try to rise above the reproductive frenzy of your noisy little food chain and contemplate friendship. i'm in too many fandoms and hit the post limit on a regular basis. good luck out there // shey/heir/it/its please title is a description of the other from lungbarrow by loomlight
ok new pinned post that’s just a reblog of my old pinned post because i like it too much
hi, i’m trixie! i use shey/heir & it/its pronouns. this is my main blog (you can also find me @goldenzingy46butwriteblr (fanfiction), @trixierosewrites (original fiction), @chronicwhorebatman (original batman posts), and uh. like 15 other blogs) and i post a lot about doctor who, and also a bunch of other stuff (heated rivalry, batman, the terror, classics, malevolent, star wars, etc.)
my ao3, nsfw anon collection, my website (to be linked when it’s less lorem ipsum and more actual text)
commonly used tags:
-> trixie.text (original posts)
-> trixie’s own personal hell (personal tag, but you can rb all of this or interact with it however you like. i don’t care)
-> trixie's vaguely interesting dw posts (dw posts i think are interesting)
-> trixie thonks on dw (dw meta)
-> trixie's dw episode musings (posts i’ve made while watching/listening to a specific episode, or things about a specific episode. also tagged as interesting if i think they’re interesting. trixie's dw episode musings: [number] or something is appended per doctor; bf is appended for big finish; bf[number] per big finish doctor. example: trixie's dw episode musings: 5; trixie's dw episode musings: bf5)
-> otherposting (posts about the other. there’s some subtags on this but you can probably find those by clicking on the otherposting tag. i am lazy)
-> trixie’s malevolent livelisten (what it says on the tin)
-> a couple other liveread tags (tlt & wicked off the top of my head. all doctor who novels are just tagged with the name of the novel)
-> vent (i used to have a me specific tag but i’ve stopped using it because i forgot what it was)
-> trixie bonk tag (asks; dw asks are also tagged dw asks)
-> [jazz music stops] (original politics posts. you’ll see these more around uk general elections than anything else)
-> ref/fave/top fave/top fucking fave/jfj frequent rewatch tag/poll tag (various tags i use for refinding things)
if i didn’t answer your ask: i will. i just have every disorder under the sun so sometimes it takes a while
if you think i’ve blocked you: uhhh. i might’ve. i block for: bigotry, being a dick, terfs/radfems, anyone using tma/tme, pissing me off, being annoying, disliking fifth/eleventh/twelfth doctor, being wrong about doctor who, character hate in the main tags, asking me for money more than once when i don’t know you, posting about weight loss, misuse of a tag i like (off the top of my head, “the doctor” & “best enemies”). so. as you can imagine i have blocked a lot of people.
i appreciate being told if i’ve reblogged something that’s ai art or being used to fuel a form of bigotry. if you’re my friend/mutual you can also ask me to delete something posted by someone specific. i don’t respond to anonymous asks that say “don’t reblog from xyz they’ve been cancelled” 👍
i've had this blog since i was fourteen years old. if you find a post from years ago and i'm saying something stupid, i was probably being fourteen about it :/
you can tag me in tag games and you can always send me asks and you can send me a message. worse case scenario i don’t respond because i am bad at responding. i appreciate it anyway :)
you’re trapped! you’re trapped in a cage! your agency has been violated profoundly and you’re so so scared and you should probably chew on on your own leg or rip at your skin or idk. rip out your own catheter about it 😍🥰
we're moving to an internet where children would be banned from reaching out for help and friendship online but abusive parents can post their children's every second online to humiliate and expose them for money with no pushback
Whenever I think about the value of something being done by a person who really understands the job from a lifetime of experience, I think of my first restaurant job. My goal was to work every position, and I started with a year and a half in the dish pit at 16yo.
When i started as a dishwasher, i was trained by an old career dish pit man named Claudio. He'd spent his whole life washing dishes. It allowed him to move to just about any city in the world that he wanted to and get a job without having to deal with complex hiring processes or strict resumé requirements. Which was the main thing he wanted out of a career. I still think about him.
He'd seen a lot of people come through that station who either didn't consider it a real job or thought it was beneath them, on their way to "better" or "more important" things. And, in retrospect, those first two days he was sort of doing the minimum with me that he could do and still respect himself when he told the manager he'd trained me.
But, maybe it was because i was really interested in learning all the positions there were in a restaurant because i knew they were ALL important, or because i was a hard worker, or maybe it was because i tried to have real conversations with him in my broken spanish and did my best to not make him speak any english unless he wanted to, but after a couple days there was a big shift in the way he and i worked together, and he started to really teach me.
