Storie scolpite a rilievo e narrazioni a confronto. Gli Stylopinakia di Cizico e il fregio di Telefo a Pergamo

The decoration of monuments in the Greek world allowed for a style known as paradigmatic, which was based on the combination of stand-alone images with their own space-time coordinates. Thanks to Pausanias, for example, numerous monuments are known to have been decorated with a multitude of mythical tales, such as the Chest of Cypselus exhibited at in the Temple of Hera at Olympia, the throne made by Bathycles of Magnesia at Amyclae or the erymata painted by Panaenus inside the temple of Zeus at Olympia. The selection of the themes is subject to one or more organizing concepts, although they do not always have explicit links, and the associations can arise due to both similarities and differences. On the other hand, another approach distributes a story in a unitary frame of multiple images, featuring one or more individuals (the labours of Heracles and the deeds of Theseus in the decoration of buildings such as the Athenian Treasury at Delphi and, especially for the second hero, in Attic vase-painting), that may or may not follow a spatial and temporal coherence. This article aims to highlight these two tendencies by presenting two roughly contemporary monuments in the context of the final phase of the reign of Eumenes II in Pergamon, namely the stylopinakia of the temple of Queen Apollonis at Cyzicus and the Telephos frieze from the Great Altar of Pergamon, with an analysis of the peculiar means of composition of their images and of their message.