How does art represent the world and influence the people who observe it? Artists and philosophers have thought about these questions for millennia, coming up with various metaphors: a shadow, a copy, an imitation.
But what about a stamp?
For the ancient Greeks, an image could be understood as a seal pressed on a material to leave a mark, as opposed to an inferior imitation (mimēsis), scholar Verity Platt argues in “Epistemic Impressions: Making and Mediating Classical Art and Text.” The book advances a new history of image-making and art-text relations in classical antiquity.
“I have always been fascinated by theories of the image, especially the ways in which ancient Greek ideas about representation have inspired concepts that continue to inform our thinking about images today,” said Platt, professor of classics and history of art in the College of Arts and Sciences and director of the Humanities Scholars Program. “Traditionally, the most dominant of these has been Plato’s concept of ‘mimēsis,’ whereby images are mere ‘copies’ of the things they represent, as in the allegory of the cave in Plato’s ‘Republic.’ But my book explores quite a different way of thinking about image-making in ancient Greece – that of indexical transmission through stamping (typōsis).”
In the book, Platt connects the material processes of engraving and stamping – as well as sculptural molding and casting – to the way Greek thinkers modeled sense perception and knowledge transmission. She goes on to explore how typōsis was used in ancient writing about art, offering new readings of poems by the third-century BCE poet Posidippus, who drew on precious gems and bronze statuary in his work.
The College of Arts and Sciences spoke with Platt about the book.
How did the raised stamp of a seal shape Greek thinking?
The Greek word for a stamp or impression is typos, which is etymologically related to our word “type.” In Greek philosophy, the making of typoi is often used as a metaphor for the imprinting of sense-impressions upon the mind (or soul) and thus offers a way of thinking about the acquisition of knowledge, not through the contemplation of abstract ideas (such as Plato’s Forms), but through embodied interaction with the material world itself. My book explores how these ideas were directly informed by the use of seals, which were employed across the ancient Mediterranean as security devices engraved with elaborate forms of iconography.
As a form of media technology, the seal shaped Greek thinking not only about the creation and transmission of images, but also about the storage and processing capacities of the mind itself. This was especially important for philosophers such as the Stoics, who were interested in materialist models of mind rather than Platonic dualism.
How was the engraved seal – or intaglio – used in its time?
Seals often took the form of engraved precious and semi-precious gems, such as carnelian or amethyst, but could also be made of metal or molded glass. Today, major antiquities collections include hundreds of these objects, which were often set into rings and had an intimate relationship with the human body. In the Greek and Roman worlds, they were used as personal signatures when stamped into beeswax or clay but were also prized as miniature works of art in their own right, sometimes even signed by the artists who had engraved them.
Engraved gems were celebrated in ancient poetry, such as a series of epigrams “On Stones” by the Hellenistic poet Posidippus, which use the concept of transmission through impression as a way of exploring the meta-poetic relationship between works of art and literary texts. But they were also used daily for administrative purposes and cover a wide spectrum of materials and artistry, so they occupied a prominent role in visual and material culture across many strata of society.
Today, when so much creation and communication exists in a purely digital realm, why might deep consideration of the “interface between the material and conceptual” brought up by engraving still be important?
My book draws on a fundamental argument in media theory, which is that media technologies do not just reflect the cultures that produce them, but actively shape them. In demonstrating how information could be carried from one medium to another through the act of stamping (i.e. from the “negative” engraving to its “positive” impression), seals made it possible for ancient thinkers to conceive of a particular model of mind, which “takes impressions” from the world around it, thus acting as an interface between the material world and more abstract mental operations.
Today, we are more likely to imagine our minds as computers. In a digital world in which the majority of images are mediated through screens, it is all too easy to feel materially and corporeally distant from the data we receive. But we would do well to remember that a) our metaphors of mind are not self-evident, but are still produced by the culture we inhabit, and that b) digital culture can only be streamed to us through hardware that is created and powered by the stuff of the world around us, with all the ecological and ethical implications that entails.
If the ancient world has anything to teach us about images, it is that we need to be as self-aware as possible about the ways in which we create, transmit and consume them.
