JOHN ELSNER
w. And Christopher Hobin's two names, when taken lOp;ethcr with 'Trespassers after an uncle and William after Trespassers', became CHAPTER EIGHT proof. They did not simply prove that Piglet had a grandfather. They proved that the language-game of two names I.:ould work, and that it could provide an identity for all concerned for Piglet, philostratus and the imaginary museum for Piglet'S grandfather, for the sign TRESPASSERS wand for NORMAN BRYSON Christopher Robin. Through competition, the limits of the credible, of identity itself, had changed. 34
The Imagines of the Elder philostratus must cuunt as one of the great ruins of antiquity (Fig. ]9). From the Renaissance until the time ofthe excavations at Pompeii and ITerculaneum, the-Imagines, together with tlie--sur~T~ing-!ragments preserved in' RO~le, ~titUted virtually all that couldJ);k~;I~-E~~bpe-::;l~~~r';~~ classical painting. Even today, when so much more of that painting has been brought to light, the Imagines remains ~ ~~e reso~~c.e. It is our most extensive account of what a Roman picture gallery, a Roman catalogue ofpictures, ;md the Roman viewing of pictures may have been like. philostratus claims to base his account in actuality. In the Proem he assures his reader that his sixty-odd verb'll descriptions are rendered after original paintings (pil1.akes) housed in a single collection ill Neapolis (Naples).
I was lodging olltside the walls lof Neapolisj in a suburb facing the sea, where there was a portico built on four, I think, or possibly five terr'lCes, open to tile east wind and looking out on the Tyrrhl'l\ian sea. It w:!s resplendent with all the marbles favoured by luxury, blll it was , ", particularly splendid by reason of the panel-paintings set within the walls, paintings which I thought had been collected with real for thev exhibited the skill of very many painters. I
philostratus has been asked by the son of his host to speak about the paintings, and he agrees. The text that follows presents itsd!" as the record of his discourses, delivered before an ,IUdience ofynung men' eager to learn', in the presence of the pictllr('s lH Parr of the fascination of the text for the Renaissance and 2~) -~,..~ ...... ".---
PHI LOS T RAT USA N I) TilE I MAG I N A II Y M {' Sj. NORMAN BRYSON
eighteenth century seem to have intensified this A t1anti.~-like ) aspect of the Imagines, and in the nineteenth century attempts were \1,. undertaken to correlate philostratus' text with the .~ u..l1earth::J_~ ex~v~ti~~. One consequence ofsuch efforts was that the ctescriptions were found by some scholars n~~ to correspond, ,I \, <-U),}l)'Ut,)l)r1 \... or not to correspond closely 5nough, wit]I the Campani,ln paintings. A debate accordingly developed from the second half of (ft.... l the~T;,eteenth century and into the twentieth century in which the in--l~ . CJuestion of the authenticity of the descriptions became the leading CJuestion. Were they reliable, or had philostratus invented the. entire gallery out of nothing as a virtuoso exercise in ecp1Irasis? ( ~ll~~n became polarised,~with figures such as Welcker, > Brunn, and Wickhotf on the side ofauthenticity, opposing CayIus) Friedrichs, Matz and Robert.2 Scholarship in English played a lesser role in the debate, with the great exception of Karl Lehmann'5 article 'The Imagines of the Elder Philostratus', published in Art Bulletin some fifty years ago, in 1941.:1 Coming almost at the close of the' authenticity' debate, Lehmann's article advanced what is perhaps the most vigorous and ingenious case ever mounted in defence of the view that the Imagines were b'lsed on an actual picture collection from the late second century or early third century CEo ok Lehmann begins ~h Goethe's essay' Philostrats ~;ema.lde' 'J written in 1818.4 Goethe had maintained that the present order of the sixty-odd elements in the Ifllaljines is confused and confusing. Acc( ,rdingly he rearranged them under nine separate headings: ( 1) Heroic an(1 Tragic Subjects; (2) Love and Wooing; (3) Birth and Education; (4) Deeds of Herakles; () Athletic Contests; «(i) Hunters and Hunting; (7) Poetry, Song and Dance; (8) Landscapes; and (9) Still Lite. Lehmann takes Goethe's thematic Fig. 29 re-ordering, which aimed at a clearer editorial se(luence, and puts it to use within the debate on the authenticity of Philostratus' modern reader has been the promise contained in the idea of pictures. Working entirely from the existing, and apparently resurrection: from its pages might be constructed an entire gallery confused, sequence, Lehmann argues that it is possible to account of the lost paintings ofantiquity, together with the context of their for both the coherence of thematic groupings within the Imar;illes reception by a living audience. Though the paintin~s at Pompeii and the seeming incoherences of sequence also present in the text and Herculaneum antedate philostratus by two centuries, the by mapping the Imagines against an arcl!itectura/~ "} "-. lS(i discoveries in Campania anel their publication from the mid ~...... -.
NOHMAN BRYSON PHll.OSTRATllS AND TIIF IMA(;INARY ~ll'SE'"
Some examples will help to clarify Lehmann's processes of reasoning. In the second book of the Imagines occur six 20 consecutive pictures illustrating the adventures of Herakles. r A~'~sl 'I· Africa I Lehmann points out that it is inconceivable that this grouping _ J could be accidental. [. Apart from a fleeting appearance in the WALL II picture of the Argonauts (2. I 5), Herakles features nowhere else in ---lUi the sixty-odd descriptions. And yet, the sequence of the Ilerakles ""I ),.1 '0 ej rlibY "I~ pictures is strange. The first (2.20) portrays the contest between ___aJ I , ~r Herakles and Atlas; the scene takes place in north-western Africa. -I -I ,...~ The second (2.21) shows the fight between Heraklcs and Antaios; ~ now the scene is Libya. The next depicts Herakles, again in north Africa, sleeping and attacked by the Pygmies (2.22). Obviously il 3 these three (2.20-2.22) are concerned with Herakles' African ~.
