Sapirstein, P. 2019 - Picturing Work

Introduction

Ancient literary sources depict work in generic and unrealistic ways.
Discussions of work in antiquity engage with literary biases.
This chapter focuses on visual material to provide different perspectives on labor.
Depictions of laborers exist in Greco-Roman visual culture.
Mythology and idealized scenes dominate, making work an unpopular subject.
Workers preferred expressing other interests besides repetitive toil.
Identifying themselves through work reveals attitudes towards it.

Scholarly Attention to Ancient Pictures of Work

Early interest focused on eyewitness recordings of lost technological systems.
Jahn's 1861 catalogue and Blümner's compilation of textual, visual, and scientific evidence.
Recent revitalization of studies on specific techniques, especially architecture and pottery.
Gummerus' 1913 study raised questions about identity and social standing in Roman craft representations.
Burford’s "Greek and Roman Craftsmen" is a foundational work illustrated with ancient depictions of laborers (close to fifty).
Cultural and art historical investigations of specific crafts have followed.

Problems with Visual Evidence from Antiquity

Ancient representations are not neutral documentary sources but cultural constructions laden with meaning.
Few crafts preserved didactic material.
Knowledge passed down through apprenticeships and guild memberships.
Architects used 2D projection drawings and models to communicate designs.
Ancient imagery lacked a compelling need for technological accuracy, leading to obvious errors.
Example: A gilt-glass plate featuring carpenters with incorrect tool usage (Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana inv. 60788).
Artisans might distort technology or omit ambiguous stages for composition.
The goal was a recognizable icon of work, not necessarily a realistic one.

Interpretation and Meaning

Consider the context, reasons for depicting labor, patrons, and intended audience.
Methodology rooted in semiotics to decode symbolic systems.
Images have no single straightforward reading, and subjects are debatable.
Clothing, attributes, and inscriptions provide information about workers' status and conceptualization.
Two main groups of images: Athenian vase paintings and early Roman imperial grave monuments.
Some images align with literature (workers as anonymous and compliant), while others cast labor in a positive light.
Infrequent survivals reveal diverse attitudes held by a significant nonaristocratic sector, largely absent in literature.

Work on Attic Pottery

Attic vases preserve the majority of labor images from the Greek world which skews our visual evidence towards Athenian attitudes.
Up to a few hundred pots depict work.
Specialized male manufacturing appears on close to forty extant vases (excluding mythical contexts).
Agriculture nominally appears on more than one hundred vases, but most are comical scenes.
Women are more often shown at work, with more than three hundred examples of textile production.
Fetching water is common.
Women picking fruit are portrayed as engaging in light work at leisure.
Altogether, more than four hundred scenes concerning labor.
The corpus represents about 1% of original material, corresponding to roughly fifty thousand total scenes.
Dated between 560 and 510 BCE.
Attica produced around one hundred thousand painted vases per year around 480 BCE.
Labor scenes represent a small fraction of the output (less than 1 percent).
Modern scholars have given outsized attention to this minority of vases, which indicate steady demand for images of manufacturing.

Artisans in Myth

Reluctance to show craftsmen is apparent in the presentation of Hephaestus, the god of fire, the forge, and artisans.
Hephaestus was disfigured and lame, creating machinery to compensate for his physique.
He is not a popular Olympian on vases, shown between 190 and 270 times (compared to about six thousand for Dionysus or four thousand for Heracles).
His return to Mount Olympus on a mule dominates iconographically, occurring at least 140 times.
Hephaestus is usually shown in standard Olympian narratives like the birth of Athena.
He can be identified holding tools but is actively making something on only seven extant vases (less than 4 percent).
Six of the seven show him seated among icons of tools, presenting the arms of Achilles to Thetis.
One shows Hephaestus working an anvil in front of a furnace, while two satyrs contemplate a wine break.
Vase painters ignore Daedalus or Epeius and episodes when popular heroes make things.
Athena appears in only a handful of vases as patroness of craftsmen.
Epic poetry praising crafted daidala offered opportunities to represent manufacturing visually, but these scenes were avoided.
TABLE 2.1 Attic vases showing work in a non-mythological setting:
- Manufacturing: Specialized (pots, bronze, shoes, etc.): 40, Textiles (carding, spinning, weaving): 195
- Agriculture: Men plowing, harvesting (grapes/olives): 25, Women picking fruit from trees: 25
- Other: Shepherds, fishermen, butchers: 25, Women drawing or transporting water: 90, Merchants: 25
- All values are rounded to the nearest multiple of 5.

