PATRICK CROWLEY: Parrhasius’ Curtain, or, a Media Archaeology of a Metapainting
UIC Art History Colloquium
September 13, 2019
3:30 PM - 5:00 PM
This lecture explores the media-archaeological foundations of trompe l’oeil painting in antiquity, specifically the famous contest between the Greek painters Zeuxis and Parrhasius as recounted by Pliny the Elder. The anecdote is well known: whereas Zeuxis had painted a picture of grapes that deceived the birds who flew up to peck at them, Parrhasius won the palm for deceiving his rival with a painting of a curtain that compelled Zeuxis to ask that it be raised and the picture shown for his appraisal. Modern accounts and even depictions of the contest have universally taken for granted the formal realism of this painting, its extreme illusionism, as the catalyst of its deceptive power. By contrast, this talk examines Parrhasius’ curtain from a media-theoretical perspective that considers the order of representation in relation to the experience of beholders in real space. In short, it argues that the success of Parrhasius’ picture had less to do with its technical virtuosity than a shrewd understanding of how to produce the conditions for depictive and bodily co-presence.
Patrick R. Crowley is a historian of the art and visual culture of ancient Rome. His forthcoming monograph, The Phantom Image: Seeing the Dead in Ancient Rome, is forthcoming in December from the University of Chicago Press.
Date posted
Aug 30, 2019
Date updated
Sep 5, 2019