Music, song and dance were integral to ancient Greek religion. These activities, encapsulated by the Greek term mousikē, were not only standard elements of divine worship. They were also favoured divine pastimes: representations of gods making music are common in Greek literature and art from the Archaic period onwards. In this beautifully produced book, illustrated throughout with high-quality colour illustrations, L. offers the first monograph devoted to images of divine music in Archaic and Classical Greek art.
The book’s subtitle, ‘Seeing the Songs of the Gods’, captures the paradox inherent to the subject. After all, visual images are silent, and gods are normally invisible, so what on earth (or heaven) does divine music look like? How can a silent image conjure sound? Those questions, central to L.’s study, tap into an enduring Greek preoccupation with the relationship between arts that appeal to the eyes and to the ears. Long before Simonides quipped that ‘painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting that speaks’, Homer portrayed Achilles’ shield in Iliad 18 as extraordinary as much for how it sounds as for how it looks. As L. shows, Archaic and Classical Greek artists rose to the challenge of visualising the sonic with their numerous depictions of gods engaged in mousikē, singing, dancing and playing various musical instruments.
The book lies at the intersection of three strong currents in recent classical scholarship: the study of the senses, of ancient mousikē, and of the material culture and visual theology of Graeco-Roman religion. In particular, L. builds on recent scholarship on divine epiphany to argue that visual representations of divine music on Attic vases and votive reliefs offered viewers in various contexts ‘the chance to experience a multisensory epiphany’ (p. 244).
The book is comprised of an introduction, five chapters and a short conclusion. Images of divine music were prolific in various media across the Greek world. From this corpus L. restricts her study to art made in Attica in two media: vase-paintings of the sixth and fifth centuries bce, and sculpted votive reliefs of the fourth century bce. While many gods were shown performing mousikē in Athenian vase-painting and relief sculpture, L. focuses on ‘representations of those gods who are most frequently depicted engaging in musical activities, namely Apollo, the Muses, Dionysos, and Pan’ (p. 25).
L.’s decision to restrict her corpus in this way makes sense for her approach, which is guided by the kind of close formal analysis advanced by F. Lissarrague and R. Neer. Throughout the book L. leads readers through a slow and attentive process of looking closely at the artworks. Such an approach is commendable, not least to fine-tune readers’ sensitivity to the artworks in question, but it is also vital to one of L.’s principal arguments. That is, that the formal features of an artwork, its structure, composition and patterning, can convey the nature of the sound depicted, its ‘rhythm, timbre, and affective quality … The aesthetic conflation of sight and sound thus manifests through the forms and shapes that the lines and curves make as they are rhythmically repeated across the surface of the vase or relief. Images, in other words, can create visual soundscapes by asking their viewers to imagine the presence of sound’ (p. 13).
One of L.’s primary interests is the experience of divine music, both as it is depicted in the artworks and as it is imagined for their ancient viewers. In this respect and in her emphasis on the senses, L.’s study is in line with and contributes to one of the dominant trends in current scholarship on Graeco-Roman religion, that is, to understand the experience of ancient worshippers. How viewers perceive artworks is conditioned by the circumstances in which they encounter them. For this reason, attention to the contexts in which the artworks were seen – above all, sanctuaries, symposia and cemeteries – is fundamental to L.’s study.
The chapters are organised by subject matter. Chapter 1 looks at sculpted reliefs dedicated in Attic cave sanctuaries that depict Pan playing his pipes in the company of nymphs. By reconstructing the environment of these shrines and examining the reliefs’ iconography, L. explores how ancient viewers might have engaged with them. The Vari Cave on Mount Hymettos features in the course of this discussion (pp. 47–53). These votive reliefs, L. argues, invited worshippers to hear Pan’s pipes imaginatively and to join the nymphs’ dance; imagined music and divine image facilitated an embodied experience of divine presence for worshippers.
The remaining four chapters are concerned with Attic vase-paintings of the sixth and fifth centuries bce. Chapter 2 considers vase-paintings of Apollo holding a lyre in one hand and a libation bowl in the other. These scenes are part of a corpus of Attic vase-paintings, dated to c. 500–450 bce, that have long puzzled scholars: images of gods pouring libations. L. regards the scenes as forms of religious expression that served to establish bonds between Apollo and his mortal beholders. Her argument proceeds by situating the images of Apollo making his ‘musical libation’ (p. 89) within the context of the symposium, suggesting that they encouraged viewers, who were themselves pouring libations and making music, to participate in Apollo’s musico-ritual act.
Chapter 3 is also dedicated to vase-paintings of Apollo, where he features in various scenes with his lyre. L. employs close visual analysis of the paintings to infer the formal and affective quality of Apollo’s divine music. In the process, she enlists the concepts of rhythmos, symmetria and harmonia, applicable to visual and musical forms in Greek thought, to characterise Apollo’s imagined music as calm, balanced and harmonious. Given the emphasis on the ancient experience of music and L.’s effective use of literary sources, I was surprised not to find some critical engagement with the affective responses to mousikē repeatedly described in Archaic and Classical Greek texts: for example, terpsis (‘delight’), charis (‘pleasure’), eros (‘love’) and himeros (‘desire’).
Vase-paintings of the Muses are the subject of Chapter 4. As L. observes, the lack of an established iconography for the Muses in the Archaic and Classical periods means that, without accompanying inscriptions, their identification is often in doubt. It is precisely this ambiguity, L. argues, that makes these depictions of women engaged in mousikē multivalent. In other words, they assume a range of potential meanings depending on the interaction between image, viewer and place, whether it is a private home, sanctuary, symposium or Etruscan cemetery.
The final chapter turns to Dionysos, another deity closely associated with mousikē and yet whose representation on Attic vases differs significantly from other gods. Unlike Pan, Apollo and the Muses, Dionysos is rarely shown making music. Instead, he typically appears as a static figure amidst his musical retinue of satyrs and maenads. Rather than a musician himself, Dionysos inspires music in others, prompting them to ecstatic revelry, to dance in poses of wild abandon that visually evoke the sonic character of his musical entourage. L. links this aspect of Dionysos’ portrayal to the Presocratic concept of a divine being capable of effecting movement without toil (p. 210), though it is unclear why this aspect of Presocratic theology should be applicable solely to images of Dionysos, and not to Apollo or any other musical divinity.
The conclusion recapitulates the contention that it is ‘through the conflation of sensory perceptions, where seeing is a kind of listening and where the viewers are invited to hear the sounds that they see on a physical, material object, that the gods and the sounds of their music are fully revealed’ (p. 243). While offering a novel approach to the timeless dialogue between the visual and aural arts in Greek culture, the book opens the way for further study of divine music in Greek art and of how Greek artists sought to transcend the limitations of their visual medium.
