La costruzione di una iconografia. Arredi e paesaggio nelle scene della Natività fra IV e V secolo d.C. Qualche considerazione . (original) (raw)
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This study proposes an attempt to analyze and reconstruct the features and evolution of visual imagery and the cultural systems of the communities that inhabited the territories of Siritide and Metapontino between the mid 8th century and the first decades of the 6th century BC, through the systematic examination of the known figurative productions expressed or used by these groups. The status and functions of the images for the construction and transmission of the cultural identity of a social group, or of its segments, and the mediation devices in the relational dynamics internal and external to it, are arguments that have been debated for a long time and whose fields of investigation go beyond the perimeter of the historical and archaeological disciplines and indeed derive from consolidated sociological and ethno- anthropological traditions. When applied to ancient communities, and in particular to the ones involved in the “colonial phenomenon” in southern Italy in the Archaic period - Greek, indigenous and “hybrid”- the study of the processes related to the development of their own cultural heritage and to the forms of their manifestation within ethnic and territorial contexts, different from those of Greece, has brought some fundamental problems to the attention of scholars. This concerns the variability of Hellenic experiences in the Mediterranean and the relationship between the social complexity of the communities that created it and that of the ideological and symbolic universe expressed by them; the origin, composition and status of apoikoi groups; their relationship with the socio-cultural context of origin and the forms of their interaction with their new homes; the role of indigenous peoples in the development of such relationships; the existence of “original” cultural identities and their possible correlation with substrates or matrices of ethnic type; the documentary significance of the testimonies of ancient authors about the events and characteristics of the first colonial communities and the correct epistemological approaches to these sources of information, in particular in relation to what is prefigured by archaeological phenomenology. In the context of these problems, which, especially over the last three decades, have been the corner- stones of a deep, sometimes radical, rethinking of the “Greek colonization” of the archaic period and of the hermeneutical categories with which it has traditionally been approached, we can place the theme of the role and informative contribution of figurative expressions as projections of specific ideological and identity traits. To analyze these issues, we chose a methodological approach in which the images are analyzed inside the context in which they were exposed or used and represent the variables of multiple relationships with other objects, architecture and fieldwork in the specific point in time during the history of the site they were part of. Following this approach, the book is organized into three sections, corresponding to three different moments of the research. The first is entitled “Quadro archeologico e attestazioni iconografiche” and collects the results obtained from an overview of the figurative documents found in the territories examined in the chronological period defined above. This survey of the iconographic dossier comprising the corpus of this research was carried out within the more general classification of the sites that made up the ancient landscape of the communities covered by the study. Each of these is analyzed and described in the light of the available topo- graphic, stratigraphic and architectural data, and, where possible, identified by its nature and functional destination in the periods considered. For each site the contexts that belonged to it were identified: houses, productive buildings, religious and funerary sites and those of uncertain definition. The objects found in each one were also identified, as well as those of uncertain origin. The description of sites, contexts and associated iconographies is discussed according to a diachronic sequence based on archaeologically detect- able transformations. This allowed us to outline a distribution scheme of images in the territory, organized on the basis of the historical sequence of their production/use and abandonment connected to the history of the sites where they were used and the type of supports on which they were reproduced. The second section details the «Repertorio delle immagini e dei Tipi iconografici». In it the images are organized according to the type of support to which they are associated and classified according to iconographic criteria. The iconographies were analyzed in the light of their stylistic and formal characteristics and seen within the broader panorama of the craft traditions of the Aegean and colonial area. Subsequently, the possible semantic values of each figurative document were examined in depth, considering the conditions suggested by the context of discovery and/or of use and their possible relations with other objects or buildings associated with them. Finally, the third section consists of a “Commento”. In it the information offered by the iconographies identified in the “Quadro” and analyzed in the “Repertorio” are integrated and related to the universe of sources (archaeological, literary, epigraphic, etc.) available for the contexts considered. This chapter delves further into the questions and issues evoked by the examination of iconography, questions for which iconographic analysis alone is insufficient. Thus the “Commento” completes, as far as possible, the pro- cess of recomposing the original connections between systems of signification and the other aspects that composed an ancient reality and which constituted the perimeter within which the visual imagery of the community was expressed. The volume is completed by a cartographic apparatus including period and phase maps of the territories considered, plans of the sites and contexts analyzed, tables and significant comparisons for the figurative documents examined, and, finally, a list of indexes and tables of concordance of the images and of the contexts studied.
Il saggio presenta il ricco repertorio di Natività di Giovan Pietro da Cemmo, pittore che, tra l’ultimo quarto del Quattrocento e il primo decennio del Cinquecento, affrontò ripetutamente il tema in contesti culturali e materiali diversi, prevalentemente in Valle Camonica. Conservate nei siti originari, esse costituisco un Museo diffuso utile per riflettere sull’iconografia tardo medievale del racconto della nascita di Gesù, nelle sue implicazioni didattico-teologiche e nel confronto con lo schema di tradizione bizantina, di cui si conserva in Valle Camonica un esemplare trecentesco. The essay presents the rich repertory of Nativity by Giovan Pietro from Cemmo, an artist who dealt repetetively with this theme in different cultural and material contests, mostly in Valle Camonica, between the end of XIV century and the very start of XV. They are preserved in their original sites and they form a Widespread Museum useful to think over the late Medieval iconography of the story of Jesus’s birth, its didactic-theological implications and the comparison to Byzantine tradition’s scheme, of which Valle Camonica preserves an exemplar from XIV century.
Traditionally, two iconographic types are associated to the mythical king of Athens Cecrops: a hybrid figure, half man and half snake, and a dignified king with a whole anthropomorphic appearance. A re-exam of the iconographic repertoire of the anthropomorphic representation of Cecrops together with few, but noteworthy data from literary sources, proves that such a type is to be associated with the homonymous king of the Erechteids, Cecrops II. As a result, the only true iconographic representation of Cecrops I is the figure shaped with the top half like a man and the bot¬tom half in a serpent form.
La corona del dio. Nota sull’iconografia divina del Protodinastico
During the Early Dynastic Period the element that characterizes gods’ representations, thus making them different from human-beings, is a particular hair-dress: the horned-crown. The analysis here presented distinguishes at least three different types of divine hair-dresses - the simple horned-crown, the Anzu-crown and the horned-crown with vegetable mid-element -, showing how each one is linked to deities with a specific sphere of influence. In this way, it is possible to hypothesize a development of the divine hair-dress from the simple horned-crown to the multiple one.