What Is It Called When You Turn Words Into Art

Describing visual art in words

"The presence that thus rose so strangely beside the waters, is expressive of what in the means of a thousand years men had come to want. Hers is the head upon which all 'the ends of the earth are come', and the eyelids are a little weary. It is a beauty wrought out from within upon the flesh, the eolith, little prison cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions. Set it for a moment beside one of those white Greek goddesses or beautiful women of antiquity, and how would they be troubled by this beauty, into which the soul with all its maladies has passed! All the thoughts and experience of the world accept etched and moulded there, in that which they accept of ability to refine and make expressive the outward form, the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the reverie of the eye age with its spiritual appetite and imaginative loves, the render of the Pagan world, the sins of the Borgias. She is older than the rocks amid which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen mean solar day almost her; and trafficked for foreign webs with Eastern merchants: and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and, every bit Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her only equally the audio of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with which information technology has moulded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands. The fancy of a perpetual life, sweeping together ten m experiences, is an old one; and modern idea has conceived the idea of humanity as wrought upon past, and summing upward in itself, all modes of idea and life. Certainly Lady Lisa might stand up every bit the embodiment of the old fancy, the symbol of the modern thought." The Mona Lisa described by Walter Pater

The give-and-take ekphrasis, or ecphrasis, comes from the Greek for the written description of a work of art produced as a rhetorical exercise,^[one] often used in the adjectival class ekphrastic. It is a vivid, oft dramatic, verbal description of a visual work of art, either real or imagined. In aboriginal times, it referred to a description of any thing, person, or experience. The word comes from the Greek ἐκ ek and φράσις phrásis, 'out' and 'speak' respectively, and the verb ἐκφράζειν ekphrázein, 'to proclaim or call an inanimate object by proper name'.

Co-ordinate to the Verse Foundation, "an ekphrastic poem is a vivid description of a scene or, more commonly, a work of fine art."^[ii] More generally, an ekphrastic verse form is a poem inspired or stimulated by a work of art.

Ekphrasis has been considered generally to be a rhetorical device in which 1 medium of art tries to relate to some other medium by defining and describing its essence and course, and in doing so, relate more directly to the audition, through its illuminative liveliness. A descriptive work of prose or poesy, a film, or even a photograph may thus highlight through its rhetorical vividness what is happening, or what is shown in, say, any of the visual arts, and in doing and then, may enhance the original art and then take on a life of its ain through its brilliant description. One example is a painting of a sculpture: the painting is "telling the story of" the sculpture, and and so becoming a storyteller, as well every bit a story (work of art) itself. Virtually any type of creative medium may be the player of, or subject field of ekphrasis. One may not always be able, for case, to make an accurate sculpture of a book to retell the story in an authentic way; yet if it is the spirit of the book that we are more concerned nigh, information technology certainly can be conveyed by virtually whatsoever medium and thereby enhance the creative impact of the original book through synergy.

In this style, a painting may correspond a sculpture, and vice versa; a poem portray a moving-picture show; a sculpture depict a heroine of a novel; in fact, given the right circumstances, any art may describe whatsoever other art, especially if a rhetorical chemical element, standing for the sentiments of the artist when they created their work, is present. For instance, the distorted faces in a oversupply in a painting depicting an original work of fine art, a sullen countenance on the face of a sculpture representing a historical figure, or a film showing particularly dark aspects of neo-Gothic architecture, are all examples of ekphrasis.

History [edit]

Plato's forms, the offset of ekphrasis [edit]

In the Republic, Volume X, Plato discusses forms by using real things, such equally a bed, for example, and calls each way a bed has been made, a "bedness". He commences with the original form of a bed, one of a variety of means a bed may take been constructed past a craftsman and compares that form with an ideal form of a bed, of a perfect archetype or image in the form of which beds ought to be made, in brusque, the epitome of bedness.

In his analogy, one bedness grade shares its own bedness – with all its shortcomings – with that of the platonic form, or template. A third bedness, besides, may share the platonic form. He continues with the fourth form also containing elements of the ideal template or classic which in this way remains an e'er-nowadays and invisible platonic version with which the craftsman compares his work. As bedness after bedness shares the ideal form and template of all creation of beds, and each bedness is associated with another ad infinitum, information technology is called an "infinite regress of forms".

From class to ekphrasis [edit]

Information technology was this epitome, this template of the ideal form, that a craftsman or later an artist would try to reconstruct in his attempt to achieve perfection in his piece of work, that was to manifest itself in ekphrasis at a later on phase.

Artists began to use their own literary and artistic genre of fine art to work and reverberate on another art to illuminate what the eye might not encounter in the original, to elevate it and possibly fifty-fifty surpass it.

Plato and Aristotle [edit]

For Plato (and Aristotle), it is not so much the class of each bed that defines bedness:^[3] equally the mimetic stages at which beds may be viewed that defines bedness.

