Callistrate: Fourteen Visions (statues and bas-relief).

Probably a witness to the rise of Christianity during the 4th century, Callistrates, an otherwise unknown author, owes his escape from the dustbin of history to this small collection of Descriptions of Masterpieces of Greek Sculpture. This shows the value, inversely proportional to its length, attributed to it by those who preserved it for us! In fact, we are in the presence of 14 poems in prose - for the first time since the 17th century, translated into French -, 14 visions that concentrate the quintessence of Neoplatonic aesthetics. Indeed, between aesthetics, imagination and poetry, this incantatory evocation of fictitious and real objects simultaneously transfigures stone into living matter through the magic of art, and gives the artist the dimension of a theurgist capable of elevating the spirit towards the mysteries of the Absolute. Faced with such beauty and spirituality, it seemed necessary to entrust the translation to a poet, the only one capable of not trivializing the text and of restoring its full poetic force in contemporary French. It is the same desire to honor such a precious text that led to the insertion of original iconographic transpositions, intended to make the vertigo of depth more sensitive through a mise en abyme and to pictorially translate the scriptural effects. This double translation, by the subjects addressed and the themes of the content, concerns specialists of ancient art as well as those of the Second Sophistic, and as much historians of the plastic arts as those of aesthetics. But more broadly it is addressed to all lovers of Beauty.