1 - Ways of Making Sense: Eagle and Snake in Archaic and Classical Greek Art

Summary

One century ago, the German Professor of Archaeology at Halle, Carl Robert, published a remarkable book entitled Archaeologische Hermeneutik. It was a summary of his life experience of looking at ancient pictures, Greek and Roman, and trying to understand and explain them. The title of the book sounds philosophical, but Carl Robert had no pretension to philosophy; he even insisted in his foreword that his book was based on empirical experience and that he left to more philosophical brains the task of producing a philosophical theory. Indeed, explaining the difference between “rules” (Regeln) and “laws” (Gesetze), he states: “Die Gesetze der Hermeneutik in ein System zu bringen muss ich philosophischeren Köpfen überlassen.” The book is indeed a practical handbook about how to decipher ancient images, and each new image is studied as a problem to solve. The methodology of Carl Robert is straightforward and rather efficient within its own limits. He starts with basic statements about looking, drawing, describing (“Sehen” – “Zeichen” – “Beschreiben”), then develops various ways of interpreting images by using different levels of analysis, as attested by the Table of Contents: naming the figures, and deriving meaning from the picture itself, from the myth, from textual evidence, from other images, from the display, or the context, and finally the meaning of stories that are known only through pictures. He also discusses mistakes, restorations, and forgeries, as well as misinterpreted images, uninterpreted or meaningless images, and why these problems occur. It is a fascinating program and makes for rich reading. To sum up, Carl Robert's book and approach start from the situation of the modern interpreter. What tools do we have, and what are the different ways of creating meaning when we are confronted with a new, unpublished image?

This approach is essentially ‘etic,’ as an anthropologist would put it: it takes into account the values and knowledge of the modern interpreter, as opposed to an ‘emic’ attitude, which tries to understand the viewpoint of the ancient viewer, of the people who produced and used these pictures. The distance between the modern and the ancient viewer as implied by such an approach makes no appearance in Carl Robert's book. He does not build a critical history of ancient images, but simply explains how he reaches an interpretive result.