1. a bed as a physical entity is a mere class of bed
2. any view from whichever perspective, be it a side elevation, a full panoramic view from above, or looking at a bed end-on is at a 2nd remove
3. a full picture, characterising the whole bed is at a 3rd remove
4. ekphrasis of a bed in another art class is at a fourth remove

Socrates and Phaedrus [edit]

In another example, Socrates talks nigh ekphrasis to Phaedrus thus:
"You know, Phaedrus, that is the foreign affair nearly writing, which makes it truly correspond to painting.
The painter's products stand earlier united states as though they were alive,
only if you question them, they maintain a most purple silence.
It is the aforementioned with written words; they seem to talk
to you as if they were intelligent, but if you ask them anything
near what they say, from a desire to be instructed,
they go on telling you just the same thing forever".^[4]

Genre [edit]

In literature [edit]

The fullest case of ekphrasis in artifact tin be establish in Philostratus of Lemnos' Eikones which describes 64 pictures in a Neapolitan villa. Ekphrasis is described in Aphthonius' Progymnasmata, his textbook of mode, and later classical literary and rhetorical textbooks, and with other classical literary techniques was keenly revived in the Renaissance.

In the Middle Ages, ekphrasis was less oftentimes proficient, especially every bit regards real objects, and historians of medieval art have complained that the accounts of monastic chronicles recording at present vanished art concentrate on objects fabricated from valuable materials or with the condition of relics, and rarely give more than the cost and weight of objects, and perhaps a mention of the subject matter of the iconography.

The Renaissance and Bizarre periods made much use of ekphrasis. In Renaissance Italia, Canto 33 of Ariosto'southward Orlando Furioso describes a picture gallery created by Merlin. In Kingdom of spain, Lope de Vega oft used allusions and descriptions of Italian art in his plays, and included the painter Titian every bit one of his characters. Calderón de la Barca too incorporated works of art in dramas such as The Painter of his Dishonor. Miguel de Cervantes, who spent his youth in Italy, utilized many Renaissance frescoes and paintings in Don Quixote and many of his other works. In England, Shakespeare briefly describes a grouping of erotic paintings in Cymbeline, but his well-nigh extended exercise is a 200-line description of the Greek ground forces before Troy in The Rape of Lucrece. Ekphrasis seems to have been less mutual in France during these periods.

Instances of ekphrasis in 19th century literature tin can be constitute in the works of such influential figures as Spanish novelist Benito Pérez Galdós, French poet, painter and novelist Théophile Gautier, Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, and Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

Herman Melville's Moby Dick, or The Whale features an intense apply of ekphrasis as a stylistic manifesto of the book in which it appears. In the chapter "The Spouter Inn", a painting hanging on the wall of a whaler's inn is described as irreconcilably unclear, overscrawled with fume and defacements. The narrator, and then-called Ishmael, describes how this painting can exist both lacking any definition and still provoking in the viewer dozens of distinct possible understandings, until the cracking mass of interpretations resolves into a Whale, which grounds all the interpretations while containing them, an indication of how Melville sees his own volume unfolding around this chapter.

In Pérez Galdós'southward Our Friend Manso (1882), the narrator describes two paintings by Théodore Géricault to betoken to the shipwreck of ethics; while in La incógnita (1889), there are many allusions and descriptions of Italian art, including references to Botticelli, Mantegna, Masaccio, Raphael, Titian, etc.

In Ibsen's 1888 work The Lady from the Bounding main, the showtime human activity begins with the description of a painting of a mermaid dying on the shore and is followed by a description of a sculpture that depicts a woman having a nightmare of an ex-lover returning to her. Both works of art can be interpreted as having much importance in the overall significant of the play equally protagonist Ellida Wangel both yearns for her lost youth spent on an island out at body of water and is later on in the play visited by a lover she thought dead. Furthermore, as an interesting example of the dorsum-and-forth dynamic that exists between literary ekphrasis and art, in 1896 (eight years after the play was written) Norwegian painter Edvard Munch painted an paradigm like to the one described by Ibsen in a painting he entitled (unsurprisingly plenty) Lady from the Ocean. Ibsen's last work When Nosotros Dead Awaken also contains examples of ekphrasis as the play's protagonist, Arnold Rubek, is a sculptor who several times throughout the play describes his masterpiece "Resurrection Twenty-four hour period" at length and in the many different forms the sculpture took throughout the stages of its creation. In one case again the evolution of the sculpture as described in the play tin be read every bit a reflection on the transformation undergone past Rubek himself and even as a statement on the progression Ibsen'south own plays took every bit many scholars have read this final play (stated by Ibsen himself to be an 'epilogue') equally the playwright's reflection on his own work every bit an artist.

The Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky employed ekphrasis most notably in his novel The Idiot. In this novel, the protagonist, Prince Myshkin, sees a painting of a expressionless Christ in the house of Rogozhin that has a profound effect on him. Later in the novel, another grapheme, Hippolite, describes the painting at much length depicting the paradigm of Christ equally one of brutal realism that lacks whatever dazzler or sense of the divine. Rogozhin, who is himself the possessor of the painting, at one moment says that the painting has the power to take abroad a human's faith, a comment that Dostoyevsky himself made to his wife Anna upon seeing the actual painting that the painting in the novel is based on, The Trunk of the Expressionless Christ in the Tomb by Hans Holbein. The painting was seen soon before Dostoyevsky began the novel. Though this is the major instance of ekphrasis in the novel, and the one which has the most thematic importance to the story as a whole, other instances can be spotted when Prince Myshkin sees a painting of Swiss landscape that reminds him of a view he saw while at a sanatorium in Switzerland, and too when he first sees the confront of his dearest interest, Nastasya, in the form of a painted portrait. At one bespeak in the novel, Nastasya, besides, describes a painting of Christ, her ain imaginary work that portrays Christ with a child, an paradigm which naturally evokes comparison between the image of the dead Christ.

