Ekphrastic encounters: New interdisciplinary essays on literature and the visual arts 9781526125804

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his book offers a comprehensive reassessment of ekphrasis: the verbal representation of visual art. In the past twenty five years numerous books and articles have appeared covering different aspects of ekphrasis, with scholars arguing that it is a fundamental means by which writers have explored the nature of aesthetic experience. However many critics continue to rely upon the traditional conception of ekphrasis as a form of paragone (competition) between word and image. 

David Kennedy was Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Hull Richard Meek is Lecturer in English at the University of Hull

Cover image: Johannes Vermeer, Woman Writing a Letter, with her Maid (c. 1670), oil on canvas, 71.1 x 60.5 cm. Image copyright National Gallery of Ireland Cover design: riverdesignbooks.com

ISBN 978-1-5261-2579-8

9 781526 125798 www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

encounters

This exciting and interdisciplinary collection will be of particular relevance to readers interested in the relationship between literature and the visual arts, as well as students and scholars of comparative literature, cultural studies, and history of art.

Ekphrastic

Ekphrastic encounters seeks to complicate this critical paradigm, and proposes a more reciprocal model of ekphrasis that involves an encounter or exchange between visual and textual cultures. This critical and theoretical shift demands a new form of ekphrastic poetics, which is less concerned with representational and institutional struggles, and more concerned with ideas of ethics, affect, and intersubjectivity. The book brings together leading scholars working in the fields of literary studies, history of art, modern languages, and comparative literature, and offers a fresh exploration of ekphrastic texts from the Renaissance to the present day. The chapters in the book are critically and methodologically wide-ranging; yet they share an interest in challenging the paragonal model of ekphrasis that has been prevalent since the early 1990s, and establishing a new set of theoretical frameworks for exploring the ekphrastic encounter. 

Kennedy and Meek (EDS)

T

Ekphrastic encounters N e w int e r dis cipl ina ry e s s ay s o n l it e r at ur e a nd t h e v is ua l a rt s

n Edited by David Kennedy and Richard Meek

Ekphrastic encounters

Ekphrastic encounters New interdisciplinary essays on literature and the visual arts Edited by David Kennedy and Richard Meek

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Manchester University Press 2019 While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press, copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors, and no chapter may be reproduced wholly or in part without the express permission in writing of both author and publisher. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 5261 2579 8 hardback

First published 2019 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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Contents

List of figuresvii Notes on contributors x Acknowledgements xiv Introduction: from paragone to encounter David Kennedy and Richard Meek Part I: Early modern encounters   1 ‘Lamentable objects’: ekphrasis and historical materiality in Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece Rachel Eisendrath   2 ‘Fabulously counterfeit’: ekphrastic encounters in Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy Richard Meek   3 ‘Art indeed is long, but life is short’: ekphrasis and mortality in Andrew Marvell Keith McDonald   4 ‘The Painter has made a finer Story than the Poet’: Jonathan Richardson’s ekphrastic ‘Dissertation’ on Poussin’s Tancred and Erminia Jason Lawrence Part II: Nineteenth-century encounters   5 Blind spots of narration? Ekphrasis and Laocoön digressions in the novel Catriona MacLeod   6 The face of Beatrice Cenci Stephen Cheeke   7 Mirroring naturalism in word and image: a critical exchange between Émile Zola and Édouard Manet Lauren S. Weingarden

1 25 27 48 70

91 107 109 126 144

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8 Close encounters of the third kind: Hamo Thornycroft’s The Mower and Matthew Arnold’s ‘Thyrsis’ Jane Thomas

165

Part III: Modern and postmodern encounters

181

  9 An artist of the bizarre: Stanley Spencer’s ‘ordinary’ ekphrases 183 Liliane Louvel 10 The graphics of ekphrastic writing: Raymond Pettibon’s drawing-writing203 Tilo Reifenstein 11 Ekphrasis/exscription: Jean-Luc Nancy on thinking and touching art219 Johanna Malt 12 On gazers’ encounters with visual art: ekphrasis, readers, ‘iconotexts’237 Claus Clüver Afterword257 James A. W. Heffernan Index

267

Figures

  1 Michael Goldberg, Sardines (1955), oil and adhesive tape on canvas, 205.1 x 167.7 cm (Smithsonian American Art Museum) 2   2 Guercino, Allegory of Painting and Sculpture (1637), oil on canvas, 114 x 139 cm (Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica, Rome) 4   3 Biagio d’Antonio and Workshop, The Triumph of Camillus (c. 1470–75), tempera on panel, 60 x 154.3 cm (courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington) 7   4 Raphael, The Sacrifice at Lystra (c. 1515–16), bodycolour on paper mounted on canvas, 350 x 560 cm (© Victoria and Albert Museum, London)11   5 Roundel with Annunciation to the Virgin (c. 1500–10), colourless glass, vitreous paint, and silver stain, overall 22.5 cm (© The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) 32   6 The War of Troy (1475–90), tapestry woven in wool and silk on wool warp, 414 x 737 cm (© Victoria and Albert Museum, London) 34   7 The Spanish Tragedie: Or, Hieronimo is mad againe (London, 1615), title-page woodcut (© British Library Board; shelfmark C.117.b.36) 55   8 Benozzo Gozzoli, The Feast of Herod and the Beheading of Saint John the Baptist (c. 1461–62), tempera on panel, 23.8 x 34.5 cm (National Gallery of Art, Washington) 59   9 Unknown artist, Sir Henry Unton (c. 1596), oil on panel, 74 x 163.2 cm (© National Portrait Gallery, London) 60 10 Giorgione, Sleeping Venus (c. 1508–10), oil on canvas, 108.5 x 175 cm (Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden) 74 11 Titian, Venus of Urbino (1534), oil on canvas, 119 × 165 cm (Uffizi Gallery, Florence) 75 12 Circle of Robert Walker, Portrait of Oliver Cromwell, half-length, in armour and a grey cloak, wearing a chain and Order, in a feigned oval, with a Latin inscription to Queen Christina of Sweden, lower left (1653), oil on canvas, 73.7 x 61 cm (© Euston Estate) 79 13 Nicolas Poussin, Tancred and Erminia (c. 1634), oil on canvas, 75.5 x 99.7 cm (The Barber Institute of Fine Arts, University of Birmingham)97

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List of figures

14 Guido Reni, Portrait of Beatrice Cenci (1600), oil on canvas, 75 x 50 cm (De Agostini Picture Library / Bridgeman Images) 128 15 Constantin Guys, At the Theater (Au foyer du théatre; Ladies and Gentlemen) (1860–92), watercolour with ink wash and pen and ink on paper, 17.4 x 16.3 cm (Walters Art Museum, Baltimore) 148 16 Édouard Manet, Olympia (1863), oil on canvas, 130.5 x 190 cm (© RMN-Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay, Paris); photograph by Hervé Lewandowski)150 17 Édouard Manet, Émile Zola (1868), oil on canvas, 146.5 x 114 cm (© RMN-Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay, Paris); photograph by Hervé Lewandowski)152 18 Édouard Manet, Nana (1877), oil on canvas, 154 x115 cm (© Hamburger Kunsthalle/bpk; photograph by Elke Walford) 154 19 Édouard Manet, A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882), oil on canvas, 96 × 130 cm (© The Samuel Courtauld Trust, The Courtauld Gallery, London) 158 20 Hamo Thornycroft, The Mower (1894), bronze, 190.5 cm (courtesy of National Museums Liverpool, Walker Art Gallery) 170 21 Stanley Spencer, The Resurrection of the Soldiers (1923–27), Sandham Memorial Chapel, Burghclere, wall painting (© The Estate of Stanley Spencer / Bridgeman Images; photograph courtesy of National Trust Images/A. C. Cooper) 190 22 Stanley Spencer, The Resurrection of the Soldiers, detail (© The Estate of Stanley Spencer / Bridgeman Images; photograph courtesy of National Trust Images/John Hammond) 191 23 Stanley Spencer, The Resurrection of the Soldiers, detail (© The Estate of Stanley Spencer / Bridgeman Images; photograph courtesy of National Trust Images/John Hammond) 192 24 Stanley Spencer, Sarah Tubb and the Heavenly Visitors (1933), oil on canvas, 94 x 104.1 cm (© The Estate of Stanley Spencer / Bridgeman Images; image supplied by the Stanley Spencer Gallery, Cookham, www.stanleyspencer.org.uk)194 25 Stanley Spencer, The Lovers (The Dustmen) (1934), oil on canvas, 115 x 123.5 cm (© The Estate of Stanley Spencer/ Bridgeman Images) 196 26 Raymond Pettibon, No Title (All the windows …) (1990), ink and tempera on cardboard, 76.5 x 56.4 cm (© Raymond Pettibon) 205 27 Juan de Flandes, The Ascension (1514–19), oil on pine panel, 110 x 84 cm (© Photographic Archive Museo Nacional del Prado) 231 28 Giuseppe Penone, Guanti (1972), one of two colour photographs, each 38.4 x 48.9 cm (© ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2018) 233 29 Manuel Amado, Janela sobre o Mar (1992), oil on canvas, 81 x 65 cm (Collection of the artist, Lisbon; reproduced by kind permission)242



List of figuresix

30 Heinz-Günter Prager, sieben begehren (2010), aquatint on handmade paper, portfolio with 8 sheets, each 77 x 55.5 cm, images 5 and 6 (© 2018 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn; photographs by László Tóth) 31 Ori Gersht, Pomegranate (2006), digital film still (by kind permission of the artist) 32 Guido Reni, Saint Cecilia (1606), oil on canvas, 95.9 x 74.9 cm (The Norton Simon Foundation)

244 259 263

Notes on contributors

Stephen Cheeke is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Bristol, UK. His publications include Writing for Art: The Aesthetics of Ekphrasis (Manchester University Press, 2008) and Transfiguration: The Religion of Art in NineteenthCentury Literature Before Aestheticism (Oxford University Press, 2016). Claus Clüver is Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at Indiana University, USA. He has also taught at New York University and University of California, Berkeley, and in Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Portugal, and Brazil. Among his publications are a book on modern epic theatre and over forty essays on the history, theory, and practice of intermedial studies. He has also co-edited several essay collections on topics in word-and-image studies, including The Pictured Word (1998), Signs of Change: Transformations of Christian Traditions and their Representation in the Arts, 1000–2000 (2004), Orientations: Space/Time/ Image/Word (2005), and The Imaginary: Word and Image/L’Imaginaire: texte et image (2015; all published by Rodopi, now Brill). Rachel Eisendrath is Assistant Professor of English and chair of the Medieval and Renaissance Studies Programme at Barnard College, Columbia University, New York, USA. She is the author of Poetry in a World of Things: Aesthetics and Empiricism in Renaissance Ekphrasis (University of Chicago Press, 2018). James A. W. Heffernan is Professor of English Emeritus at Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, USA. He has published widely on the relations between literature and visual art. His books include The Re-Creation of Landscape: A Study of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Constable, and Turner (University Press of New England, 1985), Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery (University of Chicago Press, 1993), Cultivating Picturacy: Visual Art and Verbal Interventions (Baylor University Press, 2006), and Hospitality and Treachery in Western Literature (Yale University Press, 2014). He is also founding editor of Review 19 (www.nbol-19.org). David Kennedy was Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Hull, UK. He was co-editor of the Bloodaxe anthology The New Poetry



Notes on contributorsxi

(1993), and the author of New Relations: The Refashioning of British Poetry 1980–1994 (Seren, 1996). He published three collections of poetry with Salt, including The Devil’s Bookshop (2007), and a book-length sequence about Cézanne, entitled The Apple and the Mountain, with Shearsman Books (2015). His ­critical books included Elegy (Routledge, 2007), Douglas Dunn (Northcote House, 2008), The Ekphrastic Encounter in Contemporary British Poetry and Elsewhere (Ashgate, 2012), and the co-authored study Women’s Experimental Poetry in Britain 1970–2010: Body, Time and Locale (Liverpool University Press, 2013). Jason Lawrence is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Hull, UK. His first monograph, ‘Who the Devil taught thee so much Italian?’: Italian Language Learning and Literary Imitation in Early Modern England (Manchester University Press, 2006), explored the relationship between methods of learning Italian in Renaissance England and techniques of literary imitation in response to Italian materials. His latest monograph, Tasso’s Art and Afterlives: The ‘Gerusalemme liberata’ in England (Manchester University Press, 2017), focuses on the reception in England of the life and works of the great sixteenth-century Italian poet Torquato Tasso, spanning literature, opera, and the visual arts from the late sixteenth to the late nineteenth centuries. Liliane Louvel is Professor Emerita of British Literature at the University of Poitiers, France. She has published numerous articles and books on the relationship between word and image, including L’oeil du texte: Texte et image dans la littérature de langue anglaise (Presses Universitaires du Mirail, 1998), Oscar Wilde,‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’: Le double miroir de l’art (Ellipses, 2000), Texte/image, images à lire et textes à voir (Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2002), Le tiers pictural: Pour une critique intermédiale (Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2010), and Poetics of the Iconotext, edited by Karen Jacobs and translated by Laurence Petit (Ashgate, 2011). Angeliki Tseti’s translation of Le tiers pictural has been published by Routledge as The Pictorial Third (2018). She has also edited several collections of essays on this subject. She is currently President of the European Society for the Study of English (ESSE), and President of the International Association for Word and Image Studies (IAWIS/ AIERTI). Catriona MacLeod is Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor of German at the University of Pennsylvania, USA. She is the author of Embodying Ambiguity: Androgyny and Aesthetics from Winckelmann to Keller (Wayne State University Press, 1998), and Fugitive Objects: Literature and Sculpture in the German Nineteenth Century (Northwestern University Press, 2014), as well as coeditor of two volumes on inter-arts studies, and, most recently, Un/Translatables: New Maps for Germanic Literatures (Northwestern University Press, 2016). Her current book project, Romantic Scraps, explores how Romantic authors and

xii

Notes on contributors

visual artists manipulate paper, generating paper cuts, collages, and inkblot poems to create striking new hybrid forms. Since 2011 she has been senior editor of Word & Image. Keith McDonald joined the University of London, UK in 2015 following spells teaching Renaissance literature at the University of Leicester and the University of Geneva. He completed his doctoral thesis on Andrew Marvell in 2013 and is working towards the publication of his first monograph. In addition to his website, writingprivacy.com, his work has appeared in English Studies, Marvell Studies, and in England’s Fortress: New Perspectives on Thomas, 3rd Lord Fairfax (Ashgate, 2014). Johanna Malt is Reader in French Literature and Visual Culture at King’s College London, UK. She is the author of Obscure Objects of Desire: Surrealism, Fetishism, and Politics (Oxford University Press, 2004) and of numerous articles on the relationship between literature, theory and visual art. Richard Meek is Lecturer in English at the University of Hull, UK. He is the author of Narrating the Visual in Shakespeare (Ashgate, 2009), and co-editor of Shakespeare’s Book: Essays in Reading, Writing and Reception (Manchester University Press, 2008) and The Renaissance of Emotion: Understanding Affect in Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (Manchester University Press, 2015). He is currently completing a study of sympathy in early modern literature and culture. Tilo Reifenstein is Associate Lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK, where he recently completed his PhD, ‘On the Graphic in Writing-Drawing Practice’. Tilo is a trustee of the Association for Art History and associate editor of the Open Arts Journal. Jane Thomas is Professor of Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Literature and Director of the Centre for Nineteenth Century Studies at the University of Hull, UK, and a former Research Fellow of the Henry Moore Institute. She has published monographs and articles on the life and work of Thomas Hardy; Victorian literature, art and sculpture; and contemporary women writers. Current research projects include editions of Hardy’s novels and a critical study of the twin practices of writing and painting in the work of Beryl Bainbridge. Lauren S. Weingarden is Professor of Art History at Florida State University, USA. Her publications focus on the interrelations between written and visual texts and their functions within nineteenth-century cultural contexts. She is the author of Louis H. Sullivan and a 19th-Century Poetics of Naturalized Architecture (Ashgate, 2009). She has also written numerous articles on nineteenth-century



Notes on contributorsxiii

French modernity, as defined by Charles Baudelaire and represented by Édouard Manet. Her research on Manet and Zola’s ekphrastic relations is part of a book project entitled Embodying Baudelairean Modernity: A Neuroarthistory of the Painters of Modern Life.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the International Association of Word and Image Studies (IAWIS/AIERTI) for generously supporting this project in its early stages, and the Faculty of Arts, Cultures and Education at the University of Hull for subsequent financial help. I am very grateful to Matthew Frost and the team at Manchester University Press for recognizing the book’s potential early on, steering it through the production process, and transforming the manuscript into such a handsome material object. We would like to extend our thanks to the various individuals and institutions who gave permission to reproduce the images contained in the book. Many thanks to the anonymous readers at the Press for their detailed, generous and helpful reports, which helped us to sharpen the book’s focus and bring out its wider significance. I am also very grateful to my partner, Jane Rickard, for her advice and encouragement. Finally I would like to thank our excellent team of contributors for their hard work and patience, and for making this project a collegial and stimulating scholarly encounter from the outset. I would also like to take this opportunity to pay tribute to my co-editor, David Kennedy, who sadly passed away in March 2017, shortly after we sent a draft of the manuscript to the Press. While I am pleased that the book is finally completed I am very sorry that David is not around to see the finished product. This project grew out of our shared interest in the relationship between visual and verbal art, and indeed many of the chapters below build on David’s particular interest in ekphrasis as an encounter. David was an ekphrastic poet as well as an insightful critic, and it was a particular pleasure for me to hear him read from his collection The Apple and the Mountain before he died. He is much missed at the University of Hull as a friend and colleague, and I would like to dedicate this book to his memory. I hope that it will serve as a testament to his scholarship, creativity, and personality. Richard Meek Leeds, January 2018

Introduction: from paragone to encounter David Kennedy and Richard Meek

I am not a painter, I am a poet. Why? I think I would rather be a painter, but I am not.1

Frank O’Hara’s poem ‘Why I Am Not a Painter’ opens with this equivocal comparison between the roles of poet and painter. The poem focuses on the making of two works of art – one pictorial and one poetic – and implicitly invites the reader to compare the two art forms. The first section describes O’Hara’s visits to a house on Long Island that the painter Michael Goldberg was sharing with another painter, Norman Bluhm. Goldberg is working on a painting that includes the word ‘SARDINES’. As Goldberg explains to O’Hara, ‘“Yes, it needed something there”’ (9). O’Hara drops in on another occasion, and finds that the word has been obscured in the finished painting: ‘All that is left is just / letters’ (15–16). The final section describes the writing of a sequence of twelve poems – which end up as prose – prompted by the colour orange, which the poet calls ‘ORANGES’. At the end of the poem, O’Hara sees Goldberg’s painting in a gallery: it is ‘called SARDINES’ (29). Despite its opening statement, then, which appears to differentiate between the roles of painter and poet, the poem ultimately points to an equivalence between them. While Goldberg’s finished painting apparently no longer contains the word ‘SARDINES’, O’Hara’s sequence does not contain the word ‘ORANGES’.2 At the same time, however, the poem cannot quite decide whether or not there are similarities between these two forms of art. The question, ‘But me?’ (17), which introduces the last section about the writing of the poetic sequence, seems to suggest a contrast, but this is left unexplored. We might note that neither Goldberg’s painting nor O’Hara’s poem – nor the poetic sequence described within it – are realistic in the sense of corresponding to things in the real world. They are, however, systems of representation

2

Ekphrastic encounters

1. Michael Goldberg, Sardines (1955)

that are held in a perpetual dialogue with each other. In Goldberg’s completed painting, now in the Smithsonian American Art Museum (Figure 1), the word ‘SARDINES’ is just about legible at the bottom while the word ‘EXIT’ – not mentioned in O’Hara’s poem – appears at the top. The painting thus plays with the distinction between words and images, and between abstract and representational art. The same could be said of O’Hara’s poem, which also describes the temporal process by which both visual and verbal art are created. The phrase



Introduction: from paragone to encounter3

‘days go by’ is repeated three times; and the ‘One day’ when the poet starts writing ‘ORANGES’ is echoed by the ‘one day’ when he sees the finished painting ‘SARDINES’. ‘Why I Am Not a Painter’ attempts to perform this moment of encounter with Goldberg’s painting in some of its multiple complexity. In terms of the way the poem works, it would not be going too far to say that it stages a collaboration between the process of making a painting and making a sequence of poetry. ‘Why I Am Not a Painter’ thus opens up various questions about the relationship between literature and the visual arts that have long fascinated writers, artists, theorists, and critics. Is it competitive or collaborative? To what extent can one form of art be used to define or describe the other? Can the supposed inadequacies of poetry and painting ever be overcome? What happens when one medium attempts to represent the other? Such questions come into particular focus when we consider the practice and process of ekphrasis – the verbal representation of visual art. In the past twenty-five years numerous books and articles have appeared covering different aspects of ekphrasis, with scholars arguing that it is a fundamental means by which literary artists have explored the nature of aesthetic experience.3 The trope has typically been regarded by critics and theorists as a competition between different forms of representation. In Writing for Art (2008), Stephen Cheeke argued that ‘the notion of the paragone, a struggle, a contest, a confrontation, remains central to all thinking about ekphrasis’.4 And yet, many ekphrastic texts – including O’Hara’s ‘Why I Am Not a Painter’ – reveal the inadequacy of the paragonal model in which word and image compete with each other for artistic supremacy. Indeed critics have begun to confront, or perhaps struggle with, this critical paradigm, and to query the traditional view that ekphrasis necessarily represents a struggle for mastery or dominance. The present book sets out to explore this critical shift, and in doing so advocates a more reciprocal model of ekphrasis that involves an encounter or exchange between word and image. At the same time, however, we should acknowledge that there has always been an opposition or dialectic between these two models – antagonism and cooperation – and indeed this tension is itself the subject of debate within the theory and practice of ekphrasis. Nonetheless our central point is that the agonistic model was the primary means of conceptualizing ekphrasis during the first ‘ekphrastic turn’ of the 1990s, and has continued to be influential into the twenty-first century. Before we introduce the essays in the collection we might briefly outline the ways in which the paragone has dominated critical conceptions of intermedial relationships. As we shall see, ekphrastic works of various periods and styles have been read through the paradigm of the paragone that was established in the Renaissance; and yet this was not the only model available during that period. The Introduction goes on to explore how recent critics and theorists working across various disciplines and periods have started to interrogate this ­influential paradigm.

4 4

Ekphrastic encounters encounters Ekphrastic

Rethinking the paragone This doubleness and ambiguity about ekphrasis can be located in the word paragone itself. The term is often used figuratively to mean a test or trial, although it actually derives from the Italian for ‘comparison’.5 The word was originally used in relation to painting and sculpture – a debate that was itself visualized and extended in artworks such as Guercino’s Allegory of Painting and Sculpture (1637; Figure 2). During the Renaissance the term also came to encompass parallels between painting and poetry. Clark Hulse has written that the discourse of the paragone describes literature and painting through comparisons with one other, establishes a discrete history for each art form, and approves particular modes of behavior for the creators and consumers of the arts. It marks a radical break with the ways medieval poets and, even more, medieval painters spoke of their art, for it submerges the craft elements of art in favour of an intellectualized and theorized language that could buttress the social claims of poet and painter alike.6

The paragone between poets and painters thus had a sociological basis as well as an artistic or theoretical one: it was a way for both groups to elevate the status of their work. In his classic study of The Sister Arts (1958), Jean Hagstrum argues

2. Guercino, Allegory of Painting and Sculpture (1637)



Introduction: from paragone to encounter5

that this fascination with comparisons between literature and art was also part of a wider interest in aesthetic and intellectual rivalries: ‘This tendency to view various occupations and even ideas and philosophies as competitive is one of the distinguishing marks of Renaissance thought. Paragoni existed not only between painting and poetry but also between sculpture and painting, between Florentine design and Venetian color, between nature and art.’7 Hagstrum offers a seductive picture of the various forms of paragoni in the period, but perhaps overstates the extent to which ‘Renaissance thought’ – if there was such a thing – was distinguished by competition. Certainly there are various classical and early modern examples of ‘paragonal’ discourse about poetry and painting. Critics and theorists who have written about the paragone frequently cite the comments of Plutarch and Leonardo da Vinci as illustrative examples, setting them in opposition to one another. In his Moralia, Plutarch quotes Simonides’ saying that ‘picture was a dumbe poesie, and poesie a speaking picture’.8 Leonardo da Vinci playfully reworked Simonides’ phrase in his defence of painting known as his Paragone, in which he describes painting as the superior art: ‘poetry is the science for the blind and painting for the deaf. But painting is nobler than poetry inasmuch as it serves the nobler sense.’9 In this way, Leonardo’s treatise would appear to be as paragonal as its title might suggest. As Claire Farago points out, however, the word paragone is first used as the title of Leonardo’s defence of painting in Manzi’s 1817 edition of the Trattato della pittura – in other words, the treatise only became associated with the term paragone retrospectively.10 Indeed the critical tendency to treat Plutarch and Leonardo’s comments as fundamentally oppositional has obscured the extent to which they share common ground. Immediately after citing Simonides’ saying, Plutarch writes that, while the two arts forms have different methods, they have the same overall aim: for looke what things or actions painters doe shew as present and in manner as they were in doing, writings doe report and record as done and past; and if the one represent them in colours and figures, and the other exhibite the same in words and sentences, they differ both in matter and also in manner of imitation, howbeit both the one and the other shoote at one end, and have the same intent and purpose. (p. 984)

Leonardo, too, admits that poetry and painting share the same goal of ‘imitating nature as closely as lies in their power’ (p. 59). In this way, comparisons between the two art forms that might appear paragonal or competitive could bring out their similarities as well as differences. Both Plutarch and Leonardo concede that, while poets and painters are ostensibly in competition with one another, their apparent rivalry is part of a larger mimetic competition with Nature – to copy and outdo her.11 Indeed the related doctrine of ut pictura poesis – which derives from Horace’s Ars Poetica, and stresses equivalence between the arts – was even more influential and ubiquitous than the paragone in the early modern period.

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Ekphrastic encounters

According to Christopher Braider, Horace’s tag ‘lies at the heart of Renaissance aesthetics’, and ‘appears in virtually every treatise on art or poetry from the early Renaissance to the Enlightenment’.12 Part of the appeal of Horace’s dictum – which can be translated as ‘Poetry is like painting’ – was that it corresponded to the period’s sense that language should aspire towards pictorial vividness.13 Classical and Renaissance rhetorical treatises recommended the use of figures such as enargeia and hypotyposis to produce descriptions so vivid that readers could not only see the things being described but also experience the same emotions as those being represented.14 The aim of poetry – and other forms of literary writing – was to replicate the (supposed) immediacy of painting in its descriptions of nature and heroic human deeds. We can see something of this aspiration in Plutarch’s praise of his fellow historian Thucydides, ‘who throughout his whole history contendeth to attaine unto this diluciditie of stile, striving to make the auditour of his wordes the spectatour as it were of the deeds therein conteined, and desirous to imprint in the readers the same passions of astonishment, woonder and agony, which the very things themselves would worke when they are represented to the eie’.15 Ut pictura poesis was thus a celebration of the capacity of art – both visual and verbal – to bring about a powerful sense of direct physical presence. This fascination with the visuality of language is one reason why ekphrasis became such an important literary device in the Renaissance. Adam McKeown comments that, ‘as a kind of enargeia, it [ekphrasis] is part of the family of devices by which poets understood the capacity of language to approximate visual experience or, more precisely, to resemble picture’.16 Renaissance readers would have recognized the term ekphrasis, but would have understood it to mean simply ‘vivid description’. In classical rhetoric, ekphrasis could refer to virtually any extended description: the word literally means ‘to speak out’ or ‘to tell in full’.17 It appears as the twelfth exercise in Aphthonius’ Progymnasmata – a graded sequence of fourteen writing exercises used for the purpose of practising composition, which was still being used in the Renaissance: ‘Ecphrasis (ekphrasis) is descriptive language, bringing what is shown clearly before the eyes. One should describe both persons and things, occasions and places, dumb animals and, in addition, growing things … In composing an ecphrasis, one should make use of a relaxed style and adorn it with varied figures and, throughout, creating an imitation of the things being described.’18 And yet, despite this wonderfully open definition of the term, many writers found themselves drawn to describing works of pictorial art. Following classical examples – such as Homer’s description of Achilles’ shield in Book 18 of the Iliad and Virgil’s description of Aeneas’ shield in Book 8 of the Aeneid – Renaissance authors found pictures, sculptures, and other elaborate artefacts to be ideal subjects for vivid description. As Claire Preston suggests, such descriptions presented each writer with an opportunity ‘to write self-consciously about his own art even as he shows it off’.19 Perhaps the key Renaissance example appears in Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece, which describes Lucrece’s encounter with a painting of the fall of Troy.