That place ran the dish pit with one dishwasher, so when he was done training me I was going to be doing the job on my own.
The thing that stuck with me the most, for the rest of my restaurant career, was this... and it wasn't just the actual things he was saying, but a completely new way of looking at what i was doing within the context of how the restaurant ran. I came in for my 3rd day and he said
"When you work alone, you want to go home by midnight?"
we clocked on at 3:30 and took a half hour lunch break and usually skipped our tens, so, yeah i absolutely did want to get off work by midnight
Then, even tho i already knew where most of everything was by that time, he took me around and showed me all the dishes, cups, pots and pans, spatulas, silverware, had me look at all of it. Then he told me to remember that almost every one of the dishes I was looking at would be used more than once by the end of our shift- we were clocking on to wash the entire building full of dishes multiple times.
Then he led me back over to the industrial dishwasher most restaurants have, which looks like this:
and then this 60 year old career dishwasher from Mexico City said the thing that changed how I looked at restaurant jobs forever
"This machine takes two full minutes to run a cycle. We are on the clock for 8 hours. That means we have a maximum of 240 times we can run this machine. If you want to wash all those dishes, clean your station, mop, and clock off by midnight? This machine has to be on and running every second of the shift.
If you don't have a full load of dishes collected, scraped, rinsed, stacked, and ready to go into the dishwasher the second it's done every single time? You can't do it. If, over the course of 8 hours, you let this machine lay idle for just one minute in between finishing each load and being turned on again? Instead of 240 loads, you'll do 160 loads.
[like, literally, he had done this math, he had these exact figures]
160 loads instead of 240 loads means you are doing 20 loads in an hour instead of 30 loads. That means the dishes are going to pile up. The cooks will run out of pots and pans and will have to stop and wait for you, the servers will run out of plates and cups and have to stop and wait for you, and your night is going to SUCK. Every part of how this restaurant works can grind to a halt because of that idle minute between dish loads, and if it does you'll have an entire building of people in a hurry and all waiting on you.
And it means you're going to be here until 2 am doing the 200+ loads of dishes this restaurant goes through every night.
For this to work, you MUST have this dishwasher on and running every minute of the shift. As soon as you turn it on you have two minutes to have the next load ready. See these large items i put to the side down here? One or two of them takes up all the space in the machine. I keep them here so that if the machine finishes and shuts off before i'm ready for it i can stick one of these in there and turn it on again immediately. You have to think like that to do this job without stress."
The way he was looking at how the whole restaurant ran, the way he was looking at how he'd spend each minute of the entire shift, the way he broke down what the physical limits were and how to max them out so he could do his job and go home on time without stressing out... The way this 60 year old guy, who had never had professional ambitions beyond being a dishwasher, was still such a competent and brilliant expert in his field.
It was all such an important lesson, and one that stayed with me through every position i went on to work in restaurants, dish pit, busser, server, cook, all the way up through manager before I finally got out of my restaurant career
Claudio never wanted to be anything but a dishwasher who didn't stay any later than he had to.
But he knew how that restaurant ran better than most of the other people in it. I never had a chance to truly thank him for the specific lesson he taught me, because while it had an immediate impact, I didn't really understand how valuable a lesson it was until much later.
But I've thought about Claudio and what i learned from him many MANY times in my life.
All of this. Disaster befalls any company that holds no regard for the expertise of the lowest level staff.
In my younger years I worked at a medical office that managed both mental health and addiction recovery. The company had purchased an empty lot down the road from the building we rented to build a better facility with larger capacity. The CEO worked for months with the architect, and just as they were finalizing everything they happened to let me - who was the receptionist at that time - take a gander at the blueprints. It took all of three seconds for two major issues to jump out at me.
“The receptionist can’t see the waiting room from her desk with this layout.” I said. “It’s around the corner and blocked by a wall.”
“Is that important?” They asked.
“Do you want me to be able to keep track of the patients who are waiting?” I asked.
“Isn’t that what the sign-in sheet is for?” They asked me.
“Not everyone who comes here is signing in for an appointment, some are coming to check in, some people are here for the group therapy and need to be directed to the other side of the building, some people are painfully shy and if I don’t appear warm and inviting they won’t approach.” I explain.
“How often does that even happen?” They asked.
“Every day.” I explain.
“Bullshit.” They said.
“I’m not joking at all. Also, where is the chart room?” I asked.
“Oh, over here.” They said, pointing to a tiny closet on the far side of the building from the receptionist and check out desks. It was tucked neatly beside the CEO’s office. To get there the secretaries would have to go through two sets of security doors and it would be a five minute walk each way.
