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Portraiture was the first painterly genre. History paintings and the panorama then evolved. A Paris Art Mission showed unusual official support for art, but most patronage was limited to temple murals. Names like George Ottinger, C. C. A. Christensen, and Danquart Weggeland dominated the Utah period.

Chapter 8 reflects further on the role of images in Buddhist worship, and what the sculptures and paintings on Buddhist monuments in South Asia may be able to tell us about the ways of seeing of premodern Buddhist practitioners. Seeing Buddhist art, it seems, involved quite a bit of listening. The chapter considers more broadly the world of the visual in the Divyāvadāna and offers some suggestions with regard to the social and political transformations that may account for its construction.

It is generally assumed that a ‘triumphal painting’ glorified and commemorated the general's martial deeds by way of a twofold display: first in his triumphal procession, later in a temple or a public place. This chapter argues that commemorative paintings placed in temples and public places were made directly for static display and not for show in the triumphal processions. Battle scenes in the triumphs were other kinds of representations, produced in various media, such as models, sculptures, and dramatic tableaux. Besides war scenes, the triumph included personifications of peoples and rivers that were staged as living captives. Representations of cities, on the other hand, were shown primarily as models of rich materials, such as ivory and silver. The preference for models over personifications reveals a Roman fear of offending the gods by displaying divine, or quasi-divine beings such as cities as living creatures in fetters.

Many activities during the last fifteen years have been carried out to discover or conserve the Coptic murals. These activities have been sponsored by Dutch, French, Polish, and American (ARCE) missions. The Monastery of St. Antony (Dayr Anba Antunius) also had a great chance for the conservation of its murals in 1992, when an Italian team made a cleaning test and discovered wonderful vivid colors. The composition of the wall paintings in the two monasteries is different. The background in Dayr al-Fakhuri is red bricks; in Dayr al-Shuhada it is mud bricks. The rendering in al-Fakhuri could be lime mortar up to a few centimeters thick, the rendering in al-Shuhada is from mud clay. As a result of renovation, some changes took place after the year 1975, and these paintings disappeared. It is difficult in any event to compare the photographs by Leroy and the current situation of the paintings.

This introductory chapter begins with a discussion of the possible meanings of images of gods performing religious rituals, which was prompted by vase painting ascribed to the Berlin painter, one of the great masters of ancient Greek vase-painting. It argues that it is virtually impossible to solve the hermeneutical problem of the “libating gods” in ancient Greek vase painting by staying within the evidence afforded by the tradition. We need to look elsewhere, and we need to subject these images to the multiple recombination afforded only through comparative analysis. Similar images from other religions of the world are then considered in this chapter. An overview of the subsequent chapters is presented.

This chapter considers the question of how best to understand the ancient Greek ceremony of libation within its religious context. Questions addressed include: What kind of an offering was libation, and to whom, in anyone, was it offered? How did it reach its recipients? In what sense is libation “sacrifice?”

There appears to be nothing in ancient Greek literature that sheds light on the possible religions meaning of gods pouring libations. Contemporaneous written interpretations of Olympian gods who pour out wine offerings from cultic bowls are lost, or never existed. This chapter considers known ancient literary evidence that may bear upon the question of divine libations in classical art. These comprise both descriptions of actual cult statues and a more nebulous category made up of classical passages in which gods take part in the performance of ritual—with or without editorializing on the part of the ancient author.

Mountainous landscapes, with massive crags and narrow fissures between rocks, through which water spouts, are among the principal subjects of paintings in China. This chapter addresses the question, why, in the first place, were these subjects chosen? It focuses on developments made during the Qin (221–207 bc) and Han (206 bc–ad 220) dynasties, from the third century bc onwards. It explores the ways in which the conditions prevailing in the Qin and Han periods moulded some aspects of the later Chinese practice. It is argued that the ways in which the Chinese from the Han period onwards viewed the cosmos determined their choice of mountains as a major subject for painted images. The chapter discusses attitudes to the cosmos and the aesthetic consequences of these views. It considers the whole range of ideas about the universe and not simply with depictions or models of mountains as representing one part of the cosmos.

