Rachel Kousser
Rachel Kousser is Professor at Brooklyn College and Executive Officer (basically, chair) of the Program in Classics at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. In her writing and teaching, she focuses on the Greeks' creation, transformation, and destruction of monuments; the representation of gender, sexuality, and power in the classical era; and the place of Greek art within the globally interconnected ancient world. Her most recent work, The Afterlives of Greek Sculpture: Interaction, Transformation, Destruction (Cambridge University Press, 2017), received an Archaeological Institute of America Publication Subvention Award and was shortlisted for the Runciman Book Award for a book on Greek history or culture. Professor Kousser is also the author of Hellenistic and Roman Ideal Sculpture: The Allure of the Classical (Cambridge University Press, 2008) and of articles in Art Bulletin, RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, and the American Journal of Archaeology. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment of the Humanities, the Getty Research Institute, and the Center for the Advanced Study of the Visual Arts. Her current project, Alexander at the End of the World: The Forgotten Final Years of Alexander the Great, uses archaeological evidence to illuminate the last years of Alexander the Great; it is forthcoming in July 2024 from HarperCollins.
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Papers by Rachel Kousser
In recent years, scholars have highlighted the moral and ethical connotations of classicism in the early empire. Drawing especially on elite literary texts, they have characterized classicism as an elevated style appropriate for the gods, and for the new princeps. This article brings together Greek-style images of Aphrodite from the public and private realms to offer a different perspective; my focus is on the allure, rather than the moral authority, of Classical forms. At the same time, I demonstrate how this allure took on programmatic functions in the early principate. In major public monuments such as the Forum Augustum, it signaled the attractive qualities of the new imperial system through the metaphor of a beautiful woman’s body. In paintings and statuettes from the private sphere, by contrast, it helped to create the pleasurable ambiance that was central to the Roman conception of otium. This article thus complements earlier studies to provide a more nuanced understanding of Greek art, and especially Greek Aphrodite types, in Roman visual culture.
The statue, it is argued, was set up within the civic gymnasium of Melos. Furthermore, Aphrodite likely held out an apple in token of her victory in the Judgment of Paris, as newly accessible sculptural fragments found with the statue demonstrate. The sculpture responds to and transforms both Classical visual prototypes and earlier narratives of the Judgment, familiar to Greek audiences from the period of Homer onwards. And the Aphrodite was appropriate for display within a gymnasium since it exemplifies a critical aspect of that institution’s role during the Hellenistic period: the creation of a standardized and highly selective vision of the past to serve as a model for the present. Thus the statue, analyzed within its original context, greatly enhances our understanding of the reception of Classical sculpture and mythological narrative in Hellenistic Greece.
Books by Rachel Kousser
Book Reviews by Rachel Kousser
In recent years, scholars have highlighted the moral and ethical connotations of classicism in the early empire. Drawing especially on elite literary texts, they have characterized classicism as an elevated style appropriate for the gods, and for the new princeps. This article brings together Greek-style images of Aphrodite from the public and private realms to offer a different perspective; my focus is on the allure, rather than the moral authority, of Classical forms. At the same time, I demonstrate how this allure took on programmatic functions in the early principate. In major public monuments such as the Forum Augustum, it signaled the attractive qualities of the new imperial system through the metaphor of a beautiful woman’s body. In paintings and statuettes from the private sphere, by contrast, it helped to create the pleasurable ambiance that was central to the Roman conception of otium. This article thus complements earlier studies to provide a more nuanced understanding of Greek art, and especially Greek Aphrodite types, in Roman visual culture.
The statue, it is argued, was set up within the civic gymnasium of Melos. Furthermore, Aphrodite likely held out an apple in token of her victory in the Judgment of Paris, as newly accessible sculptural fragments found with the statue demonstrate. The sculpture responds to and transforms both Classical visual prototypes and earlier narratives of the Judgment, familiar to Greek audiences from the period of Homer onwards. And the Aphrodite was appropriate for display within a gymnasium since it exemplifies a critical aspect of that institution’s role during the Hellenistic period: the creation of a standardized and highly selective vision of the past to serve as a model for the present. Thus the statue, analyzed within its original context, greatly enhances our understanding of the reception of Classical sculpture and mythological narrative in Hellenistic Greece.