On the reception of Sappho as a personal experience to be expressed in pictures: examples from two vase paintings produced in classical Athens, fifth century BCE

Abstract

The two images that I mention in the title of this essay are line drawings of close-ups taken from two separate vase paintings created by an artist known to art historians as the Meidias Painter, whose career as a vase painter in Athens can be dated to the late fifth century BCE. In these close-ups, shown below at the end of my introductory paragraph here, I focus on a single figure who is represented in both paintings. She is a beautiful lady who is given the name Pannychis by way of the lettering next to her painted figure in each of the two pictures (this lettering is barely visible even in the best photographs). As I argued in a previous essay (Nagy 2020.10.30), the meaning of this name Pannychis, ‘all-night-long’, tells the story: she is a goddess who personifies the experience of a girl who is enjoying the beauty and the pleasure of an all-night party in the company of other girls. Such beauty and pleasure, as I also argued, is represented in the songs of Sappho, and it is to such songs that the painter refers. So, the painting of the painter becomes part of what I would call the reception of Sappho in the ancient world. But now I take the argument further. In this essay, I hope to show that such reception, which is ordinarily viewed as a collectivized experience, can be, at the same time, also an individual experience—something that is deeply personal. And one way to express such personal experience in visual art is to personify what is being experienced. That personification is the goddess Pannychis.