What is the meaning of an image depicted on an ancient work of art? What kind of response did the ancient artists expect from the ‘consumer’ of the image? Was there a uniform, quasi-monolithic way of interpreting images in a specific society? To what extent are scholars able to reconstruct the manner in which the ancient ‘gaze’ functioned? These fundamental questions have bothered scholars for the last sixty-five years, at least. Not long after the publication of the landmark study by Hellmut Sichtermann in 1963, where it was asserted that images on vases are not faithful reproductions of everyday life or ritual but rather the expression of a culturally specific mental system that was radically different from our own, scholars began to inquire about the messages communicated by vases, making ample use of a vast array of theories borrowed from social sciences.

The aim of this chapter is to contribute to the topic by addressing a specific issue that is of fundamental importance, despite the fact that it is too often overlooked in recent iconographic studies: how users of the vases understood the images, and to what extent their own interpretations departed from the original intentions of the artists who made these vases.

The ideal venue for a study of this type is the examination of funerary contexts. In fact, it is assumed here that a closed archaeological context is not a random collection of heterogeneous grave goods, but can be ‘read’ instead as an assemblage of objects bearing different and complementary yet specific messages about the status, gender, and age of the deceased. Consequently, I employ here what may be called an ‘emic’ approach to iconography based on the ‘reading’ of funerary contexts, an interpretation of funerary iconography by analyzing specific tomb contexts one by one. In theory, other types of contexts (sacred deposits, finds from a single house) are equally revealing, although in fact the extreme fragmentary nature of the material in such contexts usually makes a detailed iconographic study impossible. In reality, I propose a shift in method rather than a new interpretive framework. This method is not a panacea for the study of iconography, since it only concerns the rather limited number of vases known from proper archaeological excavations and publications, where every single item, and its position inside the tomb, is carefully recorded and analyzed.