In a lecture titled “Beyond the Pictorial: The Materiality of Classical Gems,” Rachel Patt, Mary Seeger O’Boyle Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Princeton’s Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies, discusses the ways in which viewers in antiquity would have engaged with gemstones that expanded beyond the miniature images carved onto impossibly small surfaces.
Dr. Patt explores what is meant precisely by “materiality,” a term for the many ways the matter of things matters, and approaches these tiny objects in terms of their physical and aesthetic qualities considering their material dynamism alongside the traditional art historical concern of iconography.