The Irish aesthete and novelist Oscar Wilde'south The Picture show of Dorian Grey (1890/1891) tells how Basil Hallward paints a moving picture of the young human named Dorian Gray. Dorian meets Lord Henry Wotton, who espouses a new hedonism, dedicated to the pursuit of beauty and all pleasures of the senses. Under his sway, Dorian bemoans the fact that his youth will soon fade. He would sell his soul then every bit to have the portrait historic period rather than himself. Every bit Dorian engages in a debauched life, the gradual deterioration of the portrait becomes a mirror of his soul. In that location are repeated instances of notional ekphrasis of the deteriorating figure in the painting throughout the novel, although these are oft fractional, leaving much of the portrait's imagery to the imagination. The novel forms office of the magic portrait genre. Wilde had previously experimented with employing portraits in his written piece of work, every bit in The Portrait of Mr. W. H. (1889).

Anthony Powell'southward novel sequence A Trip the light fantastic toe to the Music of Fourth dimension begins with an evocation of the painting past Poussin which gives the sequence its name, and contains other passages of ekphrasis, possibly influenced past the many passages in Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu.

In the 20th century, Roger Zelazny's "24 Views of Mt. Fuji, by Hokusai" uses an ekphrastic frame, descriptions of Hokusai'due south famous series of woodcuts, as a structural device for his story. In her novel Skyline the S African-Italian Patricia Schonstein concludes each chapter with an art curator's clarification of a naïve work of fine art as a ways of introducing additional narrative voices.

Ekphrastic poetry [edit]

This is a design of the Shield of Achilles based on the clarification in the Iliad. It was completed by Angelo Monticelli c. 1820. This shield represents the art of ekphrastic poetry Homer used in his writings.

Ekphrastic poetry may be encountered as early as the days of Homer, whose Iliad (Book xviii) describes the Shield of Achilles, with how Hephaestus made it as well every bit its completed shape.^[5] Famous after examples are found in Virgil's Aeneid, for instance the description of what Aeneas sees engraved on the doors of Carthage'due south temple of Juno, and Catullus 64, which contains an extended ekphrasis of an imaginary coverlet with the story of Ariadne picked out on information technology.

Ekphrastic poesy flourished in the Romantic era and again among the pre-Raphaelite poets. A major verse form of the English Romantics – "Ode on a Grecian Urn" by John Keats – provides an example of the artistic potential of ekphrasis. The entire verse form is a description of a piece of pottery that the narrator finds immensely evocative. Felicia Hemans made extensive use of ekphrasis,^[vi] every bit did Letitia Elizabeth Landon, specially in her Poetical Sketches of Modernistic Pictures. Dante Gabriel Rossetti's "double-works" exemplify the use of the genre by an artist mutually to raise his visual and literary art. Rossetti also ekphrasised a number of paintings by other artists, generally from the Italian Renaissance, such equally Leonardo da Vinci's Virgin of the Rocks.^[7]

Other examples of the genre from the nineteenth century include Michael Field's 1892 volume Sight and Song, which contains but ekphrastic verse; Algernon Charles Swinburne'south poem "Before the Mirror", which ekphrasises James Abbott McNeill Whistler's Symphony in White, No. ii: The Little White Daughter, hinted at only by the verse form'southward subtitle, "Verses Written under a Picture"; and Robert Browning's "My Final Duchess", which although a dramatic monologue, includes some clarification by the duke of the portrait earlier which he and the listener stand up.

Ekphrastic poetry is withal commonly practised. Twentieth-century examples include Rainer Maria Rilke'southward "Archaïscher Trunk Apollos",^[8] and The Shield of Achilles (1952), a poem by W. H. Auden,^[5] which brings the tradition back to its outset with an ironic retelling of the episode in Homer (come across above), where Thetis finds very different scenes from those she expects. In contrast, his earlier poem "Musée des Beaux Arts" describes a particular real and very famous painting, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, thought until recently to exist by rather than later on Pieter Brueghel the Elder, which is also described in the verse form by William Carlos Williams "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus".^{[ clarification needed ]} The paintings of Edward Hopper have inspired many ekphrastic poems, including a prize-winning volume in French past Claude Esteban (Soleil dans une pièce vide, Sun in an Empty Room, 1991),^[9] a drove in Catalan by Ernest Farrés (Edward Hopper, 2006, English translation 2010 by Lawrence Venuti), an English collection by James Hoggard Triangles of Light: The Edward Hopper Poems (Wings Press, 2009), and a collection by various poets (The Poetry of Solitude: A Tribute to Edward Hopper, 1995, editor Gail Levin), together with numerous private poems; see more at Edward Hopper § Influence. The poet Gabriele Tinti has composed a serial of poems for aboriginal works of art including the Boxer at Rest, the Discobolus, Arundel Caput, the Ludovisi Gaul, the Victorious Youth,^[10] the Farnese Hercules, the Hercules past Scopas,^[xi] the Elgin marbles from the Parthenon, the Barberini Faun, the Doryphoros and many other masterpieces.