adventures, Then /()liows a picture representing the madness of Alll'rtM Herakles, and now a temporal series can be inferred: after completing the last of the twelve Labours, Herakles voyaged along the coast of Africa, encountering on the way Antaios and later the A1IUes~'1 Pygmies, before his return home and his attack of insanity. This EL sequence accounts clearly for numbers 2.20-2.23 four of the six Herakles episodes. But the two remaining pictures (2.24 and 2.25) Fi!-,. lO do not fit this scheme at all. Picture 2.24 deals with Herakles and Theiodamas. In the myth, the episode can be located in two ending at the 'wrong' points. The sequence should be: the different regions - Thessaly and Rhodes. philostratus reads the commencement of Herakles' adventures in Thessaly; Heraklcs and landscape of 2.24 as Rhodian. To Lehmann, this sounds odd. For the horses of Diomedes; Herakles and Atlas; then I Ierakles' return if the painter had intended the landscape as that of Rhodes, the voyage, including the episodes with Antaios and with the Pygmies, picture should properly have been placed between the African in North Africa; finally Herakles' homecoming and madness. If adventures and Herakles' final homecoming. Lehmann's resolution Philostratus' account were cut and resequenced it would make up oT the anomaly is to claim that philostratus was wrong to interpret a single story. How has this Raw in the presentation come about? the landscape as that of Rhodes. In fact the mountains in the ' It is here that Lehmann advances the hypothesis of the Room picture must be those of Thessaly which is where. lIcrakles' 0 (fig. 3 ). If the secluence is laid out as it continuous chronicle, its · l' L.abours begm. six component episodes can be thought of as forming a band of Picture 2.24 thus inaugurates the narrative sequence. The next pictures inset into the walls ofa single chamber. The hypothesis of picture in the Imagilles shows one of the Labours - the taming of the Room then permits Lehmann to advance the corollary idea, of the horses of Diomcdcs. Though it comes last in the series, in the Doorway. That the Imagines confusingly recounts the terms of a continuous chronicle it follows 2.24 and precedes the Herakles episodes in the order 3/4/5 /6/ 1/2 can be explained if later episodes, 2.20 to 2.23. \Vhat has happened is that the PiJilostr;Ht!s is imagined entering the room through a
') X Imagines has run through a continuous story, but starting and placed between the second and third pictures (2.2~, . The horses of ]., II ..... ; ...... ,'~..~~.
NOHMIIN BRYSON PHILOSTRATliS AND THE IMAGINARY MI'SEl','
Diomedes' and 2.20, 'Atlas '). philostratus passes through the door, turns to one side, and begins his text in the middle of the Herakles legend (fig. 30). Observing the 'correct' narrative sequence is evidently less important to him than describing the pictures as he Ilnds them in situ, set into the walls. I f the existence
of room and doorway is accepted, the break in sequence can be WALL read as an architectural caesura, not a textual glitch. (In Lehmann's reading, all textual discontinuities will be projected as architectural 9 registers: disunity in the text is to be resolved into the unity of the t !l. building; the text's openings, interruptions, and incompleteness I will be transformed, through a specific ecphrastic operation, into J, the wholeness of an image, an edifice, a museum.) Having tested the hypotheses of the room and the doorway and finding them secure, Lehmann now proceeds to blot'k in the walls s of his ml/see imaginaire from dado to cornice. For it turns out that !• sometimes, within an evidently coherent sequence, such as that of ~ AI1WM Herakles, there appear quite unrelated pictures, pictures that interrupt the sequence for no apparent reason. Such cases can be I resolved by hypothesising a second tier of pictures, placed above (SOlV.JO !Sn"J11:z JOll1 7 }UOH the Ilrst, towards the ceiling. The opening pictures of book 2, II! . ~ ··oP. Lehmann maintains, form a continuous series of episodes to do UOP~SOd put ~dOj3d j -~_o~e.~ ~~ ~~Q~~~P or 6r with love. To the group as a whole he gives the name' Room of I-i~, .11 Aphrodite '.R Love's power features in the opening scene, showing
girls in a procession for Aphrodite (2.1); it continues in the stories common is that both show the corpses of young men); while the of Hippolytus refusing to love Phaedra (2,4), in the love of idea of Antilochus as a young Olympian victor can draw to itself Critheis and Meles (2.8), in the suicide of Palltlteia (2.9), and the the story of the birth ofPindar, 'the f~lmous bard ofsuch victories' death of Cassandra (2.10). Yet this catalogue of love's woes is (2.12). And, since Pan is present at Pindar's birth, Pan's presence i~terrupted by pictures quite unconnected with love: Chei ron with nymphs in an adjacent picture (2.11) can also be explained. educating Achilles (2.2) and female Centaurs (2.3). Chciron goes Lehmann docs not stop with the room. To enclose the whole of widl female Centaurs, but not with the Aphrodite seriet yet the the text, he must build an edillcr, a stoa. How is it to be lit? The interruption can be resolved if these pictures are imagined a~"a pair, walls require windows, and windows turn out to be doubly useful: placed above the' main' scene. This upper tier can now establi<;h they provide light for the pictures; and they fill up space when its own band and its own independent life. The education of there seem to be not enough pictures to go round. Consider, for Achilles (2.2) and female Centaurs (2.3) can absorb a third scene {~ -~ (",; instance, the Hoom of Dionysus (fig. 31).9 In Lehmann's analysis frnm the life of Achilles, where he mourns the death of Antilochus ~~'" this comprises a lower-level tier devoted to six Dionysian suhjects, (2,7). The picture of the youthful Antilocltus can then attract as its and an upper tier with eleven miscellaneous scenes. Ohviously (,,, cornire partner a picture of Arrhidikos (2..6; the feature held in there is a difficulty here, How could walls which, in their lower .. I':. N()I~MAN BRYSON PHILOSTRATllS AND TilE IMA(;INAIIY MUS,.!·,
tier, show only six scenes, leave space for eleven scenes above? Whatever changes of sequence that might have bef:lllen the text in Evidently, the upper pictures should be imagined as smaller in its transmission from the third century would inevitably take the scale small enoll!!;h to allow, on Wall 2, as many as live scenes f()rm of architectural synt
