Drawing vs Photography

Abstract This chapter juxtaposes drawings with photographs of Greek vases. It asks to what degree and in what way each medium is able to represent a Greek vase and explores, through a series of twentieth-century case studies, the way in which the choice of medium reflected and in turn shaped the questions that scholars were concerned with. The first section introduces the subject on a theoretical level and asks what aspects of a Greek vase are lost or emphasized in drawings and in photographs, exploring the strengths and drawbacks of each medium for a variety of audiences, in and beyond scholarship. Through specific examples, the second section pursues the discussion in closer detail to see what choices were made in early twentieth-century scholarly photographs of vases. The publication of the vase collection in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts by John Beazley and Lacey D. Caskey (1931, 1954, and 1963) is a particularly telling case study because it occurred at a time when drawing and photographs of vases still coexisted in scholarly publications. The concluding section investigates the relationship between changing scholarly interests in Greek vases and the changing repertoire of technologies brought to bear in their reproduction. It argues that this complex dynamic influenced not only how the material was illustrated in the canonical publications of the discipline—from the Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum to the vase painter monographs based on connoisseurial attribution—but also what kinds of questions scholarship on Greek vases could formulate about its subjects.