After the monograph by the Belgians Jean Hubaux and Maxime Leroy in 1939, shortly after the discovery in Daphne (Syria) in 1934 of the large phoenix mosaic in the Louvre, and after the thesis by the Dutchman Roelof Van den Broek published in 1972, the German Rainer Henke published, at the end of his career as a specialist in late Christian authors at the University of Münster (where he was a disciple of Professor Christian Gnilka), a monumental work devoted to the phoenix in Antiquity: Der Vogel Phönix im Altertum: Mythos und Symbolik. The scope of these works has grown, from 250 to 500 and almost 1,000 pages. This is because research on the unique bird cyclically reborn from its remains or its ashes, described by historians and naturalists, sung by poets and adopted as a symbol of eternity by the Roman Empire and as a symbol of resurrection by the Christian faith, was relaunched by the passage to the third millennium. The year 2000 gave rise to a number of scientific and popular publications, from the proceedings of the conference at the University of Caen Normandy organized by Silvia Fabrizio-Costa to the work for the general public by the American Joseph Nigg, via the art book by the Italians Francesco Zambon and Alessandro Grossato and the collective academic work directed by Laurence Gosserez. However, none of them had the vocation to replace the work of R. Van den Broek. - [Author]

Language: French

DOI: 10.4000/kentron.6066