Introduction: from paragone to encounter7

3. Biagio d’Antonio and Workshop, The Triumph of Camillus (c. 1470–75)

As with several other ekphrastic texts from this period, Shakespeare invokes the notion of a paragone between words and images; as the narrator puts it, ‘To see sad sights moves more than hear them told’ (1324).20 However, the ekphrasis itself offers a far more complex and ambivalent treatment of the relationship between seeing and hearing – and, implicitly, poetry and painting – than this phrase might suggest. The painting recalls the elaborately composed battle scenes found on the panels of Italian bridal dower chests (‘cassoni’), which often depicted Trojan or classical subjects (see Figure 3).21 Yet the primary inspiration for Shakespeare’s ekphrasis seems to have been literary rather than pictorial. It resembles Virgil’s description of Aeneas contemplating similar images of the fall of Troy in Book 1 of the Aeneid, as well as incorporating elements from Philostratus’ verbal descriptions of paintings in the Imagines. These classical sources remind us that ekphrasis often involves an encounter between literary texts.22 Lucrece is fascinated by the painter’s skill, but she becomes increasingly interested by the figures depicted on the painting; comparing her sufferings to those of the tragic figure of Hecuba, Lucrece ‘shapes her sorrow to the beldam’s woes’ (1458).23 And, in a remarkable formulation, Lucrece carries out an a ­ esthetic transaction with the pictorial artwork she is looking at: So Lucrece, set a-work, sad tales doth tell To pencilled pensiveness, and coloured sorrow; She lends them words, and she their looks doth borrow. (1496–8)

This passage ostensibly describes Lucrece’s emotional encounter with the ­painting – but it also offers a complex definition of ekphrasis itself. Lucrece seems to ‘borrow’ the visuality of the painting that Shakespeare has created verbally.24 Ekphrasis is figured here as a symbiosis of ‘words’ and ‘looks’ rather than a competition; Shakespeare displays an awareness of the limitations of both forms of art, but suggests that they are able to borrow from each other. Even though the painter’s depictions of emotion are ‘pencilled’ and ‘coloured’ (1497) – terms that might imply misrepresentation or deception – Lucrece nevertheless finds

8

Ekphrastic encounters

them remarkably powerful. Shakespeare implies that, while neither visual nor verbal representations can represent the thing itself, both have the capacity to conjure up images and ideas in what the narrator suggestively calls ‘the eye of mind’ (1426). This passage thus reminds us that Renaissance ekphrases – and paragoni between literature and art more broadly – often highlight the ­representational and philosophical affinities between word and image. Lessing and the paragone When we turn to the critical history of writings on literature and the visual arts since the Renaissance, however, it becomes clear that the paragone – ­narrowly understood as competition or rivalry – has proved to be more long-lasting and influential than the notion of ut pictura poesis. Part of the explanation for this is the influence of G. E. Lessing’s Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry (1766), which directly attacked Horace’s doctrine. Lessing famously argued that painting is a spatial art and that literature is a temporal or narrative art, and that the two media are therefore technically and philosophically distinct. He writes: if it is true that in its imitations painting uses completely different means or signs than does poetry, namely figures and colors and space rather than articulated sounds in time … then signs existing in space can express only objects whose wholes or parts coexist, while signs that follow one another and express only objects whose wholes or parts are consecutive.25

Like Plutarch and Leonardo, then, Lessing concedes some degree of similarity between the two arts, in the sense that they both imitate reality; but for him they do not represent the same reality.26 By the nineteenth century the neoclassical concept of ut pictura poesis seemed outmoded as art came to be seen as an expression of what Wendy Steiner calls the ‘human spirit’ rather than an ‘imitation of reality’.27 Of course, there was still a close interaction between the ‘sister arts’ in the nineteenth century, exemplified by Pre-Raphaelitism. And yet, as Malcolm Bull puts it, during this period ‘the ut pictura poesis motif ceased to be of central importance. Painters no longer needed to align themselves with poets to enhance their professional status for the academies had achieved that goal, and the new paradigm of genius emphasized spontaneity rather than learning.’28 The binary opposition between poetry and painting that Lessing reinforced continued to inform debates about word and image up until the late twentieth century. At this time, there was an expansion of critical interest in ekphrasis, and the modern understanding of the concept – as the literary representation of visual art – was crystallized. Lessing is discussed in Murray Krieger’s pioneering essay ‘Ekphrasis and the Still Movement of Poetry; or Laokoön Revisited’, first published in 1967. Krieger uses the Chinese jar in T. S. Eliot’s ‘Burnt Norton’ to make what he calls an ‘anti-Lessing’ assertion: that poetry does indeed have a ‘claim to form’. He suggests that this is achieved in the poem ‘by the use of an



Introduction: from paragone to encounter9

object of spatial and plastic art to symbolize the spatiality and plasticity of literature’s temporality’. Krieger continues: ‘a classic genre was formulated that, in effect, institutionalized this tactic: the ekphrasis, or the imitation in literature of a work of plastic art’.29 And yet, while Krieger introduced a generation of literary scholars to the modern conception of ekphrasis, he implies that the trope is an exception to Lessing’s theoretical rules: ‘literature retains its essential nature as a time-art even as its words, by reaching stillness by way of pattern, seen to appropriate sculpture’s plasticity as well’ (p. 285). Thus Krieger’s essay effectively endorses the views of theorists such as Edmund Burke and Lessing by claiming that there is an essential difference between poetry and painting. Krieger argues that the competition between the two art forms favours poetry, which can ‘uniquely order spatial stasis within its temporal dynamics’; in other words, it can incorporate the visual aspects of painting within language, and create ‘the illusion of an organised simultaneity’ (p. 285). Some twenty years later, W. J. T. Mitchell devoted an entire chapter to Lessing in his study of Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (1986), which critiques the opposition between words and images from a more explicitly ideological standpoint.30 Mitchell acknowledges that the differences between words and images ‘seem so fundamental’, but argues that there is no essential difference between poetry and painting, no difference, that is, that is given for all time by the inherent natures of the media, the objects they represent, or the laws of the human mind … These differences … are riddled with all the antithetical values the culture wants to embrace or repudiate: 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. (p. 49)

While acknowledging the tradition of ut pictura poesis and the ‘sister arts’ in criticism, Mitchell suggests that such concepts of comparison and resemblance have been spurned by critics and theorists, who generally value ideas of difference and discrimination more highly. Mitchell thus seeks to expose the paragone as an ideological construct, bound up with various other institutional and political contests.31 Yet his emphasis upon the paragone fed into several key studies of ekphrasis in the early 1990s – and, despite his deconstructionist approach, may ironically have reinforced some of the binaries that he sought to expose. Perhaps the key study of ekphrasis that appeared during this period was James Heffernan’s Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery (1993). Heffernan’s book opens with the claim that there is no more to learn about the sister arts by simply comparing them. It presents Mitchell’s Iconology as upholding the paragone, which Heffernan presents as a more fruitful way of considering the relationship between word and image.32 He goes on to offer a definition of ekphrasis that has become standard: ‘the verbal representation of visual representation’ (p. 3). Heffernan’s explanation for the endurance of the trope is in its ‘paragonal energies’. He writes: ‘Because it verbally represents visual art, ekphrasis stages a contest between rival modes of representation:

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Ekphrastic encounters

between the driving force of the narrating word and the stubborn resistance of the fixed image’ (p. 6). Showing the influence of the feminist and Marxist theories of the 1980s and 1990s, Heffernan argues that this competition is frequently figured in terms of gender: ‘the contest it stages is often powerfully gendered: the expression of a duel between male and female gazes, the voice of a male speech striving to control a female image that is both alluring and threatening’ (p. 6). Heffernan’s analysis of the individual works he discusses is careful and illuminating, and his book is still valuable for its broad chronological sweep; but his argument that ekphrasis is permeated by ‘the struggle for power – the paragone – between the image and the word’ (p. 136) now seems like the product of a particular critical and theoretical moment.33 We can see something of the limitations of this paragonal approach when we consider its application to a key ekphrastic text. In his 1994 study The Sculpted Word: Keats, Ekphrasis, and the Visual Arts, Grant F. Scott argued that Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ dramatises ‘a paragone between poet and artwork’.34 Certainly the paragone is implicit in the poem, not least in the speaker’s rapturous address to the urn in the opening stanza: ‘Sylvan historian, who canst thus express / A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme’ (3–4).35 But we might suggest that the poem resists and complicates the notion of the representational contest. Scott writes that, by the end of the poem, ‘the urn holds the decided advantage in the paragone and is in an ideal position to take the laurel wreath’ (p. 146). However the fact that the urn appears to have a legend – a piece of text – inscribed upon it collapses the very terms of the paragone: ‘“Beauty is truth, truth beauty, – that is all / Ye know on earth and all ye need to know”’ (49–50). Keats’s urn appears to be a hybrid artwork that contains both words and images. It offers further evidence that words can be spatialized – and as puzzling as the images depicted on the urn itself. As Alastair Fowler has commented, ‘The common contrast between texts that take time to read and pictures seen in an instant is entirely specious. Visual art is not instantaneously accessible. An educated eye tracking through a picture in repeated scans picks up impressions, associations, and allusions in a way quite comparable with the procedure of reading.’36 Raphael’s cartoon The Sacrifice at Lystra (Figure 4), which may be an indirect source of Keats’s poem, exemplifies this kind of pictorial complexity.The image depicts an episode from Acts 14, in which Paul and Barnabas cure a cripple, and the inhabitants of Lystra mistake them for the gods Jupiter and Mercury. The people are about to make a sacrifice to the pair, although some in the crowd recognize Paul and Barnabas’ dismay, with one young man attempting to stop the sacrifice. In this way, the image is itself concerned with meaning and interpretation, and reminds us that our experience of visual artworks is a process: an act of ‘reading’ that unfolds in time. It is also textually mediated: as well as being inspired by a biblical narrative, the image prompted the painter B. R. Haydon to write two articles about it, which are themselves echoed by Keats’s poem.37 Raphael’s cartoon thus prompts us to reflect upon the complex relationship



Introduction: from paragone to encounter11

4. Raphael, The Sacrifice at Lystra (c. 1515–16)

between reading an image and reading a text, which is arguably the central theme of the ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’. Scott concludes his reading of the poem by suggesting that ‘The paragone appears to result in a draw’ (p. 147); but his account arguably highlights the problems of the paragone as an interpretative model. As with many ekphrastic poems, the comparison that the speaker sets up between poetry and visual art is not a source of genuine anxiety but rather a literary and rhetorical device: it is one of several strategies that the poem uses to persuade us that the urn has a prior and independent existence outside the text. Beyond the paragone In the twenty-first century we have seen a new wave of ekphrastic studies, which has coincided with an increasing interest in formal, aesthetic, and rhetorical concerns.38 As noted above, critics working in different disciplines and periods have begun to query the notion of ekphrasis as rivalry or competition. This critical and theoretical shift demands a new form of ekphrastic poetics, which is less concerned with representational and institutional struggles, and more concerned with ideas of ethics, affect, and intersubjectivity.39 There has also been a greater acceptance of the possibility of free will and agency – both in terms of how critics write about characters within texts and how they conceive of writers and artists. Correspondingly, we have seen a shift in the vocabulary used, with twenty-first-century critics increasingly describing ekphrasis as a form of encounter or exchange. For example, Valentine Cunningham has questioned Heffernan’s emphasis on paragonal energies by suggesting that it is

12

Ekphrastic encounters

rather ‘the tension between the realist, presencing, logocentric desire and the counter-pressure of absence … that is manifested in the repeated moment of ekphrasis, and that keeps the tradition alive’.40 Cunningham also discusses the ways in which ekphrasis frequently involves encounters between characters within the text and other fictional or mythical figures – such as the tapestried appearance of Ovid’s Philomel in Eliot’s The Waste Land. He reminds us that such intertextual encounters raise ethical as well as aesthetic questions. As Cunningham puts it, ‘The ethical note is clear: the voice of the ekphrastic poet is often … morally weighted, admonitory, instructive; the ekphrastic encounter is commonly for the good of the fictional character, is morally heuristic’ (p. 65). By characterizing ekphrasis as a meeting or encounter, Cunningham invites us to attend to its concern with the points of connection between both individuals and forms of mimesis. Stephen Cheeke’s Writing for Art: The Aesthetics of Ekphrasis (2008), which focuses on nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature, is also interested in questions of ethics as well as aesthetics. He argues that ekphrasis often focuses on artworks that represent the pain of others – his chapter on poetic responses to Brueghel, for example, is entitled ‘Suffering’.41 Cheeke also raises larger questions about how we should conceive of the relationship between literature and visual art, writing that it is ‘best thought of not in terms of sisterly bonds at all but rather as one of radical difference and alterity’ (p. 6). Yet he goes on to acknowledge that ekphrasis is not always concerned with difference or otherness: the poem knows something or tells something that had been held back by the silent image. But there is also the notion of transgression, of crossing borders, of translation. Sometimes the encounter with alterity takes on a special charm when it is not merely an occasion for the discovery of difference but a place of relation and therefore of the possibility of exchange. (p. 6)

In Cheeke’s reading of Derek Mahon’s ‘Courtyards in Delft’, for example, he argues that, while the poem ‘seems intended to break through the surface perfection of de Hooch’s painting’, this does not amount to hostility: ‘it would not quite be correct to say that the poet (or poem) somehow harbours a wish to control or dominate the image-as-other, or to overcome the differences between poem and painting, even though these differences are also the route of the exchange’ (pp. 35–6). Thus Cheeke’s conception of ekphrasis goes beyond the paragone, and admits the possibility of interartistic exchange or transaction.42 The potential alterity or foreignness of the ekphrastic object suggests that ekphrasis can be thought of as being akin to the practices of translation. As such, it opens up wider questions regarding intercultural – including p ­ ostcolonial – relations that have attracted the attention of critics working in French and francophone studies. In 2010 Susan Harrow edited a special issue of French Studies that sought to ‘develop the ekphrastic beyond traditional assumptions of



Introduction: from paragone to encounter13

linear influence, mimetic translation, and textual incorporation’.43 She writes that the contributors to the issue ‘conceive not of rival arts but of reciprocal visual and textual cultures’ (p. 257). In particular, Harrow queries Heffernan’s model of a struggle for mastery between image and word: ‘Now the “struggle for mastery” trope is displaced by the anti-hegemonic project of new ekphrastic forms that are defined by their refusal to colonize art and by their preoccupation with the visual image that obstructs its own incorporation by the textual medium’ (p. 258). Harrow’s vocabulary remains politicized, likening ekphrasis to a form of colonization – yet she offers a more optimistic view than that of earlier critics, suggesting that ekphrastic writers may be attracted to visual art works that resist attempts to convert them into language.44 This is especially the case when we consider abstract or non-representational art, which is often neglected in traditional conceptions of ekphrasis. There has also been an increasing scepticism about the paragone among scholars of twenty-first-century Anglo-American literature. For example, in her discussion of the poetry of Cole Swensen and Sharon Dolin, Anne Keefe has described contemporary ekphrasis as ‘an active poetic strategy or process’, and as a ‘hybrid of the verbal and visual’.45 Such a conception of ekphrasis, she writes, ‘allows us to understand the space of the ekphrastic poem as an open and fluid one of exchange between the arts, and thus complicate the historically inscribed generic boundaries and power dynamics inherent not only in the verbal/visual exchange but also in the social relationships of inequality that have become mapped onto the ekphrastic encounter’ (p. 135). The idea of the ekphrastic encounter is fundamental to David Kennedy’s book-length study of The Ekphrastic Encounter in Contemporary British Poetry and Elsewhere (2012), which explores the work of poets such as Kelvin Corcoran, Peter Hughes, and Gillian Clarke. Kennedy is drawn to the term encounter ‘not only because of its meanings of an accidental unexpected meeting, but also because of its sense that as a consequence of such a meeting there is a change of direction … There is no doubt that art can present us with sudden challenges, but we should be cautious about the idea that this means that ekphrasis is inherently paragonal, that is, a struggle between different modes of representation.’46 Such arguments have considerable implications for our understanding of ekphrasis – and further highlight the gap between what critics analyse in the ekphrastic ‘exchange’ and what poets set out to do. Several of the contributors to the present book borrow and extend Kennedy’s model of the encounter, and use the term to explore interpersonal as well as inter-artistic relationships. Meanwhile, critics of Renaissance literature and culture have begun to recognize that, despite its currency in the period, the paragone does not always illuminate early modern ekphrastic texts.47 In an important essay on Shakespeare’s Lucrece, Catherine Belsey has argued that the paragonal model works rather better for actual rather than notional ekphrases: ‘The conflictual model works with varying degrees of success when brought to bear on poems describing existing paintings, but it might be argued that there is some question about its

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Ekphrastic encounters

usefulness in relation to fictitious images … An impartial observer might regard creation purely for the sake of control as an empty exercise: haven’t the best creators allowed their products free will?’48 Belsey also notes the emphasis in Lucrece on aesthetic lending and borrowing that we explored earlier, and offers the following critique of the concept of ekphrastic rivalry: It is perhaps worth reflecting that contention requires a shared element. There is no possibility of rivalry between a raven and a writing desk, since there is no basis on which they can compete. Comparison implies common ground and offers alternative possibilities: either to do battle for sole possession of the terrain in question or to regard it as a place to cooperate … Rather than contending against the picture it creates, Shakespeare’s poem joins with it in the enterprise of defining and redirecting his protagonist’s humiliation, her sense of irreparable loss, her justified anger, and her resolution to inaugurate what will be in effect a second Rome. (p. 190)

Common ground and co-operation would appear to be the new watchwords in twenty-first-century ekphrastic poetics. We might also note that Belsey is concerned to explore Lucrece’s emotional state, and the ways in which both words and images serve an important function in enabling her to represent her passions.49 Perhaps, then, we may be seeing a revival of the alternative model of interartistic relations – ut pictura poesis – albeit a more complex and sophisticated version of the doctrine. In her recent discussion of artistic ‘incompletion’ in early modern drama, Chloe Porter notes that ‘ut pictura poesis is often linked to the transcendence of verbal/visual boundaries in the pursuit of aesthetic perfection’.50 The concept thus returns us to the apparent paragone between Plutarch and Leonardo discussed earlier. Ut pictura poesis implies that both painting and poetry have the same end: to create representations that possess enargeia or vividness.51 As we noted above, enargeia involved stirring the passions of readers and audiences as well as making them ‘see’ – and perhaps this is one reason why ekphrastic texts often describe emotional as well as representational encounters. Such moments both figure and augment the reader’s emotional engagement with the literary text. Thus critics of ekphrasis in the twenty-first century are less concerned with emphasizing the differences between representational media, and more concerned with the capacity of art – whether visual, verbal, or a hybrid of the two – to explore the possibility of ‘aesthetic perfection’; sublime experiences that are beyond representation or articulation. Ekphrastic encounters The critical survey we have presented above suggests that, while some ekphrastic texts might invoke the idea of the paragone, they frequently go beyond it or question some of its terms. We have also begun to see that ekphrasis involves a variety of encounters: not only between word and image, but also between



Introduction: from paragone to encounter15

literary texts. As Grant Scott rightly observes, ekphrasis is ‘necessarily intertextual’.52 It can also involve an encounter between emotional individuals, between art and life, between the reader and the text, between the present and past, and even between scholarly disciplines.53 But we have also seen how such binary oppositions – which the very duality of ekphrasis certainly encourages – begin to collapse under scrutiny. In other words, while the trope ostensibly reminds us of the difference between visual and verbal modes of representation, it may actually demonstrate the affinity and comparability between these forms. The present book seeks to identify, map, and evaluate this important conceptual shift in ekphrastic studies. Some of the chapters offer fresh perspectives on well-known ekphrastic texts, while others introduce less canonical works. And while some contributors focus on examples of ‘notional’ ekphrasis, others explore encounters between specific literary and visual artists, or particular visual artworks that inspired literary authors. The later chapters in the volume seek to expand the definition of ekphrasis by considering the writings of visual artists, or postmodern works of art that combine words and images. Jerzy Jarniewicz’s recent identification of nineteen types of ekphrasis in the poetry of Derek Mahon is matched, in the present book, by Liliane Louvel’s argument for seven different types of ekphrasis in the writings of the British painter Stanley Spencer.54 Both accounts suggest that the present-day ekphrastic critic is more interested in questions of range and scope than his or her predecessors. Such an interest allows discussions of ekphrasis to be extended beyond its traditional boundaries; and it is such an extension that underlies many of the chapters collected here. The chapters that follow are cross-period, transnational, and interdisciplinary, and offer an exciting range of case studies and theoretical approaches. What all of our contributors share, however, is a desire to complicate the paragonal model of ekphrasis and to offer a set of new methodologies that might shape and influence subsequent research. The first part of the book explores four early modern ekphrastic encounters. In the opening chapter, Rachel Eisendrath offers a new reading of Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece. She argues that, instead of a static struggle between the arts, the ekphrasis in the poem represents an encounter between the past and present – at a time when Renaissance thinkers increasingly focused on material fragments as a way of understanding history. She also complicates our sense of the relationship between subject and object in ekphrastic texts, arguing that Shakespeare reveals the ultimate interdependence of the two. This is figured in various emotional encounters in the poem, including Lucrece’s exchanges with her maid and with the painted figure of Hecuba. Richard Meek’s chapter on Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy is also concerned with emotional encounters. He focuses on the so-called ‘Painter scene’ in which the play’s protagonist, Hieronimo, encounters a Painter and commissions a visual artwork based on his plight. Critics have tended to argue that the representational paragone implicit in this scene ultimately demonstrates the superiority of drama. Meek’s chapter

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Ekphrastic encounters

questions this approach to the play, and argues that The Spanish Tragedy highlights drama’s interdependence with, rather than superiority to, other forms of art. He suggests that Hieronimo’s quest for a suitable representational mode to communicate his emotions is intriguingly related to the play’s ambivalent fascination with the art of narrative. Keith McDonald argues that Andrew Marvell’s poetry, while being deeply concerned with the visual arts, helps us look beyond the paragonal opposition between text and image. He examines two little known Latin poems that accompany an unusual portrait of Oliver Cromwell, and argues that they present ekphrasis as prosopopoeia, exposing the boundaries of language and culture in both visual and verbal modes. When Marvell’s fascination with how lives are represented combines with metaphors of glass and reflection, we embark upon his ekphrastic encounter: of specific visual and temporal moments that define human mortality. Jason Lawrence’s chapter takes us into the early eighteenth century, and considers a key early work of art history: Jonathan Richardson’s Essay on the Whole Art of Criticism as it Relates to Painting (1719). He focuses on Richardson’s ‘Dissertation’ on Poussin’s painting of Tancred and Erminia – which is itself a depiction of a scene from Tasso’s epic poem Gerusalemme liberata (1581). Richardson’s paragone of the two forms is intended to emphasize Poussin’s ability ‘to make use of the Advantages This Art has over that of his Competitor’. As Lawrence points out, however, the pre-eminence of the art of painting can only be proven via a sustained verbal comparison of the painting and its poetic source, which ultimately implies a more complex, symbiotic relationship in the encounter between the visual and literary arts than Richardson initially admits. The second part of the book focuses on the long nineteenth century, and begins by considering the influence of Lessing’s Laocoön. Catriona MacLeod examines the long afterlife of Lessing’s treatise as it reappears as a discursive ‘foreign body’ within a number of novels, which themselves explore and test the relationship between narrative motion and visual spatiality. Going beyond strong critical readings of ekphrasis as a hostile stand-off between text and image, MacLeod considers the ventriloquizing of Lessing in Wilhelm Heinse’s Ardinghello (1787) and Adalbert Stifter’s Der Nachsommer (Indian Summer, 1857). She argues that these hauntings by Lessing reveal not only the entanglement of the modern novel with theories of representation, but also its self-­reflexive and observational stance on its own and the reader’s mediation. Stephen Cheeke’s chapter is concerned with the influence of a specific work of visual art: the supposed portrait of Beatrice Cenci, which was a major nineteenth-century tourist attraction in Rome. Cheeke suggests that Nathanial Hawthorne was the writer most obsessively drawn to the portrait, in which Hawthorne sought to read an original innocence and an innocence regained or redeemed after terrible experience. Through a detailed reading of The Marble Faun, Cheeke argues that the transfiguration of Beatrice Cenci occurs as an essentially pictorial effect that is posited as more potent than theological argument or discursive exposition: an effect of the image that cuts across discourse or verbal reasoning.



Introduction: from paragone to encounter17

Lauren Weingarden explores the symbiotic relationship between Émile Zola’s ekphrastic writings and Édouard Manet’s paintings. She argues that Manet, an avid reader of Zola’s novels and a friend of the writer, would have read Zola’s 1868 preface to Thérèse Raquin, in which the author first put forward his theories of naturalism. Weingarden proposes that Manet painted Zola’s portrait in 1868 as a retort to Zola’s perceived misinterpretation of Manet’s artistic method. The portrait of Zola also reveals how Manet, in turn, appropriated the writer and his writing for his own artistic agenda, the subsequent manifestations of which culminate in his final masterpiece, A Bar at the Folies Bergère (1882). Jane Thomas’s chapter considers another example of an encounter between a writer and visual artist. She explores the non-hierarchical, creative exchange of meaning between Hamo Thornycroft’s 1884 sculpture of The Mower and its accompanying epigraph from Matthew Arnold’s 1866 elegy ‘Thyrsis’. This relationship can be regarded as a form of ‘reverse ekphrasis’ – when a visual artist produces an equivalent of a verbal text. Thomas suggests that sculpture and epigraph, taken together, constitute a third intermedial artwork in which the compromised relationship between the aesthetic act and the desire to apprehend the ‘real’ is manifested through a complex series of textual encounters, with borrowings from classicism, naturalism, realism, pastoral elegy, and Romantic lyric. The third part of the book turns to twentieth- and twenty-first-century examples of ekphrasis. The four chapters in this section further complicate the notion that ekphrasis is simply the verbal representation of visual art; these case studies involve texts and artworks that cannot be categorized as straightforwardly visual or verbal, and thus demand a more expansive and dialogic model of intermedial relations. Liliane Louvel explores the letters, diaries, and essays of Stanley Spencer. She argues that Spencer’s writings are valuable because they combine ekphrasis with theoretical discussions and defences of his own artistic practice. Louvel’s chapter suggests that ekphrasis is more a mood then a mode with its own distinctive characteristics. In Spencer’s w ­ ritings, what we might call ekphrastic desire manifests itself as sudden moments of ­recognition or of what Louvel calls ‘advent’. In the process Louvel describes seven types of ekphrasis, which she suggests might constitute a renewal of ekphrastic ­criticism. Tilo Reifenstein’s chapter considers the importance of writing within the artworks of the American artist Raymond Pettibon. He p ­ roposes that Pettibon’s pen-and-ink drawings, which include varying amounts of written texts, question the implicit opposition between the visual and the verbal that underlies conventional critical definitions of ­ ekphrasis. The chapter shows how Pettibon introduces textual fragmentation and ­nonlinearity through his complex responses to and paraphrasing of ekphrastic authors, and how this opens up writing to the contingencies usually associated with drawing. Reifenstein argues that this quality makes Pettibon’s work reducible to neither the discourse of language nor that of the image.

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Ekphrastic encounters

Johanna Malt explores a different kind of ekphrastic encounter: namely the imprint or ‘contact-image’ made when an artwork encounters a body or some other real object. The chapter explores these questions in the light of the work of contemporary French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, notably through his notions of ‘exscription’ and touch. As Malt puts it, ‘In Nancy’s thought, signification and presence, the readable and the visible are articulated in a relation of mutual touching and withdrawal which is lateral, metonymic, and works in both directions.’ The chapter uses Nancy’s work to complicate W. J. T. Mitchell’s theories of text–image relations – and claims that the image and its non-signifying other are engaged in a non-appropriating embrace rather than an antagonistic paragone. In the final chapter Claus Clüver reiterates his 1997 rejection of the conventional restriction of the objects of ekphrastic representation to visual representations of phenomenal reality. For Clüver, such a definition excludes all twentieth-century non-representational painting and sculpture, as well as all architectural objects and their verbal representations.55 He also queries the designation of ekphrasis as a purely literary phenomenon; Clüver accordingly defines ekphrasis as ‘the verbal representation of real or fictive configurations composed in a non-kinetic visual medium’. But he remarks that this formulation still supports the traditional emphasis on ekphrasis as an instance of intermedial transposition. Clüver argues that it is more rewarding to approach an ekphrastic text as the record of an intense gaze at a meaningful visual configuration, and to consider how in different periods and textual genres such encounters have been verbalized. While questioning the concept of ‘iconotexts’ as developed by Liliane Louvel, Clüver endorses her concern with studying the reception of such verbal representations and to examine, as he puts it, ‘the reader’s performance, or how verbal clues are processed to result in a mental image of a visual configuration’.56 These final chapters thus reflect the vibrancy and scope of ekphrastic studies today. They also demonstrate the continuing interest of artists, writers, and theorists in exploring and debating the relationship between visual and verbal art. James Heffernan’s Afterword reflects upon the wider implications of the present book in relation to his own important work on ekphrasis, which has been so fruitful in framing – and reframing – critical ideas about the trope. He suggests that his earlier definition of ekphrasis may have its limitations, but nonetheless cautions against seeing all ekphrastic encounters as entirely harmonious. Like the collection as a whole, the Afterword points forward towards future scholarly conversations, meetings, and encounters. Notes  1 Frank O’Hara, ‘Why I Am Not a Painter’, in Mark Ford (ed.), The New Poets: An Anthology (Manchester: Carcanet, 2004), p. 30.  2 See Brian Glavey’s discussion of the poem in The Wallflower Avant-Garde: Modernism, Sexuality, and Queer Ekphrasis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015): ‘Even as the



Introduction: from paragone to encounter19

poem distinguishes between the arts it renders them casually interchangeable: The poem takes its inspiration from a color; the painting begins with a word and ends up “only letters”’ (p. 108). See also Hazel Smith, Hyperscapes in the Poetry of Frank O’Hara: Difference, Homosexuality, Topography (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000), pp. 170–4.  3 Several key studies of ekphrasis appeared in the 1990s: Murray Krieger, Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992); James A. W. Heffernan, Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993); and John Hollander, The Gazer’s Spirit: Poems Speaking to Silent Works of Art (Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995). See also W. J. T. Mitchell’s important essay ‘Ekphrasis and the Other’ (1992), rpt. in Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 151–81. In the twenty-first century critics have attempted to expand the definition of the term to include music and film: see Siglind Bruhn, Musical Ekphrasis: Composers Responding to Poetry and Painting (Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon Press, 2000) and Laura M. Sager Eidt, Writing and Filming the Painting: Ekphrasis in Literature and Film (Amsterdam and London: Rodopi, 2008).  4 Stephen Cheeke, Writing for Art: The Aesthetics of Ekphrasis (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008), p. 21.  5 See Claire Farago, ‘Paragone’, in Jane Turner (ed.), The Dictionary of Art (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996). The OED suggests that the Italian word paragone means ‘comparative analysis between alternatives resulting in a choice’ (OED, ‘paragon’, n. and adj.).  6 Clark Hulse, The Rule of Art: Literature and Painting in the Renaissance (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 9.  7 Jean H. Hagstrum, The Sister Arts: The Tradition of Literary Pictorialism and English Poetry from Dryden to Gray (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1958), p. 66. For further discussion of the relationship between visual and verbal art in the Renaissance see Lucy Gent, Picture and Poetry 1560–1620: Relations between Literature and the Visual Arts in the English Renaissance (Leamington Spa: James Hall, 1981); David Evett, Literature and the Visual Arts in Tudor England (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1990); Judith Dundas, Pencils Rhetorique: Renaissance Poets and the Art of Painting (Newark and London: University of Delaware Press, 1993); Christopher Braider, Refiguring the Real: Picture and Modernity in Word and Image, 1400–1700 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993); Norman E. Land, The Viewer as Poet: The Renaissance Response to Art (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994); Peter Erickson and Clark Hulse (eds), Early Modern Visual Culture: Representation, Race, and Empire in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000); Mario Klarer, Ekphrasis: Bildbeschreibung als Repräsentationstheorie bei Spenser, Sidney, Lyly und Shakespeare (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2001); Leonard Barkan, Mute Poetry, Speaking Pictures (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013); and Rachel Eisendrath, Poetry in a World of Things: Aesthetics and Empiricism in Renaissance Ekphrasis (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2018).  8 Plutarch, The philosophie, commonlie called, the morals, trans. Philemon Holland (London, 1603), p. 984. Plutarch is referring to Simonides of Ceos (c. 556–467

20

Ekphrastic encounters bc).

