A Roman Vessel for Cosmetics: Form, Decoration, and Subjectivity in the Muse Casket

In 1793, laborers digging a well at the foot of the Esquiline hill in Rome came upon the ruins of an ancient house and buried therein what proved to be the largest and most spectacular silver treasure from antiquity discovered up to that time. The known surviving items of the so-called Esquiline Treasure—probably made in the second half of the fourth century CE and concealed by its last owners sometime in late antiquity to protect it from marauders or invading barbarians, but surely intended to have been recovered and reused by them—include some very famous pieces: the Projecta Casket, the Tyche statuettes of Rome, Constantinople, Antioch, and Alexandria, a number of dishes, spoons, and ewers (Figure 2.1). Among these is the Muse Casket, a circular vessel, just under 33 cm in diameter and a little less than 27 cm high when covered with its lid. It is made of sheet silver, shaped and decorated with repoussé and engraving. Its lid is a silver dome recessed from the edge of a flat rim and attached to the base by a soldered hinge, with a narrow tab opposite the hinge for raising and lowering the cover (Figure 2.2). Inside it has five smaller vessels for toiletries and cosmetics, so that the casket as a whole was made to be used as a container for unguents. The art of the toiletry box—as a vessel that contains other vessels—casts light onto a problem that is faced across cultures, namely, improving or elevating a person’s physical or spiritual state by operating a complex device—a container of containers—and using the contents stored therein. Different cultures may seek different symbolisms to structure the generation of meaning, based on their own specific traditions and ideologies. In the case of the Muse Casket, the artifactual logic—structured through the material invitation to open, close, and use a box, and to open, close, and use the containers within it—operates alongside an iconographic rhetoric of surface decoration that alludes to the divine, that is in this case, to the Muses and the Dionysiac sphere.

Practice and Discourse: Ritual Vessels in a Fourth-Century BCE Chinese Tomb

Supposedly articulated by Confucius himself (ca. 551–ca. 479 BCE), this tightly knit political rhetoric provides a logical context for understanding the intrinsic relationship between qi (vessel, insignia, instrument) and li (ritual, rite, propriety), a central concern of Rujia 儒家—the School of Confucians—in the second half of the Eastern Zhou, from the fifth to third century BCE. The idea that vessels store essential ritual codes is stated more plainly in the Book of Rites: “The round and square food containers fu 簠 and gui 簋, the stand zu 俎, and the tall dish dou 豆, with their regulated forms and decoration, are the vessels (qi) embodying ritual propriety (li).” One of the major intellectual forces at the time, Rujia developed the notion of li on two fronts: as a principal concept in its political, moral, and aesthetic teachings, and as specific rules governing different kinds of ritual performances, including the use of ritual vessels and other ritual paraphernalia on special occasions. Accordingly li is applied to two major aspects of human lives: ceremonies and related practices; and social conventions—primarily those of law, human relations, and morality—that govern the working of society at large. These two aspects overlap. In the idealized society envisioned by Eastern Zhou Confucians, ceremonies and ritual vessels reflect and regulate human relationships and thus determine legal and moral standards. In this sense a bronze or pottery vessel can embody ritual codes and social principles. Whereas the Confucian theory of li has been a central subject in modern scholarship on traditional Chinese philosophy, the Confucian discourse on qi has received much less attention. To those who study Eastern Zhou material and visual culture, this lack is related to another overlooked issue concerning the relationship between discourses and practice: In what way were Confucian ritual writings, especially those on ritual vessels and procedures, connected to actual ritual performance? This question is not general but specific and historical because the predecessors of Rujia arose from ritual specialists, and many of its members carried on this profession in the late Eastern Zhou and even the Han. This is why Confucian ritual texts are often practical guides to conducting ritual affairs. How can we connect these writings to contemporary ritual objects, tombs, and other ritual structures found through archaeological excavations?

