engramma classicae humanitatis traditio
English Version La Rivista di engramma 42, July-August 2005


La Rivista di Engramma dedicates this monographic issue to Apelles' Calumny, starting with its most famous rendering painted by Sandro Botticelli towards the end of the Quattrocento. This painting is the focus of all the contributions to this issue of Engramma and they all examine Calumny from iconographic, iconological and textual perspectives ­ scientific enquiry which began in 2001 as part of a research seminar, and is still open to further investigation.

In the C4th BC, Ptolemy's court painter, Apelles, painted an allegorical image entitled Calumny. Six centuries later, in C2nd AD, Lucian of Samosata in an ekphrastic rendering described the same painting and the personifications in it. During the Renaissance, Lucian's literary description, rediscovered by the Humanists, became the vehicle through which the Hellenistic theme was reconverted into an image by Renaissance artists intent on competing with the art of antiquity.

A new series of photographic images of Botticelli's work, carried out specifically by Engramma in order to carry out a thorough analysis of the figurative text, is allied to the historical and artistic contexts of the work.

Analysis of the details ­ philological and figurative ­ has born varied fruit: on the one hand it has highlighted the textual variations of the humanist translations of the ekphrastic passage (Leon Battista Alberti), and on the other it has opened up new perspectives of enquiry on the iconography of the figures (the foot of the Crucifix).

The background of the painting, a kind of hypertext animated by figures drawn from antiquity, is examined both by subject (e.g. the Pathosformel of 'abandoned woman'), and in relation to possible literary sources (Boccaccio's Decameron).

Finally, the Galleries section presents a result of the analysis: it demonstrates the full extent of the fortune of the subject in Renaissance art, Italian first and then European, beginning with the recovery of Lucian's text (the images are furnished with Renaissance translations of the passage into Latin, French and German).