Dal mito tragico all’immagine su vaso. Nuclei d’azione e dinamiche transmediali

This paper aims to reflect on the relation between tragic myth and 4th century BCE South Italian mythological vase-painting. In so doing, it assumes as a starting point the hapax drōmenon criterion, first introduced in Seminario Pots&Plays 2015 and discussed in detail in Centanni, Grilli 2021. No mythological vase painting can be traced back with absolute certainty to direct theatrical experience; in a few cases, though, the very subject of the painting appears to reflect innovative versions of the myth first introduced in specific tragedies known to us, entailing therefore a certain, although otherwise undetermined, transmedial passage. Even in this case, I argue (following Centanni, Grilli 2021), the picture’s inspiration is not rooted in the visual experience of staged dramas, since it revolves around a ‘focus of action’ which I define as a minimum core of salient events. The ‘focus of action’ can be thought of as a narrative content easily transferred from one medium to another through informal social discourse. Evidence from classical texts allows us to understand the undulatory nature of myth, constantly swinging between the opposite poles of fixed textuality and of informal account. In order to understand the dynamics of this process, I propose to separate, at least theoretically, the moment when the transmedial passage from drama to vase-painting occurs, and the subsequent spreading of the image through a more varied circulation. The unceasing blend of content-related dissemination through text and/or informal discourse, and form-related circulation through reproduction, allusion, and adaptation allows us to realize the rhizomatic nature of iconographic proliferation, which no single genealogical model can pretend to comprehensively account for.