I fregi a girali abitati dell’Athenaion di Castro: iconografia e linguaggio formale di una creazione tarentina

Recent excavations carried out in the sanctuary of Athena at the Messapian settlement of Castro brought to light some limestone slabs with a baroque acanthus decoration, peopled by animals and flying Victories. The blocks constituted a monumental enclosure or embellished a huge building within the sacred area, destroyed at the end of the 3rd century BC. The paper focuses on the vegetal composition, that can be assigned to a Tarentine workshops on the basis of its iconographic and stylistic features. Special attention is devoted to the chronological definition of the monument, which seems to represent the missing link between the late-Classical scroll patterns of the Apulian vase painting and the Hellenistic sculpted friezes of the Tarentine necropolises. Because of the debated chronology of the Tarentine architectural decoration, the paper programmatically expands the comparative analysis to the Apulian painting, the pebble mosaics and the architectural decoration of mainland Greece, in order to reconstruct the art-historical background of this impressive monument, which was characterized by sophisticated perspective solutions and a naturalistic interpretation of floral motifs.