EVENT DETAILS

Rethinking Hylomorphs: Color, Matter, and Vision in Ancient Mediterranean Art

Jennifer M.S. Stager, National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow at the Getty will address the use of polychromy in ancient Graeco-Roman art and some of the major differences between ancient Mediterranean and modern Western ideas about the nature of color. These differences bear not only on the elusive nature of classical polychromy, but also on the form/color opposition, which remains a problem in the history of Western aesthetics. Inlaid eyes sculpted from polychrome pieces make for an idea case study, especially in their relation to ancient Greek theories of color and optics.