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Elsner: Art and Text
21
Art and Text
Jaś Elsner
1. Writing on art: The epigraphic habit. The inclusion of an essay on art
and text in this Companion to Latin Literature implies (on the editor’s part, at least!)
the proposition that the visual element is important for the writing of literary Latin. I
should like to open, however, by briefly raising the reverse proposition, namely the
importance of the written for visual culture. Most works of sculpture in the Roman
world – whether portraits or dedications or funerary memorials – were accompanied
by some kind of writing. So funerary altars had inscriptions, usually incised in a
specially designated panel, while the lids of sarcophagi had an epitaph inscribed or
sometimes painted in a framed section (perhaps flanked by erotes or other figures) at
the centre (e.g. Koch and Sichtermann (1982) 25-7). Normally we think of the lower
part of a sarcophagus as its most important element, with its large visual field, but
arguably the inscription which defines the deceased’s identity should make us give at
least equal weight to the lid. Often the inscribed texts that survive on Roman
monuments are simple, recording the dedicatee or donor or an artist’s signature.
Although art history has not given full recognition to the phenomenon, it is almost
impossible to imagine Roman art without the epigraphic habit that accompanied it –
helping to define objects for their patrons or viewers with something perhaps a little
like a museum label today [figure 1]. The text, including the style of the inscription’s
incised lettering and its language (whether Greek or Latin), functioned as a visual sign
as well as a literary one – giving an enhanced dignity and an inscriptional
monumentality even to relatively humble objects, as well as helping to determine their
meanings.
This widespread inscriptional culture – in which the text functions as
monument and as a visual supplement to artistic monuments – has deep roots in
Greece, looking back for instance to the wonderfully vivid epigrams that accompanied
archaic free-standing figure-sculpture, to the tribute and treasury lists erected in
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temples, to the great variety of inscribed votives and dedications in such panhellenic
sanctuaries as Olympia (e.g. Robert (1989), Millar (1983)). Just as some inscriptions
were simple and in prose, others were more complex – poems brief and lengthy, of all
kinds and of all literary levels. Just as art history has failed to do justice to the
textuality of Roman monumental culture, so literary studies have systematically
ignored (or at best underestimated) the monumental nature of inscribed texts as
fundamentally different in genre from their brethren on papyrus-rolls or writing-
tablets. For they are designed to be read in very different kinds of contexts, with
significantly different experiential frames envisaged for the reader (e.g. on response,
Woolf (1996) 25-34). Rarely are collections of such texts published with photographs
of the whole monument or of the images that accompanied the writing in its original
form (e.g. Courtney (1995); for an explicit call to consider the visual, see Sanders
(1991) 87-110).
Yet clearly the challenge to produce elegant verses for monumental contexts
exercised the finest Roman poets from the beginnings of Latin literature (Massaro
(1992) 3-61). We find epigrams (among the first elegiac couplets composed in Latin)
ascribed to Ennius in the early second century BC – which, even if they may be
impugned as spurious by some modern authorities, were certainly thought authentic
by Cicero and Seneca. For example, Ennius’ epigram on himself was clearly
designed to go alongside an image – perhaps a painting, statue or bust (Courtney
(1993) 42-3, no. 45):
Aspicite, o cives, senis Enni imaginis formam.
Hic vestrum panxit maxima facta patrum.
Look, citizens, on the portrait of Ennius in old age.
It was he that composed the great deeds of your fathers.
Like the best verse in this necessarily terse (indeed ultimately lapidary) genre, this
poem overturns the assumptions it initially sets up. The old age of the poet turns out
to be not a sign of decrepitude, but rather of his grandeur since he is the one who sang
of the still older ancestors, in a Republican culture deeply embedded in the values of
the maiores. Ennius the image and the object of the gaze becomes Ennius the artist
and composer of images of ancestral deeds in the second line. A second Ennian
epigram, on Scipio Africanus (who died in 183 BC) – restored from two citations in
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Cicero – may well not have been carved on the great man’s tomb but was written as
though it were. It indicates the way that the monumental quality implicit in carved
inscriptions could be appropriated into non-epigraphic poetry (Courtney (1993) 39-40,
no. 43):
Hic est ille situs cui nemo civis neque hostis
quivit pro factis reddere opis pretium.
Here lies the man to whom no one, fellow countryman or foe,
can make due return for his services.
