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Pinax

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In the culture of ancient Greece and Magna Graecia, a pinax (πίναξ) (plural pinakes - πίνακες) or a "board", denotes a votive tablet of painted wood, terracotta, marble or bronze that served as a votive object deposited in a sanctuary or as a memorial affixed within a burial chamber. In daily life pinax might equally denote a wax-covered writing tablet. In Christian contexts, painted icons ("images") are pinakes. In the theatre of ancient Greece, they were colored images either carved out of stone or wood or even made of cloth that were hung in the scene as background.

Marble pinakes were individually carved, but terracotta ones were impressed in molds, and bronze ones might be repeatedly cast from a model from which wax and resin impressions were made, in the technique called lost wax casting. At Locri thousands of carefully-buried pinakes have been recovered, most of them from the sanctuary of Persephone or that of Aphrodite.

The Roman architect Vitruvius mentions the pinakes in the cellas of temples, and even in the possession of private persons. Such a collection was a pinakothek, which is a modern German term for an art museum, such as the Alte Pinakothek of Munich.

The Alexandrian poet and curator of the Library of Alexandria Callimachus formed a kind of index, or "map picture" of the library's contents, which he named Pinax. Pinakes feature in the classical collections of most comprehensive museums.

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References

  • Ulrich Hausmann, 1960. Griechischen Weihereliefs (Berlin)

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