Una disputa del secolo dei Lumi: il sarcofago agrigentino con il mito di Fedra e Ippolito
In: Studi e Ricerche del Parco Archeologico di Pompei: 43, 2020
DOI: 10.48255/1200
The Attic sarcophagus depicting the myth of Phaedra and Hippolytus, now kept in the church of St. Nicholas in Agrigento, has long been considered one of the most precious examples of Greek sculpture in Sicily, before its definitive chronological and stylistic classification as Work of Attic workshops of the third century AD. In the eighteenth century, in coincidence with the presence of more and more foreign travellers in Sicily, it was at the centre of a debate, causing a dispute over the iconography and style of its reliefs. In the final decades of the 18th century, the iconographic theme of the sarcophagus was finally understood correctly, thanks to the German traveller von Riedesel. The judgement on the style of the reliefs, on the other hand, was still able to provoke a controversy that affected the cultured European travellers coming mainly from Germany and France.