Seal-Impressions (typoi) and Ancient Image Making

Art historian Verity Platt joins me in the Lesche to discuss her much-anticipated new book Epistemic Impressions: Making and Mediating Classical Art and Text (Oxford 2026).
On May 11, the Queen Mary University of London Imagination Research Network will be hosting a "launch symposium" to celebrate the book's publication. Information and tickets are available here (eventbrite.co.uk/e/third-annual-meeting-of-the…).
The novel that Verity recommends at the end of the podcast is When the Museum is Closed, by Emi Yagi. Read an excerpt here (lithub.com/when-the-museum-is-closed), in Yuki Tejima's translation.
Ancient sources
• Dionysius of Halicarnassus, various treatises (see Verity's Ch. 5) for the term archetypon (and 'style' as charaktēr)
• Herodotus 3.40-43, on the "seal" of Polycrates
• Mesomedes 9, "Ekphrasis of a sponge" (see here on Mesomedes (content.e-bookshelf.de/media/reading/L-2623450…), a Hadrianic-era poet)
• Philostratus, for using languge relating to "impressions" and typoi
• Plato's, esp. Republic, Phaedrus, Timaeus and on mimesis
• Pliny the Elder, Natural History book 35 (103 on the story of Protogenes and the sponge)
• Posidippus, various epigrams, esp. AB 13-15 (Verity reads AB 14)
• Theophrastus, On Stones
Modern bibliography/references
• The work of Charles Sanders Peirce (American scientist, mathematician and semiotician) on the "index" and "indexical reference"
• Platt, V. J. 2016. ‘The Artist as Anecdote: Creating Creators in Ancient Texts and Modern Art History’. In J. Hanink and R. Fletcher, (eds). 2016. Creative Lives in Classical Antiquity: Poets, Artists, and Biography. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 274–304.
• Pollitt, J. J. 1974. The Ancient View of Greek Art: Criticism, History, and Terminology. New Haven: Yale University Press.
• Stoichita, V. I. 1997. A Short History of the Shadow. London: Reaktion Books.
• Image: Joseph Wright's "The Corinthian Maid (nga.gov/artworks/61396-corinthian-maid)" (oil on canvas, 1782-84), in the National Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.).
About our guest
Verity Platt is a professor of Classics and History of Art at Cornell University, where she is also co-curator of the plaster cast collection and directs the Humanities Scholar Program for undergraduates. She is the author of Facing the Gods: Epiphany and Representation in Graeco-Roman Art, Literature, and Religion (Oxford 2011), and the newly published Epistemic Impressions: Making and Mediating Classical Art and Text (Oxford 2026). She is also an editor of the Classical Receptions Journal.
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Thanks for joining us in the Lesche!

Podcast art: Daniel Blanco
Theme music: "The Song of Seikilos (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seikilos_epitaph)," recomposed by Eftychia Christodoulou using Sibelius

This podcast is made possible with the generous support of Brown University’s Department of Classical Studies (brown.edu/academics/classics/classical-studies…) and the John Nicholas Brown Center for Advanced Study (jnbc.brown.edu). jnbc.brown.edu
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