house, before setting in the Tvrrhenian sea. 1:'."~.; • text. What is interesting is the way that with Lehmann till' tropes .'. of mctonymy and metaphor do not remain editorial or textual I.'j;j ~k, I I operations but are figured in terms that are visual and volumetric. , " , Metonymy projects as the gaze of a beholder who, standing at It would be possible to object to Lehmann's reconstructib'n on ,\ the centre of the room, traces a continuous narrative frieze across number of counts. His case rests on an unargued premise that the tiers; or as the pathway of the spectator's body moving from Philost~atus ney~. i'i () 1\ \[ A N B 1\ Y SON PlIlLOSTI\AT\lS ANIl TilE IMA(;[NAHY ~[I:S' I singular risks of uncurtailability. Once a common feature such as admission there remains a grollp of pictures that fall qllitl' olltside 'love' is unleashed, it is hard to see what story may not, one way the boundary of his analysis. Beviewing his work from its end, or another, be subsumed into the resulting series. Similarly, once Lehmann reckons that he has been able to account for all thirty-six the idea of chronological series cOllies into play, it becomes in sections of book I, and the first twenty-six of book 2. Yet eight principle possible to order all sixty-odd descriptions into over 'miscellaneous' cases remain. 12 Accordingly, Lehmann expels the lapping temporal groups. i3ut the potential of both metaphor and entire group from his definition of the imagines. He concilldes metonymy for unlimited expansion across the whole corpus of the that, lacking in the relations he has been proposing, the peccant imagines is held in check by the spatial boundaries of dado and images are in fact later additions, grafted on 'either before the real cornice, window and door, terrace and swircase. Architecture publication or else for a second edition '.13 nearing ill mind what emerges as the containment and pacification of textual energies Den·ida calls the 'logic of the sllpplement', by pressing on what which, without that binding inAuence from matter fixed in space, Lehmann rejects one may come to see the principles of l'xclusiotJ would soon run across the text from end to end. by which his interpretation is structured. That supplement to the What governs both metaphor and metonymy is another figure: imagines, so far from standing beyond its pale, may delineate that visualisation. The text as a whole is envisioned as a luxurious which Lehmann's reading must constantly repress in order to Neapolitan building. This response to the imagines is Lehmann's sustain itself; and, as part of this, what may be the features of the distinctive ecphrastic operation. H is work wi th rhilostratus' text imagines which are the hardest for commentary in general to results in a crossing from text to image. Lehmann reacts to each reach. round ofdifiiculty within the imagines by creating a new building One would wish to examine in detail all eight' supplementary' feature. First, the room, whose walls soon present dadoes, cornices items (2.27-2.34). Here just the first two in the group will be and doorways; they are lit by windows of varying size and considered, and especially 2.28, ' Looms'. The selection is in some position; the rooms are tiered as the terraces of a stoa; finally, like sense justified by Lehmann', own gesture ofexc\usion. His system any good architect, Lehmann considers his building in relation to has been working well; it has brollght order to all the previous .. the seasons, and the orientation of the site. He is faced with a text pictures in both books, however bizarre or dislocated they may filled with hiatuses and inconsistencies. Under pressure from the have initially appeared. Yet after Xenia 2 (at 2.26), the system text's internal stress lines he produces, step by step, an architecture breaks down entirely. In spatial terms, Lehmann's (re)construction of containment. \Vhat emerges within the text as difficulty and of the stoa is now complete. With the placing of the second still disruption is projected in the visual domain as plenitude and unity. life, Philostratus writes' The End'. The reader passes out of the The text's moments of incoherence and disruption produce an portico - out of Lehmann's text-as-architecture --- into th(' outer, architecture of massive and stable blocks. i" disorderly world. Interestingly, the bce which the world presents It is in this doubling of the broken text as an IInbrokelj:image, is exactly that of a broken building filled with debris: rather than in his deductive reasoning, that Lehmann enacts a Now Ih;~ doorway belong<; to a house by no means prosperolls; you will reading of the imagines which, I want to suggest, is entirely say it has been abandoned by its master, and the court wilhin seems sensitive to the contours and topology of rhilostratlls' writing. At deserted, nor do the columns still support its roof, for they have set tied the same time, this sensitivity is consigned by Lehmann to the and collapsed. No, it is inhabited by spiders only, ! IOI\MAN BRYSON PHILOSTRATliS AND THE IMAGINARY M\ISF1'\1 14 of a ruination at once textual and architectural. What the ti~ure of line by line. At 'look! ' the words, the paint and the spiders' web the building had particularly enabled was the transfer of all merge in a moment of visionary presence. Out of the diverse tissue problems of the text back into the space supposed to stand behind woven by the spider, the painter and the writer comes a living it: the terraced spaces of the villa. The moment when Lehmann image: 'the weavers travel across [their webs J, drawing tight such declares the 'true' text of Imagines to have ended is that of an of the threads as have become loose '. In this visionary space there edifice collapsing. is no separating the individual strands of image, text or web. The Lehmann's entire reading turns on a suppressioll of the text's ecphrasis itself draws tight any threads that come away, pulling being as written representation; his gradual construction of the them back into the unitary ima~e that is at the same time a web, a stoa, with all of its !loms mapped and its piuures securely placed pit.:ture and a text. With part of itself, the ecphrasis seeks to shed in tiers within chambers, depends on a reading of the Imagines in the opacities it possesses by virtue of being made of words terms of transparency before a pre-existing referent. Concerning only an arbitrary connection to things. It seeks to fuse the words philostratus' work within language, and of the pictures' work with into something beyond wurds, an image, a