The Allegories of the Months in Classical Art

Strzygowski's book on the famous Calendar of Filocalus, or the "Chronograph of 354," published in 1888, 1 is still considered the solid and fundamental basis for any study of figured calendars of Antiquity. Peiresc and Aleander, with knowledge and intuition admirable for their time, had almost exactly determined the meaning and the date of the original manuscript from which was derived the ninth-century copy 2 of the Calendar they had the good fortune to discover. Mommsen had proposed a relationship of the several manuscripts containing parts of the same Calendar; this was accepted by Strzygowski-and is denied today. The supposed achievement of the latter scholar was the understanding, through the study of all ancient monuments accessible to him, of the artistic phenomenon of illustrated calendars, the determination of their origin, and their evolution. How did he solve this problem?