Roman Death Masks and the Metaphorics of the Negative

References (92)

1. of Lincoln's and Grant's death masks in Cleveland Moffett, "Grant and Lincoln in Bronze," McClure's Magazine 5, no. 5 (October 1895): 425ff. How or why people began to characterize molds in more general terms as "negatives" and casts as "positives," by which they seem to mean concave and convex forms, respectively, remains unclear, but a preliminary examination of results from an Internet search engine indicates that the characterization gradually appears some- time in the 1880s in relation to patents for metal forging and gynecological models-a genealogy that seems ripe for further study. The familiar language of photographic "positives" and "nega- tives" (along with the name of "photography" itself) had already been introduced by Sir John Herschel as early as 1840, on which see especially Geoffrey Batchen, "The Naming of Photography: A Mass of Metaphor," History of Photography 17, no. 1 (Spring 1993): 28-29, 31n59. For a brief account of the early history of the negative, see D.B. Thomas, The First Negatives: An Account of the Discovery and Early Use of the Negative-Positive Photographic Process (London: H.M. Stationery Office, 1964).
2. The literature on photographic indexicality is vast. See Charles Sanders Peirce, "Logic as Semiotic: The Theory of Signs," in The Philosophical Writings of Peirce, ed. Justus Buchler (New York: Dover, 1940), 119. A retrospective reading of Bazin through the lens of Peircean semiotics can be located in Peter Wollen, Signs and Meaning in the Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969), 120-55. Perhaps the most well-known art-historical account of indexi- cality remains Rosalind Krauss, "Notes on the Index: Part 1," in The Originality of the Avant- Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), 196-209. For a reevaluation and critique of this reading, see especially Tom Gunning, "What's the Point of an Index? or, Faking Photographs," Nordicom Review 25, nos. 1-2 (2004), 39-49; and Geimer, "Image as Trace." See also Jordan Bear, "Index Marks the Spot? The Photo-Diagram's Referential System," Philosophy of Photography 2, no. 2 (2012): 315-34; and Joel Snyder, "Pointless," in James Elkins, ed., Photography Theory (New York: Routledge, 2007), 369-85. Most significant for my present purposes of bringing together these archaeological and photographic discourses is Georges Didi- Huberman, La ressemblance par contact: archéologie, anachronisme et modernité de l'empreinte (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 2008).
3. On the relationship between archaeology and daguerreotypy, see especially Lindsey S. Stewart, "In Perfect Order: Antiquity in the Daguerreotypes of Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey," in Claire L. Lyons et al., eds., Antiquity and Photography: Early Views of Ancient Mediterranean Sites (Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Museum, 2005), 66-91.
4. The earliest and most important publications about the mask are Auguste Allmer, "Epitaphe d'une petite fille dans la tombe de laquelle était déposé un moule de son visage," Revue épigraphique du midi de la France 1, no. 18 (July 1878): 298-300; Arnould Locard, "Note sur une tombe romaine trouvée à Lyon et renfermant le masque d'un enfant," Mémoires de l'Académie des sciences et belles-lettres et arts de Lyon: Classe des lettres 22 (1884): 21-36; Hénri Thédenat, Sur deux masques de l'époque romaine trouvés à Lyon et à Paris (Paris: H. Champion, 1886);
5. and Auguste Allmer and Paul Dissard, "Trion: Antiquités découvertes en 1885, 1886, et antérieure- ment," Mémoires de l'Académie des sciences et belles-lettres et arts de Lyon: Classe des lettres 25 (1887): 32-37.
6. André Steyert, Nouvelle histoire de Lyon (Lyon: Bernoux et Cumin, 1895), 1:335. 16. Although an image of the mask was first published in 1878, the mask itself went missing for several years after it came to light. This may explain why the mask belonging to the infant in Paris, although found four years later in 1878, was independently regarded as the first of its kind in recorded archaeological history. Locard, "Note sur une tombe," 24. 17. Locard, "Note sur une tombe," 34.
7. Thédenat, 12. On the philological controversy, see Charles C. Perkins, "The Art of Casting Plaster among the Greeks and Romans (Second and Concluding Notice)," American Art Review 1, no. 6 (1880): 256-57.
