Ancient vases in modern vitrines: the sensory dynamics and social implications of museum display Caspar Meyer Bard Graduate Center, New York, NY ABSTRACT This contribution explores the changing sensory priorities underpinning the display of Greek painted pottery in European collections. The focus is on the introduction of glass-fronted cabinets in the purpose-designed public museums of art and archaeology of the mid-nineteenth century. Contrary to expectations, the contemporaneous debates surrounding the use of gallery furniture show that the museum stakeholders were less worried about the safety of the objects than the pros- pect of middle- and working-class visitors being exposed to the sexualized imagery on Athenian pot- tery. A survey of the different traditions of display in Britain and continental Europe highlights the shift from the multisensory engagements in early modern elite collections with vases as evidence of ancient custom to the selective viewing of the objects’ painted decoration as works of art whose proper interpretation called for classical education. To love [the Euphronios krater], you only have to look once. To adore it, you must read Homer and know that the drawing is perhaps the summit of art ... 1 Athenian painted pottery can be made to speak to class-based analysis in both ancient and modern history. Analysis of class stratification will always be a matter of quantifying economic structures by distinguishing be- tween those who control the means of production and those who do not. But such examination also involves an understanding of the dynamic between the objective class position of historical actors and their subjective identification with political interests, which rarely permit easy correlation. The social structure of democratic Athens, with its confusing mixture of individuals of different status (citizens, foreigners, and slaves) in the same class (as freeborn wage labourers or wealthy non-citizens who lease land), demonstrates how difficult it is to align economic stratification with other aspects of personal identity. 2 Painted pottery provided a medium through which the resulting contradictions could be sublimated or escalated in a given setting to give way to 1 Thomas Hoving, the former Director of the Metropolitan Museum in New York, appraising the Euphronios krater after its illegal acquisi- tion and export from Italy. Cited in Watson and Todeschini 2006: x–xi. 2 See the well-known substitution in Athenian history of status for class as the principal analytical concept by Finley 1973: 48–51, and the Marxist critique in response by De Ste. Croix 1981: 58–59. For more recent historiographical reviews of the issue, see Nafissi 2004: 378– 410 and Kamen 2013: 1–7. V C The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Institute of Classical Studies. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com.  91 Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies, 2020, 63, 91–109 doi: 10.1093/bics/qbaa009 Original article Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/bics/article/63/1/91/5900301 by guest on 05 September 2020