Platonic Psychology: Illuminated Manuscripts

Showing posts with label Illuminated Manuscripts. Show all posts

Tuesday, January 18, 2011

Appetitive: Biblical Art

There was a display at the Getty about a year ago of Old Testament heroes and heroines. These were depiction from illuminated books of hours. The portraits were fabulous. One heroine who stood out to me among them was Judith, primarily because I find hers to be one of the oddest strong-woman tales of all time.

My mother pointed out to me that AWOL recently posted that a donation to ARTstor (essentially an image equivalent of JSTOR) put up an incredible digital collection of images from the Judith story. I have not browsed it thoroughly, but it looks fabulous.

ARTstor in itself is a fabulous resource. While a student at my Alma Mater, I used it for a variety of papers, including one on Pythia's prologue in the Eumenides. A similar procession of gods and goddesses as she describes appeared on one of the friezes at the now-ruined temple of Apollo at Delphi. ARTstor provided me with the image reconstructed by various artists and a picture of the fragments that remain of the frieze. It was a fabulous resource.

Sunday, January 9, 2011

Reasoning/Appetitive: Illuminated Manuscripts and Socratic Logic

Today I saw the "Imagining the Past in France" exhibit at the Getty. I meant to go earlier-- and had, in fact, been to a lecture on the exhibit already[1]-- but due to various complications did not manage to go until today. The exhibit was amazing and I highly recommend it. When I go into illuminated manuscript exhibits, I often play a game with myself to see whether I can identify the era of a work before I check the plate underneath it. I found this exhibit more difficult that most because there was a greater diversity in artistic style within eras than in other collections I have been. I thought it might be because these were primarily secular and historical texts. There is a great slideshow of images on the Getty website.

Imagining the Past in France: History in Manuscript Painting, 1250-1500

The curator did a brief video introduction to the exhibit as well.

Socratic Logic

The book that I decided to read yesterday during the exam I was proctoring is Gregory Vlastos' Socratic Studies. Vlastos' work, Socrates: Ironist and Moral Philosopher, was my first introduction to Plato scholarship. Although I dislike some of his methodology and conclusions, I still have a soft-spot for Vlastos' work. I will review it when I am finished (I am about 1/3 of the way through).

Endnotes

The lecture I went to was "How the French Made History: Manuscripts and Images of the Past in Medieval France." I reviewed the lecture on Fragments of Sulpicia.

Why Platonic Psychology?

Entry types into this blog are divided into three categories: appetitive, spirited, and reasoning to correspond with the three parts of the Platonic conception of the soul. The appetitive portion will most often be humorous content with a classical bent. However, Plato's understanding of appetitive is much broader than that, encompassing the general pleasures of spectacle-- such as theater, both comedy and tragedy-- as well as emotions and bodily pains and pleasures. Sometimes I will stray into one of the more Platonic uses of appetitive. If I can manage it, I will post a weekly translation of a joke or funny phrase into Latin or Greek. The spirited portion (literally timophillic i.e. honor loving) will be my own ideas about Greek and Roman ideas. This section attempts to put me on the map as a classicist with a point of view. The reasoning part will be commentary and reviews on classical texts. I will also try to post a passage for Latin or Greek prose composition, as well as translations of prose passages or poetry in Latin or Greek. I will offer my take on the passage, and if anyone would like to offer their own attempt at the passage, or corrections or criticisms of mine, they will be welcome to do so in a comment on the blogpost or email me at sulpicia3@hotmail.com.

Bread, Roman Poetry, and Other Frivolity

If you're interested in me as well as my commentary about classical texts, visit my personal blog Fragments of Sulpicia (III), in which I discuss my general day-to-day existence, alongside bread recipes, pedagogy, and Roman Love Elegy.

The Roman love elegists, writing at the end of the Roman Republic wrote beautiful poems about their experiences in love, creating the persona or changing the name of a real person on whom to center their poetry. The only extant female poet calls herself Sulpicia, daughter of Servius and constructs her poems around her lover, Cerninthus. In order to write freely, I have taken up her name, Sulpicia, and the names of her characters and the characters of her contemporary love elegists, to refer to people in my own life. A reference list of characters can be found on the righthand side of Fragments of Sulpicia (III).