“Why isn’t it next to the front office, since that’s where the people who use it are?” I asked.
“We had concerns about people just going into the chart room to goof off and not do their work. It takes them away from their desks too much. You should only go in the chart room twice a day - once in the morning to pull the charts for the day, and once in the evening to put way the charts. It would remain locked and the CEO would have the key and let you in to supervise.” They said.
“We pull charts the day before so everything is ready to go and we can alert staff if a patient with additional needs is coming in. We have to go in the chart room every time a patient calls in that’s having a problem with their meds or is in crisis or otherwise has a question for the nurse. We have to go in there every time someone cancels and we are able to fit a waitlisted patient in. We go in there 20 - 30 times a day for legitimate reasons. The only reason any of us has ever gone in there to take a minute was when we got news that a patient had died and we were crying. And even then, we filed charts as we sobbed because no one in this office has free time.”
They stared at me.
“Sit with me for an hour and see what happens up here.” I said.
They took the blueprints away from me before I could keep looking at them, but they took me up on sitting with me. They didn’t last an hour. They changed the blueprints to fix both things I’d pointed out.
Unfortunately, they didn’t let me keep looking at it and they never asked the janitor what he thought, so no one caught the final fatal flaw in the design.
There were no closets in the entire building. Nowhere to put our supplies. And I’m not talking just a place for stationary and pens. I mean no janitorial closet. Nowhere to put paper towels and toilet paper or cleaning products. Nowhere to put holiday decorations or anything at all. They completely forgot about storage of any kind and immediately started eyeballing my hard-won chart room for it.
They wound up putting all the supplies in the cabinets under the sinks in the public bathrooms. And, surprising to no one, all of it got stolen after our first week in the new building. All our spare keyboards and monitors and phones and even our paper towels just walked out of the building. Because the CEO who had never worked a lower level job in his life wasn’t convinced closets were worth it.
The level of mental hoops that guy had to jump through to say to his wife, "No, honey! Of course I wouldn't be cheating on you! Sex during gaycations doesn't count!"
Don't worry honey, all the other men on gaycation aren't real people and they stop existing after. Hey, where's all the homophoboa coming from suddenly?
SAY NO MORE. everyone sit down, grab a drink, and listen to what i like to refer to as "hey what the fuck are we even doing." i will preface this with 4 statements:
I am a terminal hater. I view every claim made in an academic publication with a suspicious squint, which probably influenced my dissertation significantly and definitely influenced my outlook on Attic Late Geometric (henceforth called LG) pottery.
I am specifically a terminal hater of periodization. I love continuity. I love observing the integration of old and new as things gradually change over time. I do not like cutting time up into ‘neat little boxes’ which end up simplifying gradual processes into sharp breaks. I am also already a bit of a hater of Early Iron Age Greek chronology. I would kill Submycenaean in a heartbeat, I think it’s stupid as hell (shoutout Papadopoulos et al 2013 btw). So I am even more predisposed to be skeptical here.
I especially hate the idea of definitive statements being applied to a protohistoric period & region like, say, Early Iron Age Attica. like man i think it depends
Either everyone else has been using a totally separate mindset here which I am incapable of having towards pottery analysis or perhaps they've been smoking crack in a corner for almost a hundred years, its really uncertain. Either way this is literally just me. I have tried to find someone else with this specific critique. Nope. Its Just Me. so take that for what you will.
Anyways, here is my beef with the Standard Approach To Late Geometric Attic Pottery Chronology & Development (Abridged) (This was an 8000 word undergraduate dissertation):
So, background context for those of you not emotionally invested in Ancient Greek Pottery Lore - THIS is the standard [big-picture] chronology of Attic Geometric Pottery (from Coldstream 2008, "Greek Geometric Pottery"):
Ignore the top bit (Proto-Attic/PA), he ain't relevant (sorry proto-attic stans). What REALLY matters here is my buddy the Late Geometric - LG I and LG II and all variants therein (LGIa, LGIb, etc). This is the one which I will focus on today, for I find the way it's been framed to be total, utter bullshit.
You may be wondering "how is this utter bullshit? it looks fine!" Well. Well. For that I must backtrack a little to first discuss the Average Approach To Studying Ancient Pots. Due to multiple factors - especially antiquities trafficking, loss of in-situ contexts, antiquarianism - the Pot People have been molded into a strange lovechild between archaeology and art history. Which means that the analysis of pottery production, and of specific vessels is less about where they were found and more about their shape and decoration [ie, if its a fuckin skyphos or not + how Achilles was painted on it]. This isn’t the only way that ancient ceramics are analyzed - there’s also other indicators such as the clay used to make them (which is very useful for pinning its original production site to a particular geographic region, since the chemical composition of clay can be pretty confidently localized) and inscriptions/writing (ie, signatures by the artisan(s) or the usage of regional alphabets). But figural decoration remains the primary focal points for scholarship centered on Athenian pottery, and influences so much of how Attic vessels are analyzed in comparison to one another and how ancient Greek ceramic production is discussed as a whole.
