LECTURA ICONOGRÁFICA DEL ARS AMATORIA EN LA PINTURA ROMANA

Abstract

In the context of these workshops in which the bimillenaries of two great Roman writers like Ovid and Livy are commemorated the aim of this work is to verify, with some examples, the strong correspondence that literature and art had in antiquity.

     Ovid, the great poet who, with a didactic spirit, taught his contemporaries “the Art of Love” had its visual mirror in many paintings that decorated the Roman domus. We know images have the capacity to be read as a narrative text, especially those that belong to the ancient world, since they were an excellent transmission vehicle for all kinds of speculative thinking. From that place, they operated actively in the consciousness
of the receiver, with the same force as the written word. Our task is to decode the iconographic code of that age to make them accessible to a contemporary reading.