8. Locard, "Note sur une tombe," 28.
9. Locard, "Note sur une tombe," 34.
10. Locard, "Note sur une tombe," 25.
11. Today the Lyon mold remains understudied even among specialists. In part, this has to do with the fact that the ancient mold had long been kept at the Musée des beaux-arts de Lyon rather than the Musée gallo-romain de Lyon, where the stele and a modern (nineteenth-century) cast of the mask had been put on display and were generally known to archaeologists since the 1880s. (Thanks to M. Hugues Savay-Guerraz, conservator at the Musée gallo-romain de Lyon, for bring- ing this to my attention.) This helps to explain why, as recently as 1980, Heinrich Drerup identi- fied the Lyon mold as missing in his modest catalogue of such objects (notably excluding the Paris mold), which by then included a handful of additional specimens that had come to light over the previous century. Drerup, "Totenmaske und Ahnenbild bei den Römern," 3. As a result, Drerup and others were forced to rely on the modern cast of the mold for their analysis, rather than on the excavated mask itself. Consequently, the ancient mold itself has largely been written out of the picture, its many imperfections smoothed over in a series of modern proxies made from var- ious and variously resembling media. The first publication of the ancient mold (as opposed to the modern cast) appears in Véronique Dasen, "Wax and Plaster Memories: Children in Elite and Non-Elite Strategies," in Children, Memory, and Family Identity in Roman Culture, ed. Véronique Dasen and Thomas Späth (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2010), 109-46.
12. Auguste Allmer, "Corrections et additions," Revue épigraphique du midi de la France 1, no. 20 (September-October 1878): 320.
13. Florian Valentin, "Miscellanea," Bulletin épigraphique de la Gaule 2 (1882): 249.
14. "Chronique," Bulletin critique de la littérature, d'histoire, et de théologie, no. 2 (15 October 1882): 217-18; and "Notes," The Nation, 30 November 1882, 464.
15. Thédenat signed nearly all of the other reviews in the "Chronique" during this period, but a scant few appear to have been left anonymous rather haphazardly.
16. See Robert de Lasteyrie, "Sur un cimetière romain découvert à Paris, rue Nicole Henri," Revue archéologique, June 1878, 378; and Thédenat, 27. The ancient mold and its modern cast remain on display at the Musée Carnavalet, the city museum of Paris.
17. Thédenat, 27. On the art-historical phenomenon of "chance images," see especially Horst W. Janson, "The 'Image Made by Chance' in Renaissance Thought," in Essays in Honor of Erwin Panofsky, ed. Millard Meiss (Zurich: Buehler Buchdruck, 1960), 254-66.
18. The Science Museum, London, owns a copy of the mask (accession no. A656209) with a handwritten inscription on the reverse that recounts the story of its making as given in Landau.
19. Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility (Second Version)," trans. Edmund Jephcott and Harry Zohn, in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, ed. Michael W. Jennings et al. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008), 27.
20. "Il est donc probable que le moule du musée de Lyon dut servir à tirer un masque en cire. . . . Claudia Severina, en déposant le moule dans la tombe, obéit à un sentiment facile à com- prendre. Elle ne voulut pas briser et jeter avec les débris vulgaires ce plâtre, sacré pour elle, car il avait touché le visage de son enfant et conservait ses traits. Elle ne voulut pas non plus que la chère image pût, indéfiniment reproduit, tomber en des mains inconnues et être profanée par des regards indifférents." Thédenat, 15-16.
21. Drerup, "Totenmaske und Ahnenbild bei den Römern," 1980.
22. On the Tunisian workshop that produced unfinished plaster portraits found alongside a plaster mold, see Hédi Slim, "Masques mortuaires d'El Jem (Thysdrus)," Antiquités africaines 10 (1976): 79-92.
23. In a letter to his friend Macrinus, Pliny the Younger contrasts the emotional response to "images of the dead displayed at home" (defunctorum imagines domi positae) to those set up in a very public space (in celeberrimo loco), although whether he is referring to more conventional likenesses in marble or bronze, or to the mold-made images his famous uncle of the same name had discussed, remains ambiguous in each case.
24. Aby Warburg, The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, trans. David Britt (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1999), 207. See also Anne-Gaëlle Saliot, The Drowned Muse: Casting the Unknown Woman across the Tides of Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 64ff.
25. Institutional spaces of justice constituted a unique example of such a context for display beyond the tomb. In his treatise on rhetorical training, Quintilian recalls an episode in which a death mask had been used as a visual aid to solicit a sympathetic response-to catastrophic effect, in this case-during a courtroom drama. That Quintilian was talking about a "true" death mask is strongly suggested by his remark that the grisly, disfigured image was fashioned in wax after being taken (through the interceding plaster mold, we must imagine) cadaveri, from the corpse itself. Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, 6.1.