This is further complicated by the general reliance on figural decoration to assign vases to a particular ‘workshop’ or painter. This is more common with later Archaic black-figure and Classical red-figure vases, which sometimes have signatures, but the method is also applied indiscriminately to unsigned vases with 0 provenance (including Geometric vases). This is all quite vibes based - ie, “the hand is pointing slightly downward so it has to be by THIS GUY!” - and tends to value the figural representation over any sort of written evidence. Beazley (the guy who basically pioneered this method for red-figure vases by staring at thousands of them for decades) actually hated painter signatures (Beazley "Attic Black Figure - A Sketch" 1989 , p. 9) which is… certainly a take! This approach to attribution & workshop studies has been criticized elsewhere (Whitley 1991, Smyrnaios 2017) but in the case of Athenian Geometric pottery (objectively one of the hardest styles to define a definitive workshop using only figural decoration [1]) it’s still Very Common (Coulié 2013, p. 2) and specifically instrumental for how we organize LG vases chronologically (Coldstream 2008, p. 8).
This brings me to the subject of Late Geometric chronology. For this I have to bring in another graph (bear with me again here, guys, please):
This particular diagram is from Davison, 1961 - a published and refined version of her PHD dissertation "Attic Geometric Workshops,” which remains influential in discussions concerning LG pottery (partially because Coldstream significantly relies on her for identifying characteristic works; cf Coldstream p. 3, 33). In her work, Davison organizes a metric fuckton of LG Attic vessels (many of which do not have a definitive in-situ context or provenance) into various workshops, relying primarily on their decoration (Davison 1961, p.6). Davison’s attributions here, including her chronology, were reinforced by Coldstream and are fundamental to current reconstructions & analyses of LG pottery production, and discussions re: the development of the Late Geometric style (especially in Coulié 2013, which is [afaik] the most recent, thorough examination of LG pottery). I want to emphasize here that Davison’s organization of these workshops is according to the painters of LG vessels, not the potters.
Which, in my humble opinion, is an absolutely fucking absurd way to conceptualize Late Geometric pottery workshops. Athenian workshops in the later Archaic period were centralized around the potters, not painters (Sapirstein 2013, 499-500); a theory that is further supported by the presence of faint inscriptions on red-figure pottery (made before firing) which delineate the position & identity of the figures depicted on the vase (Iozzo, 2018). And while I am hesitant to apply a later organization of production to what is, again, a protohistorical period with no written records, I find it far more plausible to center the production of ceramics around the potters, who are making the fucking vases here, rather than Davison & Coldstream’s focus on painters - who are fulfilling a secondary, and ultimately more specialized/individualized role in the process. Especially since painters in Archaic Athens were also not restricted to a particular workshop (Sapirstein 2014, p. 180-181), so the conception that painters were trained in the kind of centralized way that Davison & Coldstream are theorizing here (moreso Coldstream, Davison’s actually kinda flexible re: workshop organization) seems improbable. Regardless, basing the chronological sequence of vessels according to their decoration alone (in my opinion) seems far less useful than the potential route of how these vases were created.
For example, there was an incredibly interesting study semi-recently which analyzed the proportions of skyphoi cups from the Early Geometric through the LG (Smyrnaios 2017). The reason I find it so fascinating - and so useful as an approach to LG workshops - is because the study noted a consistency in these ratios, generally consistent changes in these ratios over time, and - in the case of two specific Late Geometric skyphoi - there was a clear break from the predominant pattern in favor of a different ratio which was used for only them!! (Smyrnaios 2017, p. 119). This (in my opinion) is WAY MORE useful for the reconstruction of a protohistoric workshop, because you can draw a clear, distinct contrast between how they were produced and the other studied examples. While this is not necessarily definitive in a chronological sense (maybe if you could pinpoint specific transitions in the ratio? but I digress), it’s still (again, in my opinion) far more useful than the predominant focus on the style of the painted decoration. There’s also another interesting study re: wheel-made vs. hand-made Protogeometric pottery (ca. 1000-900BCE) that proposes that differences in production methods were connected to who/where/how an individual potter was trained (Rückl & Jacobs, 2016). There’s so much more potential here re: ceramic production and its just being Ignored (well. Smyrnaios is pretty invested but overall this is a very niche area).