In, or as, fine art history [edit]

Since the types of objects described in classical ekphrases often lack survivors to modern times, art historians have often been tempted to use descriptions in literature as sources for the appearance of actual Greek or Roman art, an approach full of take chances. This is because ekphrasis typically contains an element of contest with the art it describes, aiming to demonstrate the superior ability of words to "paint a picture". Many subjects of ekphrasis are clearly imaginary, for instance those of the epics, but with others it remains uncertain the extent to which they were, or were expected to be by early audiences, at all accurate.

This tendency is past no means restricted to classical art history; the evocative but vague mentions of objects in metalwork in Beowulf are eventually always mentioned by writers on Anglo-Saxon art, and compared to the treasures of Sutton Hoo and the Staffordshire Hoard. The ekphrasic writings of the lawyer turned bishop Asterius of Amasea (fl. around 400) are often cited by art historians of the period to fill gaps in the surviving creative record. The inadequacy of almost medieval accounts of art is mentioned above; they generally lack any specific details other than cost and the owner or donor, and hyperbolic just wholly vague praise.

Journalistic fine art criticism was finer invented by Denis Diderot in his long pieces on the works in the Paris Salon, and extended and highly pointed accounts of the major exhibitions of new art became a popular seasonal feature in the journalism of nearly Western countries. Since few if whatever of the works could be illustrated description and evocation was necessary, and the cruelty of descriptions of works disliked became a part of the style.

As art history began to become an bookish subject in the 19th century, ekphrasis as formal assay of objects was regarded every bit a vital component of the subject, and by no means all examples lack attractiveness as literature. Writers on art for a wider audience produced many descriptions with bully literary every bit well as art historical merit; in English language John Ruskin, both the most important journalistic critic and popularizer of celebrated art of his mean solar day, and Walter Pater, above all for his famous evocation of the Mona Lisa, are among the virtually notable. As photography in books or on telly allowed audiences a directly visual comparison to the verbal description, the role of ekphrasic commentary on the images was even maybe increased.

Ekphrasis has also been an influence on art; for case the ekphrasis of the Shield of Achilles in Homer and other classical examples were certainly an inspiration for the elaborately decorated big serving dishes in argent or silver-gilt, crowded with complicated scenes in relief, that were produced in 16th century Mannerist metalwork.

In music [edit]

There are a number of examples of ekphrasis in music, of which the all-time known is probably Pictures at an Exhibition, a suite in ten movements (plus a recurring, varied Promenade) equanimous for pianoforte past the Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky in 1874, and then very popular in diverse arrangements for orchestra. The suite is based on existent pictures, although as the exhibition was dispersed, near are now unidentified.

The first motility of Iii Places in New England by Charles Ives is an ekphrasis of the Robert Gould Shaw Memorial in Boston, sculpted by Augustus Saint-Gaudens. Ives also wrote a poem inspired by the sculpture every bit a companion piece to the music.^[12] Rachmaninoff's symphonic poem Isle of the Dead is a musical evocation of Böcklin's painting of the aforementioned proper name. King Crimson's vocal "The Night Sentinel", with lyrics written by Richard Palmer-James, is an ekphrasis on Rembrandt's painting The Night Sentinel.

Notional ekphrasis [edit]

Notional ekphrasis may draw mental processes such as dreams, thoughts and whimsies of the imagination. It may as well exist i art describing or depicting another work of fine art which as yet is still in an inchoate state of creation, in that the work described may still exist resting in the imagination of the artist before he has begun his artistic work. The expression may besides exist practical to an art describing the origin of another fine art, how it came to be fabricated and the circumstances of its beingness created. Finally it may draw an entirely imaginary and non-existing piece of work of fine art, as though it were factual and existed in reality.

In ancient literature [edit]

Greek literature [edit]

The Iliad [edit]

The shield of Achilles is described by Homer in a famous example of ekphrastic verse, used to describe events that have occurred in the past and events that will occur in the hereafter. The shield contains images representative of the Cosmos and the inevitable fate of the metropolis of Troy. The shield of Achilles features the following ix depictions:

1. The Earth, Body of water, Sky, Moon and the Cosmos (484–89)
2. Ii cities – i where a wedding and a trial are taking place, and i that is considered to be Troy, due to the battle occurring inside the city (509–40)
3. A field that is being ploughed (541–49)
4. The home of a King where the harvest is beingness reaped (550–60)
5. A vineyard that is being harvested (561–72)
6. A herd of cattle that is being attacked by two lions, while the Herdsman and his dogs endeavour to scare the lions off the prize bull (573–86)
7. A sheep subcontract (587–89)
8. A scene with young men and women dancing (590–606)
9. The mighty Ocean as it encircles the shield (607–609)

The Odyssey [edit]

Although not written equally elaborately every bit previous examples of ekphrastic poetry, from lines 609–614 the belt of Herakles is described as having "marvelous works,"^[13] such as animals with piercing eyes and hogs in a grove of copse. It also contains multiple images of battles and occurrences of manslaughter. In the Odyssey, in that location is also a scene where Odysseus, bearded as a beggar, must testify to his wife, Penelope, that he has proof that Odysseus is still live. She asks him most the clothes Odysseus was wearing during the time when the beggar claims he hosted Odysseus. Homer uses this opportunity to implement more ekphrastic imagery by describing the golden brooch of Odysseus, which depicts a hound strangling a fawn that it captured.^[13]

The Argonautika [edit]

