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.

The novel that Verity recommends at the end of the podcast is When the Museum is Closed, by Emi Yagi. Read an excerpt here, 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, 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" (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," recomposed by Eftychia Christodoulou using Sibelius

This podcast is made possible with the generous support of Brown University’s Department of Classical Studies and the John Nicholas Brown Center for Advanced Study.

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