The stereotyped image of the sacrifice of the ox in Greco-Roman visual culture

Abstract

The aim of this article is to analyze the iconography of the immolatio boum in the Roman visual culture of the late-republican period and at the beginning of the principality. For this we will use the presence of a Greek painting in particular, the immolatio boum of Pausias of Sicyon (Greek painter of the 4th century BC) that was exhibited in the Pompey portico. This certainty is well documented in literary sources, and we will study how the formal, stylistic and visual novelties introduced by the Pausias pictorial avant-garde had an impact on the visualization of the Roman viewer. The main novelty of this article lies in analyzing the intersignification of Greek painting in a Roman public space in which it acquired interpretative nuances that were designed by the Roman political and religious culture. The literary testimonies of Pliny the Elder, Horace, Pausanias or Athenaeus offer us enough information to reconstruct the visual impact of the work in the Roman context. In addition to these written sources, the methodology of image analysis is constructed from a wide range of contemporary examples from the time of Augustus. Finally, the article aims to show how this characteristic iconography survived through different channels of visual transmission to be present in the work of Rafel Sanzio or Pedro Pablo Rubens.