Philip Sidney famously describes poetry as a ‘speaking picture’ in The Defence of Poesy (see The Oxford Authors: Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 217).  9 Leonardo da Vinci, Paragone: A Comparison the Arts, trans. Irma A. Richter (London: Oxford University Press, 1949), pp. 50–1. 10 See Farago, ‘Paragone’, in Turner (ed.), The Dictionary of Art. 11 Cf. Leonard Barkan, who writes that ‘The paragone is a medium of theory because … the arts are able to define themselves largely by reference to each other and generally in terms of their means of representation. Mimesis is by its very nature a discourse of competition – or, at the very least, of comparison’ (Mute Poetry, Speaking Pictures, p. 154). 12 Christopher Braider, ‘The Paradoxical Sisterhood: “Ut Pictura Poesis”’, in Glyn P. Norton (ed.), The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Volume 3: The Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 168–75 (p. 168). 13 See Horace, The Art of Poetry, in D. A. Russell and M. Winterbottom (eds), Classical Literary Criticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 107. 14 See Terence Cave, ‘Enargeia: Erasmus and the Rhetoric of Presence in the Sixteenth Century’, L’Esprit Créateur, 16 (1976), 5–19; and François Rigolot, ‘The Rhetoric of Presence: Art, Literature, and Illusion’, in Norton (ed.), The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Volume 3, pp. 161–7. 15 Plutarch, The philosophie, commonlie called, the morals, trans. Holland, p. 984. 16 Adam McKeown, ‘Looking at Britomart Looking at Pictures’, SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500–1900, 45 (2005), 43–63 (p. 43). 17 See Hagstrum, The Sister Arts, p. 18 n34. Murray Krieger writes that ‘The early meaning given “ekphrasis” in Hellenistic rhetoric … was totally unrestricted: it referred, most broadly, to a verbal description of something, almost anything, in life or art’ (Ekphrasis, p. 7). 18 George A. Kennedy, Progymnasmata: Greek Textbooks of Prose Composition and Rhetoric (Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature, 2003), p. 117. 19 Claire Preston, ‘Ekphrasis: Painting in Words’, in Sylvia Adamson, Gavin Alexander, and Katrin Ettenhuber (eds), Renaissance Figures of Speech (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 115–29 (p. 121). 20 The narrator of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene stresses the power of poetry to outdo painting in its ability to offer a visual representation of reality, referring to the ‘Poets wit, that passeth Painter farre / In picturing the parts of beautie daint’ (The Faerie Queene, ed. Thomas P. Roche, Jr (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978), book 3, Proem 2). For further discussion of word and image in Spenser see, among others, John B. Bender, Spenser and Literary Pictorialism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972); Theresa M. Krier, Gazing on Secret Sights: Spenser, Classical Imitation and the Decorums of Vision (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990); Dundas, Pencils Rhetorique, ch. 3; McKeown, ‘Looking at Britomart’; and Jane Grogan, Exemplary Spenser: Visual and Poetic Pedagogy in ‘The Faerie Queene’ (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009). 21 See Katherine Duncan-Jones and H. R. Woudhuysen (eds), Shakespeare’s Poems (London: Thomson Learning, 2007), p. 48. 22 See E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion, 4th edn (London: Phaidon, 1972), pp. 176–7. See also David Rosand, ‘“Troyes Painted Woes”: Shakespeare and the Pictorial



Introduction: from paragone to encounter21

Imagination’, Hebrew University Studies in Literature, 8 (1980), 77–97 (esp. p. 88). Lucrece is discussed in further detail by Rachel Eisendrath in Chapter 1, below. 23 Quotations from Lucrece are taken from Colin Burrow (ed.), The Complete Sonnets and Poems (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 24 See Richard Meek, Narrating the Visual in Shakespeare (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), p. 76. 25 Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry, trans. Edward Allen McCormick (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), p. 78. 26 See Wendy Steiner, The Colors of Rhetoric (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 13. 27 Ibid., p. 14. Braider comments that, ‘By the close of the eighteenth century, the deliberately anti-poetic version of realism associated with the rise of the novel had taken hold’ (‘The Paradoxical Sisterhood’, p. 175). 28 See Malcolm Bull, ‘Ut pictura poesis’, in Turner (ed.), The Dictionary of Art. For an insightful overview of word–image relations in the Victorian period see Hilary Fraser, ‘Art and the Literary’, in Juliet John (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Literary Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 637–55. She writes: ‘Rather than looking back to the classical formulations of Aristotle, Horace, and others … nineteenth-century writers and artists, technologies and media, inaugurate reciprocities between the literary and the visual that we associate with modernity, and that gesture forwards to the cultural preoccupations, the hybrid graphic textual genres, and the hypermedia technologies of our own post-digital times’ (p. 640). 29 Krieger’s essay is reprinted as an Appendix in Ekphrasis (quotation on p. 265). 30 See W. J. T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1986), ch. 4. 31 Mitchell makes a similar point in his 1992 essay ‘Ekphrasis and the Other’: ‘One lesson of a general semiotics, then, is that there is, semantically speaking … no essential difference between texts and images; the other lesson is that there are important differences between visual and verbal media at the level of sign-types, forms, materials of representation, and institutional traditions. The mystery is why we have this urge to treat the medium as if it were the message, why we make the obvious, practical differences between these two media into metaphysical oppositions which seem to control our communicative acts, and which then have to be overcome with utopian fantasies like ekphrasis’ (rpt. in Picture Theory, p. 161). 32 Heffernan, Museum of Words, p. 1. 33 See Heffernan’s later study, Cultivating Picturacy: Visual Art and Verbal Interventions (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2006), for a development of his earlier position. Jonathan Ellis has noted the absence of contemporary female poets in Museum of Words; Ellis considers the work of Elizabeth Bishop and Carol Ann Duffy in ‘Ekphrastic Poetry: In and Out of the Museum’, in Erik Martiny (ed.), A Companion to Poetic Genre (Oxford: Blackwell, 2012), pp. 614–26. See also Jane Hedley, Nick Halpern, and Willard Spiegelman (eds), In the Frame: Women’s Ekphrastic Poetry from Marianne Moore to Susan Wheeler (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2009). 34 Grant F. Scott, The Sculpted Word: Keats, Ekphrasis, and the Visual Arts (Hanover, NH and London: University Press of New England, 1994), p. 132. Like Heffernan, Scott

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argues that ekphrasis should be conceived of as a form of gendered paragone: ‘the strain of competition, of the paragone, in ekphrastic representation will loom large [in this study], especially as it comes to govern Keats’s psychological reaction to “feminised” works of visual art’ (p. xii). 35 Quotations are taken from John Keats, The Complete Poems, ed. John Barnard, 3rd edn (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988). 36 Alastair Fowler, Renaissance Realism: Narrative Images in Literature and Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. vi. For further discussion of these matters, see, for example, Gombrich, Art and Illusion; Bender, Spenser and Literary Pictorialism, esp. pp. 13–16; Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols, 2nd edn (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1988); and Matthew Potolsky, Mimesis (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), esp. ch. 5. 37 See Barnard’s headnote to the poem (pp. 672–3), and his note to l. 28. See also Paul Magnuson, Reading Public Romanticism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), pp. 208–9. 38 See Barbara K. Fisher, Museum Mediations: Reframing Ekphrasis in Contemporary American Poetry (New York: Routledge, 2006); Elizabeth Bergmann Loizeaux, Twentieth-Century Poetry and the Visual Arts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Ruth Webb, Ekphrasis, Imagination and Persuasion in Ancient Rhetorical Theory and Practice (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009); Claire Barbetti, Ekphrastic Medieval Visions: A New Discussion in Interarts Theory (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); and Emily Bilman, Modern Ekphrasis (Bern: Peter Lang, 2013). Other notable recent works on ekphrasis are discussed in the main text. On the new formalism see, for example, Marjorie Levinson, ‘What Is New Formalism?’, PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 122 (2007), 558–69; and Samuel Otter, ‘An Aesthetic in All Things’, Representations, 104 (2008), 116–25. 39 See Ruth Leys, ‘The Turn to Affect: A Critique’, Critical Inquiry, 37 (2011), 434–72. 40 Valentine Cunningham, ‘Why Ekphrasis?’, Classical Philology, 102 (2007), 57–71 (p. 71). 41 Cheeke, Writing for Art, ch. 5. 42 See also Loizeaux, who writes that ‘it has been difficult to move beyond the appealing drama of paragone, with its plot of conflict and uncertain victory. But under its lens every ekphrastic relationship looks like linguistic appropriation, every gesture of friendship like co-option, every expression of admiration a declaration of envy by the work for the unobtainable power of the image’ (Twentieth-Century Poetry, p. 15). See also Glavey, The Wallflower Avant-Garde, p. 7. 43 Susan Harrow, ‘New Ekphrastic Poetics’, French Studies, 64:3 (July 2010), 255–64. The issue includes provocative essays by Elizabeth Geary Keohane, Clémence O’Connor, Emma Wagstaff, Margaret Topping, and Lia Nicole Brozgal. 44 See also Robert J. Watson’s essay ‘“I wanted them to breathe between my sentences”: The Place of Paul Cézanne’s Card Players in Colette Fellous’s Postcolonial Life-Writing’, Word & Image, 29:2 (2013), 129–38. He writes: ‘In contradistinction to the model of the paragone that pits text and image as discrete entities competing against each other for mimetic excellence, I will focus on how Colette Fellous weaves images visually and verbally to constitute the text, even as the “silence” of the image becomes a narrative-generating element and the metaphor of a literary strategy of



Introduction: from paragone to encounter23

self-writing’ (p. 129). Watson’s essay is part of a special issue of Word & Image entitled ‘New Perspectives on Ekphrasis’. 45 Ann Keefe, ‘The Ecstatic Embrace of Verbal and Visual: Twenty-First Century Lyric Beyond the Ekphrastic Paragone’, Word & Image, 27:2 (2011), 135–47 (p. 135). 46 David Kennedy, The Ekphrastic Encounter in Contemporary British Poetry and Elsewhere (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), p. 22. 47 See also Barbetti, Ekphrastic Medieval Visions. Barbetti suggests that artists, critics, and theorists are beginning to recognize that ekphrasis is a ‘tool wielding transformative power’. She writes: ‘This recognition comes on the tails of new understandings of ekphrasis that break away from a long tradition rounded in Renaissance humanism and seventeenth-century empiricism that defined the concept according to a contest between the verbal and visual arts’ (p. 3). While its focus lies outside the scope of the present book, Barbetti’s study reminds us of the rich history of ekphrasis in medieval literature and culture. See also Andrew James Johnston, Ethan Knapp, and Margitta Rouse (eds), The Art of Vision: Ekphrasis in Medieval Literature and Culture (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2015). 48 Catherine Belsey, ‘Invocation of the Visual Image: Ekphrasis in Lucrece and Beyond’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 63 (2012), 175–98 (p. 188). For the distinction between actual and notional ekphrasis see John Hollander, ‘The Poetics of Ekphrasis’, Word & Image, 4 (1988), 209–19; and Hollander’s ‘Introduction’ to The Gazer’s Spirit, pp. 3–91. But see also Mitchell, who comments that ‘in a certain sense all ekphrasis is notional, and seeks to create a specific image that is to be found only in the text as its “resident alien,” and is to be found nowhere else’ (‘Ekphrasis and the Other’, p. 157 n19). 49 For a recent reading of Lucrece that attempts to goes beyond the paragone see Margitta Rouse’s chapter ‘Text–Picture Relationships in the Early Modern Period’, in Gabriele Rippl (ed.), Handbook of Intermediality: Literature–Image–Sound–Music (Berlin and Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2015), pp. 65–81. 50 Chloe Porter, Making and Unmaking in Early Modern English Drama: Spectators, Aesthetics and Incompletion (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), p. 7. 51 See Belsey, ‘Invocation of the Visual Image’, p. 190. 52 Scott, The Sculpted Word, p. 1. 53 For a provocative discussion of interdisciplinarity in relation to visual culture see W. J. T. Mitchell, ‘Showing Seeing: A Critique of Visual Culture’, in What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004), ch. 16. 54 See Jerzy Jarniewicz, Ekphrasis in the Poetry of Derek Mahon (Piotrków Trybunalski: Naukowe Wydawnictwo Piotrkowskie Filii UJK, 2013). 55 Claus Clüver, ‘Ekphrasis Reconsidered: On Verbal Representations of Non-Verbal Texts’, in Ulla-Britta Lagerroth, Hans Lund, and Erik Hedling (eds), Interart Poetics: Essays on the Interrelations between the Arts and Media (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997), pp. 19–33. 56 See Liliane Louvel, Poetics of the Iconotext, ed. Karen Jacobs, trans. Laurence Petit (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011). This book brings together some of the most significant material from Louvel’s books L’Oeil du Texte: Texte et image dans la littérature anglophone (Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Mirail, 1998) and Texte/Image: Images à lire, textes à voir (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2002). For earlier

24

Ekphrastic encounters ­ iscussions of the notion of the ‘iconotext’ see the work of Peter Wagner, especially d Reading Iconotexts: From Swift to the French Revolution (London: Reaktion Books, 1995), and the ‘Introduction’ to Wagner (ed.), Icons–Texts–Iconotexts: Essays on Ekphrasis and Intermediality (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1996). Werner Wolf’s work on intermediality is also relevant here: for a useful overview see Selected Essays on Intermediality by Werner Wolf (1992–2014), ed. Walter Bernhart (Leiden: Brill, 2017).

Part I

Early modern encounters

1

‘Lamentable objects’: ekphrasis and historical materiality in Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece Rachel Eisendrath

Behold the angel Gabriel in Pietro Aretino’s 1537 ekphrasis of Titian’s (now lost) painting of the annunciation: He, filling everything with light and shining in the inn with a marvelous new radiance, bows so sweetly with a gesture of reverence that we are forced to believe that he presented himself before Mary in this way. He has heavenly majesty in his face and his cheeks tremble in the tenderness composed of milk and blood, which the blending of your [Titian’s] coloring reproduces. His head is turned by modesty, while gravity gently lowers his eyes; though his hair is gathered in trembling ringlets, it seems nevertheless to fall naturally. The delicate garment of sheer yellow cloth, which, because of the simplicity of its folds, does not hinder movement, conceals his nakedness completely and yet hides nothing, and the girdle thrown around him seems to play with the wind. Nor have there ever been wings comparable to his in the variety and softness of their plumage. The lily he holds in his left hand emits a scent and shines with a startling brightness. Indeed, it seems that the mouth, which forms the salutation bringing our salvation, utters in angelic tones the word, ‘Ave.’1

Aretino’s ekphrasis portrays the angel as though in sensual life – defying time, the limits of representation, and the fragmentary nature of the historical record. The single word – ‘Ave’ – that seems to fall from the angel’s mouth makes this ekphrasis, almost literally, a speaking picture.2 Aretino attempts to overwhelm our senses with the sound of Gabriel’s seraphic voice, the sight of his diaphanous yellow robes, the touch of his wings’ plumy softness, and the smell of the radiant lily. Brought before our eyes in a profusion of super-saturated poly-sensorial detail, the angel who announces the salvation of humankind becomes an erotic figure, a Ganymede returned to earth. No Renaissance reader would miss the Ovidian echoes of the angel’s sheer garments that, playing in the wind, conceal and at the same time reveal the angel’s body;3 also unmistakable would be the play of white on red, a trope

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of Petrarchan love poetry. Aretino’s letter to Titian playfully uses the ekphrastic tradition to develop to the point of sensual excess the holy scene in the inn. In so doing, Aretino’s ekphrasis is hyperbolizing an attitude to history prevalent in the early Renaissance, when humanists attempted to make as fully present as possible the experience of the ancient past. As Petrarch writes in a 1341 letter from Rome, ‘For who can doubt that Rome would rise again instantly (surrectura sit) if she began to know herself (si ceperit se Roma cognoscere)?’4 The fifteenth-century poet Angelo Poliziano describes his efforts to resurrect the past by analogy to Asclepius: just as the mythical doctor used his healing art to rejoin the parts of Hippolytus’ dismembered body, Poliziano claims, so the humanist used philological techniques to reconstruct the badly damaged corpus of Cicero’s works.5 For humanists who collected f­ragments of manuscripts and broken bits of ancient sculptures, these metaphors of reconstitution and revivification could seem literal. Especially in regard to the world of the ancient Romans, the desire underlying this project of restoration was, as one humanist puts it in a letter to Lorenzo de’ Medici, to ‘see the things which they saw’.6 Ekphrases in the Renaissance play a special role because they attempt to bring a depicted subject vividly before the eyes, expressing in miniature the fantasy of rebirth that lies at the heart of the humanist project. However, as the Renaissance progressed, a transition gradually occurred in the study of history: from a fantasy of restoring the past in its wholeness to an increased focus on the material fragments of the past – what the English antiquarian William Camden calls the ‘rude rubble and out-cast rubbish’ of the historical record.7 This increasing involvement with fragments produced a heightened awareness of the gaps and silences of history. It is in the context of this shift that I will consider Shakespeare’s 1594 The Rape of Lucrece, especially his ekphrasis of the fall of Troy. My claim is that Shakespeare reveals a nuanced awareness that history is built from broken material fragments, and that he thus subtly undermines the earlier humanist fantasy of a past restored to wholeness. In a recent essay on The Rape of Lucrece, Catherine Belsey explores how visual and verbal motifs come together in a common ‘longing’ for presence.8 What is at stake in Shakespeare’s ekphrasis, she argues, is not just the verbal versus the visual, as in traditional accounts of the paragone, but the ultimate inability of representation itself to achieve full presence. My contribution will be to explore how such a longing for presence reflects changing ideas about history in the Renaissance. Instead of focusing on a static comparison between the arts, I will examine how the ekphrastic form provides an encounter with a dynamic process of historical transition whereby Renaissance thinkers increasingly focused on material fragments to understand the past. This is an ‘encounter’ of a peculiar kind: one that simultaneously entails a desire for contact and an increasing awareness of distance.9 The chapter unfolds in three stages: first, I briefly review the increasing awareness of historical material fragments in Renaissance intellectual life



Ekphrasis in Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece

29

in the sixteenth century. Second, I establish the importance of fragments in Shakespeare’s poem, especially in his ekphrasis of the picture showing the fall of Troy. Third, I focus on the association of these historical material ruins with silence, and consider the problem of how suffering is expressed in the ­fragmented, or ‘fallen’, world of the poem. From resurrection to fragmentation Valentine Cunningham has proposed that ekphrasis ‘grants a demonstration of literature’s persistent resurrectionist desires – the craving to have the past return livingly, to live again, to speak again’.10 This resurrectionist desire was especially evident during the early Renaissance. In Poliziano’s celebrated ekphrasis of images carved on the doors of Venus’ golden palace in his 1478 Stanze, for example, the reader supposedly mistakes the represented scenes for reality: ‘You would call the foam real, the sea real, real the conch shell and real the blowing wind.’11 Thus, for twenty-two descriptive stanzas, Poliziano elaborates this Renaissance fantasy of the pagan world’s rebirth: You could swear that the goddess had emerged from the waves, pressing her hair with her right hand, covering with the other her sweet mound of flesh; and where the strand was imprinted by her sacred and divine step, it had clothed itself in flowers and grass; then with happy, more than mortal features, she was received in the bosom of the three nymphs and cloaked in a starry garment.12

Poliziano describes the carved doors as if this artwork makes the goddess herself appear, brought to life. This ekphrasis attempts to overcome the described art image’s necessary incompletion. Only briefly in the final lines of the ekphrasis does Poliziano acknowledge that the image is not in itself whole, insisting that the viewer’s imagination makes it seem whole: ‘whatever the art in itself does not contain, the mind, imagining, clearly understands’ (I.119).13 His ekphrasis describes the subjective experience of completeness that an art object produces in the mind. Rather than emphasizing a competition between the arts, Poliziano’s ekphrasis suggests that poetry and visual art are alike in both relying on the imagination to create a sensation of wholeness from what is always only an incomplete representation. In their writing of history, the early Renaissance humanists were more focused on resurrecting what they considered edifying virtues of the past than on reconstructing the past based on strict factual accuracy and evidence. Past figures could be models for living people in the present to imitate.14 Petrarch, for example, presented his De viris illustribus to Charles IV along with a collection of Roman coins portraying ancient rulers, offering the emperor this advice: ‘Here, O Caesar, … are the men whom you have succeeded, here are those whom you must try to imitate and admire, whose ways and character you should emulate.’15 Petrarch hoped that the emperor would bring these ancient models to life through his actions.

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For Shakespeare, who will describe a picture of Troy’s fall in The Rape of Lucrece, one especially important example of the desire to make the past feel present is Erasmus’ treatment of that city’s destruction in his De duplici copia verborum ac rerum commentarii duo, first published in 1512. For Erasmus, the aesthetic pleasure that the scene offers lies in re-experiencing the terrible historical scene as if it were unfolding now. It is as though, Erasmus says, readers were themselves witnessing the scene: If one were to say that a city had been taken by storm, he would of course imply by such an overall statement all the subsidiary events that such a calamity admits. But to go on in the exact words of Quintilian, ‘If you make explicit everything included in this one phrase, we shall witness the flames spreading through homes and temples, and the crash of falling buildings, and all the cries blending into one overriding sound; some people fleeing, not knowing where they are going, others locked in a last embrace of their loved ones, the wails of babies and women, and old men cruelly preserved by fate to see this day; then we shall see the inevitable plundering of secular and sacred, the running to and fro of men carrying off loot and looking for more, prisoners in chains, each in the charge of his personal robber, mothers resisting the abduction of their children, and, wherever anything of greater value has come to light, the victors fighting among themselves. Though the one word “destruction” includes all this, this is a case where to state the whole is less effective than to state the parts.’16

If a sense of disjointedness is inherent in the scene, and in Erasmus’ characteristically piecemeal borrowing from other authors, the emphasis is on the total cumulative effect of the parts.17 The rapid succession of emotionally heightened moments, following one another without temporal order, creates an effect of disorientation and terror, as if everything were happening simultaneously and the reader’s gaze were being pulled about haphazardly by the overwhelmingly catastrophic scene. Readers are confronted with a scene that both exceeds their capacity to take it in and yet is also emphatically unified under one idea (‘the one word “destruction” includes all this’). The many aspects of the overwhelming scene blur into one overriding effect: ‘all the cries blending into one overall sound’. The intention is to produce an experience of the past that makes it feel present. By the end of the sixteenth century, however, the emphasis on factual accuracy in history writing was increasing.18 This turn towards objectivity meant that the fragments of manuscripts and bits of sculpture and pieces of old walls did not fade into an imagined resurrection of the past in its wholeness, but now remained before the eyes as things in themselves, in their brokenness and fragmentation. For example, the 1517 Illustrium imagines, which shows a sequence of partly-invented numismatic portraits, left out certain portraits in order, apparently, to heighten the sequence’s evidential effect; the assumption may have been, according to Sean Keilen, that a record would seem more real if left incomplete.19 In another case, the sculptures depicted in Maarten van Heemskerck’s meticulous 1532–36 drawings of Jacopo Galli’s garden were



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not of goddesses floating over the waves on their conch shells (such as Sandro Botticelli had imagined in his iconic late fifteenth-century painting), but of broken sculptures seen in their brokenness. One image shows a Bacchus sculpture that is missing a hand, creating an effect of ‘authenticity’, even though it is actually based on a late fifteenth-century work by Michelangelo.20 There was, of course, no single decisive tipping point, no one moment when individual historical fragments of evidence shifted from being in the background of an imaginatively reconstructed sense of the past to being in the forefront as objects of evidence. Rather, a tension built up between these two modes of ­understanding the past. ‘Art gave lifeless life’: fragments, ruins, and tombs Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece relates an oft-told tale of the rape of a Roman woman, Lucrece, by the king’s son, Tarquin, in 509 bc. As the ancient historian Livy recounted, her ensuing suicide served as the impetus for a major change of regime: the Romans expelled the royal family and thereby initiated the Roman Republic. Of the many changes Shakespeare made to the Lucrece story, he added an approximately 200-line ekphrasis of a picture depicting the fall of Troy. This ekphrasis is positioned after the rape, when Lucrece is waiting for her husband and father to arrive home, and is looking at a picture of this historic event. Throughout the ekphrasis, Shakespeare evokes the earlier Renaissance tradition of revivification, maintaining a familiar tone of credulous admiration for the wonders of an artwork that seems real: the depicted scene ‘beguiled attention, charmed the sight’ (1404).21 He employs the stock motif of art outdoing nature: ‘A thousand lamentable objects there, / In scorn of Nature, Art gave lifeless life’ (1373–4). This trope, which had been reworked over and over again in the Renaissance, ultimately derives from Pliny’s anecdote about Zeuxis’ painting of grapes, which appeared so real that the birds pecked at them (Naturalis Historia, XXXV.36). So familiar is this motif in Renaissance ekphrases that a reader might hardly notice the paradox that Shakespeare draws from it: The artwork endows its ‘thousand lamentable objects’ with a kind of ‘life’ that is ‘lifeless’ – whether because so much of the depicted scene of horror is associated with death (Shakespeare mentions dying eyes, ashy lights, dying coals, and reeking blood), or because these images of death are merely a lifeless art object’s mimetic representations. From the ekphrastic assertion of a resuscitated reality, Shakespeare draws out an awareness of thingly fragmentation that is almost completely absent from Erasmus’ treatment of Virgil’s ekphrasis of the falling city. Whereas Erasmus uses the parts of the scene to reconstruct a complete experience (‘all the cries blending into one overall sound’), Shakespeare uses the parts to emphasize the scene’s material fragmentation. Shakespeare’s ekphrasis appears to celebrate the idea of an illusionistic experience that makes the past seem fully alive as a vivid fantasy in the

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5. Roundel with Annunciation to the Virgin (c. 1500–10)

present. However, as it continues, the ekphrasis begins to draw the audience’s attention to the things – the ‘thousand lamentable objects’ in their disjointed ­thingliness – that supposedly evoke this fantasy. Toying with creating the illusionistic effect of fullness, he alludes to the sound of Nestor’s speech, for example, when he writes: ‘In speech it seemed his beard, all silver-white, / Wagged up and down, and from his lips did fly / Thin winding breath, which purled up to the sky’ (1405–7). But even here the fantasy stays surprisingly tethered to the concrete bits from which it should rise into dreamlike fullness. The lips and wagging beard release not the full resonance of a voice, but ‘thin winding breath, which purled up to the sky’. For Renaissance readers, this description may have evoked not so much the illusionistic experience of a voice, as rather a curling speech scroll, also known as a banderole (commonly used in the period to represent speech in tapestries, book illustrations, etchings, paintings, and stained-glass windows).



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Shakespeare directs our attention to the object itself, instead of to the illusion that this object is supposed to create: About him [Nestor] were a press of gaping faces… Some high, some low, the painter was so nice. The scalps of many, almost hid behind, To jump up higher seemed to mock the mind. Here one man’s hand leaned on another’s head, His nose being shadowed by his neighbour’s ear… …for Achilles’ image stood his spear, Gripped in an armèd hand, himself behind Was left unseen, save to the eye of mind: A hand, a foot, a face, a leg, a head Stood for the whole to be imaginèd. (1408; 1412–16; 1424–8)

Drawing on the late-antique Greek rhetorician Philostratus’ Imagines, which was available in Latin and French translations,22 Shakespeare describes the overlapping of figures – the oldest technique by which an illusion of depth is created in visual art and which was still common into the fifteenth century. Philostratus, in his ekphrasis of a painting showing the siege of Thebes, explained that the figures in front are shown in full figure; those behind only from the waist up; those still further back as heads only; and those furthest back as mere spear points. As things move higher up the picture plane, they seem to recede back into space: ‘the problem is to deceive the eyes as they travel back along with the proper receding planes of the pictures’, Philostratus writes (I.4.32–3).23 As E. H. Gombrich noted, Shakespeare’s version of the battle at Troy seems to recall Philostratus’ explanation of perspective: Shakespeare repeats Philostratus’ itemization of the body parts; he even includes Philostratus’ detail of the spear.24 But in his enthusiasm for pictorial artifice, Shakespeare’s narrator displays a humorous naivety: ‘Some high, some low, the painter was so nice. / The scalps of many, almost hid behind, / To jump up higher seemed to mock the mind.’ The artist’s desired illusionist effect is not, of course, that some figures are jumping, but rather that some figures are further back.25 In pretending to celebrate the picture’s lifelike illusionistic effect, as Richard Meek and Catherine Belsey have also recently emphasized, Shakespeare actually describes with exaggerated realism or literal-mindedness the arrangement of the art object itself and, specifically, the way its figures (especially their heads or even just their scalps) are located at different heights on the picture plane.26 Instead of fusing together into a cohesive illusion of reality, the image remains fragmented. So literal is the description that an earlier generation of scholars conjectured that Shakespeare was thinking of actual fifteenth-century Netherlander tapestries depicting the fall of Troy.27 Similarly, Shakespeare’s description of the picture representing Troy as ‘so compact’ (1423) probably means, as Colin Burrow notes, that the picture is

6. Tapestry with scenes of the war of Troy (1475–90)



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‘made up of a complex intermingling of elements’. But Shakespeare also draws on another meaning of ‘compact’ to imply that these pieces are ‘packed closely together’.28 Again, Shakespeare is playing with a literal description of the figures, describing them as if through the eyes of someone unfamiliar with how pictures can construct an illusion of depth. When seen without a sense of the space between them, the body parts of the represented men appear collaged against each other.29 While setting up his reader to think that this ekphrasis will celebrate the completion of the image in the viewer’s imagination, Shakespeare instead draws the reader’s attention to the parts and pieces of objects in the picture: ‘A hand, a foot, a face, a leg, a head / Stood for the whole to be imaginèd’ (1427–8). The list refers to, but does not construct, a fantasy of fullness: what it really offers is an inventory of dismembered body parts, not unlike the parts of a broken sculpture. Whereas Erasmus described Trojan people (babies, mothers, prisoners) in his ekphrasis of Troy’s fall, Shakespeare points to the body parts (hand, foot, leg) that make his audience imagine these people.30 A similar tension between a humanist fantasy of the past’s resurrection versus an antiquarian emphasis on the fragments of the historical material record arises in Hamlet, as Sean Keilen suggests. On the one hand, the past quite literally returns to stalk the present. The Ghost comes back from the dead to demand retroactive, heroic action from the living. On the other hand, the grand figures of the past appear as all-too-material fragments. Hamlet, disillusioned, imagines Alexander the Great reconstituted as the lowly plug of a ‘bung-hole’ in a barrel (5.1.194). In this way, Hamlet ‘ridicules the piety and nostalgia of humanism’s historical vision’.31 By employing in his description of Troy’s fall this later approach to history, an approach that is more focused on material fragments, Shakespeare is more like the period’s proto-empiricists, its antiquarians and naturalists, than like the earlier humanists. Even before Francis Bacon had promised to lead men to ‘the things themselves’32 at the beginning of the seventeenth century, antiquarians and naturalists in the sixteenth century were moving towards objectivity by trying to describe the sensorial world in an increasingly observational mode. Instead of representing, as did the poets, the object of fantasy’s complete fulfilment, antiquarians and naturalists increasingly used ekphrasis to represent the object as it appeared in its fragmentation – without the admixture of the imagination. Description was becoming a form of empiricism. In his study of mid-­sixteenthto early seventeenth-century botany, The Science of Describing, Brian W. Ogilvie differentiates the Renaissance practice of natural history from medieval and later seventeenth-century practices: Renaissance naturalism’s distinguishing trait is its emphasis on description. He associates this tendency with ‘the early modern European cult of the fact’.33 Peter N. Miller, examining the 100,000some pages of the Carpentras and Aix archives of the antiquarian NicolasClaude Fabri de Peiresc, reports that Peiresc’s notes, which are on highly

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diverse topics, have in common that ‘they take the form of descriptions’.34 Among his many interests, Peiresc was apparently fascinated, for example, by Charlemagne’s hair and collected information about it: of the beardless marble portrait head in the Louvre, Peiresc carefully noted that ‘the hairs seem long on the head, and all the same in curls down the front and all around the scalp, making large bubbles of hair’.35 In The Rape of Lucrece, Shakespeare repeatedly emphasizes the importance of material things (a word that is used nineteen times in the poem to refer both to objects and events). In part, his focus on the materiality of existence can be considered part of the legacy of the story that he inherited, wherein the purity or impurity of Lucrece’s body had often been debated. While Livy’s Lucrece asserted that she could maintain her chastity only by killing herself (History of Rome, I.1), Augustine argued that Lucrece remained innocent of the rape since that crime happened to her body against the will of her soul (City of God, I.19). Shakespeare’s Lucrece argues against Livy in staunchly defending her innocence but also against Augustine in rejecting his soul–body dualism. She presents herself as undone both externally and internally; she is like a tree that dies, she says, when its bark is stripped away (1167–9). But this investigation into the meaning of the physical body often leads in Shakespeare’s poem to an unusual focus: on the things specifically of the historical record. For example, when Tarquin considers the ramifications of the crime he is about to commit, he says: Yea, though I die, the scandal will survive, And be an eyesore in my golden coat. Some loathsome dash the herald will contrive To cipher me how fondly I did dote, That my posterity, shamed with the note, Shall curse my bones…. (204–9)

Tarquin understands his crime as ‘an eyesore’, ‘some loathsome dash’, or a heraldic ‘note’ that will shame his posterity and make them curse his ‘bones’.36 That is, he thinks about his deed as a physical mark on a future object of history. What he neglects to consider, of course, is his effect on Lucrece’s experience of suffering in the present. In the long ekphrasis of the picture showing Troy’s fall, it is this problem of understanding history in terms of its material remains that comes to the fore. Not only is this ekphrasis of a thing (a painting or tapestry), but the figures represented within the picture are described as though they were things – ‘a thousand lamentable objects’ (1373). Most important for my analysis is the narrator’s description of Hecuba: In her the painter had anatomized Time’s ruin, beauty’s wrack, and grim care’s reign. Her cheeks with chaps and wrinkles were disguised: Of what she was no semblance did remain.