The Cloak of Jason is another example of ekphrastic verse. In The Argonautika,^[fourteen] Jason'south cloak has seven events embroidered into it:

1. The forging of Zeus' thunderbolts by the Cyclops (730-734)
2. The building of Thebes by the sons of Antiope (735–741)
3. Aphrodite with the shield of Ares (742–745)
4. The battle betwixt Teleboans and the Sons of Electryon (746–751)
5. Pelops winning Hippodameia (752–758)
6. Apollo punishing Tityos (759–762)
7. Phrixus and the Ram (763–765)

The description of the cloak provides many examples of ekphrasis, and non only is modeled off of Homer's writing, but alludes to several occurrences in Homer'southward epics the Iliad and the Odyssey. Jason's cloak tin can exist examined in many ways. The style the cloak'southward events are described is like to the catalogue of Women that Odysseus encounters on his trip to the Underworld.^[fifteen]

The cloak and its depicted events lend more than to the story than a simple description; in true ekphrasis manner it non only compares Jason to future heroes such as Achilles and Odysseus, simply likewise provides a type of foreshadowing. Jason, by donning the cloak, tin be seen as a figure who would rather resort to coercion, making him a parallel to Odysseus, who uses schemes and lies to consummate his voyage dorsum to Ithaca.^[16]

Jason also bears similarities to Achilles: past donning the cloak, Jason is represented equally an Achillean heroic figure due to the comparisons made betwixt his cloak and the shield of Achilles. He is likewise takes up a spear given to him by Atalanta, not as an afterthought, but due to his heroic nature and the comparison between himself and Achilles.^[17]

While Jason only wears the cloak while going to come across with Hypsipyle, it foreshadows the changes that Jason volition potentially undergo during his run a risk. Through the telling of the scenes on the cloak, Apollonios relates the scenes on the cloak as virtues and morals that should be upheld by the Roman people, and that Jason should learn to live by. Such virtues include the piety represented by the Cyclops during the forging of Zeus' thunderbolts.^[xviii] This is likewise reminiscent of the scene in the Iliad when Thetis goes to meet Hephaestus, and requisitions him to create a new set of armor for her son Achilles. Earlier he began creating the shield and armor, Hephaestus was forging 20 gilded tripods for his own hall, and in the scene on Jason's cloak we see the Cyclops performing the terminal step of creating the thunderbolts for Zeus.^[nineteen]

Roman literature [edit]

The Aeneid [edit]

The Aeneid is an epic that was written past Virgil during the reign of Augustus, the first Emperor of Rome. While the epic itself mimics Homer's works, it can be seen as propaganda for Augustus and the new Roman empire.^[20] The shield of Aeneas is described in book eight, from lines 629–719.^[21] This shield was given to him past his mother, Venus, subsequently she asked her husband Vulcan to create it.^[21] This scene is nigh identical to Thetis, the mother of Achilles, asking Hephaestus to create her son new weapons and armor for the battle of Troy.

The difference in the descriptions of the ii shields are easily discernible; the shield of Achilles depicts many subjects, whereas the shield made for Aeneas depicts the time to come that Rome will have, containing propaganda in favor of the Emperor Augustus.^[xx] Much like other ekphrastic verse, information technology depicts a clear catalogue of events:

1. The She Wolf and the suckling Romulus and Remus (629–634)
2. The Rape of the Sabine Women (635–639)
3. Mettius pulled apart by horses (640–645)
4. Invasion of Lars Parsona (646–651)
5. Manlius guarding the capitol (652–654)
6. Gauls invading Rome (655–665)
7. Tartarus with Cato and Catiline (666–670)
8. The Sea around the width of the shield (671–674)
9. The Battle of Actium (675–677)
10. Augustus and Agrippa (678–684)
11. Antony and Cleopatra (685–695)
12. Triumph (696–719)

There is speculation equally to why Virgil depicted certain events, while completely avoiding others such every bit Julius Caesar's conquest of Gaul. Virgil clearly outlined the shield chronologically, just scholars argue that the events on the shield are meant to reflect certain Roman values that would have been of loftier importance to the Roman people and to the Emperor.^[22] These values may include virtus, clementia, iustitia, and pietas, which were the values inscribed on a shield given to Augustus past the Senate.^[23] This example of ekphrasitc poetry may exist Virgil's attempt to chronicle more of his work to Augustus.

Earlier in the epic, when Aeneas travels to Carthage, he sees the temple of the urban center, and on it are corking works of fine art that are described by the poet using the ekphrastic style. Like the other occurrences of ekphrasis, these works of art describe multiple events. Out of these, in that location are eight images related to the Trojan War:^[21]

1. Depictions of Agamemnon and Menelaus, Priam and Achilles (459)
2. Greeks running from Trojan soldiers (468)
3. The sacking of the tents of Rhesus and the Thracians, and their deaths by Diomedes (468–472)
4. Troilus being thrown from his Chariot every bit he flees from Achilles (473–478)
5. The women of Troy in lamentation, praying to the gods to aid them (479–482)
6. Achilles selling Hektor's trunk (483–487)
7. Priam begging for the return of his son, with the Trojan commanders nearby (483–488)
8. Penthesilea the Amazon, and her fighters (489–493)

