AIA-2A: Contextualizing Pliny the Elder's Material World: An All-Encompassing Vision of the Wonders of Nature (Colloquium)
Sponsored by:
Ancient Painting and Decorative Media Interest Group
Organizers
Hilary Becker, Binghamton University, SUNY; and Anna Anguissola, University of Pisa
Overview Statement
At the bimillennium of the birth of Pliny the Elder,
archaeologists, art historians, and philologists alike are looking anew at his
working methods, many inspired by the so-called material turn. In book 37 of
the Natural History, Pliny states that a single gemstone can engender a “supreme
and all-encompassing vision of the wonders of nature” (HN 37.1). This
impression of the kaleidoscope of knowledge to be derived from a single
material inspires the contributions offered here. Each aims to demonstrate that
not only did Pliny artfully enrich the “barren matter” (sterilis materia)
of his diverse topics with complex layers of information, but also that his
corpus is an important index of the technical and scientific knowledge,
history, folklore, and economy of the Roman world of his day. These papers
demonstrate that close readings of Pliny’s material landscape can reveal the
fractal logic that informs the structure and meaning of the Natural History
as a whole.
A first group of papers treats the material realia of
Pliny’s world. One examines how his list of pigment prices can shed light on
both the aesthetic and economic interests of patrons and painters, while
another examines what Pliny’s survey of monolithic marble columns reveals about
the strengths of Roman trade and commerce. A third decodes the material
semantics of Roman gems and their intended use based on status and gender, while
a further pair focus on technê: the first explores how Pliny’s anecdotes
about artistic competitions express a Roman need to make sense of
decontextualized Greek paintings and sculptures, while the second compares
Pliny’s account of glass manufacture (including the invention of flexible
glass) with modern research.
Pliny’s own interdisciplinary methods can help
to reconcile scholarly dichotomies whereby individual aspects of materials are
often treated in isolation by instead focusing on a material in all its
wondrous layers. In this vein, a final paper engages with the narrative
strategies and concepts that guide Pliny the Elder’s account of the natural
world as a whole, seen through the prism of glass, obsidian, and fire.