picture; and then to their represented scenes, Lehmann's account says nothing. In fuse that picture with what is real, in a web tltat is no longer lexical pointing this out, the aim is not, in fact, to criticise or fault but pictorial, and no longer pictorial but alive. Lehmann's interpretation. One of the principal desires of the Lehmann's desire for a text of the Imafiines that will dissolve descriptions in the Imagines is exactly to cease being words on the first into the pictures ofa collection, and then into the architectural page, to come alive in the f<>rIn of an imaJ!;e, to pass from the ensemble that hOllses them, is ullcannily true to this aspect of opacity of words to the luminous scenes behind the words. philostratus' text. Yet it embodies only part of that text's energies. Frecluently met with, in the Ima/iines, is a textual moment at Though in the passage just quoted the separate re~isters of the description at last feels its own language to dissolve into the weaving, of picturing, and of describing all come together ill of the scene it opens upon. This is the philostratian ' Look!': radiant fusion at Philostraws' , For look!', elsewhere the' Looms' description presents these registers as separable, separate and out Now the painter has been successful in these respects also: that he has wrought the spider itself ill so painstaking a fashioll, has matched its of phase. spots with fidelity to nature and has painted its repulsive fuzzy surface In fact, 'Looms' opens with a picture of- representation. The and its savage nature - all this is the mark of a good craftsman and one first, and seemingly gratui tous, pictu re in the description shows skilled in depicting the truth. For look! here is a cord I;)rming a Penelope's loom, complete with its shuttle, warp, threads and lint. squaPe ... (' Looms', 3. I What opens the ecphrasis, then, is an image describing the The painter's attention to truth has realised the spider in all its fabrication of images, the representational means by which repulsive detail. Having traced that' fidelity to nature' wittl'a .pen Penelope creates iJer tapestry. The image is made (and, with no less observant than the painter's, Philostratus earns the riglhfor Penelope, unmade), within the apparatus of representation. The his OWl] words also to be recognised as fully backed by truth. After ecphrasis begins by emphasising representation not as something his exclaimed 'For look!', the description at last rcaches the which vanishes before its referent, but which stays stubbornly moment of lift-off. visible and in place, as material technique. Three related labours come together in a single disclosure and Similarly, 'Looms' foregrounds Its own apparatus of rep presence: the work of rhe spicier, building its web strand resentation, language. Penelope is presented not only as tlte site of strand; the work of the painter, tracing each of the threads stroke work with images, but of work with words. She is the creation of .(, stroke; the work of the ecphrasist, tracing the two previous sets Homer, and it is with Hnmpr'" linE'C: th,,. nh;l,w NIlHMAN EllYSON PHILOSTRATliS AND TilE IMA(;JNAHI' ~ll1SI.1 own picture of her.• Penelope III Homer melts the snow with them.' This is a reference to Oc{yssey 19.2°4: • Her tears flowed and her face melted Against Lehmann's maps of the architectural referent one might as the snow melts on the lofty mountains ... and as it melts the posit another topology of things, pictures and words, not as these streams of the rivers flow full: so her fair cheeks melted as they come together in the ensemble ofa resurrected museum but as they , In the same way, philostratus makes a point of telling his fail to connect, in a fracture or ruin of representation. The reader that the fine threads on which the spiders drop from the roof {magines work with three dil1'erellt 'substances': words, things, and then climb up again, are taken froll] llesiod. 15 At these points and images. With part Phi!ostratus;- act ()t' descriptio-n ·w;;rks t~ blur these three in visionary merger (fIg. )2). ~ in the text the words exactly t~lil to dissolve, either into pictures ~) (Penelope) or into things (spiders). They remain the embedded lines of Homer and of Hesiod, woven into a text which refuses to assimilate them as its own or to dissolve them before a referent in (:,"~; pictures or in the world. ~.~ ~ // Just as the text insists on its own opacities, its ineradicable wordiness, so it points to ways in which nature itself will not be absorbed into the supposedly higher realm of human represen (-) lp, tation and culture. The place of the spiders is presented as the Fi~. J2 annihilation of human work. ~/here roofs and columns the spiders thrive. Human observers may compare the In the heat of this words turn into images, or images Penelupe, and apply to their webs the terms of or into real things: !' (4)· But such excitement and geometric measurement (lelral'iaslOs), but the webs take over animation is only one of the Imagines' many possibilities. There where human creation comes to its end. Interestingly, the spiders are others, less ecstatic. Words come unstuck from things: they in 'Looms' are imagined not only as they appear in the picture, hark back, not to things in the world but to other words, by description also includes a scene which exceeds that picture: Homer or Hesiod (3). Or images pull away from the task of • the flat [nests] are good to summer in. and the hollow sorl. .. is representation: they are shown as products of material technique, in winter'. This is a aside, a threads, weft, lint, looms (J). Or the world pulls away from its to other times and the picture but representation in art and language (2): the courtyard appears as within it. The that moment deserted, . abandoned by its master', a place where the visual order race across their web; it does not shd~ ,them in imposed by human cultivation collapses alld the primary other seasons, when in summer spiders choose the ~~t webs of human space - columlls, roof, shelter way to the and in the winter the hollow ones. 'Looms' points to another life openness of nature. of spiders which the scene, in other words, implies but does not I t is appropriate that' Looms' opens with state; to a world of ruins, silences, and spider-life that goes on standing both for the capacity ofart to provide marvellous whether or not there are people around to see it. Nature takes over of the world, and for the unravelling ofart back into mere from culture; culture in fact collapses, its columns broken, but and lint. The ecphrasis is in t;Jct in continuous aeros... all spiders silently persist, away from the human labours of building, of the interstices between the world. til/' word, and Image .1.