National Lecture Program

AIA Lecturer: Patricia E. Kim

Affiliation: New York University

Patricia Kim is an Associate Professor at the Gallatin School of Individualized Study and a member of the Affiliate Faculty in the Department of Classics New York University. She holds degrees from the University of Pennsylvania (PhD and MA), and and UC Berkeley.  Her research interests include the archaeology and art of Hellenistic Greece, Egypt, and Western and Central Asia; gender, ethnicity, and race in antiquity; and public art and monuments.  She has created multi-disciplinary public installations in collaboration with artists, scientists, and technology experts.  Her latest monograph is The Art of Hellenistic Queenship: Bodies of Power (2024, Cambridge University Press).

Abstracts:


Beginning in the early fourth century BCE, a significant change in monuments occurred: dynastic and royal women were represented in public art for the first time throughout the Aegean. What explains these curious innovations in the history of art and the history of women?

Through distinct case studies, this talk discusses the roles that queens played as both subjects and patrons of dynastic monuments throughout the Hellenistic world—from the Hecatomnids of Lycia in the fourth century to the Attalids at Pergamon in the second century. On the one hand, such monuments uniquely affirmed the presence and power of a royal dynasty vis à vis the image, memory, and/or deeds of the queen. On the other hand, such monuments also expressed ideas that were central to dynastic legitimacy and continuity, including kinship, mythological and divine links, and triumph. Such a look at the archaeological and art historical record for spectacular monuments begins to illuminate the exceptional political responsibilities of dynastic women in the Hellenistic world, while contributing to our knowledge of women in the history of ancient art.

If “male nudity” was a costume of heroism in Greek art, how did royal women wear the “female body” in the Hellenistic world? With a particular focus on the evidence for the Ptolemaic empire, this talk illuminates the stakes of royal women’s bodies in dynastic art and politics.

Portrayals of Ptolemaic queens took place across a variety of contexts and in different styles, materials, and scales, including on temple reliefs and large-scale stone sculpture to gems, vessels, and graphic arts (e.g. mosaics). Despite the remarkable eclecticism in visual and material culture, the Ptolemaic queen’s body was often represented in sexually alluring ways in both images and texts. On the one hand, such evidence suggests that the figural representation of their queens was central to the Ptolemaic dynasty’s expressions of power across Egypt and the eastern Mediterranean. On the other hand, many of these representations bring special attention to the contours of the female body, especially to female sex characteristics and erogenous zones, emphasizing the ‘sexiness’ of her body in surprising ways. Ultimately, this talk discusses the role of representations of the female body and feminine beauty in articulations of dynastic and imperial power.

In the Hellenistic world, both royal courts and non-royal subjects deified their queens as a way to further elevate the legitimacy of a ruling dynasty. While some women were linked with powerful goddesses like Aphrodite, others were divinized in their own right. Royal women’s cults depended on and were facilitated by their portraiture. That is, the corporeal presence of a queen was central to her cult.

This talk focuses on the eclectic visual and material articulations of queens’ cults throughout the Ptolemaic and Seleucid Empires in particular. Such representations of the deified queen took place across multiple formats, scales, and materials: large-scale honorific portraits in marble or bronze, portable objects fashioned from luxury materials, and even ephemeral performances constitute the corpus of queen’s cultic images. Moreover, these remarkable aesthetic strategies were either entirely invented or adapted from older, more ‘traditional’ modes of representation in order to facilitate the cults of and for dynastic women. What these examples illustrate is that the portrayal and embodiment of divinized queens throughout the Hellenistic world not only encouraged their worship, but also ensured attitudes of dynastic devotion.

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