Introduction

The vessel might seem an unproblematic category. Vessels are, after all, essential to human survival. They are necessary to contain water, to cook, to store food and goods for future use. Nearly all societies have made and used them; indeed, clay vessels, or their fragments, are one of the principal kinds of archaeological data that give us empirical access into distant worlds of the past. A good proportion of ancient art in museum collections around the world consists of things we would categorize as vessels. Such ubiquity makes vessels central to many kinds of historical investigation. Archaeologists rely on quantitative surveys of durable potsherds to answer questions about chronology, population, trade, and the function of particular spaces, while close attention to the iconography on vessels furnishes important documentary evidence about many aspects of ancient society. Yet as the essays in this volume demonstrate, such approaches by no means exhaust the perspectives that vessels may offer on ancient societies. Many vessels—and assemblages of vessels— were in their own time sites of considerable intellectual power, smart and sophisticated commentaries on the very categories that they embody. On closer examination, the category of the vessel is complex. A vessel is defined not only by its shape, but also by its function, by the presumption that it contains something, though that something may be concealed when the vessel is in use and is not always easy to reconstruct from the archaeological record. But what about a Greek rhyton, a drinking horn with an opening at the bottom, so that liquids poured into one end stream out the other? What about an unused vessel that never held its intended contents; a Maya chocolate pot, broken and then repaired in a way that is no longer watertight; or a thin and fragile gu cup from a Chinese tomb, the form so attenuated that it could never be used? “Is it really a vessel?” is perhaps the least interesting question we can ask about these objects. As Richard Neer argues in his essay in this volume, for us as much as for the ancient Greeks, the value of the category “vessel” might lie precisely in its openness.

When Pots Had Legs: Body Metaphors on Maya Vessels

A body is a vessel. A vessel is a body. This metaphor frequently proved irresistible to ancient artisans, yet the conceptual work that it did varied greatly across time and space. A Moche stirrup-spouted vessel in the shape of a human head, perhaps a portrait of a specific individual, is by no means the same as a Protocorinthian aryballos where an elaborately coiffed female head tops the swelling curves of the oil flask beneath (for more on body metaphors in Greek ceramics, see Richard Neer’s essay in this volume). Neither is like a ritual wine beaker in the shape of a fantastical bird, every inch of its cast bronze surface patterned with symmetrical masks.3 But morphology is not meaning. Saying that a vessel is shaped like a body is where the inquiry must begin, not where it ends. In this chapter, I trace the shifting meanings associated with the body metaphor in Maya pottery from the city of Tikal, located in modern Guatemala. Between 300 and 800 CE, there were at least three moments when lids adorned with human heads caused vessels to be read as bodies. Vessels became a medium of fruitful dialogue with the past, as each iteration of the theme clearly drew on previous precedent, but used it to radically different ends. What began as a relatively unpopular adjunct to a predominant world of animal body metaphors on clay serving dishes before 400 CE became a satisfying way to integrate foreign forms in succeeding decades and the key touchstone in a pair of archaizing vessels made out of precious jade centuries later. Within this chain of associations, the bodies invoked became increasingly specific, their meanings more and more politically charged. It is surprisingly difficult to write about an individual vessel in isolation. Bound by the constraints of function and tradition, each vessel is an entry into a series of similar objects. Much of the interest—and what makes the examples here so distinctive—is in the way that they play on the existing constraints and conventions of their genre, eking new meaning out of small but conceptually significant changes in decorative program. Getting at how this is accomplished means paying close attention to each individual vessel, while also thinking about series, context, assemblage, interaction, and intended contents.

Ancient Greek Vessels between Sea, Earth, and Clouds

What is a vessel? It is, first and foremost, a tool. It is a tool historically, in the prosaic sense of an item manufactured in the more or less distant past for the purpose of containing something. But a vessel is also a tool for historians: vessel is a taxonomic term, naming a category of data that we use to build arguments. An animating idea of the present volume is that these two tools may not be identical. It is for this reason that it makes sense to ask: What is, what counts as, a vessel? One might rephrase this question more precisely to say: What are the necessary and/or sufficient conditions of being a vessel? This way of putting it is very Greek, even Socratic. But what if there are no such conditions, nothing that does the work of essence when it comes to vessels? That seems, in fact, to be the case when it comes to Archaic and Classical Greek materials. This is not to say that ancient Greek vessels had nothing in common beyond the fact that they were called vessels (angeia, skeuē). What these objects had in common is that they were vessels, which is to say that they answered to a certain use. In early Greece, the application of a term like vessel was arbitrary, not random, and could be projected into new and unexpected contexts. There is no answer to the question, What is a vessel? if, like Socrates, we take it to request a definition; the demand for a definition only leads to problems. I will make this point informally, by demonstration and reductio. It may be tempting to identify the two ways of using the word vessel that I have just described with the anthropologist’s distinction between emic and etic categories. How does the “insider’s view,” the emic category, of a given type-concept relate to the “outsider’s perspective,” the etic one? This way of putting the matter begs the question in at least two ways. The first way has to with the distinction itself, the second, with the notion of category that it implies.