ArtofACOdyssey 9: Signed Monuments

 

I’ve got something a little different today for #ArtofACOdyssey. I spent some time climbing around the Parthenon (as one does) to check out the ionic frieze and found something SUPER interesting on the inside of the porch.

Turns out, the Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey Parthenon has a bunch of anachronistic names inscribed! Pictured here are Ubisoft/Ubisoft Quebec technical art director Yannick Morel, 3D artists Hugo Lamarre and Mikael Boulet, and others that google isn’t letting me track down.

 

Ionic porch graffiti, Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey (Ubisoft 2018).

While we take artist signatures for granted these days, most works in ancient Greece and Rome weren’t signed. There are some obvious exceptions of course…the Orestes and Elektra group from Palazzo Altemps is signed by Menelaos, student of Stephanos (who signed his own version, currently in Naples), and numerous ceramic vessels signed by potters and/or painters. When buildings are inscribed, they most often reflect who paid for them rather than who designed them.

Here’s looking at you, Pantheon…granted, the one we have was restored by Hadrian, who kept M. Agrippa’s name on the inscription in deference to the original. Most of the artists and architects we DO know about come from Pliny, Pausanias, and other authors who recorded them.

 

Prisoner graffiti, Beauchamp Tower, Tower of London. Photo: K. Jones.

There is also a long running tradition of people inscribing their names on monuments – not only ones that they visited, but ones that they spent a lot of time in as well. Pictured here is prisoner graffiti from Beauchamp Tower in the Tower of London. but other examples include …the runic graffito in Hagia Sophia, Hubert Robert’s 1764 graffito on a fresco in the Villa Farnese at Caprarola. I highly recommend Charlotte Guichard’s article on artist graffiti in 18th c. Rome if you want to read up on it (Journal18, issue 1, Spring 2016).

More pertinent to us here are the reconstructions which incorporate some aspect of the modern artist and/or patron. A prime example of this is the base of Athena Parthenos in Nashville, where Pandora is flanked by divinities that look suspiciously like the project’s patrons. In short, AC Odyssey may deviate from the original Parthenon in this respect but it is also part of a long standing tradition. I would encourage you to climb up there yourself and check out the names of the folks who put so much work into this game.

 

 

 This was originally published on Twitter, October 24 2018.