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Her blue blood changed to black in every vein, Wanting the spring that those shrunk pipes had fed, Showed life imprisoned in a body dead. (1450–56)

Instead of offering a vivified image of extreme female grief – for example, by portraying Hecuba in the act of weeping, tearing at her hair, or beating at her breast (all traditional epic displays of female mourning) – the poet represents her as though she were a dissected lifeless thing, ‘a body dead’. The word ‘anatomized’ conveyed then, as it does now, dissection: the first use of this word, according to the OED, is in a 1541 book on surgery: ‘Anathomy is called ryght dyuysyon of membres done for certayne knowleges.’37 The word can mean analyze, but it also refers to this cutting of bodies into parts. This Greek-based meaning is reinforced by the following line’s tripartite fragmented structure and staccato rhythm: ‘Time’s ruin, beauty’s wrack, and grim care’s reign.’ The stanza goes on then to describe Hecuba as the parts of a corpse (‘a body dead’): ‘Her cheeks with chaps and wrinkles were disguised’ evokes the aged, dried skin on her face, at the same time as the line also evokes her skull. Chaps are fissures, as well as jawbones (Hamlet refers to Yorick’s skull as ‘quite chapfallen’ (5.1.182)), and cheeks in the Middle Ages could similarly refer to jaws.38 Hecuba’s blood is also accounted for. Wanting its ‘spring’, it seems no longer to be regenerating and has turned black. The poet seems here more like a kind of mortician than the mythical doctor Asclepius, to whom Poliziano referred in order to express the humanists’ attempts to resurrect the broken corpus of literature by rejoining its broken parts. Shakespeare’s imagery, which evokes a dissected, lifeless body, goes even further. This is a poem that often associates women’s bodies with buildings and falling cities.39 In an extended series of metaphors, Lucrece’s rape is compared to the siege and capture of a city. Her breasts are ‘turrets’ (441) that Tarquin’s hand scales; later, her breast is an ivory wall, and Tarquin’s hand a ram that batters it. He feels ‘her heart (poor citizen) distressed, / Wounding itself to death, rise up and fall, / Beating her bulk, that his hand shakes withal. / This moves in him more rage and lesser pity / To make the breach and enter this sweet city’ (465–9). After the rape, Lucrece describes herself as ‘robbed and ransacked’ (838).40 In keeping with this extended metaphor, the description of Hecuba in the ekphrasis also evokes a broken physical ruin. In his commentary on the line, ‘Time’s ruin, beauty’s wrack, and grim care’s reign’ (1451), Burrow glosses ruin as ‘destructive influence’, but the power of the stanza depends on our also hearing the more concrete sense of the word: the condition of a structure, especially a building, that has collapsed, or the material that remains after a structure has fallen (ruin comes from ruere, to fall).41 For example, in his 1582 translation of the first four books of the Aeneid, Richard Stanyhurst describes this very scene of Troy’s destruction: ‘The old towne fals to ruin’ (Thee First Foure Bookes of Virgil his Aeneis, II.32).42 It is this more concrete sense of ruin

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that Shakespeare’s poem evokes in Lucrece’s complaint to time, where she laments that time’s glory is ‘To ruinate proud buildings with thy hours, / And smear with dust their glitt’ring golden towers; / To fill with worm-holes stately monuments, / To feed oblivion with decay of things’ (944–7). The fact that this lament uses verbs without time – that is, in the infinitive – constructs a lament about time that is itself timeless, emerging from a perspective on the oblivion of the world that is as ahistorical as the typically medieval ubi-sunt lament. But in this poem, as opposed to in many medieval laments, ruinated materials do not disappear so quickly into an eschatological perspective; rather, they appear as dilapidated historical things with their own concrete materiality (with dust and worm-holes). Taking the words ruin and wrack in their concrete sense, the figure of Hecuba starts to evoke what Bacon will describe as one of the ‘antiquities [which] are history defaced’.43 Hecuba’s association with a ruined monument gains a unique valence through the reference to her ‘veins’. The word evokes not only blood vessels, but also, especially in the context of a description of the wondrously verisimilar qualities of an artwork, markings in marble. Shakespeare may be thinking of the 1590 printed edition of The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, where Sidney plays on the connection between the ‘veins’ in the stone and in the body: A naked Venus of white marble, wherein the graver had used such cunning, that the naturall blew veines of the marble were framed in fitte places, to set foorth the beautifull veines of her bodie. At her brest shee had her babe Aeneas, who seemed (having begun to sucke) to leave that, to looke upon her fayre eyes, which smiled at the babes follie, the meane while the breast running.44

Ekphrasis often promises this fullness of representation. Sidney’s conceit is that this sculpted fountain is so perfect that the veins the sculptor found in the marble show the veins in the body he was portraying. Shakespeare torques this tradition: Whereas Sidney’s Venus embodies youth and fecundity, with her smiling eyes and breast overflowing with liquid, Shakespeare’s Hecuba is an image of age and desiccation, ‘wanting the spring that those shrunk pipes had fed’. Shakespeare’s metaphor of the shrunken pipes retains the memory of a ruined fountain or aqueduct, which, like the fragments of ancient Roman fountains at that time being unearthed, lacked flowing water. The desire that underlies many ekphrases to bring the past to life again turns back on itself in Shakespeare’s ekphrasis and registers the fragmented, material nature of the remains it wants to resurrect. Shakespeare appears to have been thinking about a similar constellation of issues in Titus Andronicus, published the same year as The Rape of Lucrece and also set at a time of violent political upheaval. (The Rape of Lucrece is set at the beginning of the Republic; Titus Andronicus at the end of the Empire.) Many commentators have noted the prevalence of imagery of ruins in this play. Most importantly, after Lavinia is raped and mutilated (her tongue and hands are cut off), her uncle Marcus compares her to a fountain. His ekphrasis of her ‘lopped



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and hewed’ (2.3.17) body subverts traditions of Petrarchan blazon, as Heather James has shown, at the same time as her brokenness also evokes specifically the material imagery of ruins.45 Like so many broken ancient sculptures, such as the Bacchus in the Heemskerck drawing, she lacks hands, and cannot speak for herself. Shakespeare’s interest in ruins at this time in the mid-1590s is further suggested by his strangely anachronistic reference to ‘a ruinous monastery’ (5.1.21) later in this play. The imagery of ruins recalls imagery earlier in The Rape of Lucrece. In an ekphrasis describing Lucrece, Shakespeare compares her to a tomb or monument. This ekphrasis occurs at the moment when Tarquin first enters Lucrece’s chamber to rape her: Her lily hand her rosy cheek lies under, Coz’ning the pillow of a lawful kiss, Who therefore angry seems to part in sunder, Swelling on either side to want his bliss, Between whose hills her head entombèd is; Where, like a virtuous monument, she lies, To be admired of lewd unhallowed eyes. … Her hair, like golden threads, played with her breath: O modest wantons, wanton modesty! Showing life’s triumph in the map of death, And death’s dim looks in life’s mortality. Each in her sleep themselves so beautify As if between them twain there were no strife, But that life lived in death, and death in life. (386–92; 400–6)

The unsettling effect of these stanzas derives from Shakespeare’s use of descriptions of verisimilar art to describe a living person. He seems, oddly, to be praising a living woman for being lifelike. The trope that Shakespeare uses of the hair that plays in the air (‘Her hair, like golden threads, played with her breath’) reverses the normal relationship between animate and inanimate objects, so that it is the inanimate that moves the animate, in a similar way as does Aretino’s earlier description of Titian’s painting, where the angel’s ringlets ‘tremble’ and the girdle ‘seems to play with the wind’. Praise of hair’s movement recurs throughout the tradition of ekphrastic descriptions of art objects, and Pliny groups the ability to represent hair and veins as two advances towards verisimilar statuary.46 But the reference to the ‘virtuous monument’ (391) on a pillow, which has ‘entombèd’ (390) Lucrece’s head, narrows the reader’s focus from art in general to tomb effigies of wives in particular. Women in medieval and Renaissance churches were often shown sleeping on a pillow beside their husbands, as Burrow notes.47 If Shakespeare’s ‘virtuous monument’ suggests memorial statuary, Shakespeare’s promise in the dedication of Venus and Adonis to produce ‘some graver labour’ (commonly understood as a reference to the

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more serious epic ambitions of his ensuing Lucrece) becomes a kind of pun on this sepulchral sense of ‘graver’. This association is underscored by the allusions to death in the second stanza quoted above, as well as to her ‘alabaster skin’, since alabaster was commonly used for tomb statues.48 It is as though Lucrece has already become a ruin of the past, anticipating ‘her future role as monument’.49 The colourfulness of Shakespeare’s image of Lucrece before the rape (lily hand, rosy cheek, green coverlet, eyes like marigolds) contrasts with the colourlessness of Hecuba. Given that medieval tomb effigies were frequently painted, it is as though this first statue-like image (of Lucrece) is unruined; the later one (of Hecuba) ruined. In the first condition, the monument is associated with colour, wholeness, and living nature; in the second, it is colourless, broken, and dry. Before the rape, the imagery of monuments was associated with life (the monument was a metaphor for Lucrece); after the rape, the monument has become deanimated, desiccated, and dead (evoked through the description of the ruin-like Hecuba). Similarly, the metaphor that Shakespeare uses to describe Tarquin’s soul changes from a ‘fair temple’ (719) before the rape to ‘weak ruins’ (720) after the rape – a shift from a structure filled by the divine to a historicized and secularized object that has been emptied out.50 It is as if the poem is meant to inhabit an older, more medieval mindset in the beginning, where the funereal imagery is made to seem paradoxically alive (‘As if between them twain [life and death] there were no strife, / But that life lived in death, and death in life’).51 Then, by the end, the poem encounters its own imagery in a different condition, not as lifelike monuments but as ruins. Silent things, things that talk Shakespeare associates the objective world of broken ruins that emerges in The Rape of Lucrece with a larger loss of the innate expressivity of things. Especially in the beginning of the poem, the things of the world have the power to speak directly. It is as though the world were a language that could express itself fully without the mediation of words. Lucrece herself is, in some ways, a thing and speaks as such. In the space of four lines at the beginning of the poem, she is referred to as ‘treasure’ (16), ‘wealth’ (17), ‘possession’ (18), and ‘fortune’ (19). Lucrece’s beauty, the narrator says, can ‘persuade / the eyes of men without an orator’ (29–30). The white and red of her skin are objectifications of her virtue and beauty, each of which struggles to be uppermost in her cheeks (52–77).52 Hearing her husband praised, Lucrece strikes a pose that could be emblazoned in stained glass, for she is an emblem illustrating universalized, timeless emotions that are directly connected to divine sources of meaning: ‘Her joy with heavedup hand she doth express, / And wordless so greets heaven for his success’ (111–12). The frequent use of adages, emphasized by printer’s marks in the 1594 edition, asserts generalized truths that Lucrece illustrates. It is no wonder that Lucrece fears, immediately after her rape, that she could become an ‘object



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to the tell-tale day’ (806), since bodies express what has happened to them. Thus, the sunlight will reveal her rape as a ‘story’ (808) that is ‘charactered in my brow’ (807), and the illiterate, ‘quot[ing] my loathsome trespass in my looks’ (812), will be able to read her physical being like a book.53 In contrast, as the poem progresses, a gap arises for Lucrece between things and what they mean. Things no longer speak directly. When Lucrece sees in the picture of Troy’s fall the representation of Sinon, the Greek who tricked the Trojans into accepting the Trojan horse, she at first cannot believe that such an innocent-seeming face could have been capable of such deception: ‘Such signs of truth in his plain face she spied / That she concludes the picture was belied’ (1532–3). Yet recalling her own deception by Tarquin, she concludes that only such an innocent-seeming face could have been capable of such lies. As she makes this realization about the distance between appearances and meaning, her language becomes convoluted: ‘“It cannot be”, quoth she, “that so much guile – ”/ She would have said “can lurk in such a look”, / But Tarquin’s shape came in her mind the while, / And from her tongue “can lurk” from “cannot” took’ ­(1534–7). A distance has emerged between the ‘outward’ (1545) and the ‘inward’ (1546). It is precisely this gap between things and what they mean that Lucrece ineffectually tries to attack when she physically claws at the image of Sinon with her nails. Ruefully, she realizes her error: ‘At last she smilingly with this gives o’er / “Fool, fool”, quoth she, “his wounds will not be sore”’ (1567–68). Just as Sinon’s inner meaning does not inhere in his outward appearance, the full meaning of an artefact or artwork does not inhere simply in its outward describable physical qualities. One exception to the pattern of increasingly alienated signification is Lucrece’s interaction with the maid immediately after the rape, an interaction which returns to a form of connection that is immediate, seeming to reside outside language, and that prefigures Lucrece’s later interaction with the image of Hecuba. Without knowing the cause of Lucrece’s grief, the maid responds instinctively as though sharing in her mistress’ pain: But as the earth doth weep, the sun being set, Each flower moistened like a melting eye; Even so the maid with swelling drops gan wet Her circled eyne enforced by sympathy Of those fair suns set in her mistress’ sky, Who in a salt-waved ocean quench their light, Which makes the maid weep like the dewy night. A pretty while these pretty creatures stand, Like ivory conduits coral cisterns filling. One justly weeps; the other takes in hand No cause but company of her drops’ spilling. (1226–36)

The first stanza is all one sentence, its unbroken continuity expressive of the fluidity of the images; references to the maid and Lucrece are structured

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c­ hiastically, as though the two women were blending into one another as drops of water that touch. In Shakespeare’s extended metaphor, the flowers express the earth’s sadness in the same way that the maid expresses the grief of her mistress, that is, in a manner outside the logic of cause and effect. There is ‘no cause’, Shakespeare says, but that of proximity, ‘company of her drops’ spilling’. The imagery is first of natural things, possibly associating this non-verbal and non-rational sympathy with a more primitive state, and then of a kind of fountain, like the rediscovered ancient fountains or aqueducts, but, this time, in an unruined state full of flowing water (‘like ivory conduits coral cisterns filling’). However, if the extra-linguistic communication succeeds in this case, Shakespeare contrasts the positive interaction with the maid against the negative interaction with the messenger in the very next scene. Again, the interaction is non-verbal, but this time communication goes awry. While the groom blushes from a sense of humble dutifulness, Lucrece misreads what the sudden redness in his cheeks signifies (1352–8). When not inscribed in language, the meaning of the image has become unstable. Lucrece thinks the cause of the groom’s blush is his knowledge of the rape, whereas the blush really indicates only his bashfulness. Their physical relatedness (the mutual blush) becomes the source of misunderstanding and separation. The poem’s central theme of rape, which the Ovidian poetic tradition treats as unspeakable, allows Shakespeare to explore this problem of the physical world’s silence in a highly charged way.54 Lynn Enterline has insightfully explored how, in Ovid’s highly influential account of Philomel’s rape in the Metamorphoses, not only does the rapist cut out Philomel’s tongue, rendering her unable to tell what she has undergone, but even her sister Procne is rendered silent by knowledge of the crime: ‘Grief restrained her mouth; words sought in language that were bitter enough were lacking’ (VI.583–5).55 At the moment of Lucrece’s rape, Tarquin stifles her with her own bed sheets. She is silent because her mouth is bound, but also because of the tomb-like qualities of the imagery: Tarquin ‘Entombs her outcry in her lips’ sweet fold’ (679). The sexual implications of ‘her lips’ sweet fold’ conflates the rape with the act of silencing her, and the reference to the tomb associates this silence with the material, historical record that recurs throughout the poem. Similarly, in Titus Andronicus, Marcus remarks on Lavinia’s devastating inability to express her pain after she has been raped and mutilated: ‘Sorrow concealed, like an oven stopped, / Doth burn the heart to cinders where it is’ (2.3.36–37). Again, rape and silence are closely equated, and these are linked with ruin-like materiality. In Shakespeare’s version of the Lucrece story, the raped woman talks much more than she does in previous authors’ versions: traditionally, she says few words before killing herself. However, what Shakespeare’s Lucrece articulates is the painful burden of having suffered more than her verbal abilities can convey: ‘For more it is than I can well express, / And that deep torture may be called a hell / When more is felt than one hath power to tell’ (1286–8). Lucrece stands for not just the verbal insufficiency often experienced by people who



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have undergone extreme forms of violence, but, at least in key moments, for the voicelessness of the material historical record itself, which can come nowhere near to fully express the suffering of which it becomes the evidence. The establishment of the Republic, like the establishment of empire, emerges from an act of violence that buries the past in silent ruins.56 Just before the ekphrasis, Lucrece writes a letter to her husband calling him home. Shakespeare suggests that this document is incomplete as a record of her suffering: ‘My woes are tedious, though my words are brief’, she writes (1309). Shakespeare further stresses the inadequacy of this document: Here folds she up the tenor of her woe, Her certain sorrow writ uncertainly. By this short schedule Collatine may know Her grief, but not her grief’s true quality. (1310–13)

Lucrece’s short letter may indicate the existence of her grief, but cannot fully express its ‘true quality’. Shakespeare puts the greatness of Lucrece’s woe in subtle tension both with the inexpressiveness of her written words (‘her certain sorrow written uncertainly’) and also with the light material thing on which these words are recorded (the piece of paper that can be folded up). In this chapter, I have been exploring the poem’s ekphrases as providing an encounter with the silent fragments of history. I would like to end by suggesting one possible meaning of this emphasis: as expressive of an experience of silence that inheres in suffering itself. In the scenes surrounding the ekphrasis of the picture showing Troy’s fall, both Lucrece and the ruined Hecuba are shown painfully unable to express the experience of having suffered brutality. On this sad shadow Lucrece spends her eyes, And shapes her sorrow to the beldam’s woes, Who nothing wants to answer her but cries, And bitter words to ban her cruel foes. The painter was no god to lend her those; And therefore Lucrece swears he did her wrong, To give her so much grief, and not a tongue. (1457–63)

Considered in one way, the image of Hecuba seems to express the failing of visual art, as in traditional accounts of the paragone: the problem with visual art, so the argument goes, is that it is mute. Understood in this way, the figure of Hecuba represents the material object that Lucrece turns to in order to help generate her later speech to her husband, father, and Brutus. But, in his meditation on the objects of history, Shakespeare romanticizes neither the material artefact nor the word as containing the essential truth of historical suffering. Rather, in Shakespeare’s poem, the relationship of Lucrece and Hecuba is expressive of a mutual experience of silence that is radically reciprocal. When read in the context of the whole poem, the reader realizes that what Lucrece identifies with is precisely the silence and loss of coherence that the

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objectness of Hecuba’s image embodies. Just as Lucrece cannot fully express her suffering (‘more is felt than one hath power to tell’ (1288)), Hecuba cannot express her experience (the painter gave her ‘so much grief, and not a tongue’ (1463)). Lucrece relates to Hecuba, then, not despite her brokenness and fragmentation, but precisely because of them. In Shakespeare’s ekphrasis, the mutilated exteriority of the objective historical artefact (the ruin of Hecuba) becomes an image of the subjective experience of a living person (Lucrece) – the expression of her devastation. Silence, incompletion, and brokenness are ultimately the very qualities that bind these two devastated figures across the gap of time. Traditionally, ekphrasis may represent the capacity of poetry to serve as a ‘speaking picture’. But here, in Shakespeare’s highly ekphrastic poem, what emerges in the encounter of the visual and verbal is a sense of history’s ineffability and silence. Notes  1 Pietro Aretino, Lettere sull’arte, ed. Ettore Camesasca (Milan: Edizioni del Milione, 1957), I.78–9. Translation quoted from Norman E. Land, The Viewer as Poet: The Renaissance Response to Art (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), p. 132.  2 Plutarch, De Gloria Atheniensium, 346F. Plutarch attributes this famous saying to Simonides.  3 See, for example, the description of Daphne fleeing Apollo (Metamorphoses, ­I.528–30).  4 Francesco Petrarch, Letters on Familiar Matters (Rerum familiarium libri), Vol. 1 (Books I–VIII), trans. Aldo S. Bernardo (New York: Italica Press, 2005), VI.2, p. 293.  5 Thomas M. Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982), p. 169.  6 Ibid., p. 9.  7 William Camden, Remaines of a greater worke, concerning Britaine, the inhabitants thereof, their languages, names, surnames, empreses, wise speeches, poësies, and epitaphes (London, 1605), sig. A3v. See also Scott L. Newstok, Quoting Death in Early Modern England: The Poetics of Epitaphs Beyond the Tomb (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p. 61. One major feature that distinguishes a Renaissance sense of the past from a medieval one is the emphasis on evidence, as explained by Peter Burke, The Renaissance Sense of the Past (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1969), p. 7. For further discussion of the early modern fascination with archaeology and antiquarianism see Philip Schwyzer, Archaeologies of English Renaissance Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), and Angus Vine, In Defiance of Time: Antiquarian Writing in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).  8 Catherine Belsey, ‘Invocation of the Visual Image: Ekphrasis in Lucrece and Beyond’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 63 (2012), 175–98 (p. 196).  9 Greene describes an unrequited desire in the Renaissance for the ancient world, a desire that was like an ‘incomplete embrace’ (The Light in Troy, p. 43). 10 Valentine Cunningham, ‘Why Ekphrasis?’, Classical Philology, 102 (2007), 57–71 (p. 63).



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11 ‘Vera la schiuma e vero il mar diresti, / e vero il nicchio e ver soffiar di venti; / la dea negli occhi folgorar vedresti….’ (The Stanze of Angelo Poliziano, trans. David Quint (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993), I.100). 12 Ibid., I.101: ‘Giurar potresti che dell’onde uscissi / la dea premendo colla destra il crino, / coll’altra il dolce pome ricoprissi; / e, stampata dal piè sacro e divino, / d’erbe e di fior l’arena si vestissi; / poi, con sembiante lieto e peregrino, / dalle tre ninfe in grembo fussi accolta, / e di stellato vestimento involta.’ 13 Ibid., I.119: ‘e quanto l’arte intra sé non comprende, / la mente imaginando chiaro intende.’ 14 See Timothy Hampton, Writing from History: The Rhetoric of Exemplarity in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990). 15 Francesco Petrarch, Letters on Familiar Matters (Rerum familiarium libri), vol. 3 (books 17–19), trans. Aldo S. Bernardo (New York, Italica Press, 2005), 19.3, p. 79. 16 The translation of De copia is by Betty I. Knott, Collected Works of Erasmus, Literary and Educational Writings 2, De Copia / De Ratione Studii, ed. Craig R. Thompson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978), pp. 577–78. Erasmus is quoting Quintilian, 8.3.67ff. 17 See Marc Fumaroli, L’âge de l’éloquence (Geneva: Librarie Droz, 2002), p. 97. 18 See Anthony Grafton, ‘Fragmenta historicorum Graecorum: Fragments of Some Lost Enterprises’, in Collecting Fragments / Fragmente sammeln, ed. Glenn W. Most (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1997), pp. 124–43. 19 Sean Keilen, ‘Exemplary Metals: Classical Numismatics and the Commerce of Humanism’, Word & Image, 18:3 (2002), 282–94. 20 See Leonard Barkan, Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), pp. 121, 203. 21 Quotations from Lucrece are taken from The Complete Sonnets and Poems, ed. Colin Burrow (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 22 The Imagines was also part of the curriculum at St John’s College, Oxford, where Thomas Jenkins, the principal master of Stratford Grammar School, studied (see Burrow’s note to 1422–8). 23 I am quoting the translation included in Philostratus the Elder, Imagines (with Philostratus the Younger, Imagines and Callistratus, Descriptions), trans. Arthur Fairbanks (London: Wm Heinemann; New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1931). 24 E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 211. 25 Burrow glosses the lines: ‘Viewers know that they [the figures] are not actually higher, but are deceived by the perspective’ (note to The Complete Sonnets and Poems, p. 318). 26 Belsey, ‘Invocation of the Visual Image’, p. 192; Richard Meek, Narrating the Visual in Shakespeare (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), p. 75. 27 Sidney Colvin, ‘The Sack of Troy in Shakespeare’s “Lucrece” and in Some FifteenthCentury Drawings and Tapestries’, in A Book of Homage to Shakespeare, ed. Israel Gollancz (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1916), pp. 88–99. The fifteenth-century tapestry series from Tournai known as The War of Troy Tapestry (see Figure 6) uses this technique to represent space. Several sets were made of this series, including one owned by Henry VII. 28 OED, ‘compact’ (adj.), 1b.

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29 See William V. Dunning, Changing Images of Pictorial Space: A History of Spatial Illusion in Painting (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1991), especially pp. 14–15, and John White, The Birth and Rebirth of Pictorial Space (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1987). 30 See Meek, Narrating the Visual, p. 76. 31 Keilen, ‘Exemplary Metals,’ p. 282. 32 Francis Bacon, ‘The Great Instauration’, in Selected Philosophical Works, ed. RoseMary Sargent (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 1999), p. 74. 33 Brian W. Ogilvie, The Science of Describing: Natural History in Renaissance Europe (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006), p. 12. 34 Peter N. Miller, ‘Description Terminable and Interminable: Looking at the Past, Nature, and Peoples in Peiresc’s Archive’, in Gianna Pomata and Nancy G. Siraisi (eds), Historia: Empiricism and Erudition in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), p. 356. 35 Ibid., p. 366. 36 Burrow explains that rape was supposed to be indicated with a small inverted red shield in the centre of a family coat of arms (note to 206). 37 The Questyonary of Cyrurgyens, Robert Copland’s translation of a work by Guy de Chauliac (OED, ‘anatomy,’ I.1a). 38 The OED cites Chaucer’s Monk’s Tale 48, ‘And hadde no wepne but an Asses cheke’ (OED, ‘cheek,’ 1a). 39 For a study of the association of anxieties about the female body and fears of invasion in Elizabethan England, see Linda Woodbridge, ‘Palisading the Elizabethan Body Politic’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 33 (1991), 327–54. 40 Lucrece’s association with Roman ruins is also suggested by Henry VIII’s printer Thomas Berthelet, whose device depicted ‘Lucrecia Romana’ at the moment of her suicide, standing proleptically before ruined Roman arches and columns. See Anne Prescott, ‘Du Bellay and Shakespeare’s Sonnets’, in Jonathan F. S. Post (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare’s Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 134–50. 41 OED, ‘ruin’, 1a. 42 Ibid. 43 Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, ed. William Aldis Wright (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1891), p. 90. 44 Sir Philip Sidney, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, ed. Albert Feuillerat (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), pp. 17–18. The first OED citation of ‘veins’ in stone is from the mid-seventeenth century; see ‘vein,’ 5a. 45 Heather James, Shakespeare’s Troy: Drama, Politics, and the Translation of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 64ff. Quotations are taken from Titus Andronicus, ed. Jonathan Bate (London: Routledge, 1995). 46 See, for example, Callistratus’ ‘On the Statue of Orpheus’ (7.430) and ‘On the Statue of a Youth’ (11.435), and Pliny, Naturalis historia, XXXIV.19. The image of Lucrece’s head on the pillow also draws on Ovid’s description of Pygmalion’s lifelike statue, which he lays on his bed, with its head on a soft pillow (Metamorphoses, X.269). 47 Burrow (ed.), The Complete Sonnets and Poems, note to 391. 48 See Burrow’s note to 419.