Laborers in Mythological Painting

Very few images of laborers occur in mythological painting.
The story of Danae was popular in the early fifth century; about twenty vases show her departure with Perseus in a wooden chest.
Six versions, dating close to 480 BCE, include a carpenter preparing the chest.
In a pelike by the Geras Painter, the carpenter is balding and holds an adze.
Other versions show the carpenter with a bow-drill.
The carpenter signals the wondrous craftsmanship of Danae’s coffin-boat.
The only other example of a carpenter is the name-vase for the Carpenter Painter.
A handsome youth in a loin-cloth works a mortised beam with an improbably slender adze.
The tondo of another cup features a satyr dressing a stone column shaft.
Builders are virtually unrepresented in pottery except in scenes related to Danae’s chest.
FIGURE 2.1 Attic red-figure pelike fragments by the Geras Painter showing a carpenter at the chest of Danae, 480–470 BCE.

Athenian Manufacturers

The roughly forty scenes featuring artisans outside of a mythological narrative are more informative.
Besides the Carpenter Painter’s name vase, there is a sculptor carving a herm, four scenes with shoemakers, about fifteen with metalworkers, and perhaps twenty more representations of pottery production.
The distribution cannot meaningfully reflect the actual distribution of craftsmen in Athens, and is especially biased towards potters.
The most ambitious shoemaking scene is attributed to the Plousios Painter, a black-figure painter active around 500 BCE (Figure 2.2).
The shoemakers sit at a workbench inside a shop populated by icons of the appropriate tools.
A young woman watches the shoemaker cut leather, and an older man observes.
The artisans are relatively well-dressed. The shop master is bare-chested but wears a garland.
Clients are dressed as citizens, suggesting a power relationship.
Other depictions reiterate this portrait of shoemakers as obedient workers serving clients.
The other side of this vase has a complex depiction of metalworkers (Figure 2.3).
Two naked smiths hammer a metal rod on an anvil, with a forge and iconic tools.
Their work is admired by two citizens, and their gesture may invite viewers to assume the perspective of observing citizens.
The interior of the Berlin Foundry Cup shows Hephaestus preparing the arms of Achilles, but the exterior is exceptional (Figure 2.4).
It reveals an active bronze-sculpting workshop with installations and tools, focusing on ten figures.
The forge is tended by two men. A muscular youth leans on his tool, and a man hammers a bronze statue.
Two well-dressed men gaze at a larger-than-life-size bronze warrior, and artisans polish the statue.
The headless athlete attests an otherwise lost late archaic statue type.
Mattusch recognizes models used in indirect lost-wax casting.
The Foundry Painter need not have been intimately familiar with the process.
Scholars wonder if the idle citizens are proprietors, master sculptors, or buyers.
The pair replicate the position of the viewer, admiring the scene.
The scene expects an audience comfortable with the idea that metalworkers are of lesser status than citizens who exercise at the gym.
About half of the fifteen representations of metalworkers employ similar devices.
The remainder show metalworkers as attractive, well-toned youths.
FIGURE 2.2 Shoemakers on an Attic black-figure amphora attributed to the Plousios Painter, 500–490 BCE.
FIGURE 2.3 Blacksmiths on an Attic black-figure amphora attributed to the Plousios Painter, 500–490 BCE.