(, X 1 weaving, painting and describing. to 7; see also fig . At times (' For ! ') it seems I hal , (~, \ o H ~l A N B R Y SON PHI LOS T RAT {J SAN D THE I MAG I N A It Y \1l'!H I art, concealillt?; art, m,lkes the dead mailer of leLters and brushslrokes corne alive. BUl this is only one phase ill the ecphrastic process. Equally important are the momellts when the ecphrasis 'fails', when words revert to being words, tapestries revert to thread, and architecture to rubble. One reason that Lehmann's reading banishes' Looms' from the Imagines may perhaps be the description's eminent f~lilure: instead of giving way to a luminous and ostensible referent enthusiasm that enables philostratus to say' Look! The spiders' and Lehmann to say 'Look! The sma' - ' Looms' darkens the picture, making it a place of shadows, dust, and broken architecture. Spatially, it figures itself as a ruined courtyard. Textually, it traverses not only the place of ecphrastic excitement where words turn into pictures and pictures turn into things, but all the negative ecphrastic spaces whcre words remain words, or form hybrids with pictures, and pictures revert to thei I' constituent elements, threads WII hering lint on a loom. That philostratus intends this cffect of net?;ativity, and intends it as a figure for his own ecphrastic enterprise, is confirmed by the pairing which 'Looms' (2.28) forms with its preceding picture, •The birth of Athena' (2.27). The link, of course, is Arachne. 16 As Ovid tells the tale, Fig. 33 , Arachne is a human weaver who challenges the skill of the divine weaver, Minerva, and is punished ! OltMAN BRYSON P II I L () S Tii A T USA N Il TilE J M A (; I N A H Y ~Il! S H· commentary on art is already present in Ovid's text: 'I t requires comically deflated retelling of the fable philostratus places his own no great leap of the imagination to see in Arachne's tapestry all the project, the Imagines, somewhere between the higher artists elements of Ovid's own poetry in the Metamorphoses.' Just as she (Homer, Hesiod, Ovid, etc.) and the beasts. Ovid and tells the stories of the loves of the gods and the metamorphoses of use the images of their own their victims, so does he. 21 Like Velazquez, Ovid positions his own work somewhere between the disorderly profusion the inverts the rhetoric, in a comic metamorphoses that issue from Arachne's loom, and desublimation or parody. theologically correct, carefully framed tapestries that come Let us touch again on the philostratian exclamation, 'Look!'· the loom of Minerva. k .. The moment when a picture seems to come alive is encountered 'fI That philostratus intends' Looms' to unfold in the space of this again and again in the 1m agi/les. In Xenia I philostratlls remark~ a number of details. The Birth of that the painted grapes' are good to eat and full of winey juice; the first subject of Minerva's tapestry, immediately (r.3 I). In Xenia 2 he invites the reader to reach out and take a loaf precedes the text of' Looms' in philostratus' gallery. In Ovid, the from the painted basket (2.26). In' Narcissus' he says he cannot contest of Arachne and Minerva is visualised as a spectrum of tell' whether a real bee has been deceived bv the painted Hower or iridescent colours: whetlier we are to be deceived into thinking that a real' (1.23)' At the core of the Imagines is the promise tl1at. at ~ As when after a storm of rain the sun's rays strike through, and a rainbow with its huge curve stains the wide sky, though a thousand ments, words different colours shine in it, the eye cannot detect the change from each intense experience that one to the next; so appear the adjacent colours.22 oth pictures and words. It is not simply that words arc supplemented by pictures and pictures by words. To read the This is precisely the metaphor philostratus uses to describe the Imagines that way is to model it on the example of the illustrated armour of Athene as the goddess emerges fullv armed from ~ . book. The logic of the text is in fact closer, once again, to that of head of Zeus: Derrida's supplement. What words lack (because they are As for the material of her panoply, no-one could guess iI, Ii)r as many words, characters on the page, marks without light), images can hJlui.naJv.t as are the colours of the rainbow, which changes its light now to one hue 2 1 with a presence which is based on that lack, which grows fro~l it, ;>'1d now to another. so many are the colours of her armour. : and turns it into light. What images lack (because they are Taking Philostratus' two descriptions in sequence, one can say in time, mere pigments on a surf~lce, threads on a loom), words Gill that' Looms' applies to the competition between Minerva and sugply with narration and movement. This strange, hallueinato;y Arachne the figure ofhathos. It is a comic transformation orOvid's power ofecphrasis calls on the capaei~ies of words and I~ to contest, down-scaled, with Penelope in the place of MinerW1 describe the world, but goes beyond their several powers into a spiders in the place of Arachne. ".~ _ moment when' Look!' becomes the only appropriate "",-\- ~ ~L philostratus begins where Ovid left off, with Arachne's response. The exclamation directs the reader not towards the text, J t metamorphosis: 'the rest was belly' is expanded into the spider's or its Image, but past them both into another space where presence ')f 'repulsive fuzzy surface and its savage nature', and the spider's \ ;, ,~vo to ,11 th, "0'" "' ooce (';gl", h"doS, tooeh, t"''')' 'fiJ:;;tJ grisly meaL Where Ovid uses the Arachne fable as a means to -. Yet compared with Ovicl (or Vehizquez), philostratlls' text is (. comment on his own project in the MUal11orn/wses. niacin!! his clearly self-mocking and self-defeating. Its lines move Ollt into all ~ ~~;. 2 book somewhere between divine the negative ecpilrastic spaces where the enanIeia of ' I.ook'· j" " • .vJ.. ..,~ _ _ ...... ,. NORMAN BHYl>ON PHILOSTRATLJS AND THE IMAGINARY M{I~I exactly unfortilcoming. Instead of Aracillle, the spider; instead of 26 ... enterprise. Filling out what remained only tentative in Goethe's the loves of the gods in tapestry, an insect meal Oil a web. essay, he perceives an order in the Imagines which not even their Accompanying the project of inciting the reader to envision, is author realised. The Imagines have to be wrested from philo Philostratus' awareness that with every ecphrasis, at some point stratlls' hands. Philostratus misreads the mountains of Thes~ly as the lines and strokes always separate and unravel. The text presents mountains of Rhodes. 