The Ennian move from inscriptional culture as such to a self-consciously playful,
literary and in this case panegyrical mode, such as that practised above all by Martial
in later Latin (Sullivan (1991) 78-114) and also Statius (Newlands (2002) 38-43, 49-
50, 74), is paralleled by (indeed modelled on) the development of the literary epigram
in the Hellenistic Greek tradition (Bing (1988) 17-18, Cameron (1993) 1-6,
Gutzwiller (1998) 47-114). Collections of compilations like the third-century BC
Posidippus papyrus in Milan (which is thought -- rightly? – to be an early anthology
of the epigrams of a single poet, see Austin and Bastianini (2002) nos. 1-112) or the
Hellenistic Garland of Meleager, or in the later Roman period the Garland of Philip
and in Byzantium the Greek Anthology are testimony to the continued vibrancy of the
genre in Greek throughout the antiquity and the Middle Ages (Cameron (1993),
Gutzwiller (1998) 227-322). While later examples of this elegantly literary form of
what was once a monumental statement may relatively rarely have been inscribed, the
frequency with which works of art are addressed within epigram indicates that the
genre never wholly forgot its roots in material culture and its relations to the viewing
of art (Goldhill (1994), Gutzwiller (2001)). Indeed isolated examples could of course
always be composed for inscription, as in the Christian poems of Paulinus of Nola
inscribed alongside the mosaics of his basilica of St Felix at the end of the fourth
century AD (especially the tituli recorded in Paulinus’ letter 32 of about 403 AD, with
Goldschmidt (1940) 35-47, 97-8; also Conybeare (2000) 94-9).
When the inscription was of a complex literary kind, the textuality of art
works in several ways. An inscription may serve to play alongside the visual
depiction – extending its meanings through puns or allusions. Take the cinerary grave
altar of Titus Statilius Aper and his wife Orcivia Anthis, dating to about 120 AD
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[Figure 2]. The image has a bust of Anthis in a shell flanked by dolphins in the
pediment and a frontal togate image of Aper with a dead boar at his feet, a closed box
to his right and a boy (once, but no longer, winged) who may represent death. This
altar boasts two inscriptions, the first in prose at the base recording the names of the
deceased, Aper’s profession and the donors, Aper’s parents, Titus Statilius Proculus
and Argentaria Eutychia. The second, a verse epigram in four hexameters inscribed
in three lines above the prose as a sort of second textual base for the image, is more
personal (Courtney (1995) 164-5, 374, no. 176):
Innocuus Aper ecce iaces non virginis ira,
nec Meleager atrox perfodit viscera ferro:
mors tacita obrepsit subito fectique ruinam
quae tibi crescenti rapuit iuvenilem figuram.
Lo, you lie here harmless Aper (=boar)! Your flesh pierced neither
by the wrath of the maiden goddess (Diana) nor fierce Meleager’s spear.
Silent death crept up suddenly and wrought destruction,
seizing your youthful flourishing form.
The text puns on Aper’s name – shared with the dead boar depicted beside him –
while at the same time making explicit verbal reference to Aper as Meleager, standing
over the dead boar in a pose familiar from funerary sarcophagi of the second century.
The poem however denies the pun even as it makes it – claiming that Aper was not
slain, as Meleager was, as a consequence of the wrath of Diana nor, as the boar was,
by Meleager’s spear. The epigram works side by side with the image – both of them
alluding in different ways to the myth and together raising Aper’s status to a
mythological level. The epigram serves also to distance Aper from excessive
involvement in the irrelevant (and, worse, potentially negative) narrative implications
of the myth (Meleager’s love for Atalanta, his killing of his uncles and his mother’s
subsequent actions that caused his own death) by turning its theme to the pathos of
sudden death’s demolition of his youth. It thus helps to police the image’s meanings
by not only drawing verbal attention to its visual mythological references, but
attempting also to limit them.
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By contrast, take the epigram in eight elegiac couplets that survives in
fragmentary form from the lid of probably the greatest sarcophagus carved in the
fourth century Rome – that of the urban prefect Junius Bassus, who died in 359 AD
[figures 3 and 4]. The main imagery of the sarcophagus is a complex series of
Christian scenes showing Old Testament and Passion narratives as well as images of
the martyrdoms of Peter and Paul in the intercolumniations of a grand double-register
frontage. An elegantly carved prose inscription runs along the upper rim identifying
Bassus, the coffin’s recipient, describing his place on the cursus honorum (as prefect
of the city), his baptism as a Christian, and the precise date of his death (25 August,
359). The images on the lid, very poorly preserved, seem to have largely represented
the traditional Roman themes of a funerary meal and perhaps a family scene, but
neither necessarily or overtly Christian as in the images on the main part of the coffin
(Malbon (1990) 104-14). What survives of the inscription (from line 7) reads, with
restorations, as follows corrected by Cameron (2002) 288-9):
hic moderans plebem patriae sedemque senatus,
urbis perpetuas occidit ad lacrimas.
