Catherine Keesling (Associate Professor and Chair at Georgetown University) will talk on “Greek Portrait Statues: Who, When, and Why” on Thursday, November 1 (see below for more information):
The study of ancient Greek portraiture has been treated as a question of origins since the Roman author Pliny the Elder, who was concerned to show that the characteristics of portraiture most familiar to his contemporary Roman audience in fact had an ancient and distinguished Greek pedigree. Modern scholarship, hampered by the lack of preserved Greek originals and relying heavily upon Roman marble “copies” of lost Greek portraits, has often taken a similar tack. The result is that most modern studies of Greek portraiture concentrate on the fifth century B.C., a period in which portraits were seldom identified as such by their accompanying inscriptions.
Herodotus, writing in the 420s B.C., mentions more than 60 sanctuary dedications in his Histories, but only a handful of portraits; only a few of the public monuments commemorating the Greek victories in the Persian Wars of 490 and 480-479 B.C. included portrait statues. The epigraphical evidence of inscribed statue bases strongly suggests that a real explosion in the practice of portraiture in both the public and private spheres in the Greek world took place in the fourth century B.C. The epigraphical evidence also sheds new and surprising light upon the complex histories of Greek portrait statues. In addition to being copied by Roman sculptors, Greek portraits were also literally recycled as portraits of Roman subjects. Retrospective honorific portraits of the fourth century and later—that is, posthumous portraits of subjects long deceased—have also obscured the history of Greek portraiture, making it more difficult to see that Greek “portrait culture” is largely a phenomenon of the fourth century and later.
Eric Cline, our fearless leader and a world traveler managed to get lost on the way to my house. It wouldn’t be that funny except that he’s been to the house multiple times before and he has GPS in his car. Go figure. The Cutest Baby in the World (no bias here) made a grand appearance instead of napping. Thankfully, Cline brought his babysitter in training, Hannah, to help out. 