'Philostratus takes no advantage of itself as hollowed out by its own rhetorical self-awareness and as these connections and does not mention them.'27 'Although haunted by an inescapably secondary or belated relation to Philostratus was perfectly able to see immediately many of the pictures. In the Proem the author dramatises himself as a painter implications of single pictures, he did not discuss the cyclic idea. mangul: He was not interested in it.'2R As Lehmann's analysis gains Now the story of the men who have mastery in the sciellce of painting, momentum, Philostratus tends to get referred to as 'the'lcctUl'e~': and the states and kings that have been passio'l G- l' without them the third century is 'the dark century in the history c o this negative dinlension of the Ima{(ine.>, Lehmann appears ofancient painting', the era ofa' great crisis ofancient art in which 1\vt, t> emarkably insensitive. Jn his hands the Imagilles are tt; come the foundations for the development of later western art were alive; he will infuse them with his own visionary energy, bid '.:11 Here are Lehmann's words for the threat his reconstruction ~~ resurrecting the fragments of the text into a luminous stoa whose is to dispel: every corner he can visualise. His work with the blta{(illes is in a sense part of the' Pompeian' tradition which, from Winckelmann In a period lor which a lower-middle-class tomb in Rome, like that of the to l3ulwer-Lytton to Ilollywood, aims to co!!i!Jre !ivi!l~ flesh from, Amelii, is used as a cornerstone [or the history of palntin).!;, and I"r which the discovery of the frescoes of a Jewish synagogue in Mesopotamia the ashes. In terms of its own rhetoric, Lehmann's is a heroic ,...... tends to revolutionize the entire picture of the historv of ;lnr;"n. 274 reading. The example of 'the Irrc NOH~lAN BRYSON PHI I. 0 S T RAT l' SAN Il THE r M A (;] N 1\ H Y \I S I. I Is it too much to find in these words a threat to a cherished image inferior and margin<11 groups. Art history triumphs over 'art of antiquity, an image that must be protected? appreciation '. The end product of these procedurt,s is the vision of Art history emerges here in one of its dubious heroising guises, a purified architectural form, whose authority is confirmed by a as the custodian of culture working against a background of crisis tradition of national scholarship and national culture, exiled to and collapse. Quite naturally, the custodians must live in a great America and written up in English, yet still in direct contact with house, 'resplendent with all the marbles favoured by luxury, the author of Phi/ostrats gemalde and with the Graeco-Homan but ... particularly splendid by reason of the panel-paintings set in past. the walls'. The force required to protect the custodians is that of Through rhetorical operations such as these, Lehmann's museum, circa 1941. It is a modernist exhibition space: ecplrrasis becomes, in a sense, a tecitni(lue of the subject. It is surely stripped down, diagrammatic, programmatic, yet still (at the end much more than an archaeological reconstruction. Like Auerbad~s of the reconstruction) conceived as a house of the great, with Mimesis, written in Istanbtll during World War II, it mobilises the dining-chambers for the four seasons. Better than most museums, energies of cultural resistance to its own' dark century'. It inv{'sts with their difficult diplomatic balance between the needs of those energies in an incandescent visualisation that configures the scholars and of patrons, it is wholly designed by the art historian. beleaguered subject as a unified building. I t would, I think, be The scholarship that builds this space is, to judge by the footnotes, wrong to find fault with Lehmann's reading at the level on which an exclusively German affair. And the account endorses the it appears to operate, of slellth-like deduction and rationality. protocols of a certain strand in the German art history of its time. Expelled by the text's rational procedures, rhetoric returns as 'We shall always regret where fi)nllal problems are concerned the text's unconscious. At this buried or subterranean level, the limitations of a description which aimed not to descril,e but to reading actually moves much closer into the Imagines than it is interpret what the audience saw' (emphases added). Painting is to able to admit. Philostratus himself presents the art of painting not be approached formally, not hermeneutically, and interpretation, as a copy of the world but 1IIM,\N BRYSON PHILOSTRATUS AND THE IMA(;(NARY MlISEU~1 of the Ad Herenniuflt names memoria as the fourth part of rhetoric.34 In order to memorise a lengthy speech, the orator should visualise the successive topics of his discourse as images arranged in consecutive places within architectural space. In the ... c':~) . words of Frances Yates, 'who is that m,lfi moving slowly in lonely building, stopping at intervals with an intent face? He is a (~~,) . (... 0 rhetoric student forming a set of memory loci.'35 Architecture's ../ / role in rhetoric is as the supplier of milieux within which intense ~ -~ ~ -.---~...'" visualisations are to occur.:Ul As Cicero says, the images should be hI'. 34 , active, sharply defined, and unusual, having the power ofspeedily 1 encountering and penetrating the psyche' (quae oCCflrrere celeri reading rejoins Philostratus' rhetoric as an operation whose means' terque percutere animum possim).37 The speech unfolds as is imaginary buildings and whose goal is mastery over self and rhetorician walks in his mind past walls, each memory-place hung over representation. Ecphrasis here is a technique for consolidating with a vivid image, through rooms, doorways, stairways, the subject in terms ofpersonal and professional control. While on porticoes, terraces. the surface of his text Lehmann disavows hermeneutic art history and expels 'the lecturer', at other levels of his text Lehmann is The first notion is placed, as it were, ill the !