Some other significant ekphrasis in the Aeneid appears on the baldric of Pallas (Aeneid X.495-505). The baldric is decorated with the murder of the sons of Aegyptus by their cousins, the Danaïds, a tale dramatized by Aeschylus. Pallas is killed past the warrior Turnus, who plunders and wears the baldric. At the climax of the poem, when Aeneas is on the point of sparing Turnus'due south life, the sight of the baldric changes the hero's mind. The significance of the ekphrasis is hotly debated.^[24]

The Metamorphoses [edit]

There are several examples of ekphrasis in the Metamorphoses; one in which Phaeton journeys to the temple of the sun to meet his father Phoebus. When Phaeton gazes upon the temple of the sun, he sees the following carvings:^[25]

1. The seas that circle the Globe, the surrounding lands, and the sky (8–ix)
2. The gods of the sea and the Nymphs (ten–19)
3. Scenes of men, beasts, and local gods (20–21)
4. Twelve figures of the Zodiac, six on each side of the door to the temple (22–23)

Other aspects [edit]

Educational value of using ekphrasis in teaching literature [edit]

The rationale behind using examples of ekphrasis to teach literature is that once the connectedness between a poem and a painting are recognized for example, the student's emotional and intellectual engagement with the literary text is extended to new dimensions. The literary text takes on new meaning and at that place is more to reply to because another art form is existence evaluated.^[26] In improver, as the material taught has both a visual and linguistic ground new connections of agreement are formed in the student'due south encephalon thus creating a stronger foundation for agreement, remembrance and internalization. Using ekphrasis to teach literature can be done through the use of higher order thinking skills such as distinguishing unlike perspectives, interpreting, inferring, sequencing, compare and contrast and evaluating.^{[ citation needed ]}

Literature examples [edit]

