{"id":3328,"date":"2021-05-26T20:01:33","date_gmt":"2021-05-27T00:01:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/artsci.case.edu\/magazine\/?p=3328"},"modified":"2021-07-10T18:37:57","modified_gmt":"2021-07-10T22:37:57","slug":"shapers-of-memory","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artsci.case.edu\/magazine\/2021\/shapers-of-memory\/","title":{"rendered":"Shapers of Memory"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Maggie Popkin, the first CWRU faculty member ever to receive a Rome Prize, spent the spring semester in residence at the American Academy in Rome. Photo by Elliot Morrison<\/p><\/div>\n

Whenever Maggie Popkin <\/strong>considers an object from antiquity\u2014a triumphal arch, a glass figurine, an engraved silver goblet\u2014she asks what it reveals about the culture that produced it. She wonders how people thought about the object, and what it meant to them. She wants to know how it acted upon their memories and imaginations.<\/p>\n

Such queries have driven Popkin\u2019s research\u2014and led to her latest accolade: a 2020-21 Rome Prize, awarded by the American Academy in Rome, a major overseas center for advanced work in the fine arts and humanities.<\/p>\n

Popkin, the Robson Junior Professor and associate professor in the Department of Art History and Art, is the first Case Western Reserve faculty member ever to receive this honor. As the Andrew Heiskell Rome Prize Fellow in Ancient Studies, she joined 21 other distinguished scholars and creative artists for a five-month residency at the Academy this spring.<\/p>\n

\u201cMore than an excellent scholar, Professor Popkin combines an intellectual curiosity with a hunger for interdisciplinary engagement that is everything we look for in a Rome Prize Fellow,\u201d said jury member Steven Ellis, associate professor in the Department of Classics at the University of Cincinnati, when the award was announced last July. \u201cI\u2019m so very glad for both her and the Academy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Unexpectedly Captivating<\/h3>\n

Popkin\u2019s early exposure to art history helped set the direction for her future scholarship. As a first-year student at Williams College, she signed up for an introductory survey of Western art after hearing that it was one of the most popular courses in the curriculum. Although she had taken studio art in high school and was a serious painter, the field of art history was new to her. She enrolled in the class \u201cjust for fun,\u201d she says. Soon, she was won over.<\/p>\n

Art history, it turned out, was a more expansive field than she had realized, drawing ideas from anthropology and other humanistic disciplines. \u201cIt married my love of art with my interest in understanding human culture\u2014how people relate to each other and create social dynamics and power relations,\u201d she explains. Once Popkin declared her major and started taking advanced courses, she found that scholars of classical art were especially committed to an interdisciplinary approach. \u201cWe have such fragmentary evidence from the ancient world, you want to go at it from as many angles as you can,\u201d she explains.<\/p>\n

Popkin went on to earn a doctorate in art history and archaeology at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University. For her dissertation, she studied monuments Roman generals and emperors had built to celebrate their military victories. These structures, she argued, had influenced\u2014and sometimes distorted \u2014Romans\u2019 understanding of their history.<\/p>\n

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The Populonia Bottle, a glass flask dating
from the 3rd\u20134th century A.D., is engraved with monuments of the ancient port cities of Puteoli and Baiae. It was probably made as a souvenir. Populonia Bottle (probably 275\u2013325 A.D.). CMOG 62.1.31. Image licensed by The Corning Museum of Glass, Corning, NY (www.cmog.org) under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.<\/p><\/div>\n

During her time in graduate school, Popkin also wrote about smaller, less glorious objects: Roman souvenirs and memorabilia. Many of these artifacts\u2014including medallions, glass vessels, jewelry and toys\u2014had been excavated in far-flung provinces of the empire. They were decorated with images of cities, religious sites and festivals, and sporting events. To Popkin, these objects were unexpectedly captivating. Like the imperial monuments, they offered clues to \u201chow Romans perceived and conceptualized their world.\u201d<\/p>\n

Once she became a faculty member at Case Western Reserve in 2013, Popkin set about expanding her dissertation into a book. The Architecture of the Roman Triumph: Monuments, Memory, and Identity <\/em>was published three years later, and other professional accomplishments quickly followed. In 2017, shortly before she was appointed to the Robson chair, Popkin won a highly competitive fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities to pursue her interest in souvenirs.Finally, as a Rome Prize Fellow this spring, she finished writing her second book, Souvenirs and the Experience of Empire in Ancient Rome. <\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

The Impact of Objects<\/h3>\n

Traditionally, historians of classical art have devoted most of their attention to costly, large-scale works created for an educated elite, Popkin notes. Souvenirs, on the other hand, were inexpensive, portable and accessible to a wide range of socioeconomic classes. Roman visitors to the Parthenon in Athens encountered tradesmen selling miniature reproductions of the great statue of Athena. Travelers to the port city of Puteoli on the Bay of Naples could stop in at glassmakers\u2019 shops and purchase flasks adorned with sketches of local architectural landmarks. Fans of chariot racing and gladiatorial combat\u2014the empire\u2019s two major sports\u2014could purchase cups, knife handles or brooches depicting their favorite competitors.<\/p>\n