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49 Judith Dundas, Pencils Rhetorique: Renaissance Poets and the Art of Painting (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1993), p. 73. 50 Burrow glosses the reference, ‘Know ye not that ye are the Temple of God…?’ (I Corinthians 3:16). 51 Both C. S. Lewis and Douglas Bush remark on the ‘medieval’ quality of Shakespeare’s rhetorical techniques in this poem, especially his frequent use of proverbs. See C. S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954), p. 500; and Douglas Bush, Mythology and the Renaissance Tradition in English Poetry (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1963), p. 154. For the medieval versions of Lucrece and their importance to Shakespeare, see Andrew Galloway, ‘Chaucer’s Legend of Lucrece and the Critique of Ideology in Fourteenth-Century England’, ELH: English Literary History, 60 (1993), 813–32; Richard Hillman, ‘Gower’s Lucrece: A New Old Source for The Rape of Lucrece’, Chaucer Review, 24 (1990), 263–70; and Wolfgang P. Müller, ‘Lucretia and the Medieval Canonists’, Bulletin of Medieval Canon Law, 19 (1989), 13–32. 52 Elizabeth D. Harvey contrasts the descriptions of colour associated with Lucrece and Tarquin in terms of colour’s capacity to reveal inner realities (Lucrece’s blush) versus colour’s capacity to conceal such realities (the colours of Tarquin’s rhetoric). See her ‘Flesh Colors and Shakespeare’s Sonnets’, in Michael Schoenfeldt (ed.), A Companion to Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007), pp. 314–28. 53 For an alternative account of the metaphors of Lucrece as text, see Amy Greenstadt, ‘“‘Read it in me’”: The Author’s Will in Lucrece’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 57 (2006), 45–70. 54 See especially Lynn Enterline, The Rhetoric of the Body from Ovid to Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 55 ‘Dolor ora repressit, / verbaque quaerenti satis indignantia linguae / defuerunt…’, quoted in Mark Amsler, ‘Rape and Silence: Ovid’s Mythography and Medieval Readers’, in Representing Rape in Medieval and Early Modern Literature, ed. Elizabeth Ann Robertson and Christine M. Rose (New York: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 61–96 (p. 86). 56 For an account of The Rape of Lucrece as a critique of history-writing, see Heather Dubrow, ‘The Rape of Clio: Attitudes to History in Shakespeare’s Lucrece’, English Literary Renaissance, 16 (1986), 425–41.

2

‘Fabulously counterfeit’: ekphrastic encounters in Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy Richard Meek

One of the more explicit references to the paragone in Renaissance literature appears in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 16. Like several of the poems in the sequence, Sonnet 16 self-consciously reflects upon the speaker’s attempts to represent the friend in verse, or what the poet playfully refers to as his ‘barren rhyme’.1 But this particular sonnet also sets up a further comparison between poetry and the visual arts. The speaker proposes that the friend’s living offspring will offer a far more lifelike copy of their father than any ‘painted counterfeit’ (8). This concern with the inadequacy of mimesis continues with the speaker’s assertion that ‘all this time’s pencil nor my pupil pen / Neither in inward worth nor outward fair / Can make you live yourself in eyes of men’ (10–12). ‘Pencil’ and ‘pen’ were traditionally opposed in the Renaissance as representatives of visual art and poetry, respectively.2 However, in this restatement of the paragone Shakespeare emphasizes the limitations of both media in capturing the inward or outward being of the person represented. At the close of the sonnet, the speaker goes even further by proposing that the friend is the better artist: ‘And you must live drawn by your own sweet skill’ (14). Yet this compelling sense that the friend has an independent existence outside the realms of art is an illusion, derived in part from the various metaphorical and mimetic comparisons that the sonnet sets up. As we attempt to conceptualize the various forms of resemblance and competition at work in the sonnet – between the addressee, visual art, and poetry – we may temporarily forget that all of these elements are the product of Shakespeare’s ‘pupil pen’. Sonnet 16 reminds us that the paragone was not necessarily a contest between painting and poetry, but rather an opportunity for early modern writers to explore (and exploit) the comparative and illusionistic aspects of mimesis. The term counterfeit, which Shakespeare connects with painting, is especially suggestive in this regard. In the late sixteenth century the word could be used in a neutral sense to mean ‘An imitation or representation in painting, sculpture,



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etc.; an image, likeness, portrait’ (OED, 3a); but it could also refer to ‘A false or spurious imitation’ (OED, B1). The term thus captures something of the period’s ambivalent fascination with mimesis: on the one hand, representation that captures or outdoes ‘reality’ is to be prized; on the other hand, it is suspect because it is not the real thing. This fascination is particularly evident in one of the most influential plays of the period: Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (first printed 1592). Long regarded as a key example of early modern ‘metadrama’, and celebrated for its visually striking dramatic emblems, the play is also noteworthy for its interest in ekphrasis, and thus offers an especially fruitful case study for reconsidering the relationship between narrative, dramatic, and pictorial art.3 Kyd’s interest in mimetic interplay is extended in the so-called ‘Painter scene’ that appears in the 1602 quarto. This is the most obviously ekphrastic moment in the play, in which its protagonist, Hieronimo, encounters a Painter and commissions a visual artwork based on his plight. Critics of the play have tended to rely upon the traditional conception of ekphrasis as paragone, and argue that the representational contest implicit in this scene ultimately demonstrates the superiority of drama. Donna Hamilton, for example, argues that Hieronimo becomes increasingly dissatisfied with various forms of art and craves the immediacy of dramatic action: As Hieronimo moves from the oratory of the soliloquies, to painting (in the Painter addition), to metaphor and song in the Bazulto scene, and finally to the playlet of the last scene, the conclusion inevitably emerges that drama is the form most capable of expressing the human experience because it is both poesis and pictura, and has, as well, real sound and action.4

In her 2005 study The Scandal of Images, Marguerite Tassi suggests that no other early modern play reveals ‘such a fusion of the arts of painting and dramatic impersonation’. Like Hamilton, Tassi regards this mimetic fusion as a version of the paragone: ‘The energies that resulted in this fusion are arguably competitive, or paragonal, in nature. The dramatist suppressed the material body of the painting in order to draw forth a more striking, moving dramatic painting in which speech, gesture, and passionate expression create living art.’5 By contrast, the present chapter seeks to question the paragonal model of ekphrasis, and argues that The Spanish Tragedy highlights drama’s interdependence with, rather than superiority to, other forms of art. The chapter also suggests that the play’s interest in ekphrasis opens up larger questions about borrowing, imitation, and collaboration. Such concerns are reproduced on the level of plot: Hieronimo’s quest for a suitable representational mode to communicate his emotions is intriguingly related to the play’s ambivalent fascination with ekphrasis. For while Hieronimo appears to crave the immediacy of the visual, he nevertheless finds himself drawn to the art of narrative. The Spanish Tragedy highlights the illusionistic aspects of theatrical representation, and its reliance upon a juxtaposition of various forms of ‘counterfeit’ art.

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‘Both vaunting sundry colours of device’: showing and telling The critical tendency to assume that drama is intrinsically more lifelike than other forms of art has been discussed in an important chapter in Murray Krieger’s Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign (1992). Krieger notes how commentators from Plato onwards have argued that drama is a way of converting poetry into a ‘natural-sign art’.6 He cites various critics who have celebrated drama’s ability to imitate the consecutiveness of human experience, and thus supposedly bring about a removal of the artistic medium. In drama, we witness what Krieger sceptically calls ‘the uncomplicated production of walking ekphrases, those living, moving, flesh-and-blood sculptures … who strut before us in their own space, so reminiscent of our own’ (p. 51). And yet, this longstanding assumption that drama consists of ‘natural signs’ leads to something of a paradox, because the more a dramatist prioritizes action, the more narration is required: the dramatist, despite the desire to delude us into this belief that what we are witnessing is ‘real,’ is forced severely to restrict the stage space and time if all gaps are to be avoided: consequently he is forced to limit what may be directly represented. He thus must exclude much in the action that we ought to see happening for us and, as a consequence, must yield to the temptation of having the characters to tell one another (and us) about what has happened or is happening elsewhere; for he must let us in on the action one way or another. (pp. 55–6)

Krieger is primarily concerned here with French neoclassical drama, but his discussion is relevant to and illuminating of early modern plays as well. Certainly the critical preference for showing over telling that Krieger identifies was alive and well in the Renaissance. For example, Francisco Robortello, in his Poetics (1548), writes that ‘The poet … makes a kind of mute representation in words, while the [actor], speaking and expressing through voice, the mouth, the face, the gesture [creates] the very thing which is to be imitated.’7 But despite this anti-narrative prejudice among commentators from the period there seems to have been a fascination with the possibilities of narration within the plays themselves.8 As Julie Stone Peters has written, early modern playwrights ‘continued to put long explanatory monologues in the mouths of their actors (narrations, soliloquies, asides, apostrophes), justifying them as unfortunately necessary improbabilities and recommending special provisions’.9 Shakespeare’s handling of narrative in his plays, and his particular interest in ekphrasis, has begun to receive critical attention.10 But Shakespeare was not the only playwright interested in the effects of ekphrasis on stage; indeed, the ekphrastic elements in Shakespeare’s works were both influenced by, and in turn came to influence, Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy.11 As I have suggested above, the most explicitly ekphrastic episode in The Spanish Tragedy is the Painter scene. And yet, even without the 1602 additions, the play offers a complex exploration of the ­relationship between narrative and theatrical representation.



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The play begins with a lengthy passage of narrative: the Ghost of Andrea’s account of his demise and subsequent passage to the underworld. Andrea describes how he sweet-talked his way past Cerberus, ‘pleasing [him] with honeyed speech’.12 Yet he also suggests that, on his journey to Pluto’s court, he ‘saw more sights than thousand tongues can tell, / Or pens can write, or mortal hearts can think’ (57–8). This emphasis upon the power and limitations of language sets the tone for the entire first act, which contains various attempts to reconstruct Andrea’s death in narrative form. Revenge states that he and Andrea will sit down ‘to see the mystery’ (90); and we then move from the dramatic frame to the play proper. However, the emphasis in the scene that follows is once again on narration rather than action. The King of Spain asks his General to describe the recent confrontation between the Spanish and Portuguese armies: ‘unfold in brief discourse / Your form of battle and your war’s success’ (1.2.16–17). As we will soon discover, this is the battle in which Andrea was killed. The General’s extended description of the encounter between the two armies focuses on visual qualities and details: There met our armies in their proud array: Both furnished well, both full of hope and fear, Both menacing alike with daring shows, Both vaunting sundry colours of device … (24–7)

This last phrase is typically glossed by the play’s editors as ‘heraldic banners’.13 Yet the term colour could also refer to ‘Rhetorical figures or devices; ornaments or embellishments of style and diction intended to persuade the reader or listener’ (OED, 15). Susenbrotus uses the word in this context in his Epitome Troporum ac Schematum (c. 1541), a popular grammar-school textbook, in his description of the rhetorical figure of pragmatographia – the vivid description of an event or action: ‘when we graphically depict in all its colors what is either happening or has already happened, so as to transport the auditor or reader outside himself, as in a theatre, and thus to divert him’.14 The specific phrase ‘colours of device’ also recalls Thomas Wyatt’s 1536 Epistolary Satire (CXLIX), which uses the phrase in the context of rhetorical redescription: ‘And much the less of things that cannot I, / That asken help of colours of device / To join the mean with each extremity.’15 As well as referring to the visually striking banners of the two armies, then, the phrase ‘colours of device’ draws attention to the rhetorical vividness of the General’s speech, and the capacity of narrative to transport auditors elsewhere – even when they are already in the theatre. The General’s description is thus a notable example of ekphrasis, understood in its earlier rhetorical sense of description; the term literally means ‘to speak out’, or ‘to tell in full’.16 But it is also ekphrastic in its particular concern with pictorial details. As Ruth Webb writes, ‘What distinguishes ekphrasis is its quality of vividness, enargeia, its impact upon the mind’s eye of the listener who must, in Theon’s words, be almost made to see the subject.’ Webb suggests that,

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for ancient rhetoricians, ekphrasis was ‘an evocation of a scene, often a scene unfolding in time like a battle, a murder or the sack of a city’.17 The General’s description of this battle certainly appeals to the mind’s eye: On every side drop captains to the ground, And soldiers, some ill-maimed, some slain outright: Here falls a body scindered from his head, There legs and arms lie bleeding on the grass, Mingled with weapons and unbowelled steeds, That scattering overhead the purple plain. In all this turmoil, three long hours and more, The victory to neither part inclined, Till Don Andrea with his brave lanciers In their main battle made so great a breach That, half dismayed, the multitude retired … (1.2.57–67)

Jonas Barish suggests that the General’s description – with its ‘Mingl[ing]’ of bodies, legs, arms, weapons, and steeds – is rendered with ‘a certain pictorial sharpness … as in a tapestry’.18 It also has a certain deictic quality, as the General uses the terms here and there to point towards the tangible elements of this absent scene.19 Kyd seems to be fascinated with the mimetic possibilities of ekphrasis on stage, and the capacity of narrative to make audiences and readers ‘see’ absent events that cannot be represented dramatically. In the General’s account, Andrea’s demise is depicted as noble and honourable: ‘And in that conflict was Andrea slain – / Brave man at arms, but weak to Balthazar’ (71–2). But while this version of events might please the King’s visual imagination, it does not necessarily offer a full or accurate account. In particular, the General fails to mention Lorenzo’s part in Balthazar’s capture, which becomes apparent later in the same scene.20 Thus, even though the General’s narrative possesses plausibility and vividness, it may not necessarily be true. The potential ambiguity or even duplicity of enargeia is made more explicit in 1.3, which takes place in the Portuguese court. The Viceroy of Portugal asks for news of his son, Balthazar, who has been captured by the Spanish. Villuppo asks him to pardon the ‘author of ill news’ (1.3.53); nevertheless the Viceroy wants to hear it: ‘Stand up I say, and tell thy tale at large’ (1.3.58). Villuppo then offers a vivid, though deceptive, description of what took place: Then hear that truth which these mine eyes have seen. When both the armies were in battle joined, Don Balthazar, amidst the thickest troops, To win renown did wondrous feats of arms: Amongst the rest I saw him hand to hand In single fight with their Lord General; Till Alexandro, that here counterfeits Under the colour of a duteous friend, Discharged his pistol at the prince’s back, As though he would have slain their general. (59–68)



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Once again, the tale is said to be based on reality, and on what Villuppo’s ‘eyes have seen’. Yet he also suggests that appearances are not to be trusted, and that Alexandro ‘counterfeits / Under the colour of a duteous friend’.21 Villuppo uses the term counterfeit to refer to Alexandro’s supposed dishonesty: ‘To assume the character of (a person, etc.); to pretend to be; to pass oneself off as; to personate’ (OED, v. 5). But of course the word implicitly refers to Villuppo’s act of narration: ‘To make (anything) in fraudulent imitation of something else; to make or devise (something spurious) and pass it off as genuine; to forge’ (OED, v. 2). Accusing Alexandro of ‘counterfeit[ing]’ friendship enables Villuppo to direct attention away from the fraudulent nature of his narrative account. Alexandro points to the duplicity of Villuppo’s tale, although the Viceroy no longer trusts him: ‘O wicked forgery! O traitorous miscreant!’ (72). Villuppo picks up on the word forgery in an aside: ‘Thus have I with an envious forged tale, / Deceived the King, betrayed mine enemy’ (93–4). Kyd thus draws our attention to Villuppo’s narrative as a forged account of events that took place prior to the start of the play’s action. But this moment might also prompt us to reflect upon the workings of theatrical mimesis more generally. After all, one could argue that Villuppo is not entirely different from the playwright, who also composes vivid narrative accounts of absent, offstage events. Perhaps, then, Kyd is himself performing a kind of misdirection, distracting us from the fact that all of the narrative passages in the play are representations of a ‘counterfeit’ reality. But while the play highlights the duplicitous aspects of enargeia, Kyd also explores the capacity of narrative to move readers and hearers. Appealing to the emotions was a fundamental aspect of classical and Elizabethan rhetorical theory.22 For example, in his Institutio Oratoria, Quintilian refers to ‘enargeia, what Cicero calls illustratio and evidentio, a quality which makes us seem not so much to be talking about something as exhibiting it. Emotions will ensue just as if we were present at the event itself.’23 In 1.4, Bel-Imperia commands Horatio to ‘relate / The circumstance of Don Andrea’s death’ (1.4.2–3). Horatio reluctantly agrees to recount this ‘heavy doleful charge’, although he fears that his ‘tears and sighs’ will hinder his telling (7–8). Recalling Aeneas’s retelling of the Trojan War in the Aeneid, Horatio emphasizes his emotional involvement in the tragic events he describes. Horatio’s account of Andrea’ death differs from the official account offered by the General: according to Horatio, Andrea was overwhelmed by a fresh supply of soldiers, who ‘dinged him to the ground’ (22). Thus Balthazar took advantage of Horatio’s distress and killed him dishonourably. Horatio goes on to offer a moving account of his care for Andrea’s body: I took him up, and wound him in mine arms, And welding him unto my private tent, There laid him down, and dewed him with my tears, And sighed and sorrowed as became a friend. But neither friendly sorrow, sighs nor tears Could win pale Death from his usurped right. (1.4.34–9)

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Horatio’s tale not only offers a more personal account of Andrea’s death, but also describes the emotions that he experienced at the time. This vivid narrative is thus concerned with the affective aspects of mimesis. Horatio describes how he honoured Andrea with a ‘due funeral’, and took a remembrance of him: ‘This scarf I plucked from off his lifeless arm, / And wear it in remembrance of my friend’ (1.4.42–3). By wearing this scarf Horatio becomes a visual representative of Andrea, and from this point on the scarf that he wears links him with the primal scene of Andrea’s death. As Alison Hobgood has written, ‘Horatio’s tale enacts a narrative transference that resembles the material transference of Andrea’s bloody scarf on to Horatio’s arm.’24 The scarf might be seen to authenticate Horatio’s narrative – it is a piece of visual evidence that connects the action on stage with the absent scene of Andrea’s death. At the same time, however, this moment reminds us of the extent to which stage properties and other visual signs that we see on stage need to be contextualized and ­authenticated by narrative. ‘Draw me like old Priam of Troy’: the Painter scene As we have seen, then, the first act of the play contains several elaborate passages of narrative that are presented as pictorially vivid, deceitful, and emotionally affecting. But while Don Andrea’s death takes place prior to the start of the play, and remains a site of representational and interpretative contestation, Horatio’s savage murder is depicted on stage.25 In 2.5 Hieronimo encounters Horatio’s dead body, hung up in the arbour by Lorenzo and Balthazar, describing it as a ‘murderous spectacle’ (2.5.9). The visual impact of this scene in performance may be one reason why it was selected as the subject for the illustrated frontispiece of the 1615 edition (Figure 7). Here we see Hieronimo’s discovery of his son’s corpse combined with action from the previous scene, namely Lorenzo’s silencing and abduction of Bel-Imperia. Interestingly, however, this image contains fragments of speech, which are inscribed within banderoles emerging from the characters’ mouths.26 The silent picture requires the supplement of writing. Similarly, the powerful stage tableau in 2.5 requires Hieronimo’s narration and interpretation: ‘A man hanged up and all the murderers gone, / And in my bower to lay the guilt on me’ (2.5.10–11). As with Marcus’ long description of Lavinia in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, Hieronimo is surprisingly articulate given the emotional turmoil that he claims to be experiencing – and indeed his soliloquy is notable for its considerable eloquence and length: Alas, it is Horatio, my sweet son! O no, but he that whilom was my son. O, was it thou that calledst me from my bed? O speak, if any spark of life remain: I am thy father. Who hath slain my son? What savage monster, not of human kind, Hath here been glutted with thy harmless blood,



Ekphrastic encounters in Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy

7. The Spanish Tragedie (London, 1615), title-page woodcut

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And left thy bloody corpse dishonoured here, For me, amidst this dark and deathful shades, To drown thee with an ocean of my tears? (14–23)

Lukas Erne offers a compelling defence of the speech, arguing that what makes it so powerful is ‘its fine concordance with the action out of which it grows’.27 For Erne, the scene offers a perfect balance of word and image, action and narration. Nonetheless, in Hieronimo’s exchanges with Isabella that follow he points to the redundancy and insufficiency of his language: ‘I’ll kiss thee now, for words with tears are stayed’ (48). Hieronimo also takes a visual memento of the scene: ‘See’st thou this handkercher besmeared with blood? / It shall not from me till I take revenge’ (51–2). This handkerchief appears to be the ‘scarf’ that Horatio took from the dead Andrea, and thus links Horatio’s murder with that of his friend.28 Andrew Sofer suggests that the imagery here has religious connotations: ‘Kyd’s handkerchief is now literally imbued with the substance of Horatio’s blood … Hieronimo’s virtual canonization of his son invites us to see Horatio as a Christ-figure.’29 But the fact that the handkerchief is imbued with Horatio’s blood also makes it a ‘natural sign’ of his death. The remainder of the play does not simply dramatize Hieronimo’s desire for revenging his son’s murder, but also his quest for an effective (and affecting) aesthetic mode for re-presenting it. And while Hieronimo might appear to crave the immediacy of visual spectacle, he nevertheless finds himself relying upon narrative to ­re-create this scene and its emotional impact. The complex relationship between narrative and spectacle is explored most explicitly in the Painter scene, which is one of the additions that appeared in the 1602 quarto of the play. The title page of the 1602 edition advertises itself as ‘Newly corrected, amended, and enlarged with new additions of the Painters part, and others, as it hath of late been divers times acted’.30 The authorship of these additional scenes is uncertain, although Shakespeare has recently reemerged as a viable contender.31 The author of the scenes was clearly seeking to revive a popular revenge play, which may suggest a degree of writerly competition or emulation; indeed some commentators have suggested that the Painter scene was designed to replace the Don Bazulto scene (3.13), which also focuses on Hieronimo’s encounter with another grieving father.32 But the fact that the two scenes were printed together in the 1602 text suggests that we should regard the newer scene as a counterpart to the Bazulto scene rather than a competitor. After all, the Painter scene extends the original play’s interest in mimetic and emotional comparability; it also makes even more explicit the play’s interest in converting suffering into art.33 The scene returns Hieronimo and Isabella to the location of Horatio’s murder, suggesting from the outset that there is a degree of recursiveness and repetition at work here. Hieronimo is told that there is a painter at the door: ‘Bid him come in, and paint some comfort, / For surely there’s none lives but painted comfort’ (Fourth Addition, 73–4). Hieronimo uses the term painted to suggest that



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comfort is unreal or artificial. And yet, when he suggests that only God is able to provide justice, the Painter reveals that he has suffered similar losses: ‘O then I see / That God must right me for my murdered son’ (90–1). Like Don Bazulto, whom Hieronimo describes as a ‘lively portrait of [his] dying self’ (3.13.85), the Painter is another figure with whom Hieronimo is able to compare his passions. However, at the start of their encounter there appears to be a competitive aspect to their mourning: Hieronimo How, was thy son murdered? Painter Ay sir, no man did hold a son so dear. Hieronimo What, not as thine? that’s a lie As massy as the earth: I had a son, Whose least unvalued hair did weigh A thousand of thy sons: and he was murdered. Painter Alas sir, I had no more but he. Hieronimo Nor I, nor I: but this same one of mine Was worth a legion: but all is one. (Fourth Addition, 92–100)

Thus Hieronimo’s encounter with the Painter begins with a kind of emotional paragone: it does not involve a sharing of woe, but rather offers Hieronimo a means of expressing the superiority of his own love for Horatio. As noted above, critics of the scene tend to argue that there is also a representational paragone at work here. Marguerite Tassi writes that ‘the Addition’s author ingeniously makes use of stage pictures and dramatic actions from the play itself as inspiration for Hieronimo’s painting … The theatre, he implies, is a kind of superior painting that transcends the limitations of the painter’s medium.’34 Yet we might argue that, as with Shakespeare’s Sonnet 16, the scene explores the power and limitations of both media, rather than offering a straightforward paragone between drama and painting. The initial emulation between Hieronimo and the Painter soon subsides, as Hieronimo begins to focus on the Painter’s artistry.35 Despite Hieronimo’s insistence that he feels a greater sense of loss than the Painter, and his ambivalence towards ‘painted’ comfort more generally, he is fascinated by the capacity of the Painter’s art to capture or represent authentic emotions: ‘Art a painter? Canst paint me a tear, or a wound, a groan, or a sigh?’ (111–12). It transpires that the Painter is one Bazardo, and that Hieronimo has heard of his artistic skills: Bazardo! afore God, an excellent fellow! Look you sir, do you see, I’d have you paint me for my gallery, in your oil colours matted, and draw me five years younger than I am. Do you see sir, let five years go, let them go, like the marshal of Spain. My wife Isabella standing by me, with a speaking look to my son Horatio, which should intend to this or some such like purpose: ‘God bless thee my sweet son’: and my hand leaning upon his head, thus, sir, do you see? may it be done? (115–23)

In this notional ekphrasis, Hieronimo describes an idealized family portrait that is to be hung in his gallery.36 He asks the Painter – and implicitly the theatre audience – to visualize the painting in the mind’s eye: ‘do you see?’

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Hieronimo thus invites audiences and readers of this scene to imagine another representational medium. But this absent artwork is also a way for Hieronimo to remember and to reconstruct the past. In other words, it is not simply that the theatre transcends the limitations of painting, as Tassi suggests; rather, the scene points to the ways in which a theatrical ekphrasis not only stimulates the visual imagination of the audience but also provides access to the memories and inward emotions of the speaker. Hieronimo asks the Painter about the capacity of visual art to represent the passions: ‘Canst paint a doleful cry?’; ‘Seemingly, sir’, says the Painter (126–7). The Painter suggests that it is possible to paint someone who appears to genuinely weeping, even if this is an illusion. Hieronimo asks the Painter to ‘stretch [his] art’ (133) and to paint a portrait of his discovery of Horatio’s murder. He begins with a vivid description of the sights and sounds of the scene: ‘Let the clouds scowl, make the moon dark, the stars extinct, the winds blowing, the bells tolling, the owls shrieking, the toads croaking, the minutes jarring, and the clock striking twelve’ (144–7). This passage employs the rhetorical figure of topographia, described by Susenbrotus as ‘a true, clear, and significant description of places … This figure occurs whenever the whole aspect of a place is so depicted that one seems to be looking at it.’37 This vivid description of a time already passed – and inflected by Hieronimo’s memory of it – can only be depicted within a narrative account. He continues: And then at last, sir, starting, behold a man hanging: and tottering, and tottering as you know the wind will weave a man, and I with a thrice to cut him down. And looking upon him by the advantage of my torch, find it to be my son Horatio. There you may show a passion, there you may show a passion. Draw me like old Priam of Troy, crying ‘The house is a-fire, the house is a-fire as the torch over my head!’ Make me curse, make me rave, make me cry, make me mad, make me well again, make me curse hell, invocate heaven, and in the end leave me in a trance; and so forth. (147–57)

This is a powerful account of Hieronimo’s discovery of his son’s body; yet the more that Hieronimo describes, the less his description resembles any conceivable piece of visual art. He seems to be thinking of a continuous narrative painting – a genre in which successive episodes in a story are displayed in the same picture, for example in Benozzo Gozzoli’s fifteenth-century The Feast of Herod and the Beheading of Saint John the Baptist (Figure 8). The most famous English example, painted around 1596, is the extraordinary panel representing scenes from the life of the Elizabethan diplomat Sir Henry Unton, now in the National Portrait Gallery (Figure 9).38 Hieronimo’s artwork is even more remarkable than these actual paintings in its inclusion of speech; and yet, the only way of painting a figure saying ‘The house is a-fire, the house is a-fire as the torch over my head!’ is to write the phrase onto the painting itself, in the manner of the banderoles that we observed in the 1615 frontispiece. It is usually assumed that this frontispiece



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8. Benozzo Gozzoli, The Feast of Herod and the Beheading of Saint John the Baptist (c. 1461–62)

was an attempt to commemorate the play’s stage emblems in pictorial form; but one could also argue that the image was inspired by Hieronimo’s ekphrastic description in the 1602 Painter scene. After all, the illustration of Hieronimo in the 1615 frontispiece closely resembles his verbal description of this imagined portrait: ‘bring me forth in my shirt, and my gown under mine arm, with my torch in my hand, and my sword reared up thus: and with these words: What noise is this? who calls Hieronimo?’ (136–8). Both play and frontispiece create distinct, though complementary, speaking pictures. Hieronimo’s description is so lengthy that the Painter seems to hint at the impossibility of this commission, or even that it has the potential to go on indefinitely: ‘And is this the end?’ (158). The painting requires the supplement of words; but, at the same time, Hieronimo’s words become all the more vivid through this description of an imaginary artwork. Thus, while this moment is ostensibly about a work of visual art, it is arguably more concerned with language, rhetoric, and the imagination. As with the ekphrastic moments in Shakespeare’s plays, this passage also emphasizes the ways in which drama can be explicitly textual – and indeed intertextual. Hieronimo’s request to be painted as ‘old Priam of Troy’ recalls the painting of the fall of Troy in The Rape of Lucrece, and the Player’s speech in Hamlet, which tells the story of Pyrrhus, Priam, and Hecuba. These two key Shakespearean ekphrases in turn recall Marlowe’s narrative-heavy play Dido, Queen of Carthage, which itself reworks Virgil’s Aeneid.39 Hieronimo’s

9. Unknown artist, Sir Henry Unton (c. 1596)



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act of word painting thus exemplifies the play’s fascination with textual and emotional encounters. It highlights the extent to which Hieronimo’s emotional state is bound up with other representations and stories.40 By invoking Priam’s grief the author of the Additions connects The Spanish Tragedy with other late Elizabethan literary and dramatic texts, and Hamlet in particular. It recalls a specific passage from Hamlet that prompts Hamlet to imagine an offstage performance of grief that would ‘amaze indeed / The very faculties of eyes and ears’.41 Like Hieronimo’s imagined painting of himself as Priam, the Player’s speech in Hamlet provides a template for the Prince to articulate and authenticate his own passions. The Painter scene’s interest in mimetic interplay and exchange, and the capacity of narrative to make us ‘see’ what drama cannot, is another way in which it can be described as Shakespearean. For Hamilton, the function of the Painter scene is to prepare us for the dramatic immediacy of the final act: ‘By having Hieronimo register his dissatisfaction with a mute production, the author of the Painter episode prepares us for the fact that Hieronimo’s search for a more complete medium will end when he turns to drama.’42 As I have been suggesting, however, this scene implicitly questions the very notion of a ‘complete’ aesthetic medium. We might even say that the scene’s handling of the paragone resembles Hieronimo’s emotional relationship with the Painter: it might appear to be competitive, but can also be read as a reciprocal encounter that enables Hieronimo to find new aesthetic forms to represent his emotions. The scene does not imply, pace Hamilton, that painting is inferior to drama, but rather suggests that both are different forms of artifice, and reliant upon a particular set of conventions. Indeed the Painter scene – which centres on a narrative description of an imaginary painting – reminds us that early modern plays are often reliant upon what Terence Cave has suggestively called ‘the rhetoric of presence’.43 The ambivalence towards art in the Painter scene can also be detected in the play’s ending. Nevertheless, the play’s experiments with different forms of representation might trick spectators into thinking that its bloody conclusion is less ‘counterfeit’ than the explicitly fictional representations that they have witnessed thus far. ‘A strange and wondrous show’: dramatic conclusions At the start of the play’s final act, Bel-Imperia berates Hieronimo for his lack of action: ‘Is this the love thou bear’st Horatio? / Is this the kindness that thou counterfeits? / Are these the fruits of thine incessant tears?’ (4.1.1–3). BelImperia uses the term counterfeits to suggest that mere displays of emotion are inadequate, and she states her willingness to revenge Horatio: ‘Nor shall his death be unrevenged by me’ (4.1.23). Hieronimo appears to agree with her that words are useless without action, and even informs us that when he was young he composed ‘fruitless poetry’ (72). He reveals that he has written a more fruitful tragedy – the playlet of ‘Soliman and Perseda’ – that will be performed before the court, and will ‘prove most passing strange, / And wondrous p ­ lausible to that

