The debate on replication in ancient art has traditionally concentrated upon Roman ‘copies’ of famous Greek sculptures and paintings. This article explores a different, but no less significant, kind of replication – the use of intaglio gems as seals to create wax impressions. The mechanical transmission of a glyptic image from one medium to another played an important role in Graeco‐Roman society, conferring authority upon the seal as an individual or state signature employed in legal, political and personal exchange. The direct relationship between seal and impression was also appropriated by Greek philosophers as a metaphor for unmediated sense perception – the ‘impressions’ made by material objects upon the soul. However, as a comparison with the ontological issues surrounding the modern photograph shows, the seemingly unproblematic relationship between image and impression is more complex than may initially seem: the seal's philosophical appeal lay ultimately more in its social significance – as a guarantor of authenticity and marker of the self – than in its true ontological status.
Why did I see the thing? Why did I make my eyes guilty? Why, thoughtlessly, did I harbour knowledge of wrongdoing? Actaeon unwittingly beheld the naked Diana . . . 1 (Ovid, Tristia II.103±5)The pleasures of voyeurism are vicariously experienced in a broad range of contexts in Roman art. One thinks of the observers painted within mythological tableaux in the frescoes of Campania, or the frisson created for the viewer of the Warren Cup by the boy's head peering round a door in the background. 2 The voyeur within the image reflects the external viewer, so drawing one into the scene there depicted, yet simultaneously emphasizing our distance from and superiority to the thing beheld. We have the power to accept or reject the invitation; to view voyeuristically is to feel that one has a certain control over what is seen. 3 However, as Ovid warns us in my epigraph, to view is not always to be a safely objective observer; sometimes, the object which one views can look back, and, caught in the act of observing, the viewer's vicarious position is undermined: we are actively implicated in the events which we behold. Actaeon's fate is not only a result of the fact that he saw what he should not have seen, but that Diana beheld him in the act of viewing. And, as Ovid insinuates with a hint of selfdramatization, myth and reality can mirror each other in disturbing ways. 4 As Bartsch's study of theatricality in the age of Nero has demonstrated, the relationship between performer and audience was often subverted in Imperial Roman society, to the extent that`the categories of spectacle and spectator lose all stability.' 5 In such a culture, the gaze holds both power and danger for him who beholds, and him who is beheld. The meeting of gazes can be an occasion fraught with anxiety about the confrontation of Self and Other and the potential for the onset of desire, shame, violence and the loss of autonomy. 6 In this paper I will explore the way in which the complexities of the gaze are explored by a series of 4th Style mythological paintings in Pompeii II.2.2-5 (called variously the House of Octavius Quartio, or Loreius Tiburtinus). 7 Here, issues of desire related to the power of naturalistic art are provocatively intertwined with religious iconography and the dimension of the symbolic in a manner which challenges and problematizes the viewer's response to the images with which he is
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Interdisciplinary scholarship and education remains elusive at modern universities, despite efforts at both the individual and institutional levels. The objective of this paper is to identify the main motivations that bring different disciplines together in joint research and identify some of the obstacles to that coming together. Here we propose that shared purpose (why do I participate?), practice (how do we interact?), and place (where do we interact?) are, in descending order, the most important drivers for what we call “undisciplinary” research in an interaction of different disciplines. Through unstructured workshops we found the choice of participants (who participates?), aspects of time (when do we interact?), and especially the research topics and focus (what are we working on?), to be less important for individual faculty engagement. Metaphor analysis obtained during a charrette-style workshop with 13 faculty from multiple disciplines suggested “inter-epistemological ways of knowing” rather than fields of study to move us from disciplinary to interdisciplinary to undisciplinary scholarship and education. Specifically, the broad intent (why do we participate?) was found to increase the impact of undisciplinary approaches that served as drivers for engagement. These lessons learned from a series of workshops were put to the test at an experimental center that clarified the importance of both synchronous and asynchronous interactions in a common space large enough to allow these and located outside the university. Despite the valuable insights gained in what undisciplinary interaction may look like in a center, it remained clear that space design must start by mapping out why and how individuals in different disciplines may want to interact at a given institution to generate buy-in and build the foundation for continuous refinement of an institutional strategy.
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