Figurines

Jaś Elsner is Professor of Late Antique Art at the University of Oxford and Humfry Payne Senior Research Fellow in Classical Archaeology and Art at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He is also Visiting Professor of Art and Religion at the University of Chicago, and External Scientific Member of the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz. He is a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the Max Planck Society, as well as a Fellow of the British Academy. He works on all areas of art and religion in antiquity and the early middle ages across Europe and Western Asia, including pilgrimage, travel-writing, and the description of art in texts, and is particularly interested in the problems of comparativism in art history. Along with the other contributors to this book, he is a member of the Center for Global Ancient Art at the University of Chicago which is committed to comparative study of archaeological and art historical issues in all cultures across the ancient world.

Elsner's book should be used ... as a springboard for scholars and students to experiment with, pushing themselves to articulate and theorize their own approach to figurines, miniaturization, scale, and animation in their respective fields of study, and to conceive of figurines as semiotic icons in playful, creative ways. Scholars and students of art history, archaeology, and the study of material culture, will therefore find this book potent with questions that may inspire innovative studies in their own regions, cultures, and periods of specialty.

• Jaś Elsner: Introduction 1: Richard Neer: Small Wonders: Figurines, Puppets, and the Aesthetics of Scale in Archaic and Classical Greece 2: Claudia Brittenham: Shifting Scales at La Venta 3: Wu Hung: Thinking Through Scale: The First Emperor's Sculptural Enterprise 4: Jaś Elsner: The Death of the Figurine: Reflections on an Abrahamic Abstention Claudia Brittenham: Epilogue