From the Scroll to the Marble. Citations d’épigrammes livresques sur des monuments figurés

Résumé En

This article presents the various cases in which one or more literary epigrams were copied on a monument and inserted in a context including painted or sculpted images. Three vases painted by followers of the Amykos Painter in the early 4th century BCE present us with a first example: on these vases, the literary epigrams enable the painter to explain or to modify the meaning of an otherwise commonplace composition. Apart from a little number of isolated cases (a plastic vase from Hellenistic Skyros, a portrait-herm in Aelian’s villa), another interesting and apparently coherent group of examples is offered by Roman frescoes painted in the late 1st century BCE or the early 1st century CE. In these cases, Hellenistic epigrams were apparently used to create the fantasy of a different and possibly ‘exotic’ landscape or setting: an epigram could allow the viewers to pretend that they were not in a Roman town, but in a rural sanctuary lost in a Greek-speaking countryside, or that they were in third-century Alexandria and about to meet Callimachus in person. Finally, another interesting set of examples appears to have been created in Renaissance times, when epigrams from the Planudean Anthology were copied on slabs or gemstones.