Milette Gaifman, "The Power of Labeling a Monument: from Classical Antiquity to the Eighteenth Century"

Date
Fri May 26th 2023, 12:00 - 1:00pm
Event Sponsor
Department of Classics
Location
Building 110
450 Jane Stanford Way Building 110, Stanford, CA 94305
112

Description: How did labels shape the formation of the history of Greek art and its categories? In this lecture Milette Gaifman explores the fundamental role of the act of labeling in our understanding of Greek artworks and architectural monuments in the modern era. Taking a Classical Athenian monument as a case in point, the lecture examines the complex relationships between historical artefacts and naming practices across time, and considers ways of expanding our conceptual frameworks when looking at the visual arts of the past.

Biography: Milette Gaifman is the Andrew Downey Orrick Professor of Classics and History of Art at Yale University. A scholar of ancient art and archaeology, her work focuses primarily on Greek art of the Archaic and Classical periods. She is the author of Aniconism in Greek Antiquity (Oxford University Press, 2012); The Art of Libation in Classical Athens (Yale University Press, 2018); and co-editor of Exploring Aniconism, thematic issue of Religion 47, (2017); and The Embodied Object in Classical Antiquity, special issue of Art History (June 2018). Her current book project, Classification and the History of Greek Art and Architecture (forthcoming with Chicago University Press), is the revised and expanded version of the Louise Smith Bross Lectures she delivered at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Department of Art History at the University of Chicago in 2018. She was a visiting scholar at Corpus Christi College, Oxford in 2008-2009, an invited professor at the University of Paris Diderot - Paris 7 in 2015, and the 2023 Geddes-Harrower Chair of Greek Art and Archaeology, a visiting professorship at the University of Aberdeen. Additionally, she was the Co-editor-in-Chief of the The Art Bulletin in 2020-2022.

This talk will not be available on zoom and will not be recorded.