La gestualità del dolore rituale tra parole e immagini

This paper deals with mourning gestures in Roman literary and iconographic productions. Both literature and iconography are thought to be the product of a shared cultural background but, at the same time, they show differences in the way each of them expresses this background: the literary form is dynamic, while the iconographic form seems to be static. Hence, ritual mourning scenes are analyzed either in literature (where some vivid details allow the reader to visualize what is being said through words) or in iconography (where an aoristic image stands for a durative narration). In particular, the analysis focuses on a selection of literary sources that contain vivid descriptions of ritual mourning scenes and date back to a period between the I century BC and the II century AD. They are compared to the conclamatio scenes that are portrayed on some groups of Urban sarcophagi, i.e. children sarcophagi and some mythological ones (depicting the death of Patroclus, Meleager, or Alcestis), all of which date back to the middle Imperial Age. Thus, this paper aims at decoding mourning gestures as well as drawing attention to the similarities and differences that can be detected between the literary horizon and the iconographic one in regard to this particular theme.