And workshop attributions are made even more complicated by the fact that Geometric pottery is so incredibly stylized.[2] So much of these attributions boil down to shit like the torso not being a perfect triangle (Coldstream 2008, p. 43), how fancy they want a meander to be (Bohen 2017, 229), the stars looking a bit sloppy (Coulié 2015, p. 41), the claim that the figures look too big so its gotta be a different workshop (Bohen 2017, also 229, i fucking hate Bohen 2017) - and it’s just… why? Why are we bulldozing past the abstract aspects of this style, the widespread usage of the same motifs and animals, and neglecting the flexibility of an individual painter’s style all to focus on ultimately unknowable technicalities in organization (which, as previously noted re: red-figure, could very well be due to the potter or commissioner, not the painter)? And people have been saying this shit since the 1940s (Chamoux 1945, p. 62-65) so it's not for lack of trying, but rather an insistence on academic stagnation.
Now, going back to Davison’s graph, you may notice something a bit strange about the chronology of Late Geometric workshops. The style itself - and the entire period - is defined by the Dipylon Workshop - and, more specifically, the painter referred to as the ‘Dipylon Master’ (who, judging by Coldstream 2008, p. 33-35 is maybe also thought of as a potter? but I'll get to that).
You may or may not know the Dipylon Workshop from such hits as:
Athens 804, aka ‘The Dipylon Amphora’[3], and my buddy Athens 192, aka the 'Dipylon Oinochoe.' There's lots of amphorai and oinochoai out there in the world so to me they are simply A804 and A192.
The Dipylon Workshop, for all intents and purposes, is seen as the progenitor of the entire Late Geometric style (Coldstream 2008, p. 29, 33, 35, 44) (Brann 1960, Preface, p. 12) (Bohen 1991, p. 62; Bohen 2017, p. 74-75) (Couliè 2013, p. 63-65). The chronology of every single proposed LG workshop relies on how they relate to the Dipylon Workshop. The ‘Dipylon Master’ is not only framed as the beginning of LG art (Davison 1961) (Coldstream 2008, p. 35, 36, 44) (Brann p. 12, 13) (Coulié 2013, p. 65), but also credited with the invention of several LG vase forms (Coldstream 2008, p. 34, 35). Bohen 2017 even calls him "the finest artisan of the Iron Age" (Bohen 2017, p. 72). The claim that this hypothetical lone painter invented entirely new vase forms, by the way, is a bit fucking absurd considering the aforementioned research focused on later Archaic Attic pottery production arguing that vase painters & potters tended to be specialized (Sapirstein 2013, p. 499-500). Yet I kept running into these claims again and again as I did my research.
But again, I’m a skeptical bastard. So I got curious. What was the evidence behind this? Who came up with this theory? Where did it come from?
Everyone (Brann 1960, p. 12) (Coldstream 2008, 3) (Davison 1961, p. 6, 23-24) (Couliè 2015, p. 39) kept pointing back to an article by G. Nottbohm as the first to really define the 'Dipylon Master,' describe his style, and attribute works to him. So I go look for Nottbohm’s article. and. oh my god stop the fucking train okay
It’s a JdI article (Jahrbuch des Deutschen Archäologischen Instituts[Journal of the German Archaeological Institute]) published in 1943 (under the fucking Third Reich, mid-WWII) -> 🚩🚩🚩🤨 I am now incredibly skeptical. I am scanning every sentence for even the slightest hint of nazi ideology. I am on red alert, like the bias equivalent of a tornado siren. I am re-evaluating Coldstream’s proud proclamation that he “Follows G. Nottbohm In Believing Such Distinctions Are Possible” (Coldstream 2008, p. 2 yes he fucking said this) and also his entire reputation. But I’m still withholding complete judgement here. Maybe she’s got decent evidence? Some sort of sound analysis? I don’t know man, this is apparently the whole fuckin reason we treat the ‘Dipylon Master’ as this pivotal figure, surely it has something.
