparent media according to this view—water, crystal, and glass, to name but a few—the ancients seem to have insisted upon the irreducibility of a medium to its materiality. Nevertheless, the materiality itself could be made to matter. What makes rock crystal particularly good to think with, as the author demonstrates, is the way in which it dissolves so many of the distinctions between nature and artifice, occupying a kind of middle ground between the aqueous material from which it was generated and the vitreous one to which it was so often compared.
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Books by Patrick R Crowley
Papers by Patrick R Crowley