• Roberto E. Aras: "«Ecfrasis» y «sinfronismos» en la ruta de Ortega hacia El Quijote" ("Ekphrasis" and "synphronism" on Ortega's route to Don Quixote), in Disputatio. Philosophical Enquiry Bulletin 8:ten (December 2019): 0-00 (xviii p.)
• Andrew Sprague Becker: The Shield of Achilles and the Poetics of Ekphrasis. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1995. ISBN 0-8476-7998-five
• Emilie Bergman: Art Inscribed: Essays on Ekphrasis in Spanish Gold Age Verse. Cambridge: Harvard University Printing, 1979. ISBN 0-674-04805-9
• Gottfried Boehm and Helmut Pfotenhauer: Beschreibungskunst, Kunstbeschreibung: Ekphrasis von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart. München: W. Fink, 1995. ISBN 3-7705-2966-9
• Siglind Bruhn: Musical Ekphrasis: Composers Responding to Verse and Painting. Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon Printing, 2000. ISBN 1-57647-036-ix
• Siglind Bruhn: Musical Ekphrasis in Rilke's Marienleben. Amsterdam/Atlanta: Rodopi Publishers, 2000. ISBN 90-420-0800-8
• Siglind Bruhn: "A Concert of Paintings: 'Musical Ekphrasis' in the Twentieth Century," in Poetics Today 22:3 (Herbst 2001): 551–605. ISSN 0333-5372
• Siglind Bruhn: Das tönende Museum: Musik interpretiert Werke bildender Kunst. Waldkirch: Gorz, 2004. ISBN 3-938095-00-8
• Siglind Bruhn: "Vers une méthodologie de l'ekphrasis musical," in Sens et signification en musique, ed. by Márta Grabócz and Danièle Piston. Paris: Hermann, 2007, 155–176. ISBN 978-2-7056-6682-8
• Siglind Bruhn, ed.: Sonic Transformations of Literary Texts: From Program Music to Musical Ekphrasis [Interplay: Music in Interdisciplinary Dialogue, vol. six]. Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon Printing, 2008. ISBN 978-i-57647-140-one
• Frederick A. de Armas: Ekphrasis in the Historic period of Cervantes. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Printing, 2005. ISBN 0-8387-5624-7
• Frederick A. de Armas: Quixotic Frescoes: Cervantes and Italian Renaissance Fine art. Toronto: University of Toronto Printing, 2006. ISBN 978-1-4426-1031-6
• Robert D. Denham: Poets on Paintings: A Bibliography. (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010) ISBN 978-0-7864-4725-i
• Hermann Diels: Über dice von Prokop beschriebene Kunstuhr von Gaza, mit einem Anhang enthaltend Text und Übersetzung der Ekphrasis horologiou de Prokopius von Gaza . Berlin, G. Reimer, 1917.
• Barbara 1000 Fischer: Museum Mediations: Reframing Ekphrasis in Contemporary American Poetry. New York: Routledge, 2006. ISBN 978-0-415-97534-half-dozen
• Claude Gandelman: Reading Pictures, Viewing Texts. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991. ISBN 0-253-32532-3
• Jean H. Hagstrum: The Sister Arts: The Tradtition of Literary Pictorialism and English Poetry from Dryden to Gray. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1958.
• James Heffernan: Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery. Chicago: Academy of Chicago Press, 1993. ISBN 0-226-32313-7
• John Hollander: The Gazer's Spirit: Poems Speaking to Silent Works of Art. Chicago: Academy of Chicago Press, 1995. ISBN 0-226-34949-7
• Gayana Jurkevich: In pursuit of the natural sign: Azorín and the poetics of Ekphrasis. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1999. ISBN 0-8387-5413-9
• Mario Klarer: Ekphrasis: Bildbeschreibung als Repräsentationstheorie bei Spenser, Sidney, Lyly und Shakespeare. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2001. ISBN iii-484-42135-5
• Gisbert Kranz: Das Bildgedicht: Theorie, Lexikon, Bibliographie, 3 Bände. Köln: Böhlau, 1981–87. ISBN 3-412-04581-0
• Gisbert Kranz: Meisterwerke in Bildgedichten: Rezeption von Kunst in der Poesie. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1986. ISBN 3-8204-9091-iv
• Gisbert Kranz: Das Architekturgedicht. Köln: Böhlau, 1988. ISBN 3-412-06387-8
• Gisbert Kranz: Das Bildgedicht in Europa: Zur Theorie und Geschichte einer literarischen Gattung. Paderborn: Schöningh, 1973. ISBN 3-506-74813-0
• Murray Krieger: Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. ISBN 0-8018-4266-two
• Norman Land: The Viewer as Poet: The Renaissance Response to Art. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania Land University Press, 1994. ISBN 0-271-01004-5
• Cecilia Lindhé, 'Bildseendet föds i fingertopparna'. Om en ekfras för den digitala tidsålder, Ekfrase. Nordisk tidskrift för visuell kultur, 2010:1, p. 4–16. ISSN Online: 1891-5760 ISSN Impress: 1891-5752
• Hans Lund: Text as Picture: Studies in the Literary Transformation of Pictures. Lewiston, NY: E. Mellen Press, 1992 (originally published in Swedish every bit Texten som tavla, Lund 1982). ISBN 0-7734-9449-9
• Alexander Medvedev: Tiziano'due south «Denarius of Caesar» and F.Thousand. Dostoevsky's «The Chiliad Inquisitor»: on the Problem of Christian Art In: The Solovyov Research, 2011, No. 3, (31). P. 79–90.
• Michaela J. Marek: Ekphrasis und Herrscherallegorie: Antike Bildbeschreibungen im Werk Tizians und Leonardos. Worms: Werner'sche Verlagsgesellschaft, 1985. ISBN 3-88462-035-v
• J. D. McClatchy: Poets on Painters: Essays on the Art of Painting by Twentieth-Century Poets. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. ISBN 978-0-520-06971-8
• Hugo Méndez-Ramírez: Neruda's Ekphrastic Feel: Mural Art and Canto general. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1999. ISBN 0-8387-5398-1
• Richard Meek: Narrating the Visual in Shakespeare. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2009. ISBN 978-0-7546-5775-0
• W.J.T. Mitchell: Picture show Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. ISBN 0-226-53231-iii
• Margaret Helen Persin: Getting the Motion-picture show: The Ekphrastic Principle in Twentieth-century Spanish Verse. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1997. ISBN 0-8387-5335-3
• Michael C J Putnam: Virgil'due south Ballsy Designs: Ekphrasis in the Aeneid. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. ISBN 0-300-07353-iv
• Christine Ratkowitsch: Die poetische Ekphrasis von Kunstwerken: eine literarische Tradition der Grossdichtung in Antike, Mittelalter und früher Neuzeit. Wien: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2006. ISBN 978-3-7001-3480-0
• Valerie Robillard and Els Jongeneel (eds.): Pictures into Words: Theoretical and Descriptive Approaches to Ekphrasis. Amsterdam: VU University Printing, 1998. ISBN 90-5383-595-four
• Maria Rubins: Crossroad of Arts, Crossroad of Cultures: Ekphrasis in Russian and French Verse. New York: Palgrave, 2000. ISBN 0-312-22951-8
• Grant F. Scott: The Sculpted Word: Keats, Ekphrasis, and the Visual Arts. Hanover, NH: University Printing of New England, 1994. ISBN 0-87451-679-X
• Grant F. Scott: "Ekphrasis and the Picture Gallery", in Advances in Visual Semiotics. Ed. Thomas A. Sebeok and Jean Umiker-Sebeok. New York and Berlin: Westward. de Gruyter, 1995. 403–421.
• Grant F. Scott: "Copied with a Divergence: Ekphrasis in William Carlos Williams' Pictures from Brueghel". Word & Image 15 (Jan–March 1999): 63–75.
• Mack Smith: Literary Realism and the Ekphrastic Tradition. University Park: Pennsylvania State U Press, 1995. ISBN 0-271-01329-10
• Leo Spitzer: "The 'Ode on a Grecian Urn', or Content vs. Metagrammar," in Comparative Literature vii. Eugene, OR: University of Oregon Press, 1955, 203–225.
• Ryan J. Stark, Rhetoric, Scientific discipline, and Magic in Seventeenth-Century England (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2009), 181–90.
• Iman Tavassoly: Rumi in Manhattan: An Ekphrastic Collection of Poetry and Photography, 2018. ISBN 978-1984539908
• Peter Wagner: Icons, Texts, Iconotexts: Essays on Ekphrasis and Intermediality. Berlin, New York: W. de Gruyter, 1996. ISBN three-11-014291-0
• Haiko Wandhoff: Ekphrasis: Kunstbeschreibungen und virtuelle Räume in der Literatur des Mittelalters. Berlin, New York: De Gruyter, 2003. ISBN 978-3-eleven-017938-5
• Robert Wynne: Imaginary Ekphrasis. Columbus, OH: Pudding House Publications, 2005. ISBN ane-58998-335-one
• Tamar Yacobi, "The Ekphrastic Figure of Speech," in Martin Heusser et al. (eds.), Text and Visuality. Discussion and Epitome Interactions 3, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999, ISBN ninety-420-0726-five.
• Tamar Yacobi, "Verbal Frames and Ekphrastic Figuration," in Ulla-Britta Lagerroth, Hans Lund and Erik Hedling (eds.), Interart Poetics. Essays on the Interrelations of the Arts and Media, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997, ISBN 90-420-0202-6.
• Santarelli, Cristina (2019). "Fifty'ékphrasis come up sussidio all'iconografia musicale: Funzione metanarrative delle immagini nel romanzo modern e contemporaneo". Music in Art: International Periodical for Music Iconography. 44 (1–ii): 221–238. ISSN 1522-7464.

