Dr Albert Bates

Key interests: art and text; ecphrasis (the description of an artwork); the historiography of ancient art; philosophical theories of sense-perception, imagination, and representation; Greek mythology in Roman culture; animals in ancient art and thought; Greek literature of the Roman empire.

I have two on-going, research projects. The first builds on my PhD, which was awarded Cambridge's 2023 Hare Prize for the best dissertation in Classics. It is on the philosophy of Greek mythology in the art and ecphrasis of the Roman empire. It explores how the picturing of certain myths enabled artworks and descriptions of artworks to intervene in complex philosophical debates about the nature of viewing, especially those concerned with phantasia (impression/imagination), katalēpsis (apprehension), and apatē (deception). Part of this project on Philostratus' Imagines, Hercules' infanticide and the Stoic-sceptic debate on katalēpsis has been published in the American Journal of Philology.

The second project is on the self-reflexivity of animals in Graeco-Roman art. Recouping animals from the sidelines of classical art history, this project interrogates how the depiction of certain animals – namely, those associated with theories of representation, deception, craftsmanship and beauty in the literary and philosophical traditions – enabled self-conscious reflection on the very nature of art. An early fruit of this project on the mimic octopus and the ontology of the image in Greek red-figure fish plates and Roman fish mosaics has recently been published in Art History.