Classical Ecphrasis 1

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Classical Ecphrasis 1 Notes Introduction: Ecphrasis, Description, and the Imagined Place 1. Literary scholars do not follow a consistent English spelling. I adopt the Latinized spelling “ecphrasis,” unless I am directly citing the Greek lexeme, ekphrasis. 2. See for example Krieger; Heffernan; Grant F. Scott; Hollander; and Putnam. 3. I thank Clayton Koelb for this translation. 4. For English translations see Kennedy, Progymnasmata 33, 64, 90, 128. Unless otherwise noted, all translations of the progymnasmata are cited by page num- ber in Kennedy. The sections on ecphrasis in the Greek progymnasmata are in Spengel as follows: Hermogenes, 2.16–17; Aphthonius, 2.46–49; Theon, 2.118–220; Nicolaus, 3.49193. 5. The OED cites only two older usages. 6. Still standard French. Michel Patillon’s 1997 French translation of Theon’s Progymnasmata gives “La description” as the title for Theon’s “Ekphrasis” (66). 7. For weather and medicine in France, see Gillispie (226–230). 8. Philip Hardie calls it a “quasi-ekphrastic description” (239). 9. For more on the ethical meaning of mountains, see Koelb (forthcoming, 2007). Chapter 1: As If Present: Classical Ecphrasis 1. “Presence” took on a heavy burden in the late twentieth century and became associated, through the work of Jacques Derrida, with a metaphysics that some considered outmoded: what Terence Cave, in his study of enargeia, calls the “fal- lacy of presence” (5). Cf. Falck (86–114). 2. Cf. Wordsworth, 1814 Excursion IX (408): in what vivid hues His mind gives back the various forms of things, Caught in their fairest, happiest attitude! While he is speaking I have the power to see Even as he sees. 3. See Becker on simile and ecphrasis (49–50). 200 ● Notes 4. See Cave (6, n. 2). 5. Heffernan cites 1715 (without quoting Kersey’s defi nition) as the moment ecph- rasis enters English (“Ekphrasis” 297), but Kersey’s defi nition does not authorize Heffernan’s take on ecphrasis as art description. 6. Herodotus does not use the Greek term ekphrasis. It is Theon who cites the pas- sage as an example of ecphrasis. 7. The crocodile is at 2.68, the hippopotamus at 2.71. 8. For a rejoinder to Ruskin, see Hecht. 9. Cf. Piehler, Visionary. He observes that Socrates’ dialogue in the grove and the dialogue of Aeneas and Anchises in Elysium anticipate medieval dream visions in their use of visionary authority, dialogue, and landscape (84). 10. Cf. Parry (3). 11. One could easily enumerate the six charms in Keats’s “To Autumn,” a Romantic locus amoenus in which Keats clearly draws upon—and utterly renews—the European ecphrastic tradition. Cf. Blake’s season poems in Poetical Sketches, which are markedly not in this tradition. See Piehler’s discussion of rhetoric and archetype (“Allegories” 7–14). 12. Ovid’s ethical topography thrives in the Renaissance. When Shakespeare’s Lavinia tries to tell her father, Titus, that she has been raped in the woods, she draws his attention to Ovid’s tale of Philomela (Metamorphoses 6). Titus asks the rhetorical question, “Lavinia wert thou thus surpriz’d sweet gyrle?” For the “vast and gloomie woods,” he explains, “Patternd by that the Poet here describes, / By nature made for murthers and for rapes” (Titus Andronicus 4.1.1450–56). 13. Plutarch, “Mark Antony” (293; Ch. 26); Ovid, Metamorphoses (4–5;1.36–44); Florus, Epitome (208–13; 1.40); “How to depict justice,” in Gellius, Attic Nights (3:36–39; 14.4); Cacus in Aeneid 8.190ff.; Diodorus (1:162–67; 1.46); Apuleius, Metamorphoses (196–205; 4.35–5.3); Gellius quotes volcanoes of Pindar, Pythian Ode (1.21ff.) and Virgil, Aeneid (3.570ff.). Chapter 2: Unity, Form, and Figuration 1. For a detailed investigation of Horace’s actual rhetorical context, see Trimpi. 2. For primary sources on interart comparison in sixteenth-century Italy, in English translation, see Klein and Zerner. Lessing and other eighteenth-century writers lumped “visual arts” into one coherent group, unlike typical Renaissance writers. Leonardo, for example, argued for the superiority of painting over sculpture (as well as music, poetry, and mathematics). These writings were dubbed Paragone (It. “comparison”) by a nineteenth-century editor of Leonardo. Paragone has come to mean “polemical writings on the comparison of the visual arts regardless of period,” although “Leonardo himself could not have used the word in any semblance of its modern denotation” (Farago 8–9). Mitchell, indebted more to Lessing’s verbal–visual oppositionalism than to Leonardo (who took on various arts, but was mainly concerned to assert his intellectual superiority over his visual rivals, the sculptors), assumes a specialized defi nition that accords with Notes ● 201 a twentieth-century preoccupation with word and image as opposites: “The paragone or debate of poetry and painting is never just a contest between two kinds of signs, but a struggle between body and soul, world and mind, nature and culture” (Iconology 49). 