CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2018
| Author | Pallag, Zoltán |
|---|---|
| Title | Reading the Seuso Hunting Plate: Text, Image and Identity in the Later Roman Empire |
| Summary | My thesis explores the complex relationship of texts and images on the fourth century silver plate, the so called Seuso Hunting Plate with the close reading of both its inscriptions and visual images. The texts on the plate consist of a verse inscription in Latin and two name labels (Innocentius, Pelso) while the images represent various scenes of the daily life of a villa estate. The plate was probably found in Hungary in the 1970s as a part of a larger hoard. The introduction presents the topic in its modern context (the modern-day history of the object), since without the understanding the issues of its provenance it cannot be understood why it is much safer (in terms of archaeological research) to deal with plate alone and not with the treasure in general. From the data currently available, we can distinguish at least four key phases or social contexts in which the Seuso Hunting Plate participated. These are the contexts of the patron, the maker, the owner, and the viewer. Although it is impossible to identify the exact patron of the object examined, the textual and visual sources are sufficient to provide at least a profile of the probable patron of the Seuso Hunting Plate, the person who commissioned the object, using two traditional methods: epigraphy and iconological analysis. This Late Roman silver plate conveys the patron’s messages, which are incorporated into the object through conscious and unconscious choices. My thesis aims to unpack these messages by using different strategies of examination. After the analysis the texts (chapter 1) I contextualize the imagery (chapter 2) of the plate: the outdoor banquet, the hunting scenes, and the rural landscape. My starting point is that the composition of the plate is abstract and referential rather than illustrative, so the focus falls on the images and the meanings represented by them, which convey certain symbolic values. The analysis of the visual language of the plate shows that the iconography is not an ad-hoc depiction of a real picnic, hunt and villa estate but a carefully constructed iconography referring to good life and a locus amoenus, and they fit very closely into the domestic décor of the age. I aimed to demonstrate the importance of looking closely at objects and the potential of an integrated and contextual approach in the study of Late Roman silver and art in general, since the relationship between visual representations and written sources are highly complex and one should not choose to analyse only one of them since both are fundamental in research, especially if we do not have the archaeological context in which the object was found. |
| Supervisor | Menze, Volker; Gaşpar, Cristian-Nicolae |
| Department | Medieval Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2018/pallag_zoltan.pdf |
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