I am a non-resident Fellow at the Center this year (I will be in residence, however, in April and hope to meet some of you then) and a research project in the field of Classics has brought me, mirabile dictu, to Africa. Read more
Everyone is into data mining these days. Retailers find patterns in what you buy so that they can better market to you, governments search for patterns that identify terrorist threats, and data mining is at the core of privacy debates about the quarry of information collected by Facebook, Google and other websites. But the news isn't all potentially nefarious or the subject of impending litigation. Data mining is simply a… Read more
Simonides’ dictum “Painting is silent poetry, poetry is speaking painting” is very well known and appears over and over again in modern studies of ancient art and ecphrastic literature; Plutarch himself, who quotes it in The fame of the Athenians 3 (mor. 346F), refers to it elsewhere as “that often… Read more
In his History of Animals, Aristotle makes the following comment (HA VII 6, 585b28-586a4): “And from deformed [parents] deformed [offspring] comes to be, just as lame come to be from lame and blind from blind, and in general they resemble often the features that are against nature, and have inborn… Read more
Life-likeness is an old aesthetic ideal foregrounded time and again in ancient descriptions of works of art. The pertaining problems were addressed frequently: Perfect life-likeness in a way means perfect deception, while excessive authenticity can sometimes ruin the art work, as the epigram by Lucillius I quoted in my last… Read more