Her evidence boils down to Athens 804, a shitload of Louvre fragments, and a giant oinochoe (bc it has a deer frieze. thats literally it) -> 🚩 - I am now fully judging. I thought there would be more evidence here?? Everyone is just taking Nottbohm’s word for it as if this isn’t the most patchwork shit ever. Chamoux even calls her out for cherry-picking later because the logic here is obviously just a vicious circle (Chamoux 1945, p. 63-64)! And Villard (1948, p. 1072) later kicked at least 1 of her other examples (the Baring Amphora) to the curb. There’s no mention of in-situ context anywhere?? Which is baffling, genuinely baffling, she doesn’t even mention it in passing. Which is astounding to me because the excavation of Athens 804 was actually somewhat fucking documented and was published in German (Brückner & Pernice, 1893), which Nottbohm could have almost certainly gotten access to as a PHD student at the University of Leipzig. Whatever faith I had in this fuckass theoretical guy is nonexistent, it is Gone
Her main comparison against what she attributes to the Dipylon Workshop is Athens 990 (The "Hirschfeld Krater,” whose provenance is [like the Dipylon Oinochoe] mildly fucked up on account of being from Palaiologos’ undocumented 1871 ‘excavation’) -> 🚩 again Nottbohm is establishing an entire workshop that she can compare to the ‘Dipylon Workshop,’ which she is still defining at the same time, which. Honestly she’s just shitting on A990 here. this paper invented the hirschfeld workshop too which just makes this worse since A990 is the defining vessel of that (cf Coldstream 2008 p 41). like can we not consider them both beautiful. must we always quantify. actually this is a nazi paper who the fuck am i kidding. guys, can we re-evaluate this or- oh no. oh god what's she sayin-
«Vielmehr handelt es sich um die schöpferische Tat eines großen Meisters, dem es nicht nur gelungen ist, den ornamentalen geometrischen Stil auf seine höchste Höhe und zur klassischen Vollendung zu führen - eben in der Amphora in Athen - sondern in dem auch die Kräfte dieses Stiles und seiner Zeit so stark wirksam waren, daß ihm die Darstellung der menschlichen Figur im Rahmen dieses Stiles möglich wurde.» 😟😬🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩 the racist & imperialist ideology is in full fuckinv swing and this is only page 15 out of 31. we got it all. the ‘great man’ history where 1 guy singlehandedly spearheaded an entire phase of art (source? Personal Bias. she made it the fuck up i'm not even joking THIS is everyones source here). the conception of one guys art as the ‘peak’ of art and ‘classical accomplishment’. the idea that the ‘Dipylon Master’ was, somehow, just built different and better than everyone else ever. God. Are we really relying on this shit for all our comparative analyses of attic late geometric pottery. like its abundantly clear shes only in this for Athens 804. which… yeah, others at this point were also trying to connect this amphora to other vessels (cf Kahane 1940, p. 477) but Nottbohm is frankly both reaching to an absurd degree here, and is the one everyone's citing here (Coldstream doesn't even mention Kahane [Coldstream 2008, p. 2]! jfc guys). how has nobody reviewed this in the past 80 years.
«Im Verlaufe der gesamten europäischen Kunst ist ihm eigentlich — in der Größe seiner Bedeutung für die folgenden Zeiten — nur ein einziger an die Seite zu stellen, nämlich Giotto.» 😑🫠 🚩🚩🚩 this line makes me feel like im high every time i see it. both for the first half emphasizing ‘in all of european art’ and then the bit comparing him to fucking giotto which sucker punches me in the face every time like are we really fucking serious here guys. Please. this is also immediately after the prior sentence for context, these two quotes are in 1 paragraph Together back-to-back. pages 15-16. Wow
«So ist der Meister der Athener Amphora die erste faßbare Persönlichkeit auf dem Gebiete der bildenden Kunst, die uns auf europäischem Boden entgegentritt! Seine Existenz und sein Schaffen fügen sich auf das schönste dem Bilde der zweiten Hälfte des achten Jahrhunderts ein, das W. Schadewaldt in seinem Aufsatz 'Homer und sein Jahrhundert' entworfen hat. Auch an dem Meister der Amphora erleben wir den Durchbruch der Persönlichkeit aus dem Dunkel der vorhergehenden Jahrhunderte. Sein Gestaltungswille durchbricht mit elementarer Kraft den ornamentalen Formenzwang und erobert sich die menschliche Figur als Darstellungsobjekt. Eines seiner Werke, die Amphora in Athen, in ihrer tektonischen Strenge und fast mathematischen Klarheit des Aufbaus wie der Einzelheiten, bedegutet für uns eine der großartigsten Manifestationen griechischen Geistes und griechischen Kunstwollens überhaupt.» 🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩hey uh What the actual fuck (these are her concluding remarks. Btw)
This ^^ is the foundation for how scholarship compares Late Geometric Attic pottery workshops and positions their development. This fuckass article that positions the ‘Dipylon Master’[4] as the ‘first tangible artist on European soil’ who ‘breaks through the darkness of the preceding centuries’ and is ‘one of the greatest manifestations of the Greek spirit and Greek art of all time.’ like. can we all set aside all the decorative analysis this field's been obsessed with for 100+ years and unpack this? like, her framing of the ‘Dipylon Master,’ the fact that she even fucking calls him «Der Meister der Grossen Dipylon-Amphora», and the field all just adopted that shit too for some fucking reason, just. All of it. Chuck it in the bin for now guys. Please. or. no? we’ll just speculate abt which Middle Geometric workshop the ‘Dipylon Master’ came from (Bohen 2017, p. 160-162)? 🫠 🫠🫠🫠 please the racism & facism is right fucking there like am i HIGH?