Walk into an ancient library and you will see it adorned with artwork, statues, and paintings. Chapter 7 reads the relationship between art and text, seeing it as something that might effect psychological change in the viewer, connecting him with the past and serving as an aid to memory. Art also articulates the wealth that the library represents.

This chapter examines how paintings depicting the classical past became a way of talking about—or not talking about—sexual desire by focusing on the art of John William Waterhouse. It considers four of Waterhouse's paintings—Saint Eulalia, Mariamne, Hylas and the Nymph, and Circe Offering the Cup to Odysseus—and shows that they are a paradigmatic site for reflecting on the complexity of the circulation of classical knowledge in Victorian culture—reception in action. It also explores how Waterhouse represents the male subject of desire, and how his representational devices position, manipulate, and implicate the viewer. The discussion places Waterhouse at the center of a Victorian worry about male self-control and erotic openness, and suggests that his case is an example of how one strategy of modern self-definition loves to oversimplify “the Victorians” as a contrastive other to today—and nowhere more obviously than in the field of sexuality.

This chapter examines one of the paintings of Lawrence Alma-Tadema, which concerns the space of desire—a Greek scene, the gap between a man and a woman, the touch of a girl and a woman—and how this space is traversed by critics and viewers, then and now. The painting in question is Sappho, now usually called Sappho and Alcaeus, that was exhibited in the Royal Academy by Alma-Tadema in 1881. The chapter considers the shifting recognition of desire in readers' receptions of a Victorian image of the classical past—and the interpretative lures and snags of such an enquiry. It demonstrates how desire speaks and silences its name in art by analyzing not only the image of a poet from antiquity, but also the most famous female poet of ancient Greece, Sappho, whose name has become synonymous with the expression of female desire.

This chapter turns from physical stone stelai, and their replications in relief, to representations of similar monuments on vase paintings of the classical period. Although the images seen here incorporate elements from ancient actuality, they are not direct reflections of lost realities; they are visual constructs that operate under the regime of pictorial representation. These depictions are statements in their own right that offer ancient testaments of the nature of aniconism conveyed visually rather than in texts, and are particularly instructive for understanding of the place of the aniconic in Greek religion and visual culture. These vase paintings present standing stelai that marked the presence of a divinity as liminal in their essence.

This chapter discusses the role of architectural backgrounds depicted in post-iconoclastic mosaics and paintings, which acted as a symbolic language that substituted for the old symbols derived from the world of nature. It covers the symbolism of individual architectural elements such as doors, gates, stairs, and columns, as well as the meanings generated by the creation and denial of the illusion of physical space.

This chapter explores the omnipresence of Byronic Greece in writing in English from 1833 to 1913. Byron's poetry became a mantra for entry into the “experience” of Greece with sites where, as late as 1947, Dora Una Ratcliffe claimed that “the temptation to quote tries one sorely”. In 1906, Sir Sidney Colvin recalled his first visit to Athens in lines that call to mind the Greeces of Homer and Byron delineated by Hugo. Byron also was used as the medium for the experience of Greek sites in a number of paintings.

This chapter goes on to look at a rather different set of artistic works, namely the paintings of Salvador Dalí from the inter-war period, asking whether they enter into or stand outside the fetishistic processes they portray. The presentation of the surface of the painting as transparent, as a window through which one looks out on (or into) the landscape of the mind, distances the painting from its own status as a material object, complicating the way it participates in its own fetish dialectic. In order to sustain such an argument, it is essential to recognise surrealist works as always threatened by the fetishising forces they represent. Their status as critical responses to the capitalist commodity society is precarious, but at times also powerful. It is in their binding of sexual and commodity fetishism in a dialectial relation that they are able to illuminate both.