Abstract

This chapter investigates the hermeneutics of the signature in Greek and Roman visual culture. Ancient artists, it argues, exploited artistic agency as a meaning-making mechanism. The chapter focusses on the common practice of craftsmen working under the name of a more celebrated artist, taking as a particular case study the Iliac tablets. Created in the first century AD, several associate themselves with the ‘Theodorean techne’. This chapter argues that this is a form of pseudonymity: the creator wished to imbue his work with the authority of an Archaic sculptor.