298 cecily j. hilsdale
framework of the discipline, those that fail to accord with canonic designations?
Second, what would a Mediterranean reading of visual culture more broadly look
like? How, in other words, might a Mediterranean framework reinvigorate those
examples of art and architecture that do fit within the traditional designations, those
works that are securely situated in traditional disciplinary taxonomies? In asking what
is to be gained by thinking about visual culture in Mediterranean terms the chapter
offers some provisional thoughts for bringing new meaning to the established canon
through the lens of the Mediterranean. It closes, finally, with a brief excursus on the
painterly Mediterranean and the emergence of the Mediterranean as a distinct genre
of modern European art.
The Mediterranean’s comparative agendaOne of the most productive reasons for thinking about visual culture in Mediterranean
terms hinges on the comparative logic of its enterprise. Since Edward Said’s broader
critique of nineteenth-century Orientalism, scholars have made a concerted effort to
expose the artificiality of the division between the “East” and the “West” and to
destabilize such essentialist categories entirely. In the context of the ancient
Mediterranean, scholars understand the division of east and west to be predicated on
the deliberate Greek construction of the Other/East where, for example, the Persians
consistently serve as foil for Hellenic rationality (Briant, 2002; Riva and Vella, 2006;
Gunter, 2009). Such “othering” motivates Herodotus’s civilizing historical agenda
just as it undergirds the design of the Parthenon on the Athenian Acropolis.
From the Mediterranean perspective, however, a more complicated picture of
interaction emerges. A comparison of the Parthenon, crowning achievement of the
Athenian Acropolis, and the Apadana, the great audience hall of the Persian ceremo-
nial and administrative center of Persepolis, is instructive in this regard (Figures 19.1
and 19.2) (Root, 1985; Wiesehöfer, 2009; Morris, 2009).
Rather than reading these monuments in oppositional terms as emblematic of
Persian despotism on the one hand and Greek civic idealism on the other, we should
see them as engaged in a far more sophisticated formal, thematic, ritual, and political
dialogue across the Mediterranean. They thus elucidate a potential advantage for a
comparative Mediterranean approach to ancient monuments. While they each play
a key role in their own respective cultures—and historiographically each occupies
a privileged position in the longer history of Persian and Greek art—they are none-
theless Mediterranean monuments, with deep local resonances, histories, and ecolo-
gies mobilized for broader pan-Mediterranean agendas. In thinking about such broader
Mediterranean networks in comparative terms, we are encouraged to see these
interconnections in more dynamic and nuanced rather than starkly oppositional light.
The reliefs of the Apadana, Persepolis’s ceremonial audience hall begun under
Darius I (r. 521–486 bce) and completed under his son and successor, Xerxes
(r. 486–465 bce), celebrate the prosperity of an allegiance to the Persian Empire
through the visual vocabulary of gift giving, specifically through the assembly and
procession of tribute (Figure 19.2). Covering the terrace walls and monumental stair-
cases of the approach to the great platform are ranks of royal guards and dignitaries
followed, in turn, by a seemingly endless multitude of delegations of tribute bearers.
These representatives of the provincial subject nations are shown each carrying to the