nec licuit famulis domini gestare feretrum,
certantis populi sed fuit illud onus.
flevit turba omnis, matres puerique senesque,
flevit et abiectis tunc pius ordo togis.
flere videbantur tunc et fastigia Romae
ipsaque tunc gemitus edere tecta viae.
cedite, sublimes spirantum, cedite, honores!
celsius est culmen mors quod huic tribuit.
The man who governed the people of city and the house of the Senate
has died, to the everlasting tears of the city.
His slaves were forbidden to bear their master’s bier,
but that was the burden of the Roman people, who vied for the task.
The whole crowd wept – mothers, children and old men,
the reverent Senate wept, their togas put aside for mourning,
then even the rooftops of Rome seemed to weep,
and the very arcades along the street to groan.
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Give way, highest honours of the living! Give way!
Loftier still is the height assigned him in death.
Here, far from directly relating to the elegantly executed imagery of an unusually
grand sarcophagus in the way the Aper poem plays off the iconography of his
monument, the two inscriptions (prose and verse) strike different but equally personal
notes that contrast with the universal Christian message of the visual imagery. Bassus
the man is given his curriculum vitae and his dates in the prose inscription on the rim,
while the poem elevates him through its spectacular imagery of weeping into a
paragon of the lamented deceased. The last two lines, elegantly alluding to Propertius
2.34.65 (on how all former writers should yield their place to Vergil) play on the pun
in Bassus’ name (‘low’ in colloquial Latin) by referring to the heights which must
give way to him and the pinnacle he has achieved in death. Effectively, the personal
and Rome-centred account of a dignitary who had proved a loyal servant to his city is
used to supplement the Christian universalism of the main iconography. The literary
genre of the epigram and its tropes, but also the very act of its epigraphic incision,
work to provide a highly traditional (even antiquarian) link to the pre-Christian past of
the city. While the visual imagery promises what may be a rather impersonal
salvation in the kind of eternity proclaimed by Christ’s triumphant appearance
between Peter and Paul, enthroned over a personification of the world, in the central
scene of the upper tier, the text personalises the pathos and particularity of Bassus’
death, in an elegiac-metrical tradition going back to archaic Greek epigrams from ten
centuries earlier. That traditionalism (as opposed to the innovative implications of
Bassus’ Christianity) is further enforced by what appears to have been the highly
traditional and non Christian imagery of the lid, in whose centre the inscription stood.
2. Art within Writing: The Rise of Illustration. While texts frequently
made their way onto images, the reverse gesture – dramatic in its own way for the
reader of a specific papyrus roll or a vellum codex – was the intrusion of images onto
the written page. Early surviving examples in papyrus – such as the third century AD
fragment from Oxyrhynchus of a comic Greek Heracles poem with parodic sketches
of the hero’s battles (Nisbet (2002)) – give a hint of what may have been available in
the written Latin tradition before the codex took over from the roll as the dominant
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form of book in the fourth century [figure 5]. What is impossible to tell in the
absence of surviving evidence is how extensive and high quality the illustration of
rolls could be – as many as 700 separate illuminations have been estimated for the
most lavish roll editions of the Homeric epics (Weitzmann (1959) 37 and 41). Pliny
records (at Natural History 35.11) that Varro’s Imagines – an important text that
appears to have influenced both Vergil’s parade of heroes in Aeneid VI and the rows
of statues which adorned the Forum of Augustus – included 700 illuminated portraits
of famous men, each described in a short epigram of which two survive in later
florilegists (Horsfall (1983) 211). But with the rise of the codex – made of durable
vellum folios rather than fragile scrolls of papyrus, its pages protected by being flat
(unlike the permanently rolled format of papyrus) and out of the light, and its images
or particular passages of text easily found by turning pages rather than scrolling
through an entire roll –the fine art of illustration entered a new age. Of the non-
Christian antique books that survive, it was the text of Vergil that received the finest
decorative treatment, in two great fifth-century AD manuscripts now in Rome – the
Vatican Vergil of about 425 and the Roman Vergil of about 475. Ironically, Vergil’s
reflective passages on art itself (on which see below) are never chosen for illustration.
