Mito, tragedia e racconto per immagini nella ceramica greca a soggetto mitologico (V-IV sec. a.C.): appunti per una semiotica comparata

Aim of this work is to clarify to what extent the dramatization of myth into tragedy and its staging during the classical age may have had an impact on mythological vase painting in Magna Graecia, from the late 5th and 4th century BC. In the now numerous studies on the possible comparison vessel/tragedy (see, in particular, Oliver Taplin’s work Pots&Plays), specific semiotic codes that organize mythological narrative respectively in iconography and in drama have not yet been adequately considered. The present contribution clears the different logics that transform a mythical plot into a story - whether it be the episodes concatenated in a tragedy or the pictorial synthesis on a vessel. These logics are mostly complementary or unrelated: in fact, if tragedy is based mainly on a diachronic development of language, with a marginalization of dynamic events (see the events reported on stage by rheseis), the representation of mythical subject on pots tends to a synchronic and synthetic development of action, in an attempt to overcome the static form of the image.