Looking at images to understand social dynamics - Alessandro Poggio

“Looking at images to understand social dynamics: the fourth-century BC Eastern Mediterranean”
Dr Alessandro Poggio, IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca
Friday, 14th of June 2024
16.00 CEST (Rome, Paris, Berlin / GMT+2)
15:00 BST (London, GMT+1)
17.00 (İstanbul, Athens / GMT+3)
10.00 (New York / GMT-4)
The analysis of images can convey several useful information on the socio-historical contexts that have produced them: the materials used, the style, the choice of specific iconographies and their manipulation give information about the process of creation and the message conveyed. Such a complex analysis appears particularly fruitful in ancient contexts for which we don’t have enough information from other sources. In this paper I will analyse some case studies from the fourth-century BC Eastern Mediterranean, the territories of which, included into the Achaemenid Persian Empire and at the crossroad of complex intercultural contacts, experienced unique artistic dynamics. Here, a well-defined corpus of funerary monuments, attributed to local rulers, are lavishly decorated with complex figurative programs related to the life of these important
personages and their retinue (e.g., battles, hunts, banquets) or connected with the mythical sphere. My paper will thus test whether and how these images could be used as a tool for decoding the structure of local societies and understanding relevant cultural processes at work.

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I'll come back to this on a proper sized screen... Glad to see this topic.