Winged child piper from Petra.
So if the discovery of a previously unknown contemporary artist is exciting, how much more exciting is this? The Guardian article is right – we know so little of Hellenistic paintings – what we do know comes to us as stories, or as Roman works inspired by Hellenistic originals. We know that even the Greeks maintained art galleries, though none of those paintings apparently survive. Mummy portraits from Egypt, wallpaintings from Herculaneum and Pompeii, Roman mosaics – all these hint at the richness of the original Hellenistic tradition, lost in the tumultuous centuries of the rise of the Roman world. Fragile enough were the papyri in the library at Alexandria – how much more fragile would have been the Classical and Hellenistic world’s delicate water- and encaustic-painted portraits, landscapes and still-lives?
From the point of view of reconstruction art, we have lost so much rich and everyday detail about the ancient world. But even though we, famously, know that “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence”, try putting “paintings” into a reconstruction of a Roman villa and you will come up against a wall of denial. And yet, in any standard work on the Roman world, in a general discussion of art, you will find statements along the lines that the Greeks and Romans both painted paintings, but that none of them survive. Sigh. It’s frustrating – this dilemma that we know the ancient world to have been much more similar to our own than we have robust evidence to support. Yet how can we expect people in the present day to sympathise or identify with a past that is continually presented as knowingly incomplete! It’s no wonder that people retain for longer the more vibrant, rounded (and, I would argue, complete) view of the ancient world as presented in film and television. HBO’s “Rome” succeeded in creating a “living” picture of the past that will endure longer in the popular imagination than virtually any Roman reconstruction you see in museums.
Archaeologists need to embrace a living vision of the past, one lead by the needs, expectations, desires and passions of its complete, embedded human occupants – not a dead vision of the past lead by our own incomplete, distant academic understanding.
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