Picture This: The Art (and Rhetoric) of Ekphrasis

Access to Readings

• The Ekphrasis section of the Progumnasmata page
• Brill's New Pauly article on "Ekphrasis," only section "A. Concept"
• Philostratus the Elder. From, Imagines ("Images"), Loeb edition, read
  • Introduction, pp. 3-7
  • Book 1.23 "Narcissus," pages 89-93
• John Keats "Ode on a Grecian Urn" (The Poetry Foundation)

• Optional reading / listening for "Urn." Analysis of poem — the "General" section should be quite helpful (Lilia Melani, Brooklyn College). Student Paris Stroud recites the poem (Poetry Out Loud, YouTube) — shivers down your spine.

Quiz Response Prompt

• Link to Picture This: The Art (and Rhetoric) of Ekphrasis Brightspace "quiz" (or better, journal entry).

Introductory Remarks

Today's readings concern ekphrasis (also spelled "ecphrasis"), but what is ekphrasis? To quote Burton's Silva Rhetoricae site, it is:

"Vivid description; using details to place an object, person, or event before the listeners' eyes. . . . Ekphrasis has another more restricted definition: the literary description of a work of art."

Ekphrasis in Greek means something like "expression": utterance that seeks to communicate to an audience a vivid idea of a thing or person. Above all, ekphrasis is description. Ancient Greek and Latin literature is full of such description, and our age of orators featured ekphrasis as its own literary-rhetorical genre. Ekphrasis could also serve as progumnasma, that is, as a "preliminary exercise," a way for the budding orator to practice bringing things, mostly works of art, to life for an audience — a way to make memorable not just the thing described but the description as well.

The chief feature of ekphrasis is enargeia, "vividness." Here I quote from the Terms page:

Among the meanings of enargeia is the one that will concern us, namely, rhetorical "vividness," that is, vivid description, vivid narrative. From an article of mine:

"Plutarch [states] that the aim of both painting and historical narration is enargeia, 'vivid description' (De glor. Ath. 346f–47c). According to Quintilian, this quality, which he calls evidentia, lends persuasive power to narrative. For it makes audiences feel as if they are witnesses to truth. According to the author of the De elocutione, this vividness comes from attention to detail."

In other words, when composing your ekphrases, include details well chosen to make us feel we're really there, looking at whatever it is, in the flesh, so to speak.

But ekphrasis is also statement. It's a statement about the thing; it argues something that the describer wants listeners/readers to buy into about it: its significance, its value, its cultural meaning, etc. It's also, as is all oratory, a statement about you, the orator: your ability to see, to describe, to bring something to life. But ekphrasis, like all oratory, could also figure into its discourse a message, hidden or explicit.

For this class meeting, we have two primary readings (as opposed to secondary, or background readings): Philostratus' Imagines (ancient) and Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn" (modern).

The actual author of the Imagines not fully clear. The Loeb edition refers to "Philostratus the Elder," but it seems a good guess that we're dealing with the same Philostratus as wrote the Lives of the Sophists, read earlier for class. If that is our author, then the dramatic date and the period of composition will likely be some time after Philostratus relocated from Athens to Rome, around 204 CE.

The introduction starts out with reflections on visual and verbal art as imitation. It then explains the occasion and setting for descriptions that follow of paintings. Supplying the occasion are the "public games" at Naples, probably the Sebasta, games originally modeled on the Olympics and established to honor the emperor Augustus. The setting is, evidently, an aristocratic villa outside Naples and described in ekphrastic style, with terraces, sculptures, and panel paintings; what follows the introduction is a series of descriptions of panel paintings belonging to the villa in question. Philostratus is besieged by young, aspiring orators beseeching him to provide them with with a sample of his oratory. In response, Philostratus decides to treat his audience (and us) to descriptions of the villa's paintings.

The one description that I'm having you read concerns itself with the myth of Narcissus. Son of a Boeotian river god and a nymph, Narcissus had a passion for the hunt but but not for human love objects — not, that is, until he beheld his image in a pool and fell in love with it. Seeking to embrace the youth reflected in the pool, he fell in and drowned.

Note how the description resonates with the painting described at the beginning of Daphnis and Chloe and with the novel as a whole: a cave of the nymphs, herders, etc. It also features much concrete detail aiming at enargeia, "vividness of description." Dionysus, god of wine and of mystic intoxication is also evoked, as is erotic desire (erōs, himeros). What other themes does the description touch on? How do you respond to these reflections on reflection?

As for Keats "Ode,"

I'll confine myself to saying that the poet, while writing the work (in 1819), was finding inspiration in ancient Greek and Roman classics. As for the vase itself, it appears to be a composite of things Keats was reading about and viewing at the time, it's an artwork of the imagination, a synthesis of ideas that must have been churning about in Keats' head at the time — ideas about art, humanity, mortality, and the like.

In considering the poem in relation to Philostratus' Imagines, it bears mentioning that the poet, writing centuries after the sophist, was part of the Romantic movement, which, according to the usual account, set feeling over reason and reacted against the formalism of eighteenth-century neoclassical art and literature. And yet the poem, whether by design or not, in ways resembles ekphrases that sophists like Lucian and Philostratus produced. It describes scenes evidently intended as emblematic of the Greco-Roman past and narrates stories that those scenes seem, at least from the poet's perspective, intended to convey. But it also captures the life of those scenes in much the way that amber captures insect life from eons ago, preserving it immobile, forever. And, maybe a little like Philostratus, too, it seems to use description as a medium through which to explore deeper questions.

Indeed, the poem is nothing if not deeply concerned with the "classical" past — how? Is Keats' a historically accurate past? A mythic past? How is it like or unlike the "Greece that was" of Lucian, Alciphron, Longus (author of D&C), or Philostratus?

A few notes:

"Sylvan historian," "Tempe or the dales of Arcady," etc. The poem describes a vase telling a story, or multiple stories, of the classical past, stories set in a "sylvan" (rural, wooded, pastoral) setting. Tempe and Arcadia are places in Greece associated with that idyllic past. Think Daphnis and Chloe.

"Maidens loth." The maidens are being pursued by lovers. They don't want to be (are "loth" to be) caught.

"What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?" That evokes a scene of Dionysian worship, as on the Sosibios vase (above).

"Not to the sensual ear" — not to physical hearing but to the mind or to the imagination.

"O Attic shape!" Keats imagines that this is a classical (ca. 500-300 BCE) Athenian vase. But it perhaps more resembles something Roman, though evoking the Greek past. (See above, Portland vase, Sosibios vase.)

". . . with brede / Of marble men and maidens overwrought" — with interwoven images "of marble men and maidens" on its surface.