In relation to a lengthy set of diverse texts like Vergil’s poems, illustrations
perform a series of varying functions. They may inaugurate a poem – like a kind of
frontispiece, giving cues to specific sections and divisions – for instance by
illustrating the first portion of text, as in the first surviving image from the Roman
Vergil (fol. 1r), above the opening lines of the first Eclogue (1-5), which renders
Meliboeus speaking to Tityrus as the latter plays his pipe (Wright (2001) 14), or the
first surviving miniature of the Vatican Vergil (fol. 1 r), which is a full page
illumination in six scenes depicting the first 15 lines of Georgic III, and serves to
introduce both the poem and the second half of the Georgics as a whole (Wright
(1993) 8-9). The pictorial inauguration may be in the form of a generalised author
portrait, as in those eclogues that are monologues in the Roman Vergil (the second,
fourth and sixth of the seven that survive, fols. 3v, 9r and 14r with Wright (2001) 16-
18, 20) or in the lost author portrait from the front of Aeneid VII in the Vatican Vergil
(another half-way centre point, within a long poem), whose traces survive on the
largely blank page that preceded it (fol. 57v, Wright (1993) 60-1). Introductory
images may also serve to summarize texts in a general way, rather than illustrating
any particular aspect – as in the Roman Vergil’s illustration for the fifth eclogue
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which shows the dialogue of Menalcas and Mopsus that is the substance of the poem
(fol. 11r, Wright (2001) 19) or the same manuscript’s great opening (fols. 44v and
45r) of standard bucolic imagery generally relating to the themes of the third Georgic
(Wright (2001) 21-3) [figure 6].
In a long narrative poem, like the Aeneid, the miniatures are much more
directly illustrative of particular episodes and in this way form a kind of visual
commentary, heightening particular passages (at the expense of others). In the
Vatican Vergil, the pictures come thick and fast around the abandonment and death of
Dido (fols. 39v, 40r – these two being a full opening of two pages – and 41r, Wright
(1993) 38-43) and in Aeneas’ trip to the Underworld (fols. 47v, 48v and 49r – another
full opening, 52r and 53v, Wright (1993) 48-57). The emphasis of these subjects may
indicate an effort to claim a classic for Christianity, by emphasising issues of lust,
temptation and sin in the Dido episode and the visualisation of Hell, but they may
equally represent a pagan illustrative model for the kinds of illuminated manuscripts
of the Bible produced around the same period. The images do more than alleviate the
process of reading the text; they direct the reader to particular sections, as a kind of
emblematic signal to the subject-matter, through pictures.
Take, as an individual example, the Laocoon image from the Vatican Vergil
(fol. 18v) which appears below the text of Aeneid II.191-8 but illustrates II.201-224,
the bulk of which would have appeared on the now lost folio opposite (Wright (1984)
60-1 and (1993) 22-3) [figure 7]. Here three episodes within Vergil’s Laocoon story
are shown. On the left, he stands beside an altar as a beardless priest (naked to the
waist, skirted and with an axe, in the traditional iconography of a victimarius or
sacrificial slaughterer rather than a priest). Behind him is the temple of Neptune
whose statue can be seen in the doorway, and above this the temple of Minerva to
which the snakes escape at II.225-8. This imagery closely follows the text of II.201-
2, with the vividness of mactabat (‘he slaughtered’) perhaps justifying the unusual
choice of showing the priest as actual bull-slayer. In the upper left are the two snakes
approaching from the sea (as described at II.203-9), while in the right foreground – in
heroic nudity, billowing cape and larger scale – a bearded and long-haired Laocoon
and his two sons are killed by the snakes (as described at II.209-24). The miniature
closely follows the text (and its artist provides helpful labels for the figures, just in
case) and yet it transforms it radically. We have two Laocoons now – bearded and
beardless – rendering the narrative movement of the poem as a series of visual
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episodes, discrete from each other but united (i.e. discrete from other parts of the
Aeneid’s text) by being in a single picture frame. Yet some parts even of Vergil’s
Laocoon account are conflated -- such as the narrative of the snakes attacking the sons
and Laocoon vainly attempting to rescue them, which has become a single iconic
scene that may owe something iconographically to the famous marble group by
Hagesander, Polydorus and Athenodorus mentioned by Pliny at Natural History 36.37
and either identical with or replicated by the statue found in 1506 and now in the
Vatican.
3. Art Described: The Uses of Ecphrasis. While the direct alignment of
images and words through inscription or illustration represents a potent strand in
Roman culture’s combination of art and text, the move from inscriptional epigram to
what might be called purely literary epigram reflects what was to become a profound
use of visual art as a trope within Roman writing (for some reflections on Greek
origins see e.g. Zeitlin (1994) and Steiner (2001)). Whether in poetry, in letters (e.g.
