L’imaginaire entre objets et textes

This talk focuses on the representation and imaginary perception of colour in the Greco-Roman world. It will be argued that from the Renaissance onwards every “discovery” of antiques is accompanied by a specific way of imagining a coloured version of ancient monuments and artefacts. Examples include ancient masterpieces reconstructed by contemporary painters using Philostratus’s or Lucian’s ecphraseis, controversy about the artistic value of the mural paintings from the Vesuvian cities, Pompeii and Herculaneum, discovered in the XVIIIth century, or discussions about the polychromatic decorations of the Greek temples in the next century. The amazing archaeological discoveries made in the past 30 years, the new highly sophisticated methods of analysis of pigments and materials and the new resources from computerized imagery radically modify our vision of this “antiquity in full colour”. If we limit our examples to ancient painting, the famous pictures are still missing but the recent discoveries have demonstrated that the painters from the second half of the IVth century B.C. could use numerous and varied techniques to introduce colour and complex movement of figures in space. These technical innovations are based on a keen observation of the subjective perception of colors and geometrical volumes. Some very significant echoes of these experiments can be found in some of Plato’s and Aristotle’s treatises.In the same historical context, a literature specializing in art criticism developed in the first decades of the IIIrd century B.C. The recent discovery of a papyrus containing 112 epigrams attributed to Posidippus of Pella provides further evidence for the definition of some major critical concepts elaborated for visual arts in the Aristotelian tradition. It can be argued that among the main criteria applied to the classification of great painters and sculptors were the use of colour and the capacity of building images in interplay with an ideal viewer. The psychological disposition which allows this communication is called phantasia (imagination).The purpose of this talk is to analyze some of the cognitive issues in the realization and perception of ancient artefacts through a cross-examination of texts and archaeological evidence