Osymandias, namely Ramesses II, an ancient Egyptian sovereign who doesn’t appear in the Herodotean tradition, but only in Diodorus Siculus (I 47), was the object in 1818, in England, of a poetical contest between two friends, Percy Shelley and Horace Smith, and at least Shelley composed in that occasion one of the most renowned poems of the whole British literature, by evoking gigantic fragments of statues and distant desert landscapes. In addition to the traditional explanations for the inspiration of the authors I put forward the celebrity of a drawing of a great Swiss painter, Füssli, containing a man shocked by the tremendous, huge marble fragments of the Colossus of Constantine.
Osimandia in Diodoro e nella poesia inglese dell'Ottocento
GAGGERO, GIANFRANCO
2013-01-01
Abstract
Osymandias, namely Ramesses II, an ancient Egyptian sovereign who doesn’t appear in the Herodotean tradition, but only in Diodorus Siculus (I 47), was the object in 1818, in England, of a poetical contest between two friends, Percy Shelley and Horace Smith, and at least Shelley composed in that occasion one of the most renowned poems of the whole British literature, by evoking gigantic fragments of statues and distant desert landscapes. In addition to the traditional explanations for the inspiration of the authors I put forward the celebrity of a drawing of a great Swiss painter, Füssli, containing a man shocked by the tremendous, huge marble fragments of the Colossus of Constantine.
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