VI Images

Extract

As we have seen in previous chapters, throughout the Greek world, in cities, cemeteries, and sanctuaries, images, usually of figures in human form, were omnipresent, shaped at full and small size in wood, stone, and bronze, painted on panels and walls, and chosen as decoration for metal and clay vessels, for textiles, for jewellery and gems, for bone and ivory objects, and so on. Such images were constantly before the eyes of the men and women as they went about their daily lives. They acted as a visual language that was parallel to the oral versions in talk, recitation, songs, and plays. It is unlikely that the general public gave much thought to the men who made the images and gradually changed the look of the statues seen in the street, the reliefs that adorned the temples in the sanctuaries, the funerary monuments in the cemeteries, or the painted objects handled at home and elsewhere. They would have scanned the images for their content – figures created in their imagination or stories conjured up from the past that they had heard in public performance or private conversation, as well as scenes that related to the social life of their own day.