During the second year of my fellowship at the Center, I have continued work on my second monograph, entitled “Lifelikeness: A Story of Art in Ancient Greece.” The book takes its cue from the ancient Greek fascination with “lifelike” images. From our earliest surviving texts of the eighth century BCE through to those of the fourth century and beyond, Greek authors are unanimous in their wonder and praise for artworks that look “like living beings,” in Greek, hōs zōoi. This captivation with lifelike images, both in two and three dimensions, is a golden thread in Greek attitudes to art. My book explores the causes and effects of this captivation. What did “lifelikeness” mean to ancient Greeks, why was it upheld as an ideal of art, and what impact did it have on Greek art’s development?

The chronological focus of my book is the period circa 700 to 400 BCE, that is from the Archaic to Classical periods. While interest in lifelike art persisted in Greek culture long after 400 BCE, the reason I have chosen to concentrate on this period is to address a question at the heart of the Western art-historical tradition. From the eighth to fifth century BCE, Greek art underwent a rapid transformation. By the mid-fifth century, a new style of representation had become commonplace across the Greek world, characterized by the pictorial techniques of anatomical verisimilitude, contrapposto, foreshortening, and perspective. This is typically defined as the emergence of naturalism in Greek art, the faithful imitation of objective visible reality. Because of ancient Roman art, which adopted and adapted the naturalistic idiom of Greek art, this style has had an immense afterlife, inflecting Western art history from antiquity to the Renaissance to today.

The standard assumption by scholars is that lifelikeness and naturalism are synonymous, that both denote a way of making images marked by close formal adherence to objective visual phenomena. By this rationale, when Homer—in the eighth BCE, long before naturalism appeared in Greek art—speaks of artworks that look “like living beings,” he is imagining and anticipating the kind of naturalistic images Greek artists would produce some three centuries later. 

One aim of my project is to show that lifelikeness and naturalism are in fact fundamentally different. Textual analysis indicates that what Greeks understood by lifelike art was predicated on culturally specific ideas about the defining features of living things. What is more, it was subject to change: What lifelikeness meant in Greek culture was not the same in the eighth century BCE as it was in the fifth. In short, lifelikeness was a relative concept. By contrast, naturalism is universalizing, premised on an appeal to objective visible reality replicated in art.

Decoupled from naturalism, lifelikeness emerges as an indigenous Greek concept, an alien way of seeing and appreciating images integral to the evaluative frameworks of artistic production. Because its true peculiarity and difference from naturalism have not been recognized, lifelikeness has never been the subject of in-depth scholarly inquiry. My book seeks to fill this gap, to understand why this attitude and approach to image-making prevailed in Greece and with what consequences. As the book shows, uncovering why lifelikeness mattered and how it affected artistic practice provides a novel means to account for Greek art’s dramatic transformation during the Archaic and Classical periods. 

One part of the book, consisting of three chapters, explores the various pictorial techniques employed by Greek artists to make their artworks appear lifelike. This has been the focus of my work over the last year. I am currently preparing one of these chapters for publication as an article, which considers how changes in the principles of figuration in Greek sculpture were instrumental to the advent of spatial depth in Greek painting.

A. W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow, 2024–2026

At the end of his fellowship at the Center, Hugo Shakeshaft will take up residence in Malibu for a fellowship at the Getty Villa. In early 2027, he will be a lecturer in Greek art at King’s College London.