The Fabric of the City: Imaging Textile Production in Classical Athens

Abstract

Scenes of textile production on Athenian vases are often interpreted as confirming the oppression of women, who many argue were confined to "women's quarters" and exploited as free labor. However, reexamination of the iconography together with a reconsideration of gender roles and the archaeology of Greek houses dating to the 5th and 4th centuries B.C.suggests that these images idealize female contributions to the household in a positive way. The scenes utilize the dual metaphor of weaving and marriage to express the hartnonia of oikos and polis, a theme particularly significant under the evolving Athenian democracy. The past 30 years have witnessed significant change in the study of ancient Athenian iconography.1 Of particular importance has been the increased attention given to so-called genre scenes or "scenes of everyday life" in Athenian vase painting, a response to the dominating focus of earlier scholarship on mythological subject matter. This trend began in the late 1970s, and escalated in the 1980s with a series of publications primarily by French authors, most notably the groundbreaking volume La cite des images in 1984 (translated into English in 1989). Several scholars have questioned the efficacy of the image and the apparent reality of genre iconography.2 All too often, the tendency has been to treat scenes on Athenian vases as mere illustrations, but recent iconographic studies have asserted the opposite: that images are constructions in which each element is consciously or unconsciously chosen as part of a larger system of signs and symbols. 1. An early version of this paper was presented in February 2003 at the College Art Association meetings in New York. My thanks to Bonna Wescoat, Cynthia Patterson, Sian Lewis, and the anonymous Hesperia reviewers for their comments, and to Tracey Cullen for her helpful advice. The College of Arts and Sciences of the University of South Florida St. Petersburg provided funds for photographs and permissions. I am also grateful to several museums and archives for their assistance with photographs, and in particular to Vickie Garagliano (Hearst Castle), Ann Handler (Art Resource), Wendy Watson (Mount Holyoke Art Museum), Julie Zeftel (Metropolitan Museum of Art), and to Nick Cahill and Yale University Press for permission to reproduce the Olynthian house diagram (Fig. 12). 2. Berard et al. 1984, 1989; see also Schmitt Pantel and Thelamon 1983; Berard 1986; and Lissarrague 1990, pp. 1-12, for discussion of method. See Zinserling 1977 for the question of imagery versus "real life." I use the term "genre scene" here for convenience, recognizing the limitations of the phrase.

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Ancient Models for the New Musicians

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