()recourt; the second, let us Philostratus' shadow-partner or secret sharer. Lehmann's entry say, in the atrium; lhe remainder are placed in order round the into the culture of late antiquity is through a shape-shifting in impluvium, and committed not only to bedrooms and parlours, but even 3R which he performs the architectural ars memorativa of a third to statues and the like. century orator. The stability and dependability of this internal architecture is vital Yet he does so in terms very different from those supplied in the for the control of the self over its material. To forget the existence Imagines. The kind of subject proposed and assllmed by ,9 ofa particular room is to leave out a whole stage of the argument; Philostratus' text is much less driven by the urge towards unitary to lTIisremember the sequence of images is to garble the self-possession. The Imagines' subject exists in a universe where presentation of the case. things, images and words may frequently converge but do not consistently fuse together ill the ardour of imaginary vision. The places are chosen, and marked om with the utmost possible v,lriety, as descriptions show the subject in transit across the interstices where a spacious house divided into a number of rooms. Every thinK of note world, pictures and language overlap. Especially interesting 10 therein is diligently imprinted on the mind, in order that thongl\! n~ay be Philostratus are the hybrid or chiasmic zones where dillerent able to fun through all the parts without let or hindrance. The filst task registers cross over (fig. 34). is to secure that there shall be no difficulty in funning through these, for that memory must be most firmly fixed which helps another memory. all Let us return, for the last time, to 'Looms '. Penelope's loom exists at the place where images and the things of the world cross Here architecture not only stands for the control of the self; it is over. The loom is a thing that makes images, yet we do not see the the actual material means by which the self exercises its control images it makes, only the things - warp, threads, shuttle it over its words and its world. works with. Again, when the weavers travel across the web, or eat If Lehmann's unitary and massively stable architecture stands their squirming prey, they are seen as living, moving creatures; ~1 ...... _1 _~ •• l...; ..... "",. J.. ~" hill at thl' s;!me time the reader knows they are onlv a static nictllrf'. "-j' _...... -.-- .. ---- '...... "..... '.OIlMAN BRYSON PHILOSTRATUS AND THE IMAGINAI\Y M(,SEI'\' Elsewhere, the text moves to the place where the things of the Goethe, national culture, ethnic centrality, profcssion,lIisll1, posi world cross over into words. The author tells us that the spiders' tive knowledge. Which should make Lehmann Philostratus' most 'cables' are almost too tine to discern. What brings them into view inappropriate reader, were it not for the brilliance and the yearning are in fact Hesiod's lines about spiders dest:ending and ast:ending of his own visualisation. their threads. The word makes the thing exist. Or a single word in Among other things, Lehmann's reading exemplifies some of Greek -- arachnc is able to generate two utterly different beings, the paradoxes inherent in the tradition of positivist scholarship to spiders and the weaver who challenged Minerva. The characters of which it belongs. It is this aspect that raises his reconstruction 'Looms' are, so to speak, engendered by an ecphrastic pun. Words above the category of historiGl1 oddity, to adumbrate some of the and things change pi'lCes. At other times, the text crosses the place vicissitudes of positive knowledf!;e in more general terms. First, where words and image blend. Homer's text turns into a picture, Lehmann's relation to the literary, to textuality and intenextualitx, then back again into Homer's words. The line between what is is remarkably strained and contradictory. The architectural ord~r 4o verbal and visual cannot be drawn. he proposes for the Imagines is itselfbibliograplllc: Lehmann needs ( The subject of the Imagines is in constant motion and dispersal texts 10 enable his reconstruction to take place; in order to build i across this complex terrain qf wprld, jmilg@ writing, especially its interest in exploring the' negative' ecphrastic uncollscious, and it is in that energetic and overdetermined spaces in which the reader, so far from experiencing a dissolution underside of his text that his deepest engagement with Philostratus of writing before the luminous referellt (tlte philostratian may be found. What he writes is, perhaps, the dream-work of 'Look! '), apprehends the text as a sophisticated web of allusions, positivism; not the forensics of archaeology, but its own buried parodies, puns, and tonal plays. Lehmann's quest for the stable poetics.42 masonry of the referent seems altogether blind to the many ways in which philostratus' writing plays to the ,wplzia of the reader, as one who can see bizarre connections, who can understand hidden narrativcs within imagery (A rachne, Mincrva), wilD can exercise the visual eqllivalent of the elaborate verbal dexterity that characterises Hellenistic poetry. When philostratus says that the web the spiders make is 'exceedingly fine' (k)perleI'IOS) , he is doing more dlan asking liS to visualise something hard to see; he is using a key term from Hellenistic poetics, /eplOs, which means 'witty', 'fint", 'clever', 'small-scale', 'sophisticated', and doing so as an invitation or a warning to the reader that his own writing, too, is all of these things. It is a warning that Lehmann, perhaps wisely, does not heed: for once ecphrasis is thought of as a form writing that involves much mort' than a simple visualisation of a text, it leaves behind the one certainty that ecphrasis seemed to hold out to the archaeologist - its promise of presence, of resurrection and becomes something else, a mode of writing whose complexity we are perhaps only beginning to discern, and in relation to which tlie idea of visualisation begins to appear as a simplification, at best. Finally, the scrupulous rationality of Lehmann's interpretive method, with its emphasis on what can be deduced and demonstrated as positive knowledge and as archilectural form, renders it strangely unaware of its own aspect of te'l'lIality, of the ways in which it is itself a working wilh words in whit¥\ the words carry more associations, motivations, and effect than the writer is able to hear or control. Working within a highly instrumental and reduced picture-theory of language, Lehmann's analysis radically underestimates the capacity of words to exceed their allotted functions of argumentation, demonstration, and proof. Opening on to other investments and other scenes tban that simply of 2X2 archaeology and reconstruction, Lehmann's text speaks its own .' ; ~ l'. }O On Pausani,ls, see Frazer (1898), Heer (1979), Jacob (1980), 10 [n fact the lmalfines do not supply indications concerning the Habich 1 (1985) and Elsner (1992). dimensions of any particular work. }I These include discussions of the wild satyrs ofthe islands, 1.23.5-{); II [t should also be noted that Lehmann's groupings occasionally the Ethiopians, I.33.4-{,; the Ionian Greeks, 7.2.2-5.1); the require him to rewrite the given titles of pictures. marvellous animals collected in Rome, 9.21.1-2; the islands of 11 'These last eight pictures of the second book show a remarkable Sardinia and Corsica, 10.17.1-13. absence of any stich relation and connection as we have found 32 See Elsner (1992) 17--20. everywhere else.' Lehmann (1941) 37. 