Henderson, 2002) or in the prose novels, the rhetorical technique known as ecphrasis
or description, which came to be most characteristically associated with the
description of works of art, was to be used for special, often self-reflexive, often
vividly climactic purposes. In both Latin and Greek prose, the insertion of an
ecphrasis of a painting whose subject had thematic resonances with the rest of the text
was to have significant structural impact on the composition of fiction, particularly in
the use of a work of art as a kind of descriptive frontispiece, not so different in its way
perhaps from the frontispieces of early books. Sometimes, there is a striking
resonance between such descriptive insertions in literary texts and in works of art.
For instance, Catullus’ great poem 64 (from the first half of the first century BC) on
the marriage of Peleus and Thetis boasts a long ecphrasis describing the embroidered
coverlet of the nuptial bed with its images of the (hardly happy) liaison of Ariadne
and Theseus and the arrival of Dionysus (64.50-264). The famous roughly
contemporary painted frieze in the Villa of the Mysteries at Pompeii also interjects
into its main imagery (whose subject is still uncertain but is usually thought to reflect
the rite de passage into marriage) an epiphanic scene of Dionysus and Ariadne. To
argue for a direct connection is over-speculative, though the case for a strong visual
element in Catullus’ poem 64 has been well made (Fitzgerald (1995) 144-6).
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Likewise, the way in which the third century sophist Philostratus begins and ends his
two books of collected ecphraseis, written in Greek, with images of the seasons has
been linked to the visual use of seasonal imagery as a framing device in contemporary
mosaics and sarcophagi (Elsner (2000)).
But beyond a potential interrelationship of formal structure between art and
text, what proved especially attractive to Roman writers, in focussing on a described
work of art, was the chance to reflect figuratively upon their own writing, whether
prose or verse. In turning their attention to an apparently self-contained painting,
sculpture or building within their texts, writers could effectively step outside their
own work to picture it as a whole (what has been called the technique of mise en
abyme, with Dällenbach (1989)), or to draw out some of its less immediately obvious
meanings, or to dramatise some potential responses to their art by depicting responses
to the object described. The specific qualities of vividness (enargeia) and clarity
(sapheneia) prescribed by the rhetorical handbooks (e.g. Webb (1997a), Dubel
(1997)) allowed ecphraseis to stand as brilliant show-pieces within a larger text. But
the existence of a tradition of ecphrasis in Greek literature, reaching back to Homer’s
description of the shield of Achilles in the Iliad, meant that every such description
was inevitably a highly self-conscious display of intertextuality and more-or-less
subtle allusion (on the power of the Vergilian example for later writers like Statius,
Silius Italicus and Valerius Flaccus see respectively Harrison (1992) 51-2, Fowler
(1996), Hershkowitz (1998) 20-3).
These general comments may be exemplified by reference to the ecphraseis in
Vergil’s Aeneid – not only among the most complex examples of the topos in all Latin
literature but also certainly the most influential. (e.g. Dubois (1982) 28-51, Thomas
(1983), Ravenna (1985), Heffernan (1993) 22-36). Obviously I cannot here quote and
translate long sections of Vergil’s text. So what follows must necessarily be a
description of the ancient art of description in the absence of the object described
(which is no bad definition of ecphrasis itself!). There are numerous descriptions of
works of art within the epic which in each case extend beyond the object into a
narrative account of what its decoration depicts (detailed scholarly treatments of these
are listed in the section on Further Reading below) : the murals of Dido’s temple in
Carthage (I.453-93), the silver-gilt dishes chased with the deeds of Dido’s ancestors
(I.640-2), the cloak with the story of Ganymede given to the victor of the ship race
(V. 250-7), the bronze doors made by Daedalus for the temple at Cumae (VI.20-37),
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the cedar statues of the ancestors of king Latinus (VII.177-91), the shield of Turnus
(VII, 789-92), the shield of Aeneas (VIII.630-728), and the sword-belt of Pallas
(X.495-505).