26. Slim, "Masques mortuaires d'El Jem (Thysdrus)," 87-89.
27. Martial, Epigrams, 9.74.
28. Apuleius, Apology, trans. Vincent Hunink, in Rhetorical Works, ed. S.J. Harrison (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2001), bk. 14, 38. See also Yun Lee Too, "Statues, Mirrors, Gods: Controlling Images in Apuleius," in Art and Text in Roman Culture, ed. Jas Elsner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 133-52.
29. Jane Fejfer, Roman Portraits in Context (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2008), 121. 42. The major publication is Henner von Hesberg and Harald Mielsch, Die heidnische Nekropole unter St. Peter in Rom: Die Mausoleen E-I und Z-Psi, Atti della Pontificia Accademia Romana di Archeologia, ser. 3, Memorie, vol. 16, no. 2 (Rome: "L'Erma" di Bretschneider, 1986), 143-208. See also Dasen, "Wax and Plaster Memories"; Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, "Housing the Dead: The Tomb as House in Roman Italy," in Commemorating the Dead: Texts and Artifacts in Context, ed. Laurie Brink and Deborah Green (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2008), 66-76; and Luigi Maria Caliò, "La morte del sapiente: La tomba di Valerius Herma nella necropoli vaticana," in Arte e memoria culturale nell'età della Seconda Sofistica, ed. Orietta D. Cordovana and Marco Galli (Catania: Edizioni del Prisma, 2007), 289-318.
30. Barbara E. Borg, Crisis and Ambition: Tombs and Burial Customs in Third-Century C.E.
31. Rome (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2013), 135-39. On the conceptualization of familial and hereditary tombs in Roman funerary law, see Max Käser, "Zum römischen Grabrecht," in Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte: Romanistische Abteilung 95 (1978): 15-92. 44. Dasen, "Wax and Plaster Memories." 45. The bibliography on the imagines maiorum is vast. See especially Harriet Flower, Ancestor Masks and Aristocratic Power in Roman Culture (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1996);
32. Peter Blöme, "Die imagines maiorum: Ein Problemfall römischer und neuzeitlicher Ästhetik," in Homo Pictor, ed. Gottfried Boehm (Munich: K.G. Sauer, 2001), 305-22; and John Pollini, From Republic to Empire: Rhetoric, Religion, and Power in the Visual Culture of Ancient Rome (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2012).
33. Flower, Ancestor Masks. See also Wallace-Hadrill, "Housing the Dead"; and Dasen, "Wax and Plaster Memories."
34. "In the halls of our ancestors it was otherwise; portraits were the objects displayed to be looked at, not statues by foreign artists, nor bronzes nor marbles, but wax models of faces were set out each on a separate side-board, to furnish likenesses to be carried in procession at a funeral in the clan, and always when some member of it passed away the entire company of his house that had ever existed was present." Pliny the Elder, Natural History, 35.4ff. See also Georges Didi- Huberman, "The Molding Image: Genealogy and the Truth of Resemblance in Pliny's Natural History, Book 35, 1-7," in Law and the Image: The Authority of Art and the Aesthetics of the Law, ed. Costas Douzinas and Lynda Nead (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 71-88. 48. Pliny the Elder, Natural History, 35.44.
35. Florence Dupont, "The Emperor-God's Other Body," trans. Brian Massumi, in Fragments for a History of the Human Body, Part Three, ed. Michel Feher (New York: Zone Books, 1989), 396-419.
36. Dupont, "The Emperor-God's Other Body," 407; translation modified (the English transla- tion qualifies the hollow form as a "negative" and the form in relief as a "positive," but Dupont does not use these terms in French).
37. Dupont, "The Emperor-God's Other Body," 408; translation modified (the English transla- tion arbitrarily gives "hundredth").
38. See Silverman, Miracle of Analogy, 12.
39. Cicero, Against Vatinius, 28.
40. Dupont does not cite Benjamin in her essay, but Didi-Huberman (who cites Dupont) makes the theoretical connection to Benjamin explicit. On both the technical issues and art-historical consequences of producing copies of death masks, see especially Joost Keizer, "Portrait and Imprint in Fifteenth-Century Italy," Art History 38, no. 1 (February 2015): 11-37. 55. Flower, 32-59.
41. Didi-Huberman, La ressemblance par contact, 60-70 (esp. 69). See also Didi-Huberman, "The Molding Image."
42. Myles McDonnell, "Un Ballo in Maschera: Processions, Portraits, and Emotions," Journal of Roman Archaeology 12 (1999): 541-52.