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assembly’ (84–5). Huston Diehl has argued that Hieronimo’s play ‘emphasizes the spectacular and visual dimension of drama at the expense of the verbal’.44 On the contrary, however, Hieronimo’s play emphasizes the extent to which the visual dimension of drama is dependent upon words. We learn that the play will be performed in other languages, and Bel-Imperia expresses her concern that it will confuse its audience. Hieronimo offers this defence of his dramatic enterprise: It must be so, for the conclusion Shall prove the invention and all was good. And I myself in an oration, And with a strange and wondrous show besides, That I will have there behind a curtain, Assure yourself, shall make the matter known. And all shall be concluded in one scene, For there’s no pleasure ta’en in tediousness. (182–9)

Hieronimo emphasizes the play’s brevity, implying that it will conform to the classical unities of space and time, and will consist of only one scene. Hieronimo thus resembles the kind of idealizing dramatist who regards drama as a ‘natural-sign art’. However, he reveals that the play will require a long ‘oration’, combined with a ‘strange and wondrous show’, that will provide satisfaction. Hieronimo’s desire to avoid tediousness – and to compress the play’s action as far as possible – increases the need for a narrative explanation. As Krieger reminds us, ‘The search for the dramatic purity of the natural sign inadvertently turns drama into a hybrid that betrays its unnaturalness.’45 Yet Hieronimo is at pains to persuade us that his play is something more than fantasy. It is certainly brief: in the course of a mere fifty-seven lines, Balthazar and Lorenzo are murdered, and Bel-Imperia has killed herself. With the action complete, Hieronimo begins his explanatory oration by insisting that what the onstage audience has witnessed is real: Haply you think, but bootless are your thoughts That this is fabulously counterfeit, And that we do as all tragedians do: To die today, for fashioning our scene, The death of Ajax, or some Roman peer, And in a minute starting up again, Revive to please to-morrow’s audience. No, princes; know I am Hieronimo, The hopeless father of a hapless son, Whose tongue is tuned to tell his latest tale, Not to excuse gross errors in the play. (76–86)

The spectators may think that the events before them are ‘fabulously counterfeit’, and that they are watching a dramatization of a classical tale, but Hieronimo suggests that this is no ordinary theatrical performance. Hieronimo



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is ostensibly addressing the onstage audience, for whom the play-within-a-play is now indistinguishable from reality. Yet Hieronimo’s extraordinary claim that he is not an actor has a powerful mimetic effect on the offstage audience as well. As he blurs the distinction between fiction and reality for the onstage audience, we might temporarily forget that, on another level, ‘Hieronimo’ is indeed played by a tragedian who will ‘Revive’ at the end of the performance, and may well perform The Spanish Tragedy once again ‘to please to-morrow’s audience’. In other words, Hieronimo’s assertion that the onstage audience have mistaken reality for a play may also lead the offstage audience to mistake the play proper for reality. Kyd encourages us to transfer the mimetic ideality of ‘Soliman and Perseda’ onto the larger play – but we have to remind ourselves that the events of the play-within-a-play are only ‘real’ within the fabulously counterfeit world of The Spanish Tragedy. Hieronimo admits that some sort of proof is required to authenticate what he says: ‘I see your looks urge instance of these words’ (87). He then reveals the body of his dead son, emphasizing its visual immediacy: ‘See here my show, look on this spectacle’ (89). Yet despite Hieronimo’s emphasis upon visuality, he goes on to rehearse the story of his own tragedy. His elaborate ‘tale’ lasts for almost eighty lines, considerably longer than the performance of ‘Soliman and Perseda’ that it is supposed to complement. It contains a detailed account of Horatio and Bel-Imperia’s love, and Hieronimo’s discovery of Horatio’s body: But night, the coverer of accursed crimes, With pitchy silence hushed these traitors’ harms And lent them leave, for they had sorted leisure To take advantage in my garden-plot Upon my son, my dear Horatio: There merciless they butchered up my boy, In black dark night, to pale, dim, cruel death. He shrieks, I heard, and yet methinks I hear, His dismal outcry echo in the air. With soonest speed I hasted to the noise, Where hanging on a tree I found my son, Through-girt with wounds, and slaughtered as you see. (101–12)

This speech recalls, or perhaps inspired, Hieronimo’s redescription of the scene in the 1602 Painter Addition. Hieronimo seems to be recalling his rhetorical training in his attempts to make the onstage audience not only see the events being described, but also experience the same passions. In the Institutio Oratoria, Quintilian advises orators that pieces of visual ­evidence – such as bloody clothing, the unbandaging of wounds, or even stripped bodies with ‘marks of the scourge’ – can be used to induce tears in the audience.46 As Quintilian puts it, ‘These things commonly make an enormous impression, because they confront people’s minds directly with the facts’ (6.1.31). But he also emphasizes that visual ‘facts’ will not speak for themselves: ‘What depths of incompetence must there be in a pleader who thinks a

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dumb image will speak for him better than his own words!’ (6.1.32). Hieronimo appears to have taken Quintilian’s advice, by revealing and describing Horatio’s handkerchief: ‘And here behold this bloody handkercher, / Which at Horatio’s death I weeping dipped / Within the river of his bleeding wounds’ (122–4). The dumb images of Horatio’s body and his handkerchief are inadequate on their own, and require Hieronimo’s rhetorical description. Arguably, then, this scene – for all its apparent emphasis on visual spectacle – is not as different from the Painter scene as we might think: both are concerned with re-presenting Hieronimo’s discovery of his son’s body in narrative form. Hieronimo states that he is pleased with the deaths of Balthasar and Lorenzo, using terms that are decidedly metadramatic: ‘With these, O these accursed murderers: / Which now performed, my heart is satisfied’ (128–9). Yet the performance of his revenge is clearly not enough for Hieronimo, and he goes on to offer a second narrative account of what has taken place (130–52). It is worth emphasizing, however, that neither the play-within-a-play nor Hieronimo’s narrative clarify the situation for the Viceroy and Castile. Both men seem utterly baffled by Hieronimo’s actions; as Castile puts it, ‘Why hast thou butchered both my children thus?’ (167). Some critics of the play find their confusion – together with Hieronimo’s subsequent vow of silence – contradictory, given the detailed explanation that Hieronimo has already offered.47 But this is to assume the play’s characters act rationally, and listen carefully, during a period of intense emotional distress. Hieronimo’s reply emphasizes the fact that they have experienced similar losses: O good words! As dear to me was my Horatio As yours, or yours, or yours, my lord, to you. My guiltless son was by Lorenzo slain, And by Lorenzo and that Balthazar Am I at last revenged thoroughly, Upon whose souls may heavens be yet avenged With greater far than these afflictions. (168–75)

Hieronimo’s comments offer further evidence that his revenge is not merely a desire for a justice, but also his need to re-present Horatio’s death and convey his emotions to others. But Hieronimo’s attitude towards drama – and art more generally – remains decidedly ambiguous. He has engineered the deaths of Lorenzo and Balthazar in the course of a ‘counterfeit’ play; but as soon as a dramatic representation contains ‘real’ deaths it is no longer a representation. The drama that Hieronimo stages – within the fictional world of The Spanish Tragedy – is not an illusionistic work of art, but makes the Viceroy and the Duke feel what he feels through the actual loss of their own sons. And yet, as with Shakespeare’s Sonnet 16, the sense that Hieronimo’s revenge takes place outside the world of mimesis is generated by the play’s cunning juxtaposition of dramatic, narrative, and visual elements.



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In this way, The Spanish Tragedy does not demonstrate the superiority of drama per se, but rather its rich potential for intermedial exchange. Such an insight complicates the approach of the critics cited at the start of this chapter, who argue that the play stages a paragone between different forms of art, and that the function of the Painter scene is to prepare audiences for the dramatic immediacy of the penultimate scene. Rather, The Spanish Tragedy highlights the ways in which dramatic immediacy is necessarily an illusion, which ekphrasis and other rhetorical effects play a key role in creating. The play’s experiments with different forms of mimesis would prove to be a highly significant influence upon Shakespeare – and this influence would, in turn, come to reshape the play in the form of the 1602 additions. Attending to ekphrasis in The Spanish Tragedy also helps us to question a wider critical assumption that words in the play are ultimately rejected in favour of action. In his classic essay on the play’s rhetoric, for example, Jonas Barish writes that Action, in nondramatic poetry, remains of necessity verbal action. The poet, rebuffed by his mistress or the world, withdraws, perhaps, into frustration, or comes to terms with his plight rhetorically – through argument or retort, through objurgation, defiance, or self-inflicted melancholy. In the drama, words must be affirmed or denied by other acts – coupled with blows, or mingled with kisses.48

But The Spanish Tragedy also demonstrates that, in drama, actions must also be affirmed or denied by words. As we have seen, the play contains various passages of narrative that are both potentially deceptive and pictorially (and emotionally) vivid. And, despite the fact that Horatio’s death – unlike that of Don Andrea – takes place on stage, the play keeps returning to it as a subject for narrative representation. The Spanish Tragedy thus reminds us that drama is, as Krieger puts it, a ‘mixed media, a mélange of the shown and the reported’.49 By way of a conclusion, we might recall the masque that Hieronimo stages before the King in 1.4 to celebrate Spain’s victory against the Portuguese. This masque, which consists entirely of action, leaves the King craving further explanation: ‘Hieronimo, this masque contents mine eye, / Although I sound not well the mystery’ (1.4.138–9). Like ‘Soliman and Perseda’, then, Hieronimo’s masque is visually spectacular but requires an elaborate explanation to clarify its ‘mystery’. Both of these inset plays highlight one of the central paradoxes of dramatic artifice, and emphasize that narrative, for all its problems and perplexities, is a necessary part of theatrical representations. Rather than staging a paragone between word and image, then, The Spanish Tragedy explores their interdependence, and the ways in which a dramatic encounter between the two can create a ‘lively portrait’ of inward grief. Notes  1 Sonnet 16, l. 4, in The Complete Sonnets and Poems, ed. Colin Burrow (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002). On the importance of the paragone in the Renaissance

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see Jean H. Hagstrum, The Sister Arts: The Tradition of Literary Pictorialism and English Poetry from Dryden to Gray (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1958), pp. 66–70. See also Clark Hulse, The Rule of Art: Literature and Painting in the Renaissance (Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 1990) and Christopher Braider, ‘The Paradoxical Sisterhood: “Ut Pictura Poesis”’, in Glyn P. Norton (ed.), The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Volume 3: The Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 168–75.  2 See Burrow’s note to l. 10. Ben Jonson uses these terms in his reflections upon the paragone in Timber; or, Discoveries (1640–41): ‘Poetry and picture are arts of a like nature, and both are busy about imitation. It was excellently said of Plutarch, poetry was a speaking picture, and picture a mute poesy. For they both invent, feign, and devise many things, and accommodate all they invent to the use and service of nature. Yet of the two, the pen is more noble than the pencil; for that can speak to the understanding, the other, but to the sense’ (The Oxford Authors: Ben Jonson, ed. Ian Donaldson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 561).  3 In Elizabethan Popular Theatre (London: Routledge, 1982), Michael Hattaway notes the ‘specific dramatic emblems or speaking pictures’ that occur throughout the play (p. 110). But he also comments on the play’s interest in dramatic narration: ‘Following classical example, Kyd introduced narrative into his plays, and characters are thus called upon to act as prologue and choruses … As was characteristic of popular drama, the player remains distinct from the character he plays; he is therefore called upon to tell as well as to show’ (pp. 108–9). More recently, Lorna Hutson has argued that Kyd ‘married the visual, emblematic theatre of the Queen’s Men with the newly intricate dramaturgy of suspicion and probable conjecture, a dramaturgy of the mistakable rather than unmistakable sign’ (The Invention of Suspicion: Law and Mimesis in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 278).  4 Donna B. Hamilton, ‘The Spanish Tragedy: A Speaking Picture’, ELR: English Literary Renaissance, 4 (1974), 203–17 (pp. 204–5).  5 Marguerite A. Tassi, The Scandal of Images: Iconoclasm, Eroticism, and Painting in Early Modern English Drama (Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press, 2005), p. 153.  6 Murray Krieger, ‘Representation as Illusion: Dramatic Representation and the Natural Sign Aesthetic’, in Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), ch. 4 (p. 49).  7 Quoted in Julie Stone Peters, Theatre of the Book, 1480–1880: Print, Text, and Performance in Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 171.  8 For further discussion of the anti-narrative prejudice see Richard Meek, ‘Shakespeare and Narrative’, Literature Compass, 6 (2009), 482–98.  9 Stone Peters, Theatre of the Book, p. 173. 10 On Shakespearean ekphrasis see Stephen Orgel, ‘“Counterfeit Presentments”: Shakespeare’s Ekphrasis’, in Edward Chaney and Peter Mack (eds), England and the Continental Renaissance: Essays in Honour of J. B. Trapp (Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, 1990), pp. 177–84; Leonard Barkan, ‘Making Pictures Speak: Renaissance Art, Elizabethan Literature, Modern Scholarship’, Renaissance Quarterly, 48 (1995), 326–51; Rawdon Wilson, Shakespearean Narrative (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1995); Alison Thorne, Vision and Rhetoric in Shakespeare (Basingstoke: Palgrave



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Macmillan, 2000); Richard Meek, Narrating the Visual in Shakespeare (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009); Stuart Sillars, Shakespeare and the Visual Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); and Keir Elam, Shakespeare’s Pictures: Visual Culture in Drama (London: Bloomsbury, 2017). 11 Joel Altman notes the critical interest in Shakespearean ekphrasis, but argues that there has been a ‘comparative neglect of the study of ekphrasis in early modern English drama’; see his chapter on ‘Ekphrasis’ in Henry S. Turner (ed.), Early Modern Theatricality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 270–91 (p. 274)). Chloe Porter’s valuable study Making and Unmaking in Early Modern English Drama (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013) explores the work of non-­ Shakespearean dramatists and includes a brief discussion of The Spanish Tragedy (pp. 37–8). See also Jonathan Bate, ‘The Performance of Revenge: Titus Andronicus and The Spanish Tragedy’, in François Laroque (ed.), The Show Within: Dramatic and Other Insets, English Renaissance Drama (1550–1642), 2 vols (Montpellier: Publications de l’Université Paul Valéry, 1990), vol. 2, pp. 267–83. 12 Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy, ed. J. R. Mulryne (London: A & C Black, 1989), 1.1.30. All quotations from the play are taken from this edition. 13 See Philip Edwards (ed.), The Spanish Tragedy (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1959), note to 1.2.27, and Mulryne’s note to 1.2.27. 14 Quoted from Joseph X. Brennan, ‘The Epitome Troporum ac Schematum of Joannes Susenbrotus: Text, Translation, and Commentary’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Illinois, 1953), p. 84. 15 Sir Thomas Wyatt, The Complete Poems, ed. R. A. Rebholz (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978), p. 187. See also Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 159. 16 See Hagstrum, The Sister Arts, p. 18 n34. 17 Ruth Webb, ‘Ekphrasis Ancient and Modern: The Invention of a Genre’, Word & Image, 15:1 (1999), 7–18 (pp. 13–14). 18 Jonas A. Barish, ‘The Spanish Tragedy, or The Pleasures and Perils of Rhetoric’, in John Russell Brown and Bernard Harris (eds), Elizabethan Theatre (London: Edward Arnold, 1966), pp. 59–85 (p. 70). On the pictorialism of the speech see also Cinta Zumino Garrido, ‘Rhetoric and Truth in The Spanish Tragedy’, SEDERI: Journal of the Spanish Society for English Renaissance Studies, 12 (2001), 341–48 (p. 344). 19 See Valentine Cunningham, ‘Why Ekphrasis?’, Classical Philology, 102 (2007), 57–71 (p. 61). 20 See Garrido, ‘Rhetoric and Truth’, and Carol McGinnis Kay, ‘Deception through Words: A Reading of The Spanish Tragedy’, Studies in Philology, 74 (1977), 20–38. 21 See OED, ‘colour’, P2c: ‘under pretext or pretence of; under the mask or alleged authority of’. 22 See Lynn Enterline, Shakespeare’s Schoolroom: Rhetoric, Discipline, Emotion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012). 23 Quintilian, The Orator’s Education, ed. and trans. Donald A. Russell, 5 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), vol. 3, p. 61 (6.2.32). 24 Allison P. Hobgood, Passionate Playgoing in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 74. See also Thomas Page Anderson, Performing Early Modern Trauma from Shakespeare to Milton (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), p. 143.

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25 Molly Smith argues that this makes Horatio’s death more important than that of Andrea: ‘Horatio’s body, hanged and mutilated before a full house, thus takes precedence over Don Andrea, whose death has been narrated rather than witnessed’ (‘The Theater and the Scaffold: Death as Spectacle in The Spanish Tragedy’, SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500–1900, 32 (1992), 217–32 (p. 225)). 26 See Rachel Eisendrath’s discussion of early modern banderoles in relation to Lucrece (Chapter 1, above). 27 Lukas Erne, Beyond ‘The Spanish Tragedy’: A Study of the Works of Thomas Kyd (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), p. 69. 28 See Mulryne’s note to 1.4.42. 29 See Andrew Sofer, ‘Absorbing Interests: Kyd’s Bloody Handkerchief as Palimpsest’, Comparative Drama, 34 (2000), 127–53 (p. 143). 30 The Spanish Tragedie (London: Printed by W[illiam] W[hite] for T[homas] Pavier, 1602), title page. 31 For a discussion of the authorship of the additions see Erne, Beyond ‘The Spanish Tragedy’, pp. 119–26, and Janet Clare, Shakespeare’s Stage Traffic: Imitation, Borrowing and Competition in Renaissance Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 186–8. Coleridge made the suggestion that Shakespeare was responsible for these additions (see T. Ashe (ed.), The Table Talk and Omniana of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1923), p. 203). This theory that was taken up in the twentieth century by Warren Stevenson, in ‘Shakespeare’s Hand in The Spanish Tragedy 1602’, SEL, 8 (1968), 307–21. Erne writes that this attribution is ‘groundless’ (p. 122), and suggests that ‘The question of the authorship of the additions may well have to remain unanswered’ (p. 123). More recently, however, Brian Vickers has used collocation matching to argue that Shakespeare was indeed the author; see ‘Identifying Shakespeare’s Additions to The Spanish Tragedy (1602): A New(er) Approach’, Shakespeare, 8 (2012), 13–43. 32 See Erne, Beyond ‘The Spanish Tragedy’, p. 123. 33 Kevin Dunn discusses the resonances between the Don Bazulto and Painter scenes in ‘“Action, Passion, Motion”: The Gestural Politics of Counsel in The Spanish Tragedy’, Renaissance Drama, 31 (2002), 27–60. Dunn is not specifically concerned with ekphrasis, but he does observe that ‘The metonym that connects the two is representation: both scenes concern themselves with discursive inadequacy, that is, with the ability of a particular discourse to handle the death of a son. But the first addresses the failure of law, of equity, to adequately represent Hieronimo’s interests, while the second deals with the capacity of art to capture the affect of grief’ (p. 54). 34 Tassi, The Scandal of Images, p. 159. 35 Cf. Catriona MacLeod’s discussion of the encounter between Ardinghello and Demetri in Wilhelm Heinse’s novel Ardinghello: ‘the two men physically enact a shift from hostile verbal stand-off to warm and bodily rapprochement, in a duplication of the content of their discourse’ (see Chapter 5, below). 36 Hieronimo appears to be using the term gallery in the innovative sense of ‘An apartment or building devoted to the exhibition of works of art’ (OED, 6). The OED’s first citation of this usage appears in Shakespeare’s 1 Henry VI: ‘Long time thy shadow hath been thrall to me, / For in my gallery thy picture hangs’ (1 Henry VI, ed. Michael Hattaway (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 2.3.35–6). 37 Susenbrotus, quoted in Brennan, ‘The Epitome Troporum ac Schematum’, p. 85.



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38 For useful discussions of this painting see Michael Neill, Issues of Death: Mortality and Identity in English Renaissance Drama (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), pp. 272–6; and Tassi, The Scandal of Images, pp. 168–70. 39 In Aeneas’ account of the fall of Troy in Marlowe’s Dido, he describes how Priam attempts to elicit Pyrrhus’ sympathy by drawing attention to his great losses: ‘Achilles’ son, remember what I was, / Father of fifty sons, but they are slain’ (Christopher Marlowe, Dido Queen of Carthage, in Complete Plays and Poems, ed. E. D. Pendry and J. C. Maxwell (London: J. M. Dent, 1976), 2.1.233–4). 40 For a stimulating account of the ways in which ‘grief is an emotion best understood and explained through a narrative’ see Peter Goldie, The Mess Inside: Narrative, Emotion, and the Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), ch. 3 (quotation on p. 56). 41 Hamlet, ed. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor (London: Thomson Learning, 2006), 2.2.500–1. See Meek, Narrating the Visual, ch. 3. 42 Hamilton, ‘The Spanish Tragedy: A Speaking Picture’, p. 215. 43 See Terence Cave, ‘Enargeia: Erasmus and the Rhetoric of Presence in the Sixteenth Century’, L’Esprit Créateur, 16 (1976), 5–19. See also François Rigolot, ‘The Rhetoric of Presence: Art, Literature, and Illusion’, in Norton (ed.), The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Volume 3, pp. 161–7. 44 Huston Diehl, Staging Reform, Reforming the Stage: Protestantism and Popular Theater in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1997), p. 113. 45 Krieger, Ekphrasis, p. 56. 46 Quintilian, The Orator’s Education, ed. Russell, vol. 3, p. 33 (6.1.31). 47 See Edwards’s note to 4.4.165–7, and his ‘Introduction’, pp. xxxiv–xxxv. 48 Barish, ‘The Pleasures and Perils of Rhetoric’, p. 83. 49 Krieger, Ekphrasis, p. 56.

3

‘Art indeed is long, but life is short’: ekphrasis and mortality in Andrew Marvell Keith McDonald

Andrew Marvell, the seventeenth-century poet, politician, and prose satirist, demonstrates throughout his work a profound connection with the full range of visual arts.1 Amid scenes of extreme political upheaval in the mid-seventeenth century and new dawns of scientific, technological, and astrological discovery, the visual remains at the heart of his poetic imagination. His verse combines these various cultural phenomena, often rapt with the self-conscious irony of a man who is contemplating his decision to flee England ahead of the Civil War while simultaneously exercising the influences and inspiration he acquired as a result of it. As a consequence, we often find within his work visual attributes that signify political or psychological standpoints, as Marvell undergoes exacting self-negotiation with the challenging conditions of solitude or the slippery nature of political affairs. Additionally, the visual evokes the poet’s curiosity in the qualities of perception and perspective. Marvell’s studied ambivalence is frequently employed to emphasize the complicated distinctions that arose for him between nature and artifice or between different modes of representation. To Michael Schoenfeldt, it is as if, for Marvell, the conventions of visual representation are what enable us to see the designs implicit in the order of the natural world.2 Time and again, Marvell analyses the boundaries between nature and art or the real and the artificial but never knows quite where to place the line – or if, indeed, a line exists at all. What distinguishes him as a poet is how he innovates as he imitates, and how his poems critique every medium they encounter. His thoughtful commentary on seventeenth-century literary and print culture (and the uncertain place of the poet within it) is as conscious and critical of itself as it is of its ostensible subjects. Innovation, of course, is identifiable within the Renaissance at large. One remarkable feature of the period, as we have seen in the two previous chapters, was the vast communicative interchange between media that took place.3 This occurred materially as well as artistically; images that began life in one form



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of artefact became frequently reproduced in another. By the mid-seventeenth century this process had become central to political propaganda, particularly between the English and the Dutch. The three wars fought between the two nations between 1652 and 1674 saw the English revert from having one of the world’s most advanced naval fleets following the first conflict to suffering several humiliating defeats during the second and third. Marvell’s involvement with the Dutch, which potentially includes diplomatic and undercover missions during this period, positions him at the centre of these transformative and highly provocative media exchanges.4 For Marvell, striving hard to forge and maintain a career in public service, the interplay between writing and different forms of art was evolving into new polemical frontiers, and it became a defining characteristic of his verse of engagement and retreat. The politicized aesthetic also drew the usually reticent writer into publication. An anonymous print of ‘The Character of Holland’, evidently arranged by Marvell himself, appeared in 1665 – his first printed poem in over a decade.5 This was followed soon afterwards by active involvement in the Advice-to-a-Painter poems, which used the convention popularized by Edmund Waller to satirize political self-destruction. Despite clear intermedial relationships and the remarkable visual quality of Marvell’s work, there have been few attempts to situate the poet within any traditional or contemporary debates about ekphrasis. Even poems like ‘The Gallery’, which explore the paragonal opposition that has become a mainstay of ekphrastic critical orthodoxy, have been largely overlooked in lieu of works by more celebrated authors such as Shakespeare, Spenser, and Donne.6 Katherine Acheson’s welcome new volume on the visual and spatial tropes employed by mid-seventeenth-century authors dedicates two chapters to Marvell: one examining the aesthetic of the militarized gardens at Nun Appleton in the early 1650s; the other focused on The Last Instructions to a Painter, one of Marvell’s most ostensibly ekphrastic poems from the late 1660s.7 Continuing James Heffernan’s emphasis on the paragone, Acheson states that Marvell’s verse ‘makes the claim conventional to ekphrastic poetry, that poetry is superior to painting’.8 As I hope to demonstrate in this chapter, however, Marvell’s work is ideally suited to revisionist debates that look beyond these binary divisions. David Kennedy’s recent exploration of the ekphrastic encounter, for example, offers a significant opportunity to explore new avenues for a poet often dubbed a proto-Romantic and described as having ‘renovated the grounds of English poetry’ in the 1650s.9 Marvell’s visual writing is gripped by issues of ethics and temporality, not least during his time at Nun Appleton, while the spectators of his ekphrastic works also become involved as an associative locus and assume the focal point of the action.10 Below, I explore the narrative of Marvell’s visual transformations between 1648 and 1667 – the approximate period between the two chapters dedicated to him in Acheson’s volume – and how it forms an integral relationship between his poetic and political careers. His advancement from language tutor in Yorkshire to Member of Parliament, via a spell in the foreign office, is ­underpinned by

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weighty dilemmas of casuistry and allegiance, which required equally diverse visual encounters. From ‘The Gallery’ to the Advice-to-a-Painter poems, Marvell relishes the negotiation between text and the visual object, alongside the various processes involved in the transformation from one to another. At the centre of this inter-artistic interest is a developing curiosity about novel ways in which to examine mortality during an age when conflict seemed to be everywhere, not least (and perhaps especially) within the self. When Marvell’s fascination with how lives are represented combines with glass and reflection, we embark upon his favoured ekphrastic encounter: of specific visual and temporal moments that define human mortality. Marvell’s gallery Marvell’s interest in the visual arts would have been cultivated during a period that became renowned for increasingly distinguished private collections. The rule of Charles I saw England witness ‘the greatest period of art collecting in its history’, a point acknowledged in ‘The Gallery’ when Marvell refers to the Duke of Mantua’s collection (48), which had been purchased by the King in 1629.11 A four-year excursion to the Continent, undertaken during the early years of the English Civil War, would have done much to broaden Marvell’s interest.12 Scholars have identified in ‘The Gallery’ the influence of Botticelli’s works, including The Birth of Venus and Primavera, as well as Giambattista Marino’s volume La Galeria (1619), with its re-creation of real and imagined works of art.13 Beyond painting, a sculpture by Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598–1680) of Daphne and Apollo arguably inspires the pair’s playful appearance in ‘The Garden’, while we can also speculate about the Italianate garden structures that may have influenced the poet’s visual imagination when the same poem was composed.14 Marvell’s two-year spell as a tutor in the employ of Sir Thomas Fairfax would have also offered new insights. The erstwhile commander of the New Model Army, himself a poet and a studious translator of psalms, possessed among his collection the works of artist and miniaturist Edward Norgate.15 Several of Marvell’s poems, including ‘The Coronet’, ‘The Gallery’, and ‘A Dialogue Between the Soul and Body’, owe at least part of their influence to miniaturist traditions. In ‘The Gallery’, Marvell creates hybrid works of art to reflect a transition in artistic taste and style. The ‘arras-hangings, made / Of various faces’ (5–6) favoured during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries were slowly giving way to Mannerist painting with its emphasis on the mythical subject. ‘The Gallery’, Louis Martz suggests, ‘stands forth almost as a definition of mannerist art’, which he explains as ‘an art that deliberately recalls the lessons of the masters, and then proceeds to use those lessons in a way that departs from the effects of rational harmony and idealized beauty characteristic of the High Renaissance.’16 The poem opens with the speaker summoning an accomplice, Clora, to critique a private gallery that comprises an internalized ­representation



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of the soul. This tacit spectator, who assumes the same receptive position as the reader, is led through the story of two double-sided portraits, designed to embrace the contrasting traits of taunting seductress and sublime divinity, before she is promised ‘a thousand more … In all the forms thou can’st invent’ (41, 43).17 Here thou art painted in the dress Of an inhuman murderess; Examining upon our hearts Thy fertile shop of cruel arts: Engines more keen than ever yet Adornèd tyrant’s cabinet; Of which the most tormenting are Black eyes, red lips, and curlèd hair. But, on the other side, th’art drawn Like to Aurora in the dawn; When in the east she slumb’ring lies, And stretches out her milky thighs; While all the morning choir does sing, And manna falls, and roses spring; And, at thy feet, the wooing doves Sit pèrfecting their harmless loves. (‘The Gallery’, 9–24)

