Tra ellenismo e grecità periferica: ritorno a Kazanlak

Abstract · Between Hellenism and Peripheral Greekness: Return to Kazanlak ·With the contribution dedicated to the pictorial cycle of the tholos of Kazanlak Torelli (2004) addresses the eastern periphery of the Greek world and comes to a clarification of the iconographic attributes that define the local identity of the dynast and the ‘international ascendencies’ of the queen, whose ceremonial referents are to be found in the Macedonian dynasties involved, in the central years of the 3rd c. B.C., in military and diplomatic actions for the control of the precious metals resources of Thrace and for the dominion of the straits. The Thracian art develops on production and formal models derived from archaic Iranian and connected to the princely character, and not urban, of the patronage, but adopts the rules laid down by the genres and stylistic canons at the basis of the painting of Early Hellenism, here recognizable in the different pictorial languages used in megalography and in the “historical” friezes, analyzed by Torelli in their ethnic components. The Author intervenes in the iconographic reading by specifying the male genre of trumpet players in megalography and widening the comparisons for the minor friezes of the tholos (with the chariot race and the bucrania) to the evidence of Halicarnassus and Lymira. The commonality of language between Thrace and microasiatic contexts – as well as with the nearby and better known Samothrace – testifies to the complexity of the network of artists serving local hellenized elites, pushing the re-examination of the external horizons of the Thracian art of the 3rd c. B.C. and the perimeter of its artistic koinè.