In assessing the significance of these objects, Popkin has drawn from recent work in cognitive science and neuropsychology\u2014fields that have shed light on the nature of human memory.<\/p>\n

Imagine, for instance, a merchant who returned from a business trip to Puteoli with one of those souvenir flasks. When he looked at the cityscape etched on its surface, he would have recognized structures he saw during his visit: the monumental pier in the harbor, two amphitheaters, a stadium, a temple honoring the emperor Augustus. By emphasizing these landmarks, Popkin suggests, artisans had projected an ideal vision of their city, whose architectural wonders testified to the patronage it had enjoyed under a series of Roman emperors.<\/p>\n

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Gladiators in combat appear on this glass drinking cup, dating from the 1st century A.D. Courtesy of Metropolitan Museum of Art<\/p><\/div>\n

But the flask might not have simply reminded the merchant of Puteoli\u2019s major attractions. Over time, it could also have altered the way he remembered the city. Sites depicted on the glass might have come to dominate his recollections, while others faded from his mind. Cognitive research, Popkin points out, has demonstrated that our memories are \u201cconstantly reshaped, constructed and reconstructed,\u201d and that \u201cvisual stimuli can manipulate, distort or falsify\u201d our mental images of places and actions we credit ourselves with recalling exactly as they were. The flask, then, could have been a \u201cshaper of memory,\u201d not merely an aid to it.<\/p>\n

Popkin also argues that the souvenir\u2019s impact might have extended beyond the merchant. Perhaps he would have shown the flask to guests or bequeathed it to his children. These people might never have visited Puteoli, but now they, too, would have had a mental image of the city. And <\/span>this image would have seemed definitive to them, since they had no postcards or travel brochures to compare it to. The visual representations on souvenirs were the only ones in circulation.<\/span><\/p>\n

Popkin tells a similar story about religious objects. Romans who did not travel to certain sacred sites would have seen famous statues of goddesses only in the form of souvenirs: a perfume bottle modeled after the Tyche of Antioch, a gem carved with the Artemis of Ephesus, a medallion on which the Parthenon\u2019s Athena bears her tri-crested helmet and shield.<\/p>\n

The sports memorabilia of ancient Rome hold a special fascination for Popkin, in part because they anticipate the sports merchandise of our own day. She writes that objects depicting gladiators and charioteers conferred celebrity status on select contenders and \u201ccreated an appetite for athletic performances in the provinces.\u201d They were critical to the emergence of team loyalties and a sense of community among fans who were dispersed across the empire.<\/p>\n

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These two objects\u2014a bronze statuette (1st\u20132nd century A.D.) and a glass bottle (2nd\u20133rd century A.D.)\u2014are both modeled on the Tyche of Antioch, a famous Greek statue depicting the goddess of fortune. Yale University Art Gallery<\/p><\/div>\n

Excluding such objects from our study of antiquity, Popkin argues, would be like omitting social media and other aspects of popular culture from an analysis of our postmodern world: \u201cYou couldn\u2019t hope to understand our experiences today without considering those,\u201d she says. And Popkin doesn\u2019t worry that she is attributing greater meaning to these objects than the Romans did themselves. Many souvenirs, she notes, have been discovered at burial sites\u2014evidence that their owners valued them highly enough to take them along to the afterlife.<\/p>\n

A Vibrant Community<\/h3>\n

Popkin speaks gratefully of the opportunities afforded her during her residency as a Rome Prize Fellow. She revisited many of the city\u2019s most important collections of ancient art and explored several museums for the first time. Italian colleagues generously shared their expertise; for example, she toured the Circus Maximus, the ancient stadium for chariot racing, with the archaeologist in charge of the excavations there.<\/p>\n

Popkin also had access to the extraordinary library of the American Academy in Rome, and to its specialized collections of rare books and archaeological studies. But the greatest resource of all, she says, was the vibrant intellectual community the fellows created. They took walks through different parts of the city, sharing insights about its history. When they learned that an ancient Roman aqueduct, the Aqua Traiana, runs beneath the Academy\u2019s building, they climbed down into it to look around. Each week, one humanities scholar and one artist would present their work together in a \u201cshop talk.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI was paired with Katherine Balch, a composer who uses quotidian objects as instruments,\u201d Popkin recalls. \u201cIt was wonderful to think about how we are both rehabilitating \u2018ordinary\u2019 objects that people often overlook but that have so much potential for creating amazing music or helping us understand society.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Whenever Maggie Popkin <\/strong>considers an object from antiquity\u2014a triumphal arch, a glass figurine, an engraved silver goblet\u2014she asks what it reveals about the culture that produced it. She wonders how people thought about the object, and what it meant to them. …Read more.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":97,"featured_media":3477,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":""},"categories":[59],"tags":[],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/artscimedia.case.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/147\/2021\/05\/09150406\/Popkin_featured_web1.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artsci.case.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3328"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artsci.case.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artsci.case.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artsci.case.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/97"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artsci.case.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3328"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/artsci.case.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3328\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3399,"href":"https:\/\/artsci.case.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3328\/revisions\/3399"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artsci.case.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3477"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artsci.case.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3328"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artsci.case.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3328"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artsci.case.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3328"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}