ABSTRACT
At the beginning of the second century, Theo of Alexandria gave the following definition of the myth: 'the myth is a deceitful discourse which expresses the truth in images'. Augustine associated the metaphor, which explains one thing on the basis of another, to myths, images fables, fiction, figures and likenesses. Poetry is a double of the perceptible image, and has the same status as the latter, as does the myth, by means of which it first expressed itself. In the Renaissance, the exegesis of mythical images was regarded as a mode of knowledge, linked to the hermetic tradition, in which symbols and allegories superimposed on the myth's original narrative structure reconstructs a 'Philosophy of Nature' in a new cryptography. The poems, each of which is devoted to an image, are grouped into stories, either mythical or biblical, portraits and sculptures, and here again; the description is not literal, but analytic.
