Virtus et pietas du défunt. Quelques hypothèses de lecture de l'iconographie officielle en contexte funéraire

Abstract

The ambiguity of funerary space justifies that we wonder about the validity of a separation between the public sphere and the private one within the space of the Roman city. At first sight, the monument - simple stele or monumental structure - concerns the private sphere, by its primary function of domus Aeterna, intended to preserve the memory of a private individual and to become the center of family meetings at the time of the festivities related to the worship of deads. However, marking out the Roman ways, the monument is registered, in fact, in the landscape of the public sphere; it is thus - much more than the domus - the place of exhibition of an image magnified of the dead one, whose family seeks to print the memory within the collective memoria. However, there isn't a unilateral answer to such questions. The analysis of the corpus that we chose to consider - that of the diffusion of some "political" images in funerary context - reveals a perceptible evolution in the loans to the official iconography at the imperial period. The subject being vast, we propose only some lines of thinking here, thanks to the analysis of examples allowing to illustrate the reception of two key values of the Roman citizen and the imperial figure: virtus and pietas.This article is resulting from the publication of a work edited by A. Dardenay and E. Rosso on the problems of the interactions between public sphere and private sphere within the space of the Roman city. This monograph is based on recent and particularly stimulative work allowing establishing a new approach that would address from several points of view the ongoing exchanges between the two "worlds": they have in common to consider as a priority agents and actors who were the vectors of these transfers. Structured in three parts - "Ambiguity of spaces", "Interactions: reciprocity and complementarity of exchanges ", "From public to private: transfer and appropriation of forms" - this volume brings together the contributions of twelve scholars and offers the result ...