Bellona Furens. Immagine e tempo nelle scene di battaglia tra medioevo ed età moderna

Depicting the cuspidal moments of the battle, facing the density of events and objects, has always been one of the aims of imitative art. The difficulty, as Leonardo observed, is greater for a writer than for a painter; the former encounters a true obstacle. Authors make no mystery of it; on the contrary they put it on display: invoking the muses, their patrons, the audience, and more rarely with the narrator addressing a character. But how was the problem resolved in each work? By examining excerpts from the Chanson de Roland, the Mort le roi Artu, and from Guillaume le Breton’s Philippide, we intend to demonstrate how the brevity and density of many depictions can be explained in the light of a different concept of autonomy of narrated worlds and by the different type of collaboration that the authors could expect from the audience.