More about François Lissarrague and his Sather lectures

The 100th Sather Professor is François Lissarrague, who has spent most of his distinguished career at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, working closely with its Centre ANHIMA (= Anthropologie et Histoire des Mondes anciens), which incorporates the former Centre Louis Gernet, for which he served as Director.

Prof. Lissarrague is one of the world's leading scholars of ancient Greek iconography. His main area of interest is the interpretation of Attic imagery: of the symposium, sport, warriors, heroes and the gods. He deals also with questions of gender and is interested in sociological and structuralist approaches to the ancient world. He is the author of many seminal books and articles. Those of his books translated into English include The City of Images (1989), The Aesthetics of the Greek Banquet (1990), Heroes and Gods of Antiquity (with Irene Aghion and Claire Barbillon) (1996) and The Athenians and Their Images (2000).

Over the course of his career, Professor Lissarrague has held positions as a visiting lecturer, fellow and conference convenor at many institutions, including the Universities of Pisa, Lausanne, Picardie, Berne, Lund, Siena, Modena, Fribourg, Oxford, Michigan, Cornell, the Getty Villa, l'Institutum Studiorum Humanitatis in Ljubljana, as well as the École du Louvre in several French cities. He gave seminars and public lectures at several Australian universities in 2008 as the Australian Archaeological Institute at Athens Visiting Professor, and in 2010-11 was a Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin.

About the 2014 lectures

PANTA KALA: everything is beautiful. So says Priam in the Iliad, alluding to the heroic body of a young dead warrior. This lecture series will explore several aspects of the relationship between the heroic body and weaponry as a medium expressing that beauty. It starts from a methodological assessment of the way one can use images to gain some understanding of a society, provided proper account is taken of the distortions possible between “reality” and “image.” The series will focus on the imagery of Attic vase-painting and the way painters represented heroic warriors, especially those from the Trojan cycle. Detailed attention will be paid to the relationship between body and armor, the animal metaphors used by painters decorating armor, and the system of images employed on shields, as well as to the accumulated prestige that attaches to armor through transmission and display. The final lecture in the series will discuss the relationship between beauty and violence alongside the social use of such images in Athenian society.