And Nottbohm’s methodology has been critically reviewed only once - by Chamoux (1945), who was also afaik the first one to actually respond to the article - but… he doesn’t address the ideological bend to it that taints her methodology? He does make some very good points [5] that honestly just look like he got hit by Apollo's dodgeball, where he's like "Nottbohm's terminology will only encourage people to recreate an artist's personality which is ultimately unverifiable, surely we could be doing something better with our time" (Chamoux 1945, p. 68) (i'm paraphrasing & it's all in french). unfortunately he got proven right and this field refuses to do a u-turn. Chamoux why'd you have to focus on other shit besides Geometric pottery please you were the only one[6] on the right track,,,,
Anyways that’s my take on Late Geometric pottery chronology, development & workshops 👍 i hate the "dipylon master founded it all and was First" idea and i dont give a shit if killing it nukes our current chronological dating of the LG because i think the theory should Die
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[1.] The reason I consider Geometric pottery as "objectively one of the hardest styles to define a definitive workshop using only figural decoration" is because Geometric art is - as I've noted above - kinda sparse with figural decoration? And when it does appear, it's very linear & abstract. So emphasizing the decoration here, and treating it like definitive proof of a shared producer for two vases, is just. Bizzare to me.
[2.] This is not a dig at the LG style here - I think it fucks severely. My main concern is that so many attempts to categorize LG vessels seem to ignore this element of abstraction altogether - or, worse, treat divergences from it as ‘a mistake’ (Moore 2007, p. 18), a ‘collapse’/disintegration (Coldstream 2008, p. 56), or ‘degenerative’ (Brann 1962, 15). This kind of thinking appears in tandem with the concept of Attic(cough Athenian cough) pottery being influenced by Corinth (Coldstream 2008, 56); take from that what you will.
[3.] rip to every other amphora from the hieraian gate cemetery ifg. only One Dipylon Amphora allowed
[4.] the quotation marks i have been using this whole time have been to convey just how much i fucking despise this name and all its shitass loaded baggage that it carries. this is quite an aggressive way to say this now that i think abt it but still im a Hater
[5.] Not including the bit where he tries to use LG battle scenes to date the Iliad. Not touching that with a ten-foot pole. I only care for his critique of Nottbohm ❤️
[6.] this is technically an overexaggeration, Siebert 2010 (p. 311) kinda took up the torch on this one (calling Nottbohm's methodology inadequate lmao) but. i fear its like a tiny corner of french scholarship and the anglophones need to catch the hell up ASAP.
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Sources/Further Reading:
Nottbohm, G.G. (1943) “Der Meister Der Grossen Amphora Im Dipylon,” JdI 58, pp. 1–31.
Chamoux, F. (1945) “L’ÉCOLE DE LA GRANDE AMPHORE DU DIPYLON: Étude Sur La Céramique Géométrique à l’époque de l’ «Iliade»,” Revue Archéologique, 23, pp. 55–97.
Davison, J.M. (1961) Attic Geometric Workshops. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press (Yale Classical Studies).
Coldstream, J.N. (2008) Greek geometric pottery: a survey of ten local styles and their chronology. Updated 2nd ed. Exeter: Bristol Phoenix press.
Coulié, A. (2013) La céramique grecque aux époques géométrique et orientalisante: XIe-VIe siècle av. J.-C. Paris: Picard (La céramique grecque, 1).
Smyrnaios, I. (2017) “Chaîne Opératoire: Moving from Theory to Praxis in the Study of Attic Geometric Pottery,” in L. Nevett (ed.) Theoretical Approaches to the Archaeology of Ancient Greece: Manipulating Material Culture. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, pp. 104–123. Available at: https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.8287082.
Kahane, P. (1940) “Die Entwicklungsphasen der Attisch-Geometrischen Keramik,” American Journal of Archaeology, 44(4), pp. 464–482. Available at: https://doi.org/10.2307/499959.
Villard, F. (1948) “UN NOUVEAU CRATÈRE DU DIPYLON AU MUSÉE DU LOUVRE.” Revue Archéologique 31/32, 1065–74. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41028776.