Beautiful Youths

On the opposite side from the citizens of the Berlin Foundry Cup, the young smith is rendered with a physique indistinguishable from an athlete.
The message is reiterated by an inscription stating “the boy is lovely” ("ho pais kalos") , referring to the nude young armorer depicted by the Antiphon Painter.
While the foreigner Mys is probably a metic or slave, the class of the youths shown in red-figure vases is ambiguous.
They are presented in an elevated context comparable to the mythical crafting of the arms of Achilles, and as physically attractive.
Together with the aforementioned carpenter and sculptor, these young craftsmen painted inside cups would be tempting images revealed at the end of a draft of wine, like much other subtly or overtly erotic imagery in late archaic red-figure tondos.
They suggest that physical labor could offer an alternate path to developing the desirable physique of an athlete, one that also produces the hoplite armor required by the elite citizenry.
Such images challenge the concept of craftsmen deformed by their work, though they do not go so far as showing metalworkers with the elevated status attained by the most renowned Greek sculptors of the classical period.
FIGURE 2.4 Athenian red-figure kylix by the Foundry Painter depicting the production of two bronze statues. From Vulci, 490–480 BCE.

Pottery and Sales

The remaining manufacturing scenes on pots concern pottery production itself.
Ten involve wheel-throwing by a potter assisted by an apprentice or slave, five depict painting, and the rest show related activities like pottery sales.
A skyphos by the Theseus painter probably shows stockpiles of clay for the production of something bigger than figure-decorated vases.
Scenes with potters throwing or selling vases must be votives, because the preponderance are represented on pots and pinakes from the Athenian Acropolis, where other vases have been found bearing explicitly votive inscriptions.
As likely thank-offerings to Athena created by the potter for his or her own consumption and dedication, this class of vessel would theoretically unshackle the potter from any need to make the composition appeal to (wealthy) buyers.
Yet the figures throwing pots are depicted with the same markers of low class as other manufacturers: they can be nude or only partly dressed, ill-proportioned, balding, or standing or sitting in awkward poses.
Potters had not learned the kick wheel.
Painters differentiate hierarchically among workshop personnel: boys turning the wheel have low-status marks, porters and kiln-workers are shown to rank below the potter, and all are below any visiting clients or owners.

Vase Painters

Unlike potters, vase painters are cast in the most consistently positive light of any category of worker.
An iconic tondo by the Antiphon Painter shows a youth painting a cup.
The diphros he sits upon, his long chiton (though wrapped at the waist) and his walking stick are insignia typical of citizens, and his physique may be credited to exercise at the gymnasium.
An even more flattering portrayal is found on the Caputi Hydria (Figure 2.5), where four artisans decorate amphoras and kraters.
The vessels are among the largest and most prestigious shapes, and the exceptional skill of the painters is celebrated by two nikai and Athena herself, who are crowning the painters with wreaths.
A hierarchy is implied, emphasizing the preeminence of the largest, well-dressed youth who is seated on a throne and approached by Athena.
The hydria also has the only representation of a female in a pottery studio.
Athena as patroness of artisans also visits a skillful elderly potter, and on an Acropolis dedication is next to a potter, a blacksmith, and a possible sculptor.
Unlike Hephaestus, she is not mocked, even when Athena is shown making something—sculpting a horse.
In this small collection of images, we see painters abandoning typically negative or passive representations in order to honor their profession and other skilled arts.
The positive attitude is compatible with the evidence for potters amassing sufficient wealth to dedicate large votives on the Acropolis and with early red-figure vases that name their painters among the elite participants in the symposium.

