The Survival of the Pagan Gods
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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La survivance des dieux antiques. Essai sur le rôle de la tradition mythologique dans l’humanisme et dans l’art de la Renaissance (1940) is a book by Jean Seznec. Thanks largely to Seznec, it is widely understood that the Olympian gods, and the earlier spirits of field and spring, did not die with the advent of Christianity, but survived Christianization.
They went underground to feature in folk culture, took on strange new guises and were transformed in various ways, their myths recast to suit some of the mythic saints of Late Antiquity, and their imagery permeated Medieval intellectual and emotional life. The transformed mythology re-emerged in the iconography of the early Tuscan Renaissance, with new attributes that the ancients had never imagined, and enjoyed tremendous renewed popularity during the Renaissance.
The work expands the scope of Warburg Institute scholars Fritz Saxl and Erwin Panofsky, and presents a broad view of the transmission of classical representation in Western Art.
The book was translated in English in 1953 and published by Pantheon Books as The Survival of the Pagan Gods: Mythological Tradition in Renaissance Humanism and Art. On the cover of one English edition is Pluto and Proserpina, an illumination hailing from Les Échecs amoureux moralisés by Evrard de Conty.
From the publisher:
- The gods of Olympus died with the advent of Christianity--or so we have been taught to believe. But how are we to account for their tremendous popularity during the Renaissance? This illustrated book, now reprinted in a new, larger paperback format, offers the general reader first a discussion of mythology in late antiquity and the Middle Ages, and then a multifaceted look at the far-reaching role played by mythology in Renaissance intellectual and emotional life.
See also
- Greek mythology
- Decline of Greco-Roman polytheism
- Greek mythology in western art and literature
- Christianization
- Ovid illustrated
- Paganism
- Influences antiques dans l'art du Moyen Âge français (1939) by Jean Adhémar
