Pliny’s Artistic Anecdotes and Roman Discourse on Art

Remarks on Valérie Naas’s New Book

Abstract

Valérie Naas’s 2023 monograph (Anecdotes artistiques chez Pline L’Ancien) interprets the artistic anecdotes featured in the art-related books of Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis historia within the context of a uniquely Roman art discourse. The starting point of the investigation is the shift in the history of research that reads Pliny’s encyclopedia not merely as a compilation, but as a text possessing a coherent, narrative, and ideological function. From this perspective, the anecdotes of Greek origin are not simply preserved, but rearranged and placed within a new horizon of meaning: they become part of Roman identity formation and cultural self-definition. The detailed analysis of the present study points out the merits of this approach – above all, the consistent rereading and systematization of the material – while at the same time raising critical questions regarding the conceptual definition of the anecdote, the delineation of the corpus, and the interpretation of the Plinian narrative transformation.