43. Didi-Huberman, La ressemblance par contact, 69.
44. Friedrich Kittler, Optical Media, trans. Anthony Enns (Malden, MA: Polity, 2010), 134. Cf.
45. David S. Ferris, "The Shortness of History, or Photography In Nuce: Benjamin's Attenuation of the Negative," in Andrew Benjamin, ed., Walter Benjamin and History (London: Bloomsbury, 2005), 19-37.
46. On the chaîne opératoire, see Didi-Huberman, La ressemblance par contact, 35ff.
47. Richard L. Gregory and Ernst Gombrich, eds., Illusion in Nature and Art (New York: Scribner, 1973).
48. Gregory and Gombrich, 84.
49. Regarding a similar effect in the optical "reversibility" of Marcel Duchamp's Feuille de vigne femelle in André Breton's surrealist photography, see Didi-Huberman, La ressemblance par contact, 257-65. Although I would agree that Breton's photograph of the mold constitutes a form of "reversibility" similar to Maurice Merleau-Ponty's example of the glove turned inside out, I am not sure that I would agree with a characterization of Duchamp's sculpture as a "negative" form in the first place.
50. In the ancient sepulchral context, the very fact that these "negative" molds were deposited in the proximity of more-traditional portraits, yet under very different conditions of visibility (e.g., sealed up within a sarcophagus), would seem to suggest that the Romans did indeed draw a distinction between the two in the first place and were perhaps even acutely aware of their sig- nifying power. Of course, questions of preservation may also be at issue: objects included in buri- als have a far greater chance of surviving in the archaeological record than do objects kept circulating as part of daily life.
51. Sextus Empiricus, Against the Logicians, trans. and ed. Richard Bett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 1.307 (61). For related problems of metaphor, analogy, and exemplarity in Roman philosophy, rhetoric, and jurisprudence, see the excellent collection of essays in Michèle Lowrie and Susanne Lüdermann, eds., Exemplarity and Singularity: Thinking through Particulars in Philosophy, Literature, and Law (London: Routledge, 2015).
52. Ptolemy, Optics, 2.128, quoted in and trans. A. Mark Smith, "Ptolemy's Theory of Visual Perception: An English Translation of the Optics with Introduction and Commentary," Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 86, no. 2 (1996): 44. 67. On this ancient theory of vision, see David C. Lindberg, Theories of Vision from al-Kindi to Kepler (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 1-17. On Ptolemy's optical account, see Gérard Simon, Le regard, l'être, et l'apparence dans l'optique de l'antiquité (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1988), 19; and A. Mark Smith, From Sight to Light: The Passage from Ancient to Modern Optics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).
53. Paul 3 quaestionum, D. 11, 7, 44, trans. Alan Watson, in The Digest of Justinian, vol. 1 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985). See also Yan Thomas, "Res religiosae: On the Categories of Religion and Commerce in Roman Law," in Alain Pottage and Martha Mundy, eds., Law, Anthropology, and the Constitution of the Social: Making Persons and Things (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 50.
54. Gianfranco Spagnesi, Roma: La Basilica di San Pietro, borgo e la città (Milan: Jaca Book, 2002), 126.
55. Paolo Liverani et al. eds., The Vatican Necropoles (Milan: Editoriale Jaca Book, 2010), 103. 71. Allmer, "Epitaphe d'une petite fille," 299.
56. From the inscription we learn that young Claudia Victoria took her nomen gentile from her mother (Claudia Severina) rather than her father, suggesting she was an illegitimate child of less- than-noble birth. As Véronique Dasen suggests, the cognomen "Victoria" may help to explain why the girl's parents had never been married, for the masculine version of this name was extremely common among soldiers, who at the time were not allowed to marry until they had completed their term of service. See Dasen, "Wax and Plaster Memories," 125.
57. Unfortunately, the length of the mask is difficult to compare with good statistical infor- mation from modern medical studies, whose metrics are produced by taking the precise circum- ference of the head (something that is impossible to do with a death mask) and orofacial points that use the nose (unfortunately missing in the Lyon mold) as a crucial point of reference. However, I wish to thank my colleague María Cecilia (Nené) Lozada, a bioarchaeologist and anthropologist, who conducted a visual analysis of Locard's photograph along with her class and concluded (without any knowledge of the specifics of the inscription) that the mask likely belonged to a female young adult, age twenty to thirty-five.