Food Production and Sales

The patterns observed among the manufacturers are largely replicated among agricultural scenes.
Plowing, harvesting, herding, and fishing can be considered together, comprising about fifty works after excluding the genre of satyrs making wine.
Most depictions of farming date to about 550–510 BCE, decidedly earlier than those with craftsmen.
Plowing with oxen appears on five black-figure vases.
Workers’ status seems low on a Siana cup by the Vintage Painter, where tiny laborers carry and tread grapes, then pour wine into a pot before a well-dressed, idling man.
Two unparalleled olive harvests by the Antimenes Painter provide clues about the relative hierarchy among adult male workers supervising naked boys who climb nimbly up the branches.
These scenes also convey a sheer visual delight in the spectacle of the harvest.
By the fifth century, the farmers from black-figure vases have been dropped in favor of comely country boys on red-figure vases.
Young men catching or transporting fish are one type.
Shepherds are shown as the object of romantic attention but wearing a rough pilos to signify their subsidiary status.
Merchants are a stock type repeated more than twenty-five times.
An early example depicts the weighing of goods, perhaps a symbol of the agricultural bounty from a large estate.
But the most popular version throughout the fifth century has salesmen seated among pots of fluids for sale.
The Plousios Painter gives his merchants a voice.
One of the two fills a jar of oil for sale with a funnel, proclaiming “Oh father Zeus, if only I could become rich!”
Painters gently poke fun at other oil-sellers who are shown shooing away stray dogs from their wares.

Athenian Women at Work

Women are more frequently shown at work than are men.
The vase paintings are compatible with the ancient notion of female virtue comprising both beauty and diligence.
The images reflect a male-centered view, and sometimes even a voyeuristic one.
A type common after the mid-sixth century has a line of young women filling water jars and carrying them home on their heads.
Even though they may be domestic servants and slaves, the water-carriers themselves are not conspicuously indicated as of low status like their male counterparts.
Instead, their labor outside the home puts them in a compromised position.
The group of pots depicting the sexual harassment and assault of female household dependents suggests the intended audience was males who might find the subject amusing, or females who would be admonished from going outside.

Textile Production

Textile production is the most common female labor depicted on Athenian vases.
The popularity of textile scenes rises alongside those with male manufacturing but continues to increase during the classical period.
We might guess from the commonest shapes of hydrias, lekythoi, and pyxides that many were selected by women for their own use.
However, about a sixth are cups that are marketed for male symposiasts, on which a young woman spins or cards wool.
One of the earliest and most ambitious depictions of wool-working is connected to domestic production, Amasis had, on a lekythos in the Metropolitan Museum, painted eleven figures and numerous devices, including an upright loom (Figure 2.6).
Several stages of work are done in pairs, with a lone woman at the right gesturing as if to point in admiration or to supervise production.
Another pair folds finished cloth.
The operation of the loom is carefully rendered.
The lekythos was found with another showing a bridal procession.
An early classical hydria from Rhodes shows a gathering of four wool-workers, akin to the Caputi Hydria workshop.
The space is framed by two youths, whose walking staffs signify they have come from outside.
The Leningrad Painter has left us a second workshop scene where industrious men and women collaborate.
The scene seems to show organized labor, perhaps hired or enslaved girls in the gynaikônitis of a wealthy home.
FIGURE 2.6 Women weaving, black-figure lekythos attributed to the Amasis Painter, 550–530 BCE.

Greek Representations of Work

Two additional remarks on the depictions of workers and their environments are warranted.
First, male nudity has been interpreted as a complex signifier of either a degraded status or an ideal athletic physique.
Second, Amasis, the Leningrad Painter, the Foundry Painter, and several others have left us vignettes of large-scale cooperative production among four to eleven workers.
On the one hand, painters are likely to have populated group scenes with as many figures as would comfortably fit within the panel, eliding redundant workers from restricted panels like the shoulder of a hydria.
The painting could conceivably intend to indicate just two weavers working at different tasks repeated endlessly through the lifetime of a married woman.
Only rarely do workers show up elsewhere than Athenian pots. Corinth produced one exceptional group with the archaeological discovery of crude pottery that served an apotropaic ritualistic function.
Athens has produced a few more notable examples such as The Acropolis Relief.
Athenian shoemakers are specially honored in three late classical reliefs such as Xanthippos’ Funeral Stele.
These rare moments give a limited voice to workers who show shoemaking in an unabashedly positive fashion.
Still, most of the painted images reflect an elite prejudice that crafts were of moderate but secondary interest, and artisans themselves of marginal status.

