PECULIARITIES OF THE USE OF ANCIENT QUOTATIONS IN THE PORTRAITURE OF THE RENAISSANCE ERA

Abstract

The article is devoted to the peculiarities of the use of quotations from ancient authors’ works in the form of inscriptions on secular portraits of the Renaissance period. It outlines the cultural and historical prerequisites that determined the peculiarities of portrait painting development in this period as well as the use of Latin inscriptions therein. The key underlying role in cultural development of this period played the change of religious and philosophical paradigm, the general cultural humanistic orientation of the era, as well as the revival of classical ancient ideas. These factors ultimately determined the selection and application of Latin inscriptions in the Renaissance portraiture. This paper analyses the grammatical features (change in the grammatical design of individual quotation elements) and structural transformations (abbreviation or, conversely, supplementation) of the ancient quotations on portraits depending on their respective functional load, which the painters availed themselves of, in order to explicitly convey their artistic intention. The article scrutinizes various semantic transformations undergone by ancient quotations in terms of their use in a completely different (as regards to the original text) cultural context. It also offers general description of the functional semantics of ancient quotations on secular portraits of the Renaissance period.