58. Locard, "Note sur une tombe," 23.
59. Richard Neer, "Connoisseurship and the Stakes of Style," Critical Inquiry 32, no. 1 (2005): 1-26.
60. Nathan Burgess, "Taking Portraits after Death," Photographic and Fine Art Journal, 1855, 80, quoted in Ruby, 44-45.
61. See especially Édouard Papet, "Le moulage sur nature au service de la science," in À fleur de peau: Le moulage sur nature au XIXe siècle, ed. Édouard Papet (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 2001), 88-95.
62. On these questions of facture in the nineteenth century, see especially Édouard Papet, "Technique: 'Saisir la nature sur le fait,'" in À fleur de peau, 74-77; and Hans Georg Hiller von Gaertringen, Masterpieces of the Gipsformerei: Art Manufactuary of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin since 1819 (Munich: Hirmer, 2012). For contemporary accounts of the physionotype, see Musée des familles 2 (1835): 144; and [François-Ferdinand-Philippe-Louis-Marie d'Orléans, prince de Joinville], Memoirs (Vieux Souvenirs) of the Prince of Joinville, trans. Lady Mary Loyd (New York: Macmillan, 1895), 298.
63. Lasteyrie, "Sur un cimetière," 378; and Thédenat, 11-12. On the plaster victims from Pompeii, see especially Brigitte Desrochers, "Giorgio Sommer's Photographs of Pompeii," History of Photography 28, no. 2 (Summer 2003): 111-129; and Eugene Dwyer, Pompeii's Living Statues: Ancient Roman Lives Stolen from Death (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010).
64. "Par un hasard singulier et qui mérite d'être signalé, le lourd couvercle, en tombant sur le mortier liquide au moment de la tombe, a fait jaillir une certaine quantité de mortier jusque sur la figure du petit défunt; ce liquide en séchant a moulé les traits du pauvre enfant et nous les a conservé jusqu'à aujourd'hui, comme la boue qui a enseveli Pompéi a conservé les corps de quelques-unes des victimes du Vésuve." Lasteyrie, "Sur un cimetière," 378. 81. For the history of this object, see especially Amedeo Maiuri, Pompei ed Ercolano: Fra case e abitanti (Padua: Le Tre Venezie, 1950), 55-60.
65. Théophile Gautier, Arria Marcella (1852), trans. F.C. de Sumichrast (Boston: Brainard, 1901), 315-16. See also Georges Didi-Huberman, "L'air et l'empreinte," in À fleur de peau, 43-59.
66. Robin Kelsey, Photography and the Art of Chance (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2015).
67. Johann Gustav Droysen, Historik (1875), ed. Peter Leyh (Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 1977).
68. See especially Cornelia Vismann, "The Love of Ruins," trans. Dominic Bonfiglio, Perspectives on Science 9, no. 2 (2001): 196-209. See also Gavin Lucas, Understanding the Archaeological Record (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 20ff. 86. Droysen, 11; and Vismann, "The Love of Ruins," 202.
69. Droysen, 76 (emphasis added); and Vismann, "The Love of Ruins," 202.
70. Vismann, "The Love of Ruins," 205ff. On the relation between chance and the manipula- tion of discourse, see John Tagg, "Neither Fish nor Flesh," History and Theory 48, no. 4 (December 2009): 78-79.
71. Vismann, "The Love of Ruins," 204.
72. Quoted in Vismann, "The Love of Ruins," 204; translation slightly modified (in her text, which is translated from German, Droysen's spare mention of Gips is translated as "mold," but the context suggests he means a cast, which would more normally be designated as Gipsabguss).
73. See especially Klaus Fittschen, "Über das photographieren römischer Porträts," Archäologischer Anzeiger 1 (1974): 484-94; and Annetta Alexandridis and Wolf-Dieter Heilmeyer, Archäologie der Photographie: Bilder aus der Photothek der Antikensammlung Berlin (Mainz: Verlag Philipp von Zabern, 2004). More generally, see Mary Bergstein, "Lonely Aphrodites: On the Documentary Photography of Sculpture," Art Bulletin 74, no. 3 (1992): 475-98 and Claire L. Lyons, "The Art and Science of Antiquity in Nineteenth Century Photography," in Antiquity and Photography, 22-65.
74. Sir David Brewster, "On the Optical Illusion of the Conversion of Cameos into Intaglios, and of Intaglios into Cameos, with an Account of Other Analogous Phenomena," Edinburgh Journal of Science 4 (1826): 99-108; reprinted in Sir David Brewster, Letters on Natural Magic (London, 1834).