Picturing Work in Roman Society

Outside the Athenian democracy, most Greeks who patronized art seem to have found servile characters distasteful or uninteresting.
Romans were more inclined to show themselves working or to represent labor in public and private art.
The highest strata of Roman society avoided images with laborers, and in any case the preference for classical modes left few models (Athenian vases had long vanished from circulation).
However, some wealthy patrons did choose to depict workers such as the Vetti of Pompeii.
In the primary reception space of the house, clients awaiting their patrons could examine a series of thirteen panels with a variety of industrious amores and psyches.
Though the scenes are whimsical, the vignettes indicate tools and installations at a detail beyond that demanded for simply signifying a particular job.
The tombs of the wealthy show living workers as socially inferior to their patrons such as on the grave monument of Eurysaces, the baker however with much better detail unlike what we see from Greece.
Imperial art generally eschews any association with these base and servile means of income, with Trajan’s column a notable exception, where we see building scenes from his campaigns.
Other views from above can be found in the mosaics of Roman villas such as the Villas of Tunisia.

Self-Representation by Roman Workers

Unlike the Greeks, many Roman workers commissioned images of themselves perhaps from Etruscan influence.
One painting shows a carpenter’s procession on a wall next to the street entrance to a Pompeian shop (Figure 2.11).
Technically there is no labor happening, as the largest figures are instead carrying a ferculum.
She watches over what must be understood as effigies of carpenters, one planing a board, and two others sawing a board supported on an impossibly thin stick.
At the front, Daedalus stands over a dead body, his nephew Perdix, whom he killed in jealousy for inventing the saw and the compass like a primitive guild.
More explicit paintings of work from the house of Verecundus flank doorways opening to the street.
At Ostia Antica, in the Forum of the Corporations, mosaics identify the collegium of the grain measurers by showing a mensor at work levelling grain in a modius.
As with the multiperson Athenian workshop scenes, the internal hierarchy among the crew is made explicit by dress and age.
Many more depictions of Roman artisans and merchants have survived from cemeteries as seen from Gerhard ZImmer’s collection.
Both the epitaphs and the visual evidence show it was common for manumitted slaves to identify with the trades that earned their freedom, however many freeborn workers also identify themselves implying respect for their professions and for the potential upward social mobility granted.
FIGURE 2.11 Fresco depicting a procession of carpenters, from the Carpenter’s Workshop at Pompeii, first century CE.
FIGURE 2.12 Central panel depicting grain measurer and assistants, floor mosaic from the Forum of the Corporations, Ostia Antica.

Roman Workers in Tombs

Only a third of the funerary scenes of artisans catalogued by Zimmer depict active labor due to artistic convention.
The grave stele of Publius Longidienus Camillus prominently displays his bust together with that of his wife, formerly his slave, and those of the two additional libertini who commissioned the monument.
Other subjects omitted from the classical repertoire instead seem to originate in the visual traditions of northern Italy like Dresden butchers.
Roman Grave Relief of a Butcher and His Wife.
Group scenes are uncommon except for bakers, builders, metalworkers, and sailors—activities where the direction of many workers was an important part of the trade.
Working women are only occasionally shown on Roman grave monuments.

Conclusion

The hundreds of funerary reliefs occurring throughout Roman Europe over more than two centuries cannot be directly compared to Athenian vases from a 50-year period when painted scenes of laborers were in vogue.
These images correlate to the period of maximum prosperity of Rome, when commodities were being manufactured and distributed throughout the empire at unprecedented levels.
This explicit valuation of labor would seem very out of place in Greece, where workers generally avoided identifying trades in their graves.
Most Athenian vase painters who depicted laborers were employed by a potter hoping to sell wares in some kind of market, and thus the painters probably did not convey their own ideas about labor so much as those of their intended clientele.
The Roman seem more conservative about working women, avoiding depictions of them doing anything productive, even if a few exceptional cases do show women engaged in light physical labor.
The Greek and Roman representations of work reflect cultural attitudes in an immediately recognizable way.
These icons of labor cannot be used straightforwardly as ethnographic illustrations of ancient processes.
Still, if carefully judged against potential distortions, we can glean a great deal of valuable information about ancient production techniques and organization.