2020.12.04 | By Gregory Nagy §0. In the title of this essay, the wording ‘sweet bird’ echoes what we hear in part of a poem by John Milton, Il Penseroso (1645/1646), later set to music by George Frideric Handel (1740), whose librettist merged Milton’s poem with the symmetrical L’Allegro (1645). So, Milton’s poetry became for Handel an extended song blending the mirth of L’Allegro with the melancholy of Il Penseroso.… Read more
2020.11.13 | By Natasha Bershadsky §0. I pick up here the thread of an essay by Gregory Nagy where he connects a vase painting that pictures a girl with a little pet bird, as painted by the Meidias Painter, with Poems 2 and 3 of Catullus. I will argue that there is a poetics of fluidity in identifying this little bird, and that the identities of such birds actually depends… Read more
2020.11.13 | By Gregory Nagy §0. For an illustration that is most relevant to what I have to say in this essay, I show a line-drawing of a close-up from a vase painting by the Meidias Painter, whose artistic career, in Athens, can be dated to the late fifth century BCE. In this close-up, we see the picturing of a lady named Eurynoe (ΕΥΡΥΝΟΗ) who is playfully teasing a pet… Read more
2020.11.06 | By Gregory Nagy §0. The two images that I show here in introducing this essay are line drawings of close-ups taken from two separate vase paintings created by an artist known to art historians as the Meidias Painter, whose career as a vase painter in Athens can be dated to the late fifth century BCE. In these close-ups, I focus on a single figure who is represented in… Read more
