Luukde Boer (Bilkent University)
In this talk, I will suggest that the contemporaneous appearance of history painting and historiography in ancient Greece is indicative of a deeper affinity between the visual arts and writing history: both find their true meaning in the fact that what they represent is absent except as image or history. Ringing the changes on Horace’s dictum, this talk thus aims to take ut pictura historia seriously not merely as a rhetorical conception of historiography anchored in vividness, but as the attempt to negotiate a central problem of historiography: the necessity to render present what is not there.
The idea that the historian can be equated with a visual artist is neither new nor unknown, and assumes the status of a commonplace in Hellenistic and Imperial literature. To the extent that this equation has been taken seriously, it is as an articulation in metaphor of a phenomenon itself of greater purchase: enargeia (Schepens 1975; Walker 1993; Hartog 2005: 11-5; Zangara 2007: 229-277; Calame 2008). The task of the historian is to place events before the eyes of the auditors, and to this extent the historian is equated with a ‘‘painter.’’ It is a testimony to the perceived metaphorical status of the connection that none of this work engages with historical painting or sculpture, whilst art historians have not been attentive to the conceptual connections between writing and picturing history (Borchardt 2002; Hölscher 1973; 1988; 2015; Stähler 1992) in spite of links on the level of terms of art (e.g. akribeia; Pollitt 1974).
The argument advanced in this talk starts with a micro-history: the picture of Darius’ bridge of boats over the Bosporus, with Darius sitting aloft on his throne and his army crossing, reported by Herodotus (Hdt. 4.88). The painting is one of the earliest examples of history painting, yet the report is of especial interest because Herodotus himself memorably paints this very bridge elsewhere in his narrative (Hdt. 7.33-36). If this suggests how Herodotus self-consciously maps historiography onto the enterprise of the visual artist, a similar attitude is evinced by his use of the adjective exitēlos, ‘‘losing color’’ in the opening of the Histories (Hdt. 1.1). This Herodotean story will then allow us to review the evidence and scholarship sketched out in the previous paragraph, first moving through the explicit but late ‘‘painter historian’’-analogy in Lucian, Plutarch and Polybius, and, secondly, discussing the 5th century appearance of historiography and history painting in ancient Athens and beyond. By means of a discussion of the Alexander mosaic and Albrecht Altdorfer’s famous Alexanderschlacht (Koselleck 1985: chapter 1), as well a treatment of recent work on the power of the image (Belting 1994; 2011; Steiner 2001), we will then attempt to locate the simultaneous genesis and continued interaction (Fulda 2017) of history painting and history writing not only in their shared predilection for the sense of sight (real in one, metaphorical in the other case) but in the very affordance of both historiography and the visual arts: its ability to render the absent present.