San Francisco Ceramic Circle Illustrated Lecture 

Drinking Dionysos: The Athenian Symposium

and its Ceramics

Andrew F. Stewart, Curator of Greek and Roman Archaeology, Phoebe Apperson Hearst Museum of Anthropology, Professor of Ancient Mediterranean Art and Archaeology, and Nicholas C. Petris Professor of Greek Studies, Departments of History of Art and Classics, UC Berkeley

SFCC lectures are complimentary for Museum visitors

About the talk: This lecture surveys the archaeology and art of the ancient Greek banquet, focusing on the sixth and early fifth centuries BC. After a brief discussion of the black- and red-figure techniques of the vases, I turn to the context and protocols of the symposium, and outline the course of a typical one. I then introduce the crockery: the vessels for storing, decanting, mixing, serving, and drinking the wine. Next comes a tour of the themes painted on them, with particular attention to Dionysos, lord of the symposium, and his rambunctious retinue of satyrs and maenads, and to other pictorial fantasies such as the so-called “courtesans’ symposium.” The lecture ends with a selection of vases of outlandish and exotic shape, some perhaps echoing contemporary work in metal and others probably invented by particularly creative potters.

About the speaker: Andrew Stewart is a graduate of St. Catharine’s College, Cambridge, and a former student of the British Schools of Archaeology at Athens and Rome. He has taught at Cambridge, at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand, and at Columbia University in addition to Berkeley, where he joined the faculty in 1979. At Berkeley, he is Professor of Ancient Mediterranean Art and Archaeology in the Departments of History of Art and Classics, Nicholas C. Petris Professor of Greek Studies, and Curator of Mediterranean Archaeology at the Phoebe Apperson Hearst Museum of Anthropology. He has received major fellowships and grants from the Guggenheim and Getty Foundations, and from the American Council of Learned Societies, and is a member of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens and the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut. In 2009 he received U.C. Berkeley’s Distinguished Teaching Award.

Professor Stewart specializes in Greek art, particularly in Greek sculpture. His interests include the body in Greek art and thought, the development of portraiture and personhood in ancient Greece, and Greek and Roman attitudes to and writing on Greek art. His replacement for J. J. Pollitt’s Art and Experience in Classical Greece was published in 2008. He is currently working on the publication of the Hellenistic sculpture from the Athenian Agora. His other interests include the Greeks in the Levant before and after Alexander, and the Renaissance and later reception of ancient sculpture. He has excavated at the Minoan palace of Knossos in Crete, at Long Beach Maori settlement in Otago Province, New Zealand, and from 1986-2006 at the Phoenician, Israelite, Persian, Greek, and Roman harbor town of Dor in Israel. He spends what little free time he has sailing on San Francisco Bay, singing baritone with the Pacific Mozart Ensemble, and ministering to his partner’s menagerie of cats.

Next SFCC functions

Saturday, June 26, 2010 Summer Social. Please note this is an SFCC members and guests only event

Thursday, July 15, 2010 Members "Pot Night". Please note this is an SFCC members and guests only event

Sunday, August 15, 2010 Ed Schwartz " Worcester Blue and White - many shapes and sizes"