It is worth noting that the poet is careful to vary the material forms and types
of the (imaginary) objects he chooses to describe, creating a deliberate variation
except in the case of the two shields of the opposed heroes Aeneas and Turnus, which
are paired in counterpoint (on the range of materials, see Simon (1982)). The actual
description is in several cases the result of a deliberate build-up in which the narrative
pace has been slowed – so that in Book I Aeneas and Achates survey the great
prospect of Dido’s new Carthage under construction (I.418-52) before focussing on
the temple paintings, while in Book VIII, Venus brings her son his new arms
(VIII.608-25), before the narrator turns the textual gaze onto the shield itself. The
pause in the pace of epic narrative allows a description which is at the same time the
insertion of different narratives – the Trojan war and Aeneas’ past in Book I, the
tragedies of Crete and especially of Daedalus in Book VI, the future history of Rome
culminating in Augustus himself on the shield in Book VIII, the crimes of the Danaids
on the baldric of Pallas. These new narratives – apparently works of art figured in
words – are expounded in the very language of the rest of the poem, but with the
special difference that the actors of the Aeneid can be portrayed as themselves
responding to art. As a result the reader is provided with an admittedly highly
complex, not to say ambiguous, paradigm of the range of responses he or she is
potentially to feel (Leach (1988) 311-19, Barchiesi (1997a) 275-8, Bartsch (1998)
335-7, Putnam (1998b) 269-75). At the same time, by being the account of the
Aeneid’s narrator and not of any particular internal actor (like Aeneas himself) the
ecphraseis allow the reader to learn what the epic’s protagonists cannot know
themselves, and thus to be aware both of the subjectivity of responses within the
poem and of the likely subjectivity of the reader’s own reactions to the poem (Boyd
(1995) 78-80).
The first of the ecphraseis poses the problem of emotional response –
something emphasised by the rhetorical handbooks (Webb (1997b)) – with eloquent
reiteration. Looking at the frescoes of the Trojan war, Aeneas weeps (lacrimans,
I.459) and pronounces some famous lines on the sorrows evoked by deeds (rerum,
I.462) – whether these be actual (the ‘real’ history of Troy and Aeneas’ part in that
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war), literary (effectively the passage is a summary of the Iliad’s narrative) or painted
(paintings being the immediate cause for Aeneas’ wonder (miratur, I.456) and his
tears:
sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt.
solve metus; feret haec aliquam tibi fama salutem (I.462-3)
And our misfortunes human pity breed.
This fame may help produce; suppress thy dread.
(Sandys, 1632, cited from Gransden (1996) 62)
The viewer’s misery (and Aeneas is hardly an ordinary viewer of course, but rather an
actor in what he is portrayed as viewing) is a repeated theme:
multa gemens, largoque umectat flumine vultum (I.465 cf. 470 and 485)
His heart with sighs, his face with rivers fraught…
(Sandys, 1632, cited from Gransden (1996) 62)
Yet the flood of emotion goes side by side with the theme of wonder at the handicraft
of the artist (I.455-6, 494) and a gaze concentrated on the object (which contrasts
explicitly with the averted gaze of Athena as she looks away from the supplications of
the Trojan women within the description itself at I.482):
dum stupet obtutuque haeret defixus in uno (I. 495)
…while yet amaz’d,
Dardan Aeneas on each object gaz’d…
(Sandys, 1632, cited from Gransden (1996) 63)
The wonder of this wonder – and what might be called the great aesthetic
problem raised by this ecphrasis about art in general (and about responding to epic
narrative like the Aeneid itself in particular) – is that:
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…atque animum pictura pascit inani
multa gemens (I. 464-5)
…his Tears a ready Passage find,
Devouring what he saw so well design’d
And with an empty Picture fed his Mind.
(Dryden, 1697, from Dryden (1997) 19)
That emptiness recurs within the described images too where Troilus’ chariot is
presented as a curru…inani (I.476, ‘an empty car’) – empty because its charioteer is
slain by Achilles and empty too because art is simply a poor imitation of what were to
Aeneas real events. The opening ecphrasis of Book VI reconfigures the dual
thematics of sorrow (dolor VI.31) and absence. Here
…tu quoque magnam
partem opere in tanto, sineret dolor, Icare, haberes.
bis conatus erat casus effingere in auro,
bis patriae cecidere manus. (VI.30-3)
Here hapless Icarus had found his part;
Had not the Father’s Grief retrained his Art.
He twice assay’d to cast his Son in Gold;
Twice from his hands he drop’d the forming Mold.