Here, Valentine Cunningham’s account of ekphrasis, the ‘pointing at an allegedly touchable, fingerable, thisness’, is precisely how this encounter with the ‘contrived’ art is established.18 The narrative resembles a dramatic monologue, addressing the complicated problem of real presence that writing can struggle to accommodate. The same directions are relayed to the speaker’s accomplice, who observes the aesthetic object, and the reader, who cannot observe it. Demonstrative pronouns and verbal gestures direct the proceedings, granting the imaginary creation the dimensions and physical properties of a touchable, even rotatable object. Within the frames, the paintings encountered here are authentic, we presume, but are presented through familiar guises. Aurora, for example, resembles the Sleeping Venus (c. 1508–10) by Giorgione, where ‘slumb’ring’ eloquently depicts the comfortable poise of the reclining figure that fills the width of the painting (Figure 10). The creamy skin, a detail emphasized by Marvell, is a distinct feature of Giorgione’s Venus, as it contrasts with the red lips and the scarlet drapery upon which she lies. Equally, though, there is a leaning towards the similar Venus of Urbino by Titian (Figure 11), who is assumed to have completed Giorgione’s painting following his death. In Titian’s painting, the seductive Venus lies awake in the foreground, bathed in soft light, as two maids rummage through a chest in the background. She shows little apparent self-consciousness in her similarly exposed reclining position. Her tilted head

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and faint smile carry hints of seductiveness, though not quite enough to suggest that her innocence is lost. To Marvell, forever fixated by the liminal boundaries between innocence and experience, particularly as they apply to the female form on the cusp of menarche, such paintings would have offered a fascinating perspective. It would be little surprise if, for a poet now alleged to find a promiscuous Maria coming of age in Upon Appleton House, such an image carried more potency in its single impenetrable look than could be exercised in words.19 Unlike poems such as ‘The Nymph Complaining for the Death of her Fawn’, where innocence is demonstrably removed, Marvell can afford to preserve one guise of innocence in ‘The Gallery’, a note of promiscuity notwithstanding, because it is to be complemented by experience on the reverse. On this occasion, ‘experience’ is represented not by villainous ‘wanton troopers’ or countrymen ‘with whistling scythe’ that ‘untimely mow’ the innocence of their bystanders, but by a fetishized female persona – Clora’s inner temptress, who ‘torments’ with ‘Black eyes, red lips, and curlèd hair’.20 The poet’s design allows him to separate the Platonic ideal of beauty and the unbridled nature of carnal human desires while retaining them as part of the same object, whereas the paintings that inspire the poem strive to contain both simultaneously. Marvell’s conception of art and its environment here reflects the distinctly private relationship he had with his poetry as a whole. Whether or not Titian’s Venus influenced Marvell’s visual construct, the new domestic surroundings created for the female subject in the painting aptly reflect the precarious balance of enclosure and exposure shown by the poem’s own sharing of a distinctly private encounter. The speaker’s invitation into the solipsistic sur-

10. Giorgione, Sleeping Venus (c. 1508–10)



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11. Titian, Venus of Urbino (1534)

roundings of the soul, including the unseen spectator as an associative locus, ensures that the only authentic witness can be that of the written word. And by combining the metaphor of the unobservable soul with aesthetic objects that have some basis in true existence, the poem allows us to engage with the visual encounter while keeping us sufficiently distanced from it. The narrator’s choice of identifiable signifiers, ‘Aurora in the dawn’ and ‘Venus in her pearly boat’, ensures that the self-contrived art object carries familiar erotic and enrapturing pleasures rather than sensations that can only be deemed by the spectator as fabricated. Thus, the poem is re-creating visual phenomena as visual phenomena rather than as something that is designed to be outshone by words. Marvell’s distinctly private encounter grants writing authority, but it allows art to retain its own sovereignty while it is staged within its own unique privacy. Nature ‘vitrified’: glass and reflection A significant tool in Marvell’s visual apparatus was the use of glass and reflection, with the poet keen to examine how images and illusions could reconfigure his studied ambiguities into visual form. This process begins with a 1648 elegy commemorating the death of Francis Villiers, the third son of the first Duke of Buckingham, with whom Marvell had travelled just a few years earlier. The poet’s use of reflection reveals a curiously self-absorbed and narcissistic

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character, whose military inspiration was seeing himself reflected through his enemies’ eyes. Lovely and admirable as he was, Yet was his sword or armour all his glass. Nor in his mistress’ eyes that joy he took, As in an enemy’s himself to look. (‘An Elegy Upon the Death of My Lord Francis Villiers’, 51–4)

The celebration of Villiers’ military acumen towards the end of the poem is preceded by this reflection on his almost charming vanity, which is playfully suggested as the route of his downfall.21 Marvell may have borrowed here from ‘Narcissus, or the Self-Lover’ by James Shirley, who, alongside Thomas Stanley, a possible patron of Marvell’s at this time, also favoured vitrified landscapes.22 With the charismatic cavalier wearing and wielding ‘glass’ – among the most brittle and superficial of materials – two separate perspectival possibilities emerge to uphold the balance of lightheartedness and profundity that extends throughout the poem. The first of these is transparency, which suggests an effectively naked warrior. This draws further attention to the promiscuity that caused Villiers’ demise, while simultaneously distinguishing the heroic Adonis figure kissed ‘in immortal shade’ (109–14) from the comparatively ‘vulgar’ bodies of Villiers’ victims (117). The second possibility is the reflection of a mirror, which renders the man an active – even dazzling – axis of light. Thus, the use of glass becomes a striking demonstration of how Marvell’s layered verbal ambiguities can be replicated by equally diverse transformative visual effects. Upon Appleton House, written around 1651, extends this use of glass and reflection in a thoughtful and introspective encomium by Marvell on his new patron’s country estate. Here, the same pair of visual possibilities, seeing through and seeing back, is reprised, though at a much greater magnitude. The first occurrence of this is in the meadows, where Marvell recasts a band of Levellers into a layered form of reflective art: They seem within the polished grass A landskip drawn in looking-glass. And shrunk in the huge pasture show As spots, so shaped, on faces do. Such fleas, ere they approach the eye, In multiplying glasses lie. They feed so wide, so slowly move, As constellations do above. (Upon Appleton House, 457–64)

The poet’s words become a verbal representation of a visual representation (a painting), of a further representation (a landscape). The effects of mimesis are once again distanced from the reader, as the imitation is not relayed directly but through the additional medium of reflective glass. This freeze-frame also marks a reversal in the rhetorical and representative modes that precede this



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point. Previously, the poet reminisces about the restoration of the ‘sweet militia’ and ‘the Switzers of our guard’, while imagining that the perfect horticultural order would align the gardener with ‘the soldier’s place’ for military precision (330–7). But this regimental language for the militarized gardens, inspired by the conventions of military topography, moves to art that minimizes the threat of the Levellers, likening them to ‘fleas’. The language of vision and perspective, from crystal to cataracts, arises at numerous points throughout the poem. Through the interplay between ‘glass’ and ‘grass’, Marvell examines the boundaries between nature and art, reality and artificiality, and the representational modes that are drawn upon for the purpose.23 Reflection becomes an analogy for this investigation, showing the complexities of creating interpretive representations when human response to any encounter elicits any number of possibilities. Marvell may hope to find consolatory signs through this single mirrored image, which offers precious safety in its frozen moment. But the mollifying properties of reflection soon give way to dynamism upon the arrival of his tutee, Mary Fairfax: Maria such, and so doth hush The world, and through the ev’ning rush. No new-born comet such a train Draws through the sky, nor star new-slain. For straight those giddy rockets fail, Which from the putrid earth exhale, But by her flames, in heaven tried, Nature is wholly vitrified. (681–8)

Mary’s appearance into the poem sparks reflective chaos. Whereas the poet’s efforts can generate only a single momentary vitrified landscape, she instantly surpasses this by vitrifying nature in its entirety. Unlike the gallant Villiers, whose reflective potential is localized owing to his shortcomings and then prematurely ended by his death, the potential behind Mary’s lives on; she becomes a beatified source of infinite images. The specular, which plays a pivotal role in Marvell’s poem, generates new levels of selfhood found more commonly in visual art of the period, where, it is suggested, the mirror ‘lends itself to selfexamination and interior dialogue’.24 In 1595 the poet George Chapman described ‘Enargia’ as a ‘cleerenes of representation’ that includes ‘the iudiciall perspectiue … motion, spirit and life’.25 The vitrification process taking place in Upon Appleton House is a striking demonstration of this in action. The generation of images caused by Mary’s power depicts what is temporally or spatially absent, while the animation generated by this sequence of events creates an imagined sense of realism, albeit one that is sustained by supernatural abilities. Fairfax’s daughter, unbridled by the same concerns as her father, prompts a unique way of seeing in the poem.

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Her powers of reflection are bestowed with remedial qualities, since ‘only she’ can prevent the cataract and restore a clouded reflection to its ‘crystal-pure’ state (692–3). And if we take ‘cataract’ to mean an obscured lens as well as a flood, Mary’s intervention could be said to restore vision that would have been partly or entirely disabled beforehand. As a conduit, she adds ‘cleerenes’ to this transformation compared to the previous specular landscape by removing the additional reflective surface through which this scene is described. According to Heinrich Plett, enargeia inspired Renaissance painting and poetry to agree that their focus should be on the recipient, and there is a clear sense of this at work in Marvell’s country-house poem.26 The underlying irony, however, is that Marvell’s poem subtly undermines the idea of representation itself. Paper, mocked as ‘futile’ in the poem, happens to be the method through which the ongoing trial of self-discovery is taking place, while poetry, which owes its potency to the visual, is acting as the judge of it. Marvell’s Cromwell: prosopopeia and reappraisal Between portraiture, glass, and reflection, Marvell was accumulating the components that would later help him to frame a new perspective of Oliver Cromwell. In 1653, Marvell became a tutor to William Dutton, a young protégé of Cromwell, after failing to land a role in government as John Milton’s assistant. It is difficult to know quite how the relationship between Marvell and Cromwell would have developed in its early stages, especially given the numerous concerns voiced by the poet in his ‘Horatian Ode’ three years earlier.27 Perhaps the letter from Milton recommending Marvell for office had procured some favour, or Marvell’s ‘The Character of Holland’, which many have seen as part of the failed job application, was seen by Cromwell and met with his approval.28 What we can establish, however, is that one of the earliest reflections of Marvell’s personal relationship with the general was an ekphrastic encounter that staged the interplay between the verbal and the visual to renegotiate personal and political perspectives. Having previously framed his suspicions about Cromwell in an Ode form derived from Horace, Marvell turns to another of Horace’s dictums, ut pictura poesis, to speak as the voice of Cromwell and, at the same time, privately reassess his own vision of the would-be Protector. Around the late summer of 1653, Marvell penned two short poems in Latin, ‘In Effigiem Oliveri Cromwell’ and ‘In eandem Reginae Sueciae transmissam’, to accompany a portrait of the general that was sent to Queen Christina of Sweden.29 The unusual portrait by Robert Walker (d. 1658) depicts Cromwell opulently dressed as a private dignitary rather than in his customary armour, wearing a chain given to him by the Swedish monarch.30 The detail of the medallion, which features the three crowns of Sweden, is significant, as the painting and poems were designed to support the ‘civil impression on European powers’ that the English Commonwealth wanted to create following the execution of Charles I.31 In 1727, Isaac le Heup, who was sent as envoy to Sweden,



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12. Circle of Robert Walker, Portrait of Oliver Cromwell, half-length, in armour and a grey cloak, wearing a chain and Order, in a feigned oval (1653)

reported sight of this portrait with eight elegant lines inscribed at the bottom, which he mistook to be Milton’s. By that description, it is clear that the portrait was being observed as a form of composite art rather than as a straightforward image of Cromwell. Marvell had already become disillusioned by this point with the competitive nature of commemorative and self-promotional writing. The 1651 poem ‘Dignissimo suo Amico Doctori Wittie’ – one of few to be printed under Marvell’s

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name during his lifetime and the last for over twenty years – makes an extraordinary case for the destruction of the poet’s own contribution.32 So it is curious that Marvell’s re-engagement with writing for the purposes of distribution appears to take the form of another paragonal competition between word and image. However, this context alone casts doubt on all being entirely what it seems, and further highlights the limits of the rudimentary distinctions applied to the sister arts. Grant Scott, for example, believes that the work of the ekphrastic poet ‘ensures the permanence of its own composition at the expense of the artwork’.33 But this stance would be a highly unusual one for Marvell to take, especially given how he steadfastly eschewed ‘permanence’, unlike many of his peers, and how he questions the integrity of writing which follows more public aims.34 Accordingly, his own aims here do not appear to be straightforwardly antagonistic. Notionally addressing a regal audience of just one in Sweden, the two poems, which comprise just ten lines in total, remain cautiously deferential to the portrait, and only one, ‘In eandem’, assumes the personal voice of Cromwell: Haec est quae toties inimicos umbra fugavit,   At sub qua cives otia lenta terunt. (‘In Effigiem Oliveri Cromwell’) (This is a representation which has routed the enemy so many times,   But beneath which citizens pass sluggish leisure.)35 Bellipotens virgo, septem regina trionum.   Christina, arctoi lucida stella poli; Cernis quas merui dura sub casside rugas;   Sicque senex armis impiger ora fero; Invia Fatorum dum per vestigia nitor,   Exequor et populi fortia jussa manu. At tibi submittit frontem reverentior umbra,   Nec sunt hi vultus regibus usque truces. (‘In eandem Reginae Sueciae transmittam’) (Virgin, powerful in war, Queen of the Seven Oxen, Christina, gleaming star of the North Pole, you see what wrinkles I have earned beneath a cruel helmet; thus an old man I actively confront warfare; while I press forward through the pathless tracts of the fates and with my troops follow through the sturdy orders of the people. But this representation submits its brow more reverently to you, nor is this countenance forever savage towards kings.)

A recent description of Marvell as ‘fascinated by the ways that art frames and enables apprehension’ is thus particularly apt.36 Cromwell, after all, is ventriloquized in verse rather than speaking on his own behalf. Did the soon-to-be Protector believe that a personal voice would be better spoken by another: a prosopopeia of sorts? Either way, Marvell was clearly inspired by the transformative interplay that could be explored here.



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A key term shared by both of these poems, and the verse epistle ‘A Letter to Doctor Ingelo’ of around the same period, is umbra – the Latin term for image, and for shadow – which reveals the poet’s concern with mimesis and how verbal representation affects visual representation. The representative issues here are evident: how could a static image represent a figure portrayed as so dynamic in the ‘Horatian Ode’; and how would Marvell swallow his private concerns of 1650 to represent Cromwell favourably to a foreign monarch? Just as Fairfax outgrows his own home in Upon Appleton House, which can ‘scarce endure’ him, so Marvell’s prosopopeia suggests that the dynamic Cromwell outgrows a static image. Yet, the extraordinary Walker portrait presents a rare moment of seeing beyond Cromwell’s militancy to the private man with cares for peace, proudly sporting a symbol of England’s strengthening relationships with Protestant Europe. So, for Marvell, aware of the degree to which his view of Cromwell had changed, it was important to signify that the history of the man to 1653 could not be encompassed by a single portrait. But instead of upstaging the visual, which has its own unique authority, language instead becomes part of a heuristic enquiry that exposes the potency and limitations of both forms.37 Here, as elsewhere, we see signs of Marvell using a visual framework to identify the shortcomings of any single representational mode. Despite keeping his words to a minimum, Marvell ensures that balance remains paramount to these accompanying poems. He does not temper Cromwell’s military reputation, despite the portrait seemingly doing so by presenting a dignitary rather than the military commander and regicide. ‘Haec est quae toties inimicios umbra fugavit’ (This is a representation which has routed the enemy so many times) is succinct and formidable. Yet, the speaker’s self-description as senex lends vulnerability and mortality to the subject of the portrait, who had previously held an air of invincibility in Marvell’s ‘Horatian Ode’. The poet seeks enargeia again here: a kind of vivid narration that seeks to make the viewer see beyond the painting, to the uncatchable and complex existence that lies behind the single representation of Cromwell. Certainly, the lines ‘Exequor et populi fortia iussa manu’ (and with my troops (I) follow through the sturdy orders of the people) (6), and ‘Nec sunt hi vultus regibus usque truces’ (Nor is this countenance forever savage towards kings), could only have come from Marvell after a reassessment and closer understanding of Cromwell’s interests in these troublesome times.38 While the conclusion of the ‘Horatian Ode’ in 1650 shows Cromwell, ‘the war and fortune’s son’, as destined to ‘fright’ the ‘spirits of the shady night’, the reoccurrence of ‘umbra’ in the poems of 1653 seems to align him closer to them. As seen with the Levellers earlier, relegated to ‘fleas’, the fearful augury of an unpredictable future under Cromwell now seems much less threatening, while he, in turn, becomes more of a mystery. The representation of a private man about whom opinion could be divided and could change significantly was not easily met by a static portrait, however unique. A judicious Marvell had to reconcile the tension between validating the painting’s diplomatic intent and acknowledging Cromwell’s formidable reputation on foreign shores.

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Ekphrasis and mortality As the decade progressed, Marvell assumed greater involvement in commemorating the marriages and deaths of his acquaintances. In 1656 John Dutton sent him to bring ‘some good Company of friends’ to support his nephew William in fear that plots would be made to claim his estate.39 The strong connections between uncle and nephew that Marvell observed during his spell as tutor to William Dutton would presage his own avuncular bond with William Popple. Marvell then showed his growing fondness for family bonds by writing two songs for the marriage of Mary Cromwell in late 1657 and a Latin epitaph in 1658 for Jane Oxenbridge, the first wife of John Oxenbridge, with whom he and William Dutton had resided in Eton. The use of ‘anima’ in this epitaph, identifying the passage of the soul, reveals Marvell’s continued search for a stoical introversion regarding the lives of others who meant something to him. In September 1658, Oliver Cromwell died following a series of tragic circumstances, including the death of his beloved daughter, Elizabeth. Marvell joined the commemorations by writing ‘A Poem Upon the Death of His Late Highness the Lord Protector’, which was due to be published alongside other elegies by John Dryden and Thomas Sprat until it was replaced at a late stage by a contribution from Edmund Waller. Marvell’s poem has earned some praise for evoking the close relationship between himself and Cromwell – ‘a friend mourning for a friend’ – but it has also been criticized for failing to ‘compete’ with the previous Cromwell poems or to engage fully in the ‘voluptuous emotional activity’ of an elegy.40 Marvell has been accused of showing no affection for Cromwell whatsoever, with one critic even labelling the elegy a ‘poetic failure’.41 Once again, then, the notion of ‘competition’ is used to determine the effectiveness of the medium in question. But it is difficult to see how this conclusion has been reached, and critics in the most part have done little to accentuate the visual impact that is both immediate and recurring within the poem. The Cromwell elegy is memorable for its rare show of intimacy, for which ekphrasis, once again, was key. Cromwell’s funeral was a grim and low-profile affair, with neither ceremony nor oration. His rapidly decomposing corpse had been privately interred in early September 1658, well in advance of the November state funeral, which Marvell attended. Marvell’s commemorative elegy differs from the published contributions in its vigorous dedication to the private man, who had faced damning criticism in the months prior to his death on account of his ‘dissimulation … reservedness, privacy and silence’.42 Marvell, who knew better, responds by showing Cromwell to have died not through exertion in battle or public duty, but through an even nobler affliction: a broken heart at his daughter’s death: But rather than in his Eliza’s pain Not love, not grieve, would neither live nor reign:



Ekphrasis and mortality in Marvell83 And in himself so oft immortal tried, Yet in compassion of another died. (‘A Poem upon the Death of his Late Highness the Lord Protector’, 85–8)

The trail of death and grief had been devastating. Elizabeth’s son had died in June, which accelerated her own decline. As her condition worsened, Cromwell surrendered his public affairs to attend her bedside. Marvell turns to ekphrasis to express mortality, with reflection and glass once again employed to evoke the iconic power of family bonds: Like polished mirrors, so his steely breast Had every figure of her woes expressed; And with the damp of her last gasps obscured, Had drawn such stains as were not to be cured. Fate could not either reach with single stroke, But the dear image fled, the mirror broke. (73–8)

The visual construction, both powerful and delicate, captures a particularly poignant moment. Reflection represents vitality, with mortality introduced as an obscuring layer that infringes upon it. At his stricken daughter’s side, Cromwell smothers her close in his arms as her final breath leaves a stain on his armour, which both breaks the reflection and ends her life. Cromwell never recovered from her passing, even willing himself to his death. The stain on the armour becomes like the outbreak of infection from daughter to father – the illness that would lead to Cromwell senior’s death was reported only days later. The breaking of that reflection not only shatters the bond between father and daughter, but also drains away the life of the once ‘indefatigable’ Cromwell. Reflection and the vitreous here represent the iconoclastic fracture of a family bond, and the fall of a dynasty. While Marvell’s corporeal imagery may cause us to grimace on occasion, here, it contributes towards the most insular and intimate moment of his testimony: I saw him dead. A leaden slumber lies And mortal sleep over those wakeful eyes: Those gentle rays under the lids were fled, Which through his looks that piercing sweetness shed; That port which so majestic was and strong, Loose and deprived of vigour, stretched along: All withered, all discoloured, pale and wan, How much another thing, no more that man? Oh human glory vain, Oh death, Oh wings, Oh worthless world, Oh transitory things! (247–56)

Very few people saw Cromwell’s corpse, but it is conceivable that Marvell was one of them. While he may be describing here the effigy that was prepared for

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spectators and the funeral, the blunt first-person declaration, ‘I saw him dead’, is particularly striking, and decidedly rare in his political verse.43 This, together with the apostrophe and the shock at human decay, seems to identify the ineffable subject: Cromwell’s own body. As the editors of this volume have noted, the appeal of Horace’s dictum ut pictura poesis was both pictorial and emotive vividness, which was often explored in scenes of colour and grandeur. Marvell’s vividness is contrived by reversing this radiance to something understated, grotesque, and unnatural. The before-and-after comparison in these lines replays the decomposition of the cadaver in harrowing fashion, stripping the object of its normal form to the point where the resulting anti-aesthetic object now requires attention: ‘How much another thing.’ Again, Cunningham’s notion of the ‘touchable, fingerable, thisness’ – the tangibility and absolute thereness of the aesthetic object – helps to distinguish the tenor of these lines.44 The ekphrastic encounter undertaken here – the emotive redelivery of a visual experience into a verbal experience – reveals what appears to be a remarkably rare and private witness to the venerable Protector. Futile competition: Marvell’s Advices Finally, I wish to draw upon The Last Instructions to a Painter, one of a series of satirical responses by Marvell and others to Edmund Waller’s Instructions to a Painter (1665), reflecting the bungled management of the Second Dutch War. The trend initiated by Waller emerged through a 1658 translation of an Italian poem in which the poet describes to the painter a Venetian victory over the Turks, so that the poem becomes ‘a verbal painting’.45 Antagonistic in both title and approach, the genre anticipates the theoretical battleground between poetry and painting that would gain momentum via one of Marvell’s contemporaries and former colleagues in office, John Dryden.46 Several extant copies of Marvell’s poem are dated 4 September 1667, but unlike the Second and Third Advice-to-a-Painter poems, which both circulated widely in manuscript, The Last Instructions appears to have had a very limited circulation until its first appearance in print in 1689. Scientific developments in the later seventeenth century, including the technologies of optics and microscopy, offered new opportunities for innovative visual enterprises. For Marvell, intrigued by geometry, perspective, and the properties of glass, the experimentalists of London’s Royal Society presented new and eclectic means with which to further his heuristic enquiry into the merits of written and visual media. An example of this is Robert Hooke’s Micrographia (1665), a volume combining detailed miniatures with observations, which makes an early appearance in The Last Instructions. Marvell’s poem immediately sets out to reverse Waller’s convictions by questioning the methods of representation at work. The painter is invited to join Hooke and ‘through the microscope, take aim’ (16), demanding unattainable levels of precision. The ‘bold pencil’ of Waller’s artist is supplanted by a ‘desperate pencil’ (23), as Marvell’s



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allusion to Protogenes suggests that an artist may require sheer ‘chance’ rather than skill to complete his work (25–6). Unlike his modest eight-line prosopopoeia for Cromwell, The Last Instructions contains clear hints at writing’s superior abilities: Dear painter, draw this Speaker to the foot; Where pencil cannot, there my pen shall do’t: That may his body, this his mind explain. (The Last Instructions to a Painter, 863–5)

To Acheson, it is the attention to technology within the poem that fuels its paragonal energy. Unlike conventional ekphrastic verse, she argues, the claim for the superiority of poetry extends beyond the traditional reasons of the paragone, and here includes the specific context of technology, with which the field of art had become increasingly integrated. Poetry becomes superior, she continues, because ‘it is less technological and therefore less mediated, less a part of the world of commerce, less foreign, and specifically, less Dutch’.47 This reading of the poem benefits enormously from highlighting Marvell’s contemporary concerns. Where ekphrastic poetry often consciously distances itself from the context in which it is written, Marvell’s Advices intimately involve the immediate political and artistic circumstances of the period. It could also be the case that Marvell’s engagement with new scientific and visual phenomena, or his position in government, had prompted a stronger defence of the more organic written word. But Acheson’s reading is also, to some degree, a selective one. While The Last Instructions clearly demonstrates some evidence of engaging in paragonal debate, Acheson overlooks several key moments, including the denouement, where the conciliatory poet aligns his objectives with the painter’s: So thou and I, dear painter, represent In quick effigy, others’ faults, and feign By making them ridiculous, to restrain. (390–2) Painter, adieu! How well our arts agree! Poetic picture, painted poetry! But this great work is for our monarch fit: And henceforth Charles only to Charles shall sit. His master-hand the ancients shall outdo, Himself the poet and the painter too. (943–8)

The distended Last Instructions adheres to the conventional pressures of ekphrastic verse by making visible attempts to differentiate between the visual and verbal experience. But any claims for the superiority of poetry are counterbalanced by this wonderfully alliterative homage to Horace, and by the acknowledged futility of competition. It is debatable whether writing was, in fact, ‘less technological’, for a poet who was possibly contemplating a rare

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­ igh-risk print venture at this time. Writing was certainly more manipulative, h with propaganda machines in full momentum. It was Edmund Waller’s praise for the Duke of York’s victory at Lowestoft in June 1665, despite the mutinies that followed during the same month, which prompted the satirical replies. And despite his position in Parliament, Marvell was decidedly unimpressed by the government’s decision to claim the Four Days’ Battle of June 1666 as a victory. The conclusion to The Last Instructions reads as if Marvell has deliberately showcased the skirmish between word and image to emphasize the subsequent remarriage and the futility of intermedial competition. It could be argued that Marvell is, in fact, reflecting upon the impossibility of ekphrasis here. Writing for art ‘exists and thrives under the knowledge of failure’, notes Stephen Cheeke.48 ‘There is something hopeless in what it is attempting to do’, he adds, with ut pictura poesis ‘only ever a partial explorative truth’.49 As such, the ekphrastic construction becomes a fitting one for Marvell’s poem, which makes representation its framework only to underpin it with an emphasis on failure. At the end of the Third Advice, Marvell grants the poet-speaker and painter a common objective – as whistleblowers against scandal and conspiracy. ‘What servants will conceal, and couns’llors spare / To tell, the painter and the poet dare’ (439–40), he boldly pronounces. In The Last Instructions, however, where greater tension has been generated between the ‘sister arts’, both poet and painter find themselves effectively united at the eleventh hour by their powerlessness. Remarkably, the genre that is usually considered to distinguish between two modes of experience to the betterment of poetry becomes a parody of itself and, in turn, an apt metaphor for the political calamity it represents. ‘Art indeed is long…’ Marvell’s vibrant relationship with visual culture is best demonstrated by the intriguing narratives that form within and between his works. In 1649, he concludes an elegy to the young Lord Hastings with the terse phrase, ‘art indeed is long, but life is short’, disputing the claims of ‘art’ to posterity while the human body has none. The addition of ‘indeed’ to the popular aphorism shows indifference to art, for which being ‘long’ was – dispiritingly – a far more certain condition than the unpredictable and temporary span of life. But there are also signs that Marvell began to embrace increasingly diverse and eclectic visual strategies to depict the complex physical and psychological changes that made his subjects fundamentally human. As he discovered more about the deep contours of family life, an ekphrastic framework for representing mortality provided a backbone for his iconic writing of the 1650s, culminating in the account of Cromwell’s demise in a strikingly emotional elegy. Occasionally, this is counterpoised by the visual rhetoric of ‘potential’, achieved through glass and reflection, which is reserved for the young and the coming of age – though it also served to demonstrate the agonies of lost potential, the most



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painful cost of war and revolution. The emotional attachment of humanity and mortality contained within these encounters ensures that conceiving of ekphrasis as merely ‘representation’ is no longer sufficient. Rather, Marvell’s connection between art and humanity requires us to question more about the form that is being embodied. A sustained heuristic enquiry into the relative merits of writing and art reaches a natural conclusion in The Last Instructions. Adopting the ekphrastic tradition for his satirical designs, Marvell brazenly contemporizes it by allowing neither poetry nor painting to gain absolute superiority, while simultaneously exposing the flaws inherent in such elementary comparisons. Notes  1 For useful summaries, see Michael Schoenfeldt, ‘Marvell and the Designs of Art’, in Derek Hirst and Steven N. Zwicker (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Andrew Marvell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 87–101; Rosalie L. Colie, ‘My Ecchoing Song’: Andrew Marvell’s Poetry of Criticism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970); and J. B. Leishman, The Art of Marvell’s Poetry (London: Hutchinson, 1966).  2 Schoenfeldt, ‘Marvell and the Designs of Art’, p. 87.  3 Martin Dzelzainis, ‘“Ridiculous Pictures, and odious Medails”: Visual Propaganda in the Second and Third Anglo-Dutch Wars’, unpublished conference paper, Colloque International: Breaking the Image, Montpellier, Université Paul Valéry, 16 November 2012.  4 Marvell could have taken part in a 1651 embassy to Holland, as well as espionage missions during the 1660s. See Blair Worden, Literature and Politics in Cromwellian England: John Milton, Andrew Marvell, Marchamont Nedham (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 399–404; Nigel Smith, Andrew Marvell: The Chameleon (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), pp. 171–2. On the resulting visual tropes, see, for example, Edward Holberton, ‘Representing the Sea in Andrew Marvell’s “Advice to a Painter” Satires’, Review of English Studies, 66 (2015), 71–86.  5 Martin Dzelzainis, ‘Marvell and the Dutch in 1665’, in Edward Jones (ed.), A Concise Companion to the Study of Manuscripts, Printed Books, and the Production of Early Modern Texts (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015), pp. 249–65.  6 See, for example, Richard Meek, Narrating the Visual in Shakespeare (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009); Rebecca Olsen, Arras Hanging: The Textile that Determined Early Modern Literature and Drama (Plymouth: Rowman & Littlefield, 2013); Ann Hollinshead Hurley, John Donne’s Poetry and Early Modern Visual Culture (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 2005).  7 Katherine O. Acheson, Visual Rhetoric and Early Modern English Literature (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), chs 1, 3.  8 Ibid., p. 121; James A.W. Heffernan, Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993), passim.  9 David Kennedy, The Ekphrastic Encounter in Contemporary British Poetry and Elsewhere (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012); Paul Hamilton, ‘Marvell and Romantic Patriotism’, in Warren Chernaik and Martin Dzelzainis (eds), Marvell and Liberty (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999); Smith, The Chameleon, p. 101.

