Descripción

Ein gutes und sauberes Exemplar. - In this fascinating work of original scholarship, Peter Heslin makes the precise and detailed argument that painted illustrations I of the Trojan War, both public and private, were a collective visual resource for selected works of the Roman poets, including Virgil, Horace, and Propertius. The thrust of Heslin's argument is a bold one, as curator Kenneth Lapatin writes: "It posits a visual source for some of the greatest works of Roman literature." The Museum of Augustus is organized into three parts. The first is a comprehensive reconstruction of paintings from the remaining fragments of the cycle of Trojan frescoes that once decorated the Temple of Apollo in Pompeii. The second finds the echoes of these paintings in the Augustan-dated Portico of Philippus, now destroyed, which was itself a renovation of Rome's de facto temple of the Muses; in other words, a museum, both in displaying art and offering a meeting place for poets. And the third documents the responses of the Augustan poets to the decorative program of a monument that was intimately connected with their own literary aspirations. The book concludes by looking at the way Virgil, Horace, and Propertius conceptualized the architecture of their poetic projects in response to the Museum of Augustus. ISBN 9781606064214