BELLES LETTRES Dire Le Decor Antique: Textes grecs et latins au miroir des realia (IIIe s. av.-VIIIe s. ap. J.-C.)

What do we know about the technical conditions for the execution of decorations in Antiquity? About their authors? Who commissioned them? How were the heroic or tragic scenes painted on the walls of chambers or temples perceived? What were the reactions to the gilded ceilings, the sparkling veneers of polychrome marble? Why commission a portrait of a philosopher or choose a hunting mosaic for a baptistery? Only the protagonists and their contemporaries can answer these questions. From this came the project of systematically collecting their testimonies: they are gathered and commented on in this collective work, the fruit of twenty years of research. On the one hand, Greek and Latin authors evoke the artists, the famous works, the techniques, and report aesthetic or moral considerations; on the other, archaeological remains reveal decorations produced by teams of anonymous artisans, which adorn the walls, floors, and vaults. Can these two sources of knowledge coincide? Since 1921, the publication date of the Milliet Collection, Greek and Latin Texts Relating to the History of Ancient Painting, compiled and annotated by A. Reinach, the undertaking had not been attempted. However, in recent decades, excavations carried out throughout the Roman Empire and advances in methods of exploration, restoration, and virtual restitution have changed our approach; by expanding the geographical and chronological space, they have enriched the available documentation on the coverings stucco, paintings, mosaics, marble in private and public buildings, pagan and Christian, whether modest or sumptuous. DDA Dire le decor Antique compares this rich material with texts dating from the 3rd century BC to the 8th century AD. The collaboration between philologists and archaeologists opens new perspectives, provides keys to interpretation, and sheds light on the social, cultural, political, religious, and ideological significance of domestic and public decoration. A corpus of established, translated, annotated, contextualized texts, presented chronologically and accompanied by several indexes, DDA is a tool made available to philologists, archaeologists and art historians, students and researchers, as well as to a wider public, less familiar with ancient literature.