On 2 March, Lorena Pérez Yarza, Timo Eichhorn, and Marina Bastero Acha presented a paper entitled “Two Scripts, One Visual Culture? Exploring Calligraphic Semantics in the Multilingual Environment of Imperial Rome” at the Epigraphy and Papyrology seminar.
The paper examined Latin–Greek bilingual inscriptions from the first to the third centuries CE within the framework of the Stone-Masters project, with particular attention to their visual and calligraphic dimension. It focused on letterforms, decorative systems, text layout, and carving techniques in order to show how the material features of inscriptions shaped their reception and conveyed cultural meanings that went beyond language itself. Through a series of case studies, our colleagues argued that inscriptions could express a form of “visual bilingualism,” reflecting Rome’s shared epigraphic culture through their form, technique, and aesthetic execution.
Abstract: As part of the Stone-Masters project, we present our ongoing research with a selection of Latin–Greek bilingual inscriptions dating to the 1st–3rd centuries CE in order to ‘read’ visual dynamics and the semantic implications of the calligraphic design. While in Asia Minor imperial Greek inscriptions show traits of appropriation and transformation of elements taken from the Latin epigraphic habit, creating a distinct and new visual idiom, the evidence from Rome can offer a different cultural setting, shaped by multilingual communities within a city of strong Latin epigraphic tradition. The (multi)cultural and communicative implications of textual aesthetics have rarely been explored from a palaeographic and visual-material perspective. Through a few case studies, we want to discuss the possibilities offered by close analysis of letterforms, letter decorative systems, and ordinatio. Particular attention is paid to the mechanics of production, the carving gestures, serif logic, and ornamental conventions, as well as to the ways in which these material features shaped the perception and cultural reading of bilingual texts or monolingual texts with bilingual aesthetics. The comparison of elements such as the morphological treatment of mu and M, or of rho and P, together with the patterned use of carving techniques terminations and cornices, reveals the extent to which shared workshops, scripts, and visual expectations could generate subtle semantic nuances not necessarily dependent on the culture associated with the language. Ultimately, this paper argues that inscriptions also embodied a form of visual bilingualism and register switching, in which the technique and execution encoded cultural meanings that transcended linguistic boundaries, reflecting Rome’s shared epigraphic culture through materiality.