33 See Frazer (1898) xiv; compare other second-century CE descrip 13 Lehmann (1941) 39-40. tions of ruins, such as Dio Chrysostom on Thebes, Oratio 7, 14 The image of weaving is frequently used of writing; see, for Plutarch, De "~rcctu oracu/orum 8, Lucian, Dia/og. 11I0rt. 27.2. example, Catullus ()4.5ofr., in which the marriage of Peleus and 34 This chapter began as a paper on Herodotus' pyramids delivered to Thetis is covered with a ,'estis ... variata .figuris, pestit decorata Paul Cartledge's Ancient History Seminar in Cambridge in 1989. I jiguris, where filfura is also a literary term for Catullus' (;wn wish to thank him, John Henderson, Jamie Masters and the Editors rhetoric. Perhaps the crucial sites of configuring language, image of this volume for their comments on earlier drafts. My deepest debt and weaving are words such as ypaq>€lv, grap/Iein, which means is to Joan Pau Rubies y Mirabet, with whom I have fi)r several years 'write'/'draw '/' design , (in thread). discussed the problems of travel, travel-writing and identity. This I ~ Worfrs an,1 Days 777. chapter is dedicated to him. 16 The presence of Arachne in 'Looms' has been argued since the Renaissance. See, for example, the gloss on 'Les Etoiles' in Blaise CHApTEH EIGHT PHlLOSTRATliS AND Tin: IMA(;INARY de Vigenere's edition of 1610, 514. Lehmann (1941) 39 also MUSEUM suggests that the two pictures (2.27 and 2.18) both refer to the 1 English translations are taken from the Loeb edition, edited by Arachne story. T. E. Page, E. Capps and W. H. D. Rouse (London and New 17 Ovid, Met. 6.5~-8. York,193 1). 18 Minerva depicts Rhodope and Ilaemus, who dared to cal! 2 For the history of the debate see the editions of Jacobs and Welcker themselves gods, now turned to mountains; the Pygmaean queen (1825); Kayser (1844); Benndorf and Schenkel (1893); and who challenged Juno, now turned into a crane; Antigone, turned Steinmann (1914). by the angered Juno into a stork; Cinyras, whose daughters are 3 Lehmann (1941). turned to stone. 4 The essay is conveniently to be f()Und in vo!' XXVI of Cotta's 19 Arachne's tapestry shows Europa abducted by the bull; Asterie standard edition (1868) pp. 276fT. carried off by the eagle; Leda pursued by the swan; Jllpiter Lehmann (1941) 21-4. disguised as Amphitryon; Danae. 6 'Obviously he describes pictures that were topogll<'tphically united, 20 Met. 6.140--4. but without regard to the ideological and /(JrluaJ rda\~m which had 21 Barkan (1986) 4. dictated their combination.' Lehmann (1941) 20. 22 Met 6.63--6. 7 'Indeed, the only explanation of the relationships and the lack of 23 2.27. 1~-19. order is that philostratus saw real pictures which were, to a certain 24 lmaxine.r Proem. extent, arranged on the upper and lower parts of walls ... ' Lehmann 25 Lehmann (1941) 16. (1941) 20. 26 In the first paragraph of Lehmann's article, Goethe is found to be 8 Lehmann (1941) 31-3. disappointed by Pompeii and Herculaneum, mere' Middletowns' as 112 9 Lehmann (1941) 31-3. Goethe/Lehmann put it, from whose' limited atmosphere' they ,, NOTES TO I'AUES 27~-83 turn away towards the Imagines. Heference to Goethe recur at several points in the essay: 'Strangely enough, no-one, with the exception of Goethe, has ever called attention to the problem of the general order of the paintings in the two books of philostratus' (19). Yet Goethe's rearrangement of the Imap'nes is also, as List of works cited Lehmann put it, 'cavalier': his own essay lJl1ilds more sys tematically on Goethe's 27 Lehmann (1941) 2S. 28 Lehmann (1941) 30. 29 Lehmann (1941) 41-2. 30 Lehmann (1941) 41. 31 Lehmann (1941) 17-18. For abbreviations, see pp. xi--xiii. 32 Lehmann (1941) 17· Adler, J. and Ernst, U. (1988) Text als Figur: 1'1:welle Poesie 1'0.'1 der 33 Imagines 1.9 18-22.; 1 have modified the Locb translation Antike !>is rur Moderne. Weinheim. here. Alpers, S. (1983) The Art ofDescrihlilg. Chicago. 34 In Ad Herel/f/iun/ the five parts of rhetoric are: Amyx, D. A. (1988) Corinthian Vase Painting orr/Ie Arc/laic Period. The eloculio, memoria, pmllUl!lialio. Study of Corinthian Vases. Berkeley. 3) Yates (1966) 8. Arnheim, R. (1988) The Poet at rile Center. A ,)'tudl' ofCompo siti011 in the 36 On architecture's relation to the art of memory see the discussion Visual Art.r. Berkeley. of Elsner (forthcoming) chapter 2, section v. Arnott, P. (1962) Greek Scellic COl/vent/oils ill til/! Fijth Celllu~)' B.C. 37 Ad HerenniulII 2.87.3)8, cited by Yates (1966) 18. Oxford. 38 Quimilian, in.H. orat. 11.2.20, cited by Yates (1966) 22. (1989) Puhlic and Performance ill the Greek Theater. London. 39 Quintilian, Inst. oral., 11.2.18, cited by Yates (1966) 22. Arnott, W. G. (1987) 'The Stream and the Gold. Two notes 011 40 The diagram (Iig. 34) is not satisfactory; for instance its lines Theocritus', in Filologia e forme letterarie: studi (1fimi a F. Della fixity, when the whole point is to suggest fluidity and continuum. Corte, vol. I. U rhino, But 1hope the reader will follow at least the diagram's gist: that the Arthur [Katl,], M. (1975) Hurt/,ides' phoenis,lae and the P"litics illlaNille., constantly shuttles between words, il1la~es and thin~s. Diss. Yale University. Area (5) is that of merger between things and images; (6) is the (1977) 'The curse of civilizatioll: the choral odes of the PllOem.u-ae', hybrid area ofwords/ubjects; (7) is the area of blur between word HSCP 81: 163-8,. and image: perhaps the principal ecphrastic space~ \he space of the Ashmole, B. (1972) Architect and Sculptor in Classical Greece. London. wurd graphein. r Ashmole, B. and Yalouris, N. (1967) Olympia. The Sculptures of the 41 Barthes (1977) 145-6. Temple of Zeus. London. 42 1am grateful to the members of the Laurcncc Seminar, held in the Baladit" H. (1980) La Pilopollnese de Strahon. Paris. Department of Classics at Cambridge in May 1991, !