Un mouvement pictural maniériste sous les derniers Antonins et les Sévères

Résumé En

A manierist trend in the wall-painting during late Antonine and Severe periods. The archeological discoveries made recently in Gaul and Brittany have drawn the attention on Gallo-Roman mural painting of the 2-4th centuries. A renewal of ostentatious decorative genres is to be noticed during the late Antonine and Severe periods (fictive architecture and marble ornementation ; big size figures). This style can be called « manierist », insofar as it combines, often without seeking any cohesion, quotations borrowed from the former decorative vocabulary. It expresses the will to secure the durability of romanity in a period of crisis, according to a phenomenon recurrent in the history of Roman art. Thus one has to abandon the traditional conception of a biological evolution of the Roman pictorial craftsmanship : far from having sunk in an irremediable degeneration after the 1st century AD, it experienced at the end of the 2nd century and the beginning of the 3rd century a renewal the importance, scale and modalities of which we are only beginning to measure.