The expression of the body. Gestures, attitudes, gazes in ancient iconography.
PURennes| N° d'inventaire | 9669 |
| Format | 15.5 x 24 |
| Détails | 388 p., illustrations, paperback. |
| Publication | Rennes, 2006 |
| Etat | Nine |
| ISBN | 9782753502048 |
Gestures, attitudes, looks, postures are all ways of being conducive to a social and cultural reading of Antiquity. A multidisciplinary approach allows a broad chrono-cultural opening, from the archaic worlds to the end of the Roman Empire, through Greek, Etruscan, Italiote or Roman civilizations. Vases, reliefs, statues, mosaics constitute a considerable corpus from which the contributions propose, beyond the formal repetition of iconographic models and without stopping at strict typologies of gestures and postures, a historical reading of the behavior and appearance of characters in a specific context, funerary, religious, warlike, mythological... The body is observed, scrutinized, analyzed by a multitude of signs. Gestures, attitudes or looks because they are unique or on the contrary universal, become efficient reading tools and give the body, as a historical object, all its importance. Indeed, images and representations of the body reveal relationships, oppositions and allow us to read feelings. For this, three approaches were chosen. First, the analysis focused on bodily identities and the staging of the body: from the gestures of men to the gestures of the gods, from the gestures of filiation on ceramics to funerary gestures; from the designation of the Greek citizen to the expression of identity on the steles of central-eastern Gaul; from the goddesses on the mosaics of Volubilis to the illustrations of Notor. A second thematic approach addresses encounters, made up of exchanges of glances and seduction maneuvers: the conviviality of banqueters, the music of Orpheus charming the animals, the expression of masculine passivity in Roman art; the immanent gaze exchanged between Athena and Heracles, the dances of the Maenads for Dionysus, feminine seduction by love magic or perfume, the scent of immortality are all aspects addressed. A final part retraces the tensions and confrontations: the supplication of Dryas and Telephus, the painful separation of Demeter and Kore, or the representations of the servants of the Roman army but also all the constraints imposed on the bodies or that the bodies exert to enter into communication with their surroundings: the Apollonian hand-to-hand combat; the gestures of the athletes, or the maneuvers that lead men to battle or animals to sacrifice. This work contributes to the renewal of the historiography on the history of the body by approaching a neglected, little-known or ignored period without which, however, no history of the body can truly be understood and written.
Gestures, attitudes, looks, postures are all ways of being conducive to a social and cultural reading of Antiquity. A multidisciplinary approach allows a broad chrono-cultural opening, from the archaic worlds to the end of the Roman Empire, through Greek, Etruscan, Italiote or Roman civilizations. Vases, reliefs, statues, mosaics constitute a considerable corpus from which the contributions propose, beyond the formal repetition of iconographic models and without stopping at strict typologies of gestures and postures, a historical reading of the behavior and appearance of characters in a specific context, funerary, religious, warlike, mythological... The body is observed, scrutinized, analyzed by a multitude of signs. Gestures, attitudes or looks because they are unique or on the contrary universal, become efficient reading tools and give the body, as a historical object, all its importance. Indeed, images and representations of the body reveal relationships, oppositions and allow us to read feelings. For this, three approaches were chosen. First, the analysis focused on bodily identities and the staging of the body: from the gestures of men to the gestures of the gods, from the gestures of filiation on ceramics to funerary gestures; from the designation of the Greek citizen to the expression of identity on the steles of central-eastern Gaul; from the goddesses on the mosaics of Volubilis to the illustrations of Notor. A second thematic approach addresses encounters, made up of exchanges of glances and seduction maneuvers: the conviviality of banqueters, the music of Orpheus charming the animals, the expression of masculine passivity in Roman art; the immanent gaze exchanged between Athena and Heracles, the dances of the Maenads for Dionysus, feminine seduction by love magic or perfume, the scent of immortality are all aspects addressed. A final part retraces the tensions and confrontations: the supplication of Dryas and Telephus, the painful separation of Demeter and Kore, or the representations of the servants of the Roman army but also all the constraints imposed on the bodies or that the bodies exert to enter into communication with their surroundings: the Apollonian hand-to-hand combat; the gestures of the athletes, or the maneuvers that lead men to battle or animals to sacrifice. This work contributes to the renewal of the historiography on the history of the body by approaching a neglected, little-known or ignored period without which, however, no history of the body can truly be understood and written.