ABSTRACT
Comparativism must, it seems, assume that they are shareable, or at least comparable, if it is to have anything to study. For an arch-comparativist like André Malraux, it went without saying that the taxonomies of the "museum without walls" were universal. In a seminal discussion of divine imagery in the Greco-Roman world, now more than thirty years old, Richard Gordon started from the observation that the Greeks tend to talk about statues of the gods in the same way as they talk about the gods themselves. The conflationist argument is essentially philological: it uses texts to discern a radically alien visual experience of statues and other depictions in antiquity. The Knidia, as it is known, has become a touchstone for the emerging anthropology of images: it has become commonplace to cite this story as evidence of a pervasive conflation of statue and deity in antiquity.
