Artibus et Historiae no. 47 (XXIV)
2003, ISSN 0391-9064Up
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SALVATORE PISANI - Problems of the Way of Illustrating: Giambattista Vico's 'True Homer' in the Frontispiece of Scienza Nuova
The central theme of the second edition of Scienza Nuova (1730) by G. B. Vico is discovery of the True Homer, that is, the discovery that Homer was in fact not a historical personality but only a myth. The frontispiece of Scienza Nuova shows Homer as a statue. The paper discusses - on the one hand - the medial aspects of the illustration, with regard to understanding the statue as a singular collective, and on the other hand - the unusual and incomprehensible iconography of the True Homer, where the author tries to define, to what extent it was an independent creation of Domenico Antonio Vaccaro, the artist who designed the frontispiece. Throughout the whole paper the central question, of how far and how well the philosophical thought of the book fits in a given artistic form is investigated, and what breaches result from this relationship of the idea and the form.