(Dryden, 1697, from Dryden (1997) 150)
This time it is the artist who weeps and the images’ emptiness (of Icarus) is testament
to that sorrow, while Vergil’s own intervention as descriptive artist makes present (as
text rather than gilded bronze or personal feeling) both Daedalus’ pain and Icarus’
fall. Arguably the supreme confrontation with this complex thematics of art’s
imitative fragility and yet its ability to signify so much within the Aeneid’s mounting
crescendo of ecphrasis lies in ‘the fabric of the shield beyond all words to describe’
(clipei non enarrabile textum, VIII.625). This unnarratable visual text is what Vergil
spends the next hundred odd lines describing – at great length for an ecphrasis but
13
with great brevity for the great history of Rome from Romulus to Augustus. This
time Aeneas’ wonder is at a future not understood rather than a past which one might
prefer to forget and the emotion is of joy rather than sorrow:
miratur rerumque ignarus imagine gaudet
attollens umeroque famamque et fata nepotum (VIII.730-1)
Unknown the Names, he yet admires the Grace;
And bears aloft the Fame and Fortune of his Race.
(Dryden, 1697, in Dryden (1997) 237)
Even this brief account has shown that the Aeneid’s ecphraseis link together
powerfully. As a group they offer a meta-reflection on art and its responses, on the
difficulties of writing epic and its emotive challenges. But within the fabric of
Vergil’s text as a whole they build a progressive argument. The first two – the
confrontation with the Trojan war at Carthage and the silver dishes with Dido’s
ancestors – render the genealogies of the epic’s opening protagonists. Yet the pre-
history of Dido is merely referred to and dismissed in a couple of lines – an ecphrastic
signal that her narrative is but a stage on the Trojan’s long journey beyond Carthage
and her love to Italy. The third – the cloak with the tale of Ganymede – returns to the
theme of Aeneas’ Trojan past, some of which had been portrayed on Dido’s temple
paintings. The first ecphrasis, as we have seen, is replete with emotion (Aeneas’ at
his own history, the reader’s through Aeneas at Homer’s great poem retold by Vergil).
The narrative on the cloak, by contrast – half-remembered as it were, so that
Ganymede is not mentioned by name – renders the distance Aeneas has come from
that past as his epic moves into its Italian future; indeed Aeneas gives the cloak away
as a prize to Cloanthus. In Book VI (where Icarus is not depicted but is named),
Aeneas and his companions are explicitly called away from their absorption in art by
the priestess:
non hoc ista sibi tempus spectacula poscit (VI.37)
Time suffers not, she said, to feed your Eyes
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Elsner: Art and Text
With empty Pleasures.
(Dryden, 1697, from Dryden (1997) 150)
As the time for action comes, the lures of art (and its descriptions) are to be resisted.
The cedar statues at Latinus’ palace give a narrative of ancestry to the Latins
at the opening of the epic’s second half – longer than that accorded to Dido and
announcing the past that Aeneas would acquire for his people through his marriage to
Latinus’ daughter Lavinia. The two shields placed at the ends of Books VII and VIII
pit Turnus against Aeneas, the former bearing a motif of his own ancestral mythology
(Io, Argus and Inachus) immured in the past, the latter carrying the future of Rome
and interjecting the climactic rhetoric of its ecphrasis into the Augustan present and
the time of the poem’s composition (rather as the Bassus sarcophagus’ inscriptions
firmly place the Christian mythologies of its imagery firmly into the contemporary
context of the urban prefect’s death). While the emblem on Turnus’s shield looks
back genealogically, that of Aeneas carries the epic action of the poem as a whole
onwards into its Augustan future – a future that is not part of the epic’s own narrative
but is nonetheless incorporated as the decoration of a work of art and thus included
within the Aeneid’s own art. Apart from this motif of panegyric through prophecy and
teleology culminating in Augustus through the apparent description of art, the
accounts of the shields have the effect of moving the Aeneid’s ecphrastic pattern from
a materialising of genealogy (that is at the same time an allegory in the figure of Io of
Turnus’ own fate at the hands of Juno) and an aesthetics of response, to a direct
involvement in epic action. The shields become – in different ways – emblems for the
two protagonists, like the shields of the heroes in Aeschylus Seven against Thebes
(with Zeitlin, 1982).
It is the last of the ecphraseis, that of Pallas’ baldric, that fully unites the
description of art with epic action, the thematics of aesthetic response and emotion
with the dynamic of a narrative plot. The image – an ‘abominable crime’ (impressum
nefas, X.497) – is sketchily described, its protagonists (like Ganymede) never named,
but its artist (like Daedalus) firmly announced as (the unknown) Clonus Eutychides,
whose name meaning ‘Din-of-Battle, Son-of-Success’ seems like a joke at the
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expense of the Homeric epithet (X.499). Turnus wrests it from the dead body of
Pallas and Vergil warns us that he will rue the act (X.500-505). That time comes at
the very end of the entire poem when Turnus pleads for his life before the triumphant
Aeneas. Aeneas wavers – his eyes rolling (volvens oculos, XII.939) – and then he
sees the sword-belt of Pallas which Turnus is wearing. In the poem’s last moment of
the viewing of art, Aeneas ‘feasted his eyes on the sight of this spoil, this reminder of
his own wild grief’ (ille, oculis postquam saevi monimenta doloris / exuviasque
hausit…, XII.945-6).
