FAH2037H: Empathy, Embodiment and Emotion in Ancient Art

This seminar explores different facets of its topic. Using a representative selection of works in a variety of media (mainly sculpture and painting) we will examine how ancient art both depicted and elicited affects, "emotions," and bodily responses. No matter if we are looking at a Hellenistic symplegma ("entanglement"), a sarcophagus depicting the killing of the Niobids, a painting showing the violent death of Pentheus, or the decapitation of enemies of the Roman order — ancient art wanted to be experienced “in the flesh.” To this we can add scenes that — self-referentially and recursively — evoke the bodily experience of interacting with the object they decorate. But how exactly, and why, do ancient works of art seek to evoke bodily responses? How do the viewer responses they imply relate to the emotional protocols that can be reconstructed from a variety of ancient sources? (For example, in ancient theories of emotions, and in stark contrast to modern conceptions, viewers are supposed to feel "pity" in response to viewing the suffering of others only under certain circumstances). How does the emotional economy of ancient art, from the late archaic to the Roman periods, reflect a shifting corporeal habitus and changing concepts of personhood and subjectivity? Can the recent sub-discipline of "neuro-art history" provide a productive perspective, and has it made good on its claim of unravelling the "neural bases of empathy and emotion"? And if so, where does that leave us? Can the bodily responses they register really be "automatic" and universal, and how do their more reasonable practitioners account for the significant historical modulations in the responses to images? Readings will include some "classics" from the fields of Aesthetics and Phenomenology, but also more recent work produced in disciplines as diverse as Neuro-Art History and Classics.

0.50
St. George
In Class