Holly Marie Miller
PhD Student, Bronze Age Aegean Art and Archaeology, Art History and Archaeology
Education
M.A., Art History, University of Georgia
B.A., Art History, Oglethorpe University
Holly is a PhD student studying Bronze Age Aegean Art and Archaeology with Dr. Emily Catherine Egan. She received her MA in Art History from the University of Georgia in May 2020. Her thesis titled, “An Unpublished Greek ‘Grave’ Relief in The Brooks Museum: Contextualizing Banquet Scenes within the Votive and Funerary Landscapes of Late Classical Attica” investigated vestiges of pigment and reassessed an unprovenanced Athenian marble relief from the late fourth century BCE. Although very interested in classical Greek material, Holly’s primary interest is in the art of the Aegean Bronze Age and especially Minoan and Mycenaean wall painting. She is interested in exploring related questions of materiality, the interconnectedness and trade of pigments across cultures, and how to understand the visual traditions and crafts of painting within the larger contexts of the Mediterranean.
Publications
"Visual Flexibility: Votive and Funerary Banquet Reliefs in Late Classical Attica"
Holly explores the continuity of aesthetics in banquet reliefs from the Late Classical to Hellensitic period by analyzing the lesser known and smaller corpus of votive banquet relief types.
Author/Lead: Holly Marie MillerVotvie banquet reliefs featuring a reclining elder male employed a visual language that to ancient viewers unambiguously defined the nature and identity of a hero. This highly flexible language appears to have been quickly adopted in the heroising realm of funerary monuments by the end of the Late Classical period, circa 400-323 BCE, and remained a desired aesthetic throughout the Hellenistic period, circa 323-33 BCE. In this lesser known and smaller corpus of votive banquet reliefs, few examples retain any vestiges of polychromy or inscriptions. An unstudied and unpublished relief of this type from the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, however, exceptionally retains both. A close study of this relief provides insight into the aesthetic tastes of the Late Classical period, as well as an understanding of how banqueting iconography, originally reserved for a hero rather than heroised deceased, was emphatically adopted into the funerary sphere at the end of the fourth century BCE.