Again the thematics of personal suffering (cf dolor at VI.31), identification
and memory (cf. VI.26 for monimenta) arise in the face of a work of art, this time
with the response postponed for two books from the initial description and its impact
altered by the epic’s intervening action – notably the death of Pallas and the defeat of
Turnus. Where Aeneas had stood transfixed and tearful before Dido’s paintings, and
transfixed until the priestess called him away at Cumae, where Daedalus had been so
moved by dolor that he could not complete the images planned for the temple door,
now grief gives way to vengeful fury and Aeneas strikes. That mindful anger in
Aeneas’s response to the sword-belt is effectively an echo of Juno’s anger at the
opening of the epic, which initiated its action. As monimentum, and especially a
monimentum that is active in stirring its audience to emotive response, the art-work of
the sword-belt merges with the artwork that is the poem as a whole.
4. Conclusion. I have been highly selective in my examples of art and text –
whether epigraphic, illustrative or ecphrastic, favouring instances of the highest
culture above the less grand or ambitious, and in the case of ecphrasis giving
scandalously short shrift to everything but Vergil (including the whole of elegy and
especially Ovid’s masterly and repeated turns to art in the Metamorphoses ), let alone
the prose examinations of art in the novels or such texts as Pliny’s letter 3.6, with
Henderson (2002)). But I hope that the general case has been made for a deep and
persistent engagement of word and image in (Greco-)Roman culture. In particular,
the remarkable development of ecphrasis into a most complex meditation on the
nature of the work of art and its reception has proved fundamental in shaping the
Western tradition of reflecting on the nature of art itself.
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Elsner: Art and Text
[My thanks are due to the editor and to three other Latin ‘H’s for their very useful
comments and advice – in alphabetical order, Philip Hardie, John Henderson and
Nicholas Horsfall].
Guide to Further Reading
On the inscriptional culture of Greece and Rome see e.g. MacMullen (1982),
Meyer (1990), Woolf (1996). On the cinerary grave altar of Titus Statilius Aper see
Kleiner (1987) 213-6 and Koortbojian (1996) 229-31, on the sarcophagus of Junius
Bassus Apollonj Ghetti, Ferrua, Josi and Kirschenbaum (1951) 220-2 and fig. 171,
Malbon (1990) 3-90, Cameron (2002), Elsner (2003) 82-7, 89. On ekphrasis in
general and its uses in literature see e.g. Friedländer (1912) 83-103, Downey (1959),
Pernice and Gross (1969), (e.g. Ravenna (1974), Bartsch (1989),Fowler (1991), Laird
(1996), Webb (1999), Harrison (2001a); on ekphrastic techniques in the Latin novels
cf. Schissel von Fleschenberg (1913), Slater (1990) 91-101, Elsner (1993), Conte
(1996) 14-22, Laird (1997) and Slater (1998).
On the murals of Dido’s temple in Carthage (Aeneid I.453-93) see e.g.
Williams (1960a), Clay (1988), Barchiesi (1994) 114-24, Putnam (1998a) 23-54); on
the Ganymede cloak (V.250-7) see Boyd (1995) 84-88, Putnam (1998a) 55-74, Hardie
(2002b)); on the bronze doors of the temple at Cumae (VI.20-37) see Fitzgerald
(1984), Paschalis (1986), Sharrock (1994) 103-11, Putnam (1998a) 75-96); on the
shield of Turnus (VII, 789-92) see e.g. Breen (1986), Gale (1997)); on the shield of
Aeneas (VIII.630-728) see e.g. Hardie (1986) 97-109, 120-4, 336-76, Putnam (1998a)
119-88); and on the sword-belt of Pallas (X.495-505) see e.g. Breen (1986), Conte
(1986) 185-95, Putnam (1998a) 119-88, Harrison (1998a)).
On ekphrasis in Ovid’s Metamorphoses see e.g. Leach (1974), Solodow (1988) 203-
31, Hardie (2002a) 146-50, 173-226.
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