Varcare i confini del mondo: Herakles e il mito delle Hesperides

Abstract

The research that I have developed concerning the myth of Herakles and the Hesperides. During the study began, there was a large-scale reading of the phenomena which have affected the development and dissemination of this theme, with the possibility of reconstructing a scene rather than exhaustive and varied, not limited to one area or an area defined chronological specific production of old. The methodological approach applied to the study of the images is of the iconographic iconographic: the images are the vehicles of their own values and ideals of the world that produced and expressed, this ethical system is to transmit a coherent set of gestures, signs, symbols, which help to define specific behaviours and recognizable. This code responds to specific rules in the construction of images with the selection criteria of attributes, gestures, objects, absence / presence of certain elements. If then there is an underlying substratum of cultural values, literary and epigraphic sources are useful to rebuild the backdrop on which images are inserted, which should not be used merely as a point of comparison. The poetry and the arts illuminate each other and collaborate, in turn, in the reconstruction of the legends and their diachronic evolution, certainly a fruitful synergy. Data from two documentary series examined, text and images were interpreted separately and only then crossed to test the stratification of the literary tradition and iconography of the myth of Herakles in the garden of the Hesperides. [edited by Author]