Meet also [edit]

• Blazon

References [edit]

1. ^ The Chambers Dictionary, Chambers Harrap, Edinburgh 1993 ISBN 0-550-10255-eight
2. ^ The Poesy Foundation, Glossary Terms: Ekphrasis (accessed 27 April 2015)
3. ^ "Ecphrasis".
4. ^ Plato: Phaedrus 275d
5. ^ ^{a b} Munsterberg, Marjorie, Writing About Art: Ekphrasis (retrieved 27 Apr 2015)
6. ^ Grant F. Scott. The Fragile Image: Felicia Hemans and Romantic Ekphrasis in Felicia Hemans. Reimagining Poetry in the Nineteenth Century. Palgrave Macmillan, 2001. ISBN 978-0-333-80109-3
7. ^ "For "Our Lady of the Rocks", by Leonardo da Vinci". Rossetti Annal . Retrieved 7 March 2017.
8. ^ "Rainer Maria Rilke, Body of an Archaic Apollo".
9. ^ Sample poem: "Trois fenêtres, la nuit" ("Night windows"), notes
10. ^ http://blogs.getty.edu/iris/verse form-for-a-victorious-athlete/ Getty Museum | 2015-09-08
11. ^ "Giving Life to Hercules: Q&A with Gabriele Tinti and Joe Mantegna - Unframed". unframed.lacma.org . Retrieved 9 May 2019.
12. ^ Mortensen, Scott. "Orchestral Fix No. 1: Three Places in New England – Notes". A Charles Ives Website . Retrieved 19 October 2013.
13. ^ ^{a b} Lattimore, Richmond (1967). The Odyssey of Homer. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics. lines 609–614.
14. ^ Rhodios, Apollonios. The Argonautika. lines 720–763.
15. ^ Bulloch, Anthony (2006). "Jason's Cloak". Hermes. 134: 44–68 [59]. Retrieved 16 Apr 2016.
16. ^ Shapiro, H. A. (1 Jan 1980). "Jason'due south Cloak". Transactions of the American Philological Association. 110: 263–286. doi:10.2307/284222. JSTOR 284222.
17. ^ Clauss, James (1993). The Best of the Argonauts. The University of California Press. p. 120. Retrieved xvi April 2016.
18. ^ Shapiro, H. A. (one January 1980). "Jason'due south Cloak". Transactions of the American Philological Association. 110: 265. doi:ten.2307/284222. JSTOR 284222.
19. ^ Clauss, James. The Best of the Argonauts. p. 122.
20. ^ ^{a b} Williams, R. D. (1981). "The Shield of Aeneas". Vergilius (27): viii–11. JSTOR 41591854.
21. ^ ^{a b c} Ahl, Frederick (2007). The Aeneid of Virgil. Dandy Uk: Oxford World'south Classics. lines 372–406. ISBN978-0-xix-923195-9.
22. ^ Penwill, John. "Reading Aeneas' Shield" (PDF).
23. ^ Harrison, S. J. (Nov 1997). "The Survival and Supremacy of Rome: The Unity of the Shield of Aeneas". The Journal of Roman Studies. 87: 70–76. doi:10.1017/S0075435800058081. Retrieved 20 Apr 2016.
24. ^ Olive, Peter (August 2021). "Red Herrings and Perceptual Filters: Problems and Opportunities for Aeschylus's Supplices". Arethusa. 54: 1–29. doi:10.1353/are.2021.0000.
25. ^ Martin, Charles (2010). Metamorphoses. W. West. Norton and Company. pp. 1–23.
26. ^ Milner, Joseph O'Beirne, and Lucy Floyd Morcock Milner. Bridging English. 2nd ed. Upper Saddle River: Prentice, 1999. pp. 162–163.

External links [edit]

• Discussion of Class
• Essay on musical ekphrasis Archived 23 September 2009 at the Wayback Machine
• Maier Museum of Art at Randolph College Ekphrastic Poetry Web Page
• Hephaestus Starts Achilles' Shield
• Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, Ashbery
• Ekphrastic verse form past Jared Carter on the Lorado Taft sculpture, "The Confinement of the Soul."
• Human being Lying on a Wall
• Examples of Ekphrasis verse
• Ekphrastic blog, Poems and Pictures
• Martyn Crucefix on fourteen Ways to Write an Ekphrastic Poem

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Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ekphrasis

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