Brann, E.T.H. (1962) Late Geometric and Protoattic Pottery: Mid 8th to Late 7th Century B.C. (The Athenian Agora). Available at: https://doi.org/10.2307/3601969.
Siebert, G. (2010) “La réception de l’art géométrique grec dans l’historiographie (fin du XIXe-milieu du XXe siècle),” Ktèma : civilisations de l’Orient, de la Grèce et de Rome antiques, 35(1), pp. 299–312. Available at: https://doi.org/10.3406/ktema.2010.2505.
Štěpán Rückl and Loe Jacobs (2016) “‘With a Little Help from My Wheel’: Wheel-Coiled Pottery in Protogeometric Greece,” Hesperia: The Journal of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, 85(2), p. 297. Available at: https://doi.org/10.2972/hesperia.85.2.0297.
Iozzo, M. (2018) “Hidden Inscriptions on Athenian Vases,” American Journal of Archaeology, 122(3), pp. 397–410. Available at: https://doi.org/10.3764/aja.122.3.0397.
Sapirstein, P. (2013) “Painters, Potters, and the Scale of the Attic Vase-Painting Industry,” American Journal of Archaeology, 117(4), pp. 493–510. Available at: https://doi.org/10.3764/aja.117.4.0493.
Sapirstein, P. (2014) “Demographics and Productivity in the Ancient Athenian Pottery Industry,” in J.H. Oakley (ed.) Athenian Potters and Painters III: Athenian Potters and Painters III. Oxbow Books, pp. 175–186. Available at: https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvh1djzf.
Moore, M.B. (2007) “ATHENS 803 AND THE EKPHORA,” Antike Kunst, 50, pp. 9–23.
Whitley, J. (1997) “Beazley as theorist,” Antiquity, 71(271), pp. 40–47. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003598X00084520.
Bohen, B. (2017) Kratos & krater: reconstructing an Athenian protohistory. Oxford (GB): Archaeopress Archaeology (Archaeopress archaeology).
#look I don't know shit about anything so I might be so very wrong but everything op says about how the field dates Greek vases sounds insane#especially since you can. apparently. figure out where the clay came from????? why aren't you DOING that
(with apologies to @doloneia for chiming in here)
See, the problem with that approach is that knowing where the clay comes from doesn´t give you a date of when the vase was made - at best it would give you a date of the formation of the claybed (hope that´s the right word in English). We can approximately tell when a vase was fired via a method called Thermoluminescence dating, but that is VERY approxomate and as far as I know mostly done to fnd modern fakes.
Normally - or at least unless you are a classical archaeologist with a certain training, grumble, grumble - we´d prefer to date by stratigraphy and correlations with historic cultures with calendar systems we can translate into ours. Radiocarbon, if need be, but that is also somewhat imprecise and can´t be done on clay directly (on accont of not being an organic material). Dendrodating - dating by yearrings in trees in wood closely associated with the pottery in question - would be really nice, too.
And for various reasons, almost none of that is an option. Like, we can manage stratigraphic sequences at least for some sites and regions, but thanks to the prolonged fallout from the Bronze Age collapse, we lack secure associations with historic cultures, and wood does really, really not survive well in the Greek climate. On top of that, chronology in the rest of the Eastern Mediterranean and Egypt is also somewhat shaky during that time.
So we are in a situation, where we can fairly reliably date the last pottery from before the BA collapse (aka the Late Helladic B/C transition) and then nothing, really, until the Middle Geometric period at the earliest. Mostly, if I recall correctly, trading relationships with the Near East start up again at the end of this period around 750 BC and apply therefore mostly to (Attic) Late Geometric. The lengths of style phases before that are estimations.
All of that is before we go into the obsession of dating things down to a decade or two via style, an approach one of my professors called "an exercise in vanity" at one point. The problems with that op has thoroughly pointed out, but there are legitimate obstacles to doing it differently.
tysm for this addition!! i didnt really discuss other methods for dating ancient ceramics so this is a really important addendum - pottery chronology is messy, but in many cases this is one of the few surviving pieces of evidence we have. in the case of funerary remains (which are basically our main sources for LG Attic pottery with figural decoration), you could also try to use radiocarbon dating, but this method can involve destroying the bones altogether which. we dont want to do that! those are someones bones!! so yeah stratigraphic sequencing (which is haphazard, and in the case of many LG vases hard to determine since they were either illegally excavated, trafficked, or excavated in like 1890) & stylistic analysis are often the only tools we have. the specific issue i discussed above mainly arises when we try to take stylistic dating, which is inherently relative, and treat it almost like it was absolute.
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in my mind, the whole point of Monster Theory is to restore agency (power and dignity) to the “monster”—to the other.
