Pliny’s Art

written by Greta Hawes

Pliny the Elder’s Natural History is one of our best sources for descriptions of ancient artworks. Most of these appear in the final five books of his encyclopedic work, in which he uses what is ostensibly a discussion of different natural products (stone, metals, pigments…) to segue into catalogues of the various works of art created using these materials.

Many of the artworks that Pliny describes were displayed in his time in Rome and its surrounds. Most of these were, however, brought there from Greek cities, and so his account functions also as a rich account of the development of Greek sculpture, painting and decorative work in the Classical and Hellenistic periods.

Thanks to a crack team of Macquarie University PACE interns, all of the Natural History is now in MANTO.

This is a fabulous achievement, not least since it means that we have now captured all the artefacts that Pliny describes that have some kind of mythic narrative depicted on them. (For an overview of how we determine which artifacts belong in MANTO, see this blog post.)

The final tally is: 113! These comprise 72 paintings, 38 sculptures, a pair of skyphoi with a depiction of Orestes’ trial, a phiale with a depiction of the theft of the Palladion, and a ringstone with an image of Amymone carved into it. We have assigned to each of these artifacts categories which represent their artifact type (painting, sculpture, vessel, etc), chronology, and location. Quite often these last two categories were difficult to assign because Pliny does not always say where and when an artwork was made. Nonetheless, the because Pliny is often very precise in his descriptions of where they were displayed in his own ti,me, we can start to model Rome with greater granularity, adding locations like the Temple of Venus Genetrix (which housed two paintings by Timomachos of Byzantium), the Saepta Julia, and the Rostra.

You can access the data on these artifacts as .csv files here:

Artifacts in Pliny: minimal data

Artifacts in Pliny with passage references and entities depicted

(Not included here are artworks described by Pliny as having mythical scenes on them, but for which he does not give any information about the date, or artist.)

Final numbers overall for Pliny: 785 ties, covering 763 mythic people, places and things. Well done, team!

Thanks to this semester’s crack team of PACE interns for their hard work and commitment to ploughing though Pliny with me.