INVOLVED SPECTATORSHIP IN ARCHAIC GREEK ART

It is argued that models of spectatorship developed by Alois Riegl and Richard Wollheim offer a productive means of understanding how the Archaic Greek eye cup works. Eye cups represent the faces of particular mythological creatures who expect to see their mythical counterparts in the space occupied by spectators. The decoration of the cups is structured so as to invite the beholder to enter imaginatively into the Dionysiac world. Some representations of silens shown with frontal faces invite a similar response. A significant amount of Archaic poetry experienced, like the vases, in symposia also induced symposiasts temporarily to adopt fictional or mythical personae. As Nietzsche observed in The Birth of Tragedy, a comparable form of involved spectatorship is also at the heart of early Greek drama. A common aesthetic conception of involved spectatorship manifested itself concretely in several different media or cultural forms in late Archaic Greece.