Lo Scudo di Achille nell'Iliade. Esperienze ermeneutiche a confronto

The description of the making process by Ephaistos of the extraordinary shield to be held by the best of the epic heroes is, in the European culture, the prototype of every poetic description of the artistic handworks. This extraordinary section of the Iliad, which influenced for a long time the poetry of the later periods, nowadays appear to be richer and richer of cultural aspects. This book collects the papers given at the congress held in Napoli at the Università "L'Orientale", the 12th of may 2008. This congress arises from the need of bridging and comparing methodologies of different scholarly fields: archaeology, philology, history of art, history of technology, theory of literature. Indeed we are aware that only the synergy among experts on different fields may enable us to understand the extraordinary complexity of this text. The papers of this book examine the Shield as the model of the ekphrastic genre; the relationships among the arts represented in the text (from the poetry to the figurative arts, to the music and to the dance); the social, political and economic models; the technologies and the typologies of objects and arms, the figurative worlds which are evoked; the statute of the craftsman, of the artist of the bard