Touching the Gods in Ancient Art

What is the significance of the sense of touch among the figures of immortals and mortals in ancient artworks?

“Previously, reliefs or sculptures in the round typically showed either gods or dedicants,” said Nathan Arrington in a March 4 lecture titled “The Distance of the Gods: Touch in Greek Votive Reliefs,” which he delivered to Yale’s History of Art Department at the Loria Center. 

“In the 5th Century gods and humans appear together in votives, in the same figural field,” said Arrington, Professor in the Department of Art and Archaeology and Hellenic Studies at Princeton University and Chair of the Department of Art and Archaeology. “Apart from their size, these gods look like humans.” 

The anthropomorphism of Greek gods presented a challenge and an opportunity for ancient artists, said Arrington, who specializes in classical archeology with a focus on the material culture of ancient Greece, spanning from the Early Archaic through the Late Roman periods. 

Arrington illustrated his thesis with images of reliefs and statuary in Greek sanctuaries, particularly Athenian sanctuaries, in the late 5th and 4th centuries.

“How could one sufficiently honor the gods through visual means, given their possible human appearances? How did one remain true to their form while distinguishing them from the mortal world?”

Arrington, who received the Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize from the College Art Association for his 2018 article about touch and remembrance in Greek funerary art, said one way to understand how artists honored gods was to examine the sense of touch in artworks as experienced in Greek sanctuary. “Are mortals and immortals sufficiently close that they can touch one another? Did Greeks conceive of the bodies of the gods as so similar to humans that haptic sensations could be shared? What happens when they are located in the same artistic space?”

Attentiveness to touch, he said, “might provide a new way of thinking about mortal-immortal relations in and through art.” Several ways to approach the issue, Arrington noted, are by examining the physical interactions with cult statues, devotional practices and supplication, and the handling of small-scale objects and figurines.

Arrington concluded: “I wonder if the reliefs aren’t engaging in a more ambitious attempt to create the space and grounds for a type of divine touch, suspending the normal parameters of touch to create a world in which divine encounter is possible, if only in a dream, if only on a stone.”

Arrington, who is both an art historian and an archeologist, also co-directs the Molyvoti, Thrace, Archeological Project, an interdisciplinary excavation and survey project in northern Greece.

Arrington’s books include “Ashes, Images, and Memories: The Presence of the War Dead in Fifth-Century Athens” (Oxford University Press, 2015), which explores how ancient Athenian art and monuments shaped social memory of the war dead, and “Athens at the Margins: Pottery and People in the Early Mediterranean World” (Princeton University Press, 2021), which rethinks how interregional interactions influenced Greek art and culture. 

Beyond his books, Arrington has published articles and chapters on Greek funerary art, mortuary objects, and how material culture shapes social and political life.