Appendix B—
Communications Theory and the Boscoreale Cups

The dissertation of Katherina Schönberger-Münch, "Die Silberbecher von Boscoreale: Ein interpretatorischer Versuch" (Technische Universität Berlin, 1988), examines the iconography of the cups in ninety text pages.^[1] Schönberger-Münch was a doctoral student not in art history but in communications theory. She was interested to attempt a case study of hermeneutic analysis of a complex of self-referential images (i.e., what I and others call programmatic analysis), in particular of examples of "historical" art. She picked the cups because they offered such a complex series (5) and because she thought her exercise might be of some value to art historians, since there was no monograph even synthesizing previous literature as she planned to do (If.).^[2] Her aim was to demonstrate the validity of a working method that accepts compositional structure (which includes not only outline but varied emphasis in relief height) as a carrier of meaning, in addition to the individual objects and figures depicted; sees meaning as a sum of the individual meanings carried by details and also by their arrangement in relation to one another in a comprehensible structure; distinguishes the "self-evident" historical facts that "journalistic" images contain from those to which the spectator is expected to bring prior knowledge (reception and spectator theory); distinguishes "historical" from "ideological" information (23f.); and shows that these particular images do fit the historical context of their period of reference (i.e., the German frontier played a major role in Augustan policy).

These are the basic tools of any sound iconographic investigation. It is interesting to see them employed by a student of communications theory rather than by a scholar with historical and art-historical analysis as primary goal; Schönberger-Münch's thesis is like an articulation of Simon's (or my) working methods, for example. I am intrigued to see that the

formal structure of Schönberger-Münch's dissertation echoes that of certain of my chapters, in essaying first an analytic physical description, then an inventory of significant details, and then a historical, programmatic analysis.^[3] I am also fascinated to see someone else working with the interplay of the meaningful visual detail, the "sign," with its structural context, understanding how the potential meanings of a given sign are fixed in any one image by its specific location in a narrative and compositional structure.

Schönberger-Münch's analysis is based on published accounts and interpretations, comparing the words of individual critics to one another rather than comparing any other visual material. No artifacts but the cups themselves are discussed, or illustrated.^[4] There are no facts or interpretative remarks about the cups that would strike a Romanist as new; indeed, to a Romanist the study's chief interest would be its references to modern semiotic and communications theory, though German-speaking art-history students would find it a good model of reasoning from observed details and structures. While the thesis is a competent synthesis of existing literature, its author is not concerned at any point to justify her choice of a given opinion (as, for instance, when taking over a Genius-Roma identification for the allegory scene). Details that interest her as indicative of the nature of the mind-set of an Augustan spectator would not be so revealing to a Romanist, since they generally restate the basic elements of all Roman commemorative art (sacrifice, barbarian submission, etc.).^[5] Her conclusion really amounts to the simple observation that the cups (and, by unvoiced extension, Roman historical art) through attention to detail legibly communicate something—an assumption that I, as a Roman art historian, most certainly, and my readers most probably, take for granted. It seems in any case a somewhat banal answer to her original query: "Can we elicit the question to which the cups were the answer?"(5). To a semiotician Schönberger-Münch's book would, I imagine, be more interesting as a case study of a visual communication concerned to partially inform and wholly persuade and as a report on art historians like E. Panofsky and K. Gombrich.