3. For a comparative study of serial form in poetry and music, see Paula Johnson. 4. Lessing does not mention Dio in Laocoön, but among his posthumous papers is a complaint that refers to Dio’s orations (Howard xxvi). Iconoclastic Lessing would pointedly disapprove of Phidias’s Zeus and might even urge its destruction. See Mitchell, Iconology (112–115). 5. Cf. Cicero, De Legibus (325; 1.8.24–25) for a similar notion of the innate con- ception of God. 6. For discussions of how British painting expands its narrative potential, see Kroeber, British Romantic Art, and Meisel for later nineteenth-century art. 7. A signal event in the splitting that eventually produced Coleridge’s distinction between allegory and symbol (as lower and higher forms of fi guration) is Du Bos’s 1719 distinction between “complete” and “incomplete” allegory. The lower “complete” form merely personifi es abstract qualities. The higher “incomplete” form “animates and gives speech to nature,” as in the psalm “When Israel came out of Egypt” (1:176–77; ch. 25). When Coleridge deprecated allegory, “alle- gory” meant Du Bos’s complete allegory. 8. For a bibliography and defense of twentieth-century expansions of allegory, see Kelley, Reinventing. For a spectrum of theoretical takes on allegory as a medieval genre, see Russell, Allegoresis. 9. Quintilian does not consider “o navis” personifi cation because the ship does not talk back. See Quintilian 9.2.35. But, since an inanimate object is thought of as alive, the fi gure fi ts modern defi nitions of personifi cation. See Jon Whitman (269–272) for a history of the terms prosopopoeia and personifi cation. See Quilligan for a discussion of the problematic relationship between personifi ca- tion and literary allegory. 10. For a monograph devoted to Leucippe and Clitophon, see Morales, Vision and Narrative. See Doody (160–212) for a discussion of religious allegory in the ancient novel and its infl uence on medieval fi ction. Chapter 3: A Sylvan Scene 1. The episode comes at the halfway point in the epic and constitutes a “restart” of Odysseus’s adventures. Virgil uses a very similar device in the Aeneid, creat- ing a new beginning of his poem after Aeneas emerges from the underworld through the gates of ivory. Cf. Porphyry’s reading of the Phorcys description as a Neoplatonic allegory of the soul taking on material form. 2. In 1960 R. D. Williams wrote an infl uential essay on Dido’s murals that is as important to the modern theory of ecphrasis as it is to modern readings of the Aeneid. When Williams wrote that the murals show “Virgil’s ability to use a tra- ditional device (ekphrasis [not transliterated]) in such a way as to strengthen and 202 ● Notes illuminate the main themes of his poem” (145), he was not only using the term in its modern sense, as description of a work of art, he was concisely setting forth the thesis upon which Putnam would build in all his essays on art ecphrasis in the Aeneid. 3. G. Williams notes that Virgil rather originally gives the harbor description com- pletely to a narrator who uses present tenses to convey, intimately and directly, “facts that need not be known to the characters” (640). 4. “Tum silvis scaena coruscis / desuper, horrentique atrum nemus imminet umbra.” 5. See for example the plan of Pompey’s theater as reconstructed in the Renaissance (Bieber 181). Even clearer is the three-dimensional model of the similar theater at Herculaneum (Bieber 186), which conveys a vivid sense of the how the versu- rae projected toward the audience from the plane of the scaenae frons. 6. The word Virgil and Ovid choose is saxum, which means “rock,” in the sense of a building material or something made from rock such as a stone knife. The earth once held both building materials, rafters and rock, living by the root. 7. The passage occurs in Achaemenides’ account of his perilous escape from the cave of the Cyclops, after having been abandoned by Odysseus: “Past Pantagia’s mouth with its living rock I voyage—past the Megarian bay and low-lying Thapsis” (Aeneid 3.688–69; Fairclough trans.). 8. Metamorphoses 14.713. 9. Compare the terrifying “selva oscura” in which the pilgrim fi nds himself in the opening lines of Dante’s Inferno. 10. For Paradise Lost as religious masque, see John G. Demaray, Milton’s Theatrical Epic. 11. Cf. Milton’s “hairy sides / With thicket overgrown” with Virgil’s shuddering/bris- tling shade, “horrenti umbra.” 12. Cf. Don Cameron Allen’s Harmonious Vision. 13. As Lewalski points out, and few would disagree: “Paradise Lost is preeminently a poem about knowing and choosing” (79). 14. “Almost every sentence of the “Prospectus” rings with echoes of Milton’s voice in Paradise Lost” (Abrams, Natural 21).
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