Flights of Archaeology: Peschke's Acrocorinth

Abstract:Georg Vinko von Peschke (1900–1959) was a celebrated artist in 1930s Greece and a staff member of the American School excavations in Corinth, Isthmia, and Olynthos. His large work Acrocorinth (1932), painted while carrying out the castle's architectural survey, provides insights into the creative dimensions behind the School's scholarly identity. Peschke brought archaeological practices into a direct conversation with modernist poetics that sought to incorporate old historical landscapes with new and radical conceptions of the self. Through Peschke, American archaeologists turned Corinth into an interdisciplinary laboratory that explored the interface of digging, dwelling, and thinking.