The Nude constantinople: Masterpieces of greek sculpture at byzantium according to the Greek Anthology

Abstract

Several studies have been devoted to the presence of some of the most famous Classical Greek sculptures at Constantinople, right from the city’s official dedication in May 330, reinforcing the cultural and political meaning of these pieces’ exhibition at the new capital of the Empire (e.g. Mango 1963; Guberti Bassett 2000; Bassett 2004) and mentioning the many epigrams of the Greek Anthology that refer to or poetically describe them. This paper focuses on some of those epigrams and art-pieces and tries to develop the artistic (i.e. museological) and cultural information they provide, by exploring their context and poetical features, especially the use of the rhetorical device of ecphrasis. In one word, and by means of a clear example, far beyond the evidences of Praxiteles’ Knidian Aphrodite at the permanent art-exhibition of the Palace of Lausus, it tries to explore the Byzantine interpretations and poetical (both literary and plastic) recreations of that statue, thus adopting the viewer’s perspective towards pagan monuments during the first centuries of Byzantium (Saradi-Mendelovici 1990).