75. Cf. Michael Baxandall, "Fixation and Distraction: The Nail in Braque's Violin and Pitcher (1910)," in John Onians, ed., Sight and Insight: Essays on Art and Culture in Honour of E.H. Gombrich (London: Phaidon, 1994), 399-415.
76. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 133.
77. Charles Wheatstone, "Contributions to the Physiology of Vision-Part the Second: On Some Remarkable, and Hitherto Unobserved, Phenomena of Binocular Vision," Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 142 (1852): 1-17. See also Crary, 118ff; and Robert J. Silverman, "The Stereoscope and Photographic Depiction in the 19th Century," Technology and Culture 34, no. 4 (October 1993): 729-56.
78. Wheatstone, "Contributions to the Physiology of Vision," 12. While the pseudoscope proved to be a commercial failure-no one was particularly interested in seeing the very fabric of his or her world turned inside out-it nevertheless played a crucial role in the physiological understanding of binocular vision in the nineteenth century.
79. Wheatstone, "Contributions to the Physiology of Vision," 13 (emphasis in original).
80. Charles Truscott, "The Interpretation of the Negative," Wilson's Photographic Magazine 49 (1912): 153 (emphasis in original).
81. John Werge, The Evolution of Photography (London: Piper and Carter, 1890), 304. 100. That being said, collections do exist of casts of the casts from Pompeii. As a gift for Kaiser Wilhelm II, Giuseppe Fiorelli asked the sculptor Achille d'Orsi to make a set of reduced-scale plaster copies of the victims in Naples. See Dwyer, 105ff. On the Jericho skulls, which were not discovered until 1953, see especially the discussion in Didi-Huberman, La ressemblance par contact, 55ff.
82. Bazin, "The Ontology of the Photographic Image," 11n3.
83. Geimer, "Image as Trace." See also the remarks of Michel Frizot, "Who's Afraid of Photons?" trans. Kim Timby, in Photography Theory, 272ff; and Snyder, "Section 3: The Art Seminar," 150 (where he retorts, "photons don't impress"). On the wave/particle theories of light that have been variously mobilized in photographic discourse, see the classic discussion in Albert Einstein and Leopold Infeld, The Evolution of Physics: From Early Concepts to Relativity and Quanta (1938; New York: Simon and Schuster, 1966), 262-63.
84. Bazin produced a similarly heterogeneous list, including "mummy, mold, death mask, mirror, equivalent, substitute, and asymptote." See Daniel Morgan, "Rethinking Bazin: Ontology and Realist Aesthetics," Critical Inquiry 32, no. 3 (Spring 2006): 451. 104. On the related matter of photographic reproductions of Christian relics and their pecu- liar indexicality, see Georges Didi-Huberman, "The Index of the Absent Wound (Monograph on a Stain)," October 29 (1984): 63-81; and Peter Geimer, "A Self-Portrait of Christ or the White Noise of Photography? Paul Vignon and the Earliest Photograph of the Shroud of Turin," trans. Gerrit Jackson, Grey Room, no. 59 (2015): 6-43.
85. Geimer, "Image as Trace," 10.
86. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 81. 107. Barthes, 77.
87. Joel Snyder, "What Happens by Itself in Photography?" in Ted Cohen, Paul Guyer, and Hilary Putnam, eds., Pursuits of Reason: Essays in Honor of Stanley Cavell (Lubbock: Texas Tech University, 1993), 361 (emphasis in original). See also Peter Geimer, "Self-Generated Images," trans. Michael Powers, in Releasing the Image: From Literature to New Media, ed. Jacques Khalip and Robert Mitchell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011), 27-43.
88. John Dewey, Art as Experience (1934; New York: Perigee, 1980), 66-67.
89. Pliny, Natural History, 35.153ff.
90. Gilbert Simondon, Du mode d'existence des objets techniques (1958; Paris: Aubier, 1989),
91. See also Didi-Huberman, La ressemblance par contact, 34ff.
92. See especially Ernesto Paparazzo, "Philosophy and Science in the Elder Pliny's Naturalis Historia," in Pliny the Elder: Themes and Contexts, ed. Roy Gibson and Ruth Morello (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 89-111. Thanks to Verity Platt for sharing with me an unpublished paper in which she touches on aspects of Pliny's Stoic cosmology and the problem of chance, forthcoming in her book "Beyond Ekphrasis: Making Objects Matter in Classical Antiquity."