Plinio il Vecchio e la sua Storia dell’arte antica

Abstract

The literature on ancient art that appeared in the 6th century BC alongside the first art treatises, and later expanded its scope and diversity, has been almost completely lost. Only three works have been fully preserved, and even these only from the Roman period: Vitruvius’ treatise De Architectura, Pliny the Elder’s encyclopedia Naturalis Historia, which includes an excursus on ancient art in individual chapters, and Pausanias’ Description of Greece intended for Roman educated travelers. In addition to these three works, two other types of texts are classified as literary sources of art history: the essays that belong to the genre of ekphrasis (rhetorically perfected descriptions of artistic objects, real or imaginary), and the corpus of excerpts by selected authors of Antiquity that generally wrote about other themes, but in places also talked about ancient art. When Pliny the Elder composed his chapters on ancient art forms he used original works of art or Greek and Roman art history literature. When he was writing the Naturalis Historia he used information from numerous authors that he cited in the first book and also some parts of the text. The Roman encyclopedist drew his knowledge of technical aspects of art primarily from Greek treatises published between the 6th and 4th centuries BC by numerous artists; among them, the sculptor Polykleitus of Argos and the painter Pamphilus of Amphipolis are worthy of mention. Art history literature that coincides at least in part with the modern concept of art history had its beginnings in the early Hellenistic period. Pliny based his work on three authors from this period: Duris of Samos, Xenocrates of Athens, and Antigonus of Carystus. Duris of Samos (close of the 4th century BC) designed his two works – which have the generic titles On Painters and On Sculptors – as a series of biographies, in which he highlighted the apex of every artist’s life, coinciding with the creation of his most important work. In his essays, Xenocrates of Athens (second quarter of the 3rd century BC) presented the history of ancient art as a continuous evolutionary line in which great artists played the role of the first inventors. Thus art followed the development towards naturalism; that is, perfection personified, in Xenocrates’ opinion, by Lysippos among the sculptors, and Apelles among the painters. Antigonus of Carystus (last quarter of the 3rd century BC) enriched the work of his two predecessors with his own epigraphic studies. In the middle and late Hellenistic period, Xenocrates’ developmental view of the world was a generally accepted idea. Individual authors differed only by the period in which they placed the apex of development. The most influential among them, Appolodorus of Athens (2nd century BC), put the Athenian artists of the Age of Pericles to the forefront; especially Phidias. Appolodorus’ nostalgic and retrospective vision (in contrast to Xenocrates, who recognized the masters of Sicyon school, to which he also belonged, to be the pinnacle of art history development) coincided with the renewal of Attic art around 150 BC, known also as the Classicism of Athens or neoAtticism. In the late Hellenistic period, various compendiums were popular (mainly periegeses and lists of artists), among which Pasiteles’ (first half of the 1st century BC) essay entitled Mirabilia is the most interesting. Although Pliny the Elder based his history of ancient art on all the authors mentioned above, the writings of classical philologists and archeologists often imply that he might not have always used the art history literature mentioned as primary sources, but rather cited a great deal of information from the works of his predecessor, the famous Roman encyclopedist Marcus Terentius Varro (beginning of the 1st century BC).