Posted by vrcvanderbilt on Monday, February 18, 2019 in Events, HART, HART in Nashville, Lectures, News, Vanderbilt University, VRC.

Music was an integral component of daily life in the ancient Mediterranean world. The importance of music to religious ritual, celebratory banquets, personal entertainment, and even mythological narratives is made manifest through a wide variety of literary, visual, and archaeological evidence. In one region of South Italy (or “Magna Graecia”) alone, nearly 1,700 vases decorated with musical imagery and dating from the 4th century BCE have been recovered. Music and musicians on these South Italian red-figure vases were represented in a plethora of contexts, ranging from generic nuptial and funerary scenes to Dionysian and mythological compositions.

On Thursday, February 21, at 6 pm in the Nashville Parthenon, Veronica Ikeshoji-Orlati will deliver an AIA lecture entitled “Making Ancient Vases Sing: Musical Imagery in the Art of South Italy.” Ikeshoji-Orlati is the Robert H. Smith Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC.

Her presentation will begin with a survey of the corpus of musical imagery in South Italian red-figure vase painting from the 4th century BCE. Subsequently, the vases will be analyzed using two different, but complementary, approaches: a traditional, iconographic method; and a contemporary, data-driven one. The hybrid, analog/digital approach will demonstrate the complexity of ‘reading’ musical imagery on South Italian vases as documents of contemporary performance practice. In addition, it will highlight the agency of artists and artists’ workshops in the creation and dissemination of ancient perceptions and ideas about musicians and their instruments.

Free and open to the public, the lecture is cosponsored by the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA), the Program in Classical and Mediterranean Studies and the Department of History of Art, Vanderbilt University, and the Conservancy for the Parthenon and Centennial Park. Those who plan to attend the lecture are encouraged to call the Nashville Parthenon at 615.862.8431 to reserve a seat. The Parthenon is located at 2500 West End Avenue in the Centennial Park.