ANNOUNCEMENT

This meeting will be a chance to unite researchers and specialists and to confront different research domains (Literature, History of art, History and Archaeology) around particular period: the preRoman and Roman Gaul.

It will be a question of studying the representations which the Gauls and Gallo-Romans generated in art and literature for the XVIth century and the continual coming and going which they implicate with archaeology, at the origin of these same representations.

General frame of the Day

Historical sciences are a source of influence for painters and writers, who, according to to them a priori creative, want to recreate and to return present a forever past past. The appeal to the scientific sources is for the artist not specialist a guarantee of authenticity and by its creation, it gives form then to a past which the only historian could not reproduce.

The century of the Enlightenment saw the discovery of Pomp i and the artists went to search their inspiration in the ancient forms. They wanted to take again the mind of the classical civilisation, considered to be source of our civilised humanity and at the origin of the invention of the Nice. For the artists and French writers, it is also about a search of displaced origins in Italy.

If the past of Rome comes to light and fascinates, that of the Gaul is to search, to eradicate from the basement. It appears made dark and tinted with mysteries. While at the end of the XVIIIth century, the archaeological discipline in France advances, specifies its methods and its object of studies, while the notion of national Antiques is born, the artists and writers will go more easily to scoop out from this knowledge from various aims - sometimes nationalist, sometimes by aspiration for a new exoticism.

However, historical science is relating: the yesterday truths can become errors. Constant archaeological discoveries relegate at the rank of plates a lot of theories which are until then taken for the scientific truths. The literary and pictorial writings of the XIXth and XXth centuries inspired by the state of the sciences of their epoch are from now on the echo of these plates. However, considerable progress on the knowledge of the Gauls and of the Gallo-Roman does not prevent the survival of id e re ue on Our idealised Ancestors, both in the comic strip and in the cinema.

And in spite of methods always stricter, the archaeologists too carry a look on the past which is necessarily hedged by representations and myths of epoch to which they belong, but that it is often difficult, or even impossible, to lose.

Working axles

The working day will be declined according to three angles of approach: