Taken in by the Roman Consul Scipio, Polybius was allowed to travel while remaining a captive and witnessed the Punic wars and the sack of Carthage. First-hand accounts of these and other world-altering events suffuse his Histories and info…According to Pliny the Elder in The Natural History, 77-79 C.E. (in an example of laodogmatika that Polybius would have contested) the art of painting originated with people tracing the outlines of one another’s shadows. Pliny later alludes…As Polybius of Arcadia, captive of Rome, champion of facticity and ‘universal history’ against tragedy and spectacle, fades, his namesake game, one (of many) early vectors overwhelming facticity with spectacular memesis and incipient necrop…
Erwin Panofsky
art historian · 3 mentions across 1 reading
In this course
This entry appears to conflate Erwin Panofsky (the art historian known for iconological method and the study of symbolic meaning in visual culture) with Polybius, the ancient Greek historian—the excerpts consistently reference Polybius of Arcadia, not Panofsky. The course readings seem to be using Polybius's tension between facticity and spectacle, and his resistance to aesthetic distortion of historical truth, as a theoretical ancestor for thinking about how machine learning systems and algorithmic mediation reproduce or contest similar struggles between data-driven representation and mythic narratives. Without clear Panofsky citations, it's unclear whether he's being invoked for his iconographic methods or remains a misattribution in these materials.
Mentioned in 1 reading
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