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10 See Kennedy, The Ekphrastic Encounter, pp. 4, 34. 11 Charles H. Hinnant, ‘Marvell’s Gallery of Art’, Renaissance Quarterly, 24 (1971), 26–37. 12 Marvell visited France, Spain, Italy, and Holland, according to Milton’s letter to John Bradshaw. Elizabeth Story Donno (ed.), Andrew Marvell: the Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), pp. 99–100. 13 Jean H. Hagstrum, The Sister Arts: The Tradition of Literary Pictorialism and English Poetry from Dryden to Gray (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1958), p. 114. 14 John Dixon Hunt, ‘“Loose Nature” and the “Garden Square”: The Gardenist Background for Marvell’s Poetry’, in C. A. Patrides (ed.), Approaches to Marvell: The York Tercentenary Lectures (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), pp. 331–51. 15 Joan Faust, Andrew Marvell’s Liminal Lyrics: The Space Between (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2012), p. 39. 16 Louis L. Martz, ‘Marvell and Herrick: The Masks of Mannerism’, in Patrides (ed.), Approaches to Marvell, pp. 205, 195. 17 All references to Marvell’s poetry are taken from Nigel Smith (ed.), The Poems of Andrew Marvell (Harlow: Pearson Longman, revised edn, 2007). 18 Valentine Cunningham, ‘Why Ekphrasis?’, Classical Philology, 102 (2007), 57–71 (p. 61). 19 Derek Hirst and Steven N. Zwicker, Andrew Marvell: Orphan of the Hurricane (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 52–4. 20 See ‘The Nymph Complaining for the Death of Her Fawn’, ll. 1–2; ‘Upon Appleton House’, ll. 393–400. 21 It is thought that Villiers compromised his safety by spending an amorous night with Mary Kirke, the daughter of Aurelian Townsend. 22 See Ian C. Parker, ‘Marvell’s “Crystal” Mirrour’, Notes and Queries, 56 (2009), 219–26. On Marvell’s poetic networking and collaboration in the late 1640s, see Nicholas McDowell, Poetry and Allegiance in the English Civil Wars: Marvell and the Cause of Wit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 23 Some referential overlap for this section can be found with Keith McDonald, ‘“The Genius of the House”: Andrew Marvell’s Private Lord Fairfax’, in Andrew Hopper and Philip Major (eds), England’s Fortress: New Perspectives on Thomas, 3rd Lord Fairfax (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), pp. 207–9. 24 Sabine Melchior-Bonnet, The Mirror: A History, trans. Katherine H. Jewett (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 126–7. 25 George Chapman, Poems, ed. Phyllis B. Bartlett (New York: Russell & Russell, 1969), p. 49. 26 Heinrich F. Plett, Enargeia in Classical Antiquity and the Early Modern Age (Leiden: Brill, 2012), p. 106. 27 On which, see Blair Worden, ‘The Politics of Marvell’s Horatian Ode’, Historical Journal, 27 (1984), 525–47; John Creaser, ‘Prosody and Liberty in Milton and Marvell’, in Graham Parry and Joad Raymond (eds), Milton and the Terms of Liberty (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2002), p. 47. 28 The assumption that Marvell submitted the poem for preferment has been made by, among others, Jason Peacey, Politicians and Pamphleteers: Propaganda During the English Civil Wars and Interregnum (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), p. 90, and David



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Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, 1627–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 281. 29 See The Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell, ed. H. M. Margoliouth, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 3rd edn, 1971), vol. 2, p. 304. Edward Holberton, ‘Bellipotens Virgo’, Times Literary Supplement (21 November 2008), pp. 14–15, convincingly dates this Latin verse to 1653, a year earlier than it has normally been attributed. 30 Though the original painting is now lost, a memorial copy found by William Greaves was kept by Cromwell. This painting is overlooked by Knoppers in her study of Cromwellian representation; see Laura Lunger Knoppers, Constructing Cromwell: Ceremony, Portrait, and Print, 1645–1661 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), ch. 2. 31 Sean Kelsey, Inventing a Republic: The Political Culture of the English Commonwealth, 1649–1653 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), p. 65. 32 Marvell penned two commendatory poems for a translation of the Popular Errours by Hull physician Robert Witty. 33 Grant F. Scott, ‘The Rhetoric of Dilation: Ekphrasis and Ideology’, Word & Image, 7:4 (1991), 301–10 (p. 301). 34 See Randy Robertson, ‘Lovelace and the “barbed Censurers”: Lucasta and Civil War Censorship’, Studies in Philology, 103 (2006), 465–98; John McWilliams, “‘A Storm of Lamentations Writ”: “Lachrymae Musarum” and Royalist Culture after the Civil War’, Yearbook of English Studies, 33 (2003), 273–89. 35 The translations are provided by Estelle Haan, as reproduced in Smith (ed.), The Poems of Andrew Marvell. 36 Schoenfeldt, ‘Marvell and the Designs of Art’, p. 87. 37 Compare with Meek’s argument in the previous chapter for the restatement of the paragone in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 16. 38 Though note the earlier translation used by Smith in the first edition of The Poems of Andrew Marvell (Harlow: Longman, 2003): ‘[I] execute the strong commands of my people with force’ (p. 314). 39 Art Kavanagh, ‘Andrew Marvell and the Duttons of Sherborne in 1657’, Notes and Queries, 248 (2003), 184–5. 40 Pierre Legouis, Andrew Marvell: Poet, Puritan, Patriot (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2nd edn, 1968), p. 111; Annabel Patterson, Marvell and the Civic Crown (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), p. 94. 41 M.C. Bradbrook and M. G. Lloyd Thomas, Andrew Marvell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1940), pp. 82–3; M. L. Donnelly, ‘“And still new stopps to various time apply’d”: Marvell, Cromwell, and the Problem of Representation at Midcentury’, in Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (eds), On the Celebrated and Neglected Poems of Andrew Marvell (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1992), p. 167. 42 James Fraser, quoted in Joad Raymond, ‘Framing Liberty: Marvell’s First Anniversary and the Instrument of Government’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 62 (1999), 313–50 (pp. 349–50). 43 See Paul Hammond, ‘Marvell’s Pronouns’, Essays in Criticism, 53 (2003), 219–34 (p. 219). 44 Cunningham, ‘Why Ekphrasis?’, p. 61. 45 Martin Dzelzainis, ‘Andrew Marvell and the Restoration Literary Underground: Printing the Painter Poems’, The Seventeenth Century, 22 (2007), 395–410 (p. 396).

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46 See Jason Lawrence’s Chapter 4, below. Dryden worked with Marvell in the Protectorate’s ‘Office for Foreign Tongues’ and also attended the state funeral of Oliver Cromwell in 1658. An elegy by Dryden featured in the commemorative collection from which Marvell’s poem was withdrawn. 47 Acheson, Visual Rhetoric, pp. 8–9, 93. 48 Stephen Cheeke, Writing for Art: The Aesthetics of Ekphrasis (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008), p. 2. 49 Ibid., pp. 1–2.

4

‘The Painter has made a finer Story than the Poet’: Jonathan Richardson’s ekphrastic ‘Dissertation’ on Poussin’s Tancred and Erminia Jason Lawrence

The turn of the eighteenth century witnessed the emergence of art theory as a distinct discipline in England. This seems to have been prompted initially by John Dryden’s prose translation of the French artist and theorist Charles du Fresnoy’s Latin poem De Arte Graphica, printed for the first time in 1695. Dryden’s translation, The Art of Painting, also included a rendering of the explanatory notes in French added by another artist-critic Roger de Piles in the parallel-text posthumous first edition of 1668, ‘Together with an Original Preface containing A PARALLEL betwixt PAINTING and POETRY’, which cited an extensive passage, in English translation, from Giovan Pietro Bellori’s discourse on ‘L’Idea del Pittore’, printed with the first edition of Le Vite de’ pittori, scultori, et architetti moderni in Rome in 1672. These various multilingual sources for Dryden’s work, undertaken at the urging of ‘many of our most Skillful Painters, and other Artists’ in London, highlight the need to consider the marked impact of recent European works on the nascent development of art criticism in England.1 Du Fresnoy’s poem opens with an acknowledgement of the classical paragone between the sibling arts of painting and poetry by alluding to Horace’s famous dictum directly: UT PICTURA POESIS ERIT; similisque Poesi Sit Pictura, refert par æmula quæq; sororem, Alternantque vices & nomina; muta Poesis Dicitur hæc, Pictura loquens solet illa vocari. (Painting and Poesy are two Sisters, which are so like in all things, that they mutually lend to each other both their Name and Office. One is call’d a dumb Poesy, and the other a speaking Picture.)2

The point of comparison was to remain at least implicit in all the subsequent works of art theory that will be considered in this chapter, as indicated by the title of Dryden’s own prefatory ‘Parallel, of Poetry and Painting’. It might be

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significant, however, that this title reverses the order of the arts from both the Latin poem and the title page of his translation, suggesting a different emphasis in Dryden’s assessment of the two in relation to the immediate sources he is citing and translating. De Piles adds a further quotation from Horace’s Ars Poetica in his notes to du Fresnoy’s poem, translated in Dryden’s ‘Observations on the Art of Painting’, in order to accentuate the primacy of the visual medium in the comparison: The advantage which Painting possesses above Poesie is this; That amongst so great a Diversity of Languages, she makes her self understood by all the Nations of the World; and that she is necessary to all other Arts, because of the need which they have of demonstrative Figures, which often give more Light to the Understanding than the clearest discourses we can make. Segnius irritant animos demissa per aurem, Quam quæ sunt oculis commissa fidelibus.

Hearing excites the Mind by slow degrees, The Man is warm’d at once by what he sees.3

The privileging of the visual over the verbal in Dryden’s Latin and French sources is also an important feature of Bellori’s discourse, much of which is synthesized in the long passage on the ‘Idea of a Painter’ included in the English preface, despite the translator’s reservations about the ‘pompous Expressions’ of the Italian original: Ma perche l’Idea dell’ Eloquenza cede tanto all’ Idea della Pittura, quanto la vista è più efficace delle parole, io però qui manco nel dire, e taccio. (But because the Idea of eloquence yields to the Idea of painting, to the extent that sight is more effective than words, I therefore now fail of speech and fall silent.)4 But since the Idea of Eloquence is as far inferior to that of Painting, as the force of Words is to the Sight, I must here break off abruptly, and having conducted the Reader as it were to a secret Walk, there leave him in the midst of Silence to contemplate those Idea’s.5

The English translator’s own priorities, however, appear significantly different: while acknowledging in the preface a key premise of du Fresnoy’s poem, ‘that the chief end of Painting it to please the Eyes: and ’tis one great End of Poetry to please the Mind’, Dryden, perhaps unsurprisingly, adds another Horatian element to the grounds for comparison: Thus far the Parallel of the Arts holds true: with this difference, That the principal end of Painting is to please; and the chief design of Poetry is to instruct. In this the latter seems to have the advantage of the former.6

By denying to painting the capability to do anything other than appeal to the senses, Dryden subtly undermines the French and Italian theorists he is translating, and simultaneously elevates verbal art above the visual, because of its capacity to teach as well as delight. Dryden’s relegation of the art of painting



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below poetry in the final decade of the seventeenth century was, in time, to provoke a sustained response from the earliest, and one of the most significant, painter-critics in eighteenth-century England, Jonathan Richardson Senior.7 Dryden’s translation of The Art of Painting was printed again, in slightly revised form, in 1716, shortly after the appearance of Richardson’s first work, An Essay on the Theory of Painting (1715), which begins by taking issue immediately with a perceived underestimation of the art in previous critical ­assessments, ­including that of his most notable English forerunner: Because Pictures are universally Delightful, and accordingly made one part of our Ornamental Furniture, many, I believe, consider the Art of Painting but as a pleasing Superfluity; at best, that it holds but a low Rank with respect to its Usefullness to Mankind.8

It is in this English and continental context that I want to consider further the development, in the second decade of the eighteenth century, of Richardson’s critical writings on painting and, in particular, its relationship with the art of poetry. The starting point for the comparison in Richardson’s work is noticeably different from that in both Dryden and du Fresnoy, arguing forcefully in the first of his Two Discourses (1719) that ‘The Principal End of Painting is the Improvement of the Mind; and next to That Mere Pleasure’: I repeat it again, and would inculcate it, Painting is a fine piece of Workmanship; ’tis a Beautiful Ornament, and as such gives us Pleasure; But over and above this We PAINTERS are upon the Level with Writers, as being Poets, Historians, Philosophers and Divines, we Entertain, and Instruct equally with Them. This is true and manifest beyond dispute whatever Mens Notions have been.9

The opening section of this Essay on the whole Art of Criticism, as it relates to Painting attempts to demonstrate to readers ‘how to judge of the Goodness of a Picture’, and it is significant that, for Richardson, such an appraisal must focus not only on the technical aspects of a painting, but also consider ‘If in a Picture the Story be well chosen, and finely Told (at least) if not Improv’d, if it fill the Mind with Noble, and Instructive Ideas’. Where Dryden had placed painting below poetry in his paragone, Richardson does not merely put it on the same level, but rather reverses the order, wherever a painting presents ‘a fine Story artfully communicated to my Imagination, not by Speech, nor Writing, but in a manner preferable to either of them’.10 As a practical demonstration of his methods of evaluation, Richardson included in his essay an extended verbal description of a painting by Nicolas Poussin, which he had recently studied at first hand soon after its arrival in London, explaining that ‘such a Dissertation will be a fine Exercise of a Gentleman’s Abilities as a Connoisseur’.11 In his next work, An Account of Some of the Statues, Bas-reliefs, Drawings and Pictures in Italy, &c (1722), Richardson was to expand his descriptive technique to works of art viewed in person only by his son, arguing in the preface that ‘such a Description Well Made, and

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Carefully Attended to, may put a Reader Almost upon a Level with him that sees the thing; and in a much Better Situation than thousands who see without Judgment of their Own, or the Assistance of Others to show them what is before their Eyes’.12 Carol Gibson-Wood has suggested ‘that this ekphrastic role of verbal description is consistent with Richardson’s definition of art as a means of communicating ideas’,13 and it is striking that there is a direct precedent for the sustained use of such a descriptive method in one of Dryden’s immediate seventeenth-century sources, with which Richardson also seems to have been familiar. In his address to the ‘Lettore’ at the start of Le Vite de’ pittori (1672), Bellori explains the genesis of the ekphrastic technique that he has applied to specific works throughout the accounts of the lives of his selected artists: Mi sono fermato sopra di alcune con più particolare osservatione; poiche havendo già descritto l’immagini di Rafaelle nelle camera Vaticane, … fu consiglio di Nicolò Pussino che io proseguissi nel modo istesso, e che oltre l’inventione universale, io sodisfacessi al concetto, e moto di ciascheduna particolar figura, & all’attioni che accompagnano gli affetti. Nel che fare hò sempre dubitato di riuscir minuto nella moltiplicità de’ particolari, con pericolo di oscurità, e di fastidio, havendo la pittura suo diletto nella vista, che non partecipa se non poco all’udito. Et è pessima cosa il ricorrere all’aiuto del proprio ingegno, l’aggiungere alle figure quei sensi, e quelle passioni, che in esse non sono, con divertirle, e disturbarle da gli originali. Mi sono però contenuto nelle parti di semplice traduttore. (I have dwelt on some with more detailed observation, because, having at an earlier time described the images by Raphael in the Stanze of the Vatican, ... I was advised by Nicolas Poussin that I should proceed in the same manner, and that in addition to the overall intention I should deal with the conceit and movement of each particular figure and with the actions that accompany the affetti.14 In so doing, I have always been doubtful about going too minutely into the multiplicity of particulars at the risk of being obscure and tedious, for the delight of painting resides in sight, which has little to do with hearing. And it is a very bad thing to resort to one’s own imagination, imputing to figures meanings and passions that are not present in them, making them different and distorting them from the originals. I have therefore confined myself to the role of mere translator.)15

I want to argue here that Bellori’s descriptive technique provided a direct model for Richardson, in spite of the reservations about its potential risks expressed by the Italian author. In his ekphrastic ‘Dissertation’ on the Poussin painting, which will be the principal focus of the remainder of this chapter, Richardson does conspicuously pay attention to the movement and emotional expression of each individual character within the canvas as a whole, thereby applying the French painter’s key recommendations for the practice of critical ­ekphrasis to a description of one of his own works. Despite Bellori’s insistence that he intends to be a mere translator (‘semplice traduttore’) of what he has seen, in order to avoid making an obscure, distorted interpretation



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deriving from his imagination (‘proprio ingegno’), Richardson seems more comfortable in his own description with the notion that ‘the act of describing art is always an act of interpretation’.16 This might be because, rather than focusing solely on his own interpretation of the ‘sensi’ and ‘passioni’ of the figures in the picture, Richardson also carefully explores in the ‘Dissertation’ Poussin’s visual ­interpretation of a celebrated literary source in his depiction of an episode from Torquato Tasso’s Italian poem Gerusalemme liberata (1581). Richardson is thus aware that he is describing verbally, to a readership which almost ­certainly has not seen the work directly, a picture that is itself an example of what Murray Krieger has called ‘reverse ekphrasis’,17 where the painter offers a visual representation of verbal representation, rather than vice versa.18 The Poussin picture described by Richardson was purchased in France in 1717 by the noted English history painter Sir James Thornhill, from a bankrupt French gentleman, for the sum of 2,500 livres. The painting, measuring 105 centimetres by 75 centimetres, and dating from the mid-1630s, was the later of two depictions by the French painter of a dramatic moment in canto XIX of Tasso’s great epic poem of the First Crusade, where the pagan princess Erminia discovers and subsequently revives the wounded Christian knight Tancredi, with whom she is secretly in love. Thornhill’s purchase was the first of Poussin’s paintings to reach England, and it created quite a stir on its arrival in early Georgian London. By 1719 Richardson had had the opportunity to study the newly acquired picture in detail, and he included his (and some of Thornhill’s) observations on it in a letter to the Dutch connoisseur and collector Nicholas Flinck, who had been visited in Rotterdam in 1716 by Richardson’s son, Jonathan Junior. It was an English translation of part of this letter that was subsequently included in the section on how to judge ‘Of the Goodness of a Picture’ in An Essay on the Whole Art of Criticism as it relates to Painting, the first of his Two Discourses. Gibson-Wood has argued that ‘because Flinck would not have had the painting before him when he read the letter, the description represents Richardson’s ekphrastic mode at its best, and demonstrates how he adapted it to his methodical critical procedure’,19 and this would apply equally to the later readership of the printed discourse. The ‘Dissertation’ is placed towards the end of the first section of Richardson’s Essay, where it is intended to be read as a practical exemplum of the ‘System of Rules to be apply’d’ in the careful consideration of any painting.20 Richardson suggests adopting an expanded version of de Piles’s recently outlined numerical scale (with marks ranging from 18 to 1) to assess a painting in relation to seven essential categories: colouring, composition, handling, drawing, and then, more significantly, invention, expression, and finally ‘Grace and Greatness’.21 Richardson gives a brief demonstration of this numerical scale in relation to his assessment of Anthony Van Dyck’s half-length portrait of Frances Brydges, wife of the second earl of Exeter, before progressing on to a more sustained survey of the Poussin picture.

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After a short account of the painting’s provenance and dimensions, Richardson begins by considering its composition and then invention, one of his key additions to de Piles’s scale, specifically in relation to Poussin’s decision to depict ‘a Story in Tasso’s Gerusalemme Cant. 19’, which the critic briefly summarizes for the benefit of the reader: Tancred a Christian Hero, and Argante a Pagan Gyant retire to a Solitary place amongst the Mountains to try their fortune in single combat; Argante is slain, the other so desperately wounded that after he had gone a little way he dropp’d, and fell into a swoon. Erminia who was in Love with him, and Vafrino his ’Squire (by what accident ’tis too long to tell) found him in this condition, but after the first fright perceiving Life in him she bound up his Wounds, and her Veil not being sufficient for that purpose she cut off her fine Hair to supply that defect, and so recover’d him, and brought him safe to the Army.22

Richardson’s familiarity with Tasso’s poem, almost 140 years after its first printing, from which he quotes directly in Italian later in the ‘Dissertation’, matches Poussin’s own keen interest in the epic poem nearly a century earlier. Having outlined the scene in the Italian poem, Richardson then confronts the difficult task of trying to describe the composition of the picture with sufficient enargeia and detail to bring it vividly before the eyes of his readership:23 Poussin has chosen the instant of her cutting off her Hair; Tancred lyes in a Graceful Attitude, and well contrasted towards one end of the Picture, his Feet coming about the middle, and at a little distance from the bottom; Vafrino is at his head raising him up against a little bank on which he supports himself kneeling on His left knee. Erminia is at his feet, kneeling on the Ground with her Right knee; beyond her at a distance lyes Argante dead; Behind are the Horses of Erminia, and Vafrino; And towards the top at that end of the Picture which is on the left hand as you look upon it, and over the heads of Tancred, and Vafrino are two Loves with their Torches in their hands; the Back-Ground is the Rocks, Trunks of Trees with few Leaves, or Branches, and a Sombrous Sky.24

Following this precise evocation of the painting for the benefit of readers without direct access to it, it is noteworthy that the critic’s immediate instinct is to make a comparison between the visual representation and its literary source, emphasizing notable differences as much as similarities, in order to illustrate aspects of Poussin’s invention. Richardson was almost certainly unaware that the Thornhill painting was, in fact, the French painter’s second depiction of the same moment from canto 19 of Tasso’s poem, and indeed at least his fourth based on romantic episodes from the twenty-canto poem that he had painted by the middle of the 1630s,25 but some of his most acute observations are equally applicable to both of Poussin’s Tancred and Erminia paintings.26 The first point of contrast that Richardson draws between the painting and its poetic source, however, does unwittingly highlight some of the most significant alterations made in Poussin’s later depiction of Tasso’s scene. Richardson



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13. Nicolas Poussin, Tancred and Erminia (c. 1634)

attributes the lack of any indication of the intensity of the physical combat between Argante and Tancredi in the Thornhill picture to Poussin’s sense of decorum, implying that this is a conscious alteration from his verbal source, where the post-combat scene discovered by Vafrino and Erminia is conveyed far more graphically: Giunsero in loco a la città vicino Quando è il sol ne l’occaso e imbruna l’orto, e trovaron di sangue atro il camino; e poi vider nel sangue un guerrier morto che la vie tutte ingombra, e la gran faccia tien volta al cielo e morto anco minaccia. (19, 102, 3–8) (The sun was setting, darkening the whole wood, when they came to a place not very far from town. And here the way is fouled with blood, and in his blood they see a warrior, dead –taking the whole road, turning his face to heaven –and even dead he menaces.)27

In his earlier depiction of the scene, however, Poussin had more explicitly emphasized the bloodshed around both the corpse of Argante in the background

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and at the feet of Tancred, who remains in full armour, in the foreground of the picture. It is only in the second version of the scene, where, as in Tasso, Tancred’s armour has now been removed, that the aftermath of the violence is made less conspicuous, as Richardson notes: Tancred is naked to the Wast having been stripp’d by Erminia and his ‘Squire to search for his Wounds, he has a piece of loose Drapery which is Yellow, bearing upon the Red in the Middle Tincts, and Shadows, this is thrown over his Belly, and Thighs, and lyes a good length upon the ground; ’twas doubtless painted by the Life, and is intirely of a Modern Taste. And that nothing might be shocking, or disagreeable, the wounds are much hid, nor is his Body, or Garment stain’d with Blood, only some appears here, and there upon the ground just below the Drapery, as if it flow’d from some Wounds which That cover’d; Nor is he pale, but as one reviving, and his Blood, and Spirits returning to their usual motion.

In terms of decorum, the English critic also observes that Poussin has not pursued historical verisimilitude in his choice of costume, and particularly armour, for the characters: The Habits are not those of the Age in which the Scene of the Fable is laid, These must have been Gothick, and Disagreeable, it being at the latter end of the 11th, or the beginning of the 12th Century.28

Tasso indicates only that the armour worn by Argante and Tancredi marked them out as pagan and Christian, respectively (‘l’uso de l’arme e ’l portamento estrano / pagàn mostràrlo’, ‘the fashion of his arms and his strange bearing / marked him as pagan’ (19, 103, 1–2)),29 but he does not specify any details of the armour itself, so it is left to the painter to decide how to distinguish between the prone warriors. Richardson is particularly struck in the Thornhill version by the helmets of the Christian soldiers, which he describes as ‘probably Poussin’s own Invention’, and Richard Verdi has more recently drawn attention to the importance of ‘Tancred’s shield, adorned with the monogram of Christ, at Erminia’s feet’ in his interpretation of the painting as one that takes ‘the unmistakable form of a Christian lamentation’.30 Tasso’s habitual lack of specificity in his visual descriptions becomes even more significant in relation to Poussin’s key decision to convey the precise narrative ‘instant of her cutting off her Hair’ in both versions of the scene, as perceptively noted by Richardson:31 ’Tis observable that tho’ Tasso says only Erminia cuts off her hair, Poussin was forc’d to explain what she cut it off withal, and he has given her her Lover’s Sword. We don’t at all question but there will be those who will fancy they have here discover’d a notorious Absurdity in Poussin, it being impossible to cut Hair with a Sword; but though it be, a Pair of Scissars instead of it, though much the fitter for the purpose, had spoil’d the Picture; Painting and Poetry equally disdain such low, and common things.32



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Tasso reveals that Erminia’s fine veil is insufficient to dress Tancredi’s injuries, declaring only that love and pity are capable of discovering unexpected means to heal, in this case by using the hair that the pagan princess instinctively cuts to dry and bind the Christian knight’s seemingly mortal wounds: Ma non ha fuor ch’un velo onde gli fasce le sue ferite, in sí solinghe parti. Amor le trova inusitate fasce, e di pietà le insegna insolite arti: l’asciugò con le chiome e rilegolle pur con le chiome che troncar si volle. (19, 112, 3–8) (But she finds nothing near her but her veil to wrap his gashes in these far-off parts. Love taught her with strange swathings to prevail and made her mercy learn unusual arts: she dried and bound up his wounds with her hair, the very tresses she had wished to tear.)33

Richardson’s most acute observation is that it is the striking absence of visual detail in Tasso’s poetry at this point which enables Poussin’s own pictorial invention and forces him to offer a more concrete, but equally heroic, interpretation of the scene, a point developed further, some 200 years later, in Jonathan Unglaub’s account of Poussin’s earlier depiction of this dramatic moment in Tasso’s epic: Erminia’s heroic gesture is Poussin’s inspired invention in response to the text’s failure … to picture how the ‘inusitate fasce’ came about. The action Tasso had glossed over for the sake of grandeur and momentum, Poussin reconstructs as a timeless sentimental meditation. While Erminia raises the sword to her hair, the painting is not about this action and its consequences. Rather, its surface radiates the desire and piety that drive Erminia’s love of Tancred. Here the allusiveness of Tasso’s text is the extreme opposite of the ekphrastic overdetermination of Armida’s garden scene. What Tasso’s poetic language does furnish is the evocation of twilight and the depths of Erminia’s pathos.34

Unglaub describes this earlier version as ‘a painting of mood’ whereas the later depiction is considered instead as a less sentimental narrative painting, where the Christian knight’s ‘imminent revival encourages Vafrino gently to lift Tancred into consciousness and galvanizes Erminia to sever her tresses heroically. Opposed to the meditative elegy of the Saint Petersburg picture, the Birmingham composition initiates a cycle of cause and effect essential to the emplotment of narrative action.’35 Anthony Blunt concurs that Poussin’s second version is ‘less poetical’ than the earlier one, but draws attention to, and praises, the ‘brilliant effect of movement and countermovement in the placing and drawing of the horses’ in the later depiction.36 Richardson had been similarly struck by the artist’s rendering

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of the horses, focusing in particular on one apparently minor detail, again with direct reference to the artist’s response to his poetic source in Tasso: We know not whether it will be worth while to observe a small Circumstance; One of the Horses is fasten’d to a Tree; If it be suppos’d to be Erminia’s, and done by her self, ’twould be intolerable, she must have had other Thoughts than to secure her Horse when she dismounted, for ’twas not till Vafrino had found that he who at first sight they took to be a Stranger (as well as Argante) was Tancred, and then she is finely describ’d by Tasso as Tumbling, rather than Lighting from her Horse.   Non scese no, precipito di Sella. But as this may possibly be Vafrino’s, Or if ’twas her’s, perhaps his care was divided betwixt the wounded Hero, and the Lady, to whom it was of consequence to have her Horse secur’d, it will not be thought partiality to suppose so Great a Man as Poussin would not make such a Blunder as This, taking it in the worst Sence; but ’twould be Unjust to determine Otherwise when the most Favourable Opinion is most Probable; and That being taken, here is a Beauty, not a Fault; It amplifies, and raises the Character of Vafrino, tho’ it would have spoil’d that of Erminia. Whether a Painter ought to go so far into these little parts is a question which will bear reasoning upon.37

If this observation might initially bring to mind Bellori’s caveat about the risk of including too much detail in an ekphrastic description, the speculation about Poussin’s motives for having one horse tethered, in relation to Tasso’s characterization of Erminia and Vafrino in the poetic source, again demonstrates Richardson’s confidence in advancing an interpretation that is not exclusively an invention of the critic’s own imagination. Two centuries before Unglaub was to focus on the strong narrative impetus of the later depiction of Tancredi and Erminia, Richardson had already drawn attention to how Poussin expertly manages to convey narrative and character simultaneously in the second picture, through a sustained analysis of the artist’s use of expression, which he maintains is ‘Excellent throughout’. The artist-critic highlights one of the central and inevitable dilemmas in narrative history painting, in terms of how the artist can best try to represent visually more of the preceding and ongoing narrative than can ostensibly be conveyed in the single moment chosen for representation. In this particular example, Richardson praises highly Poussin’s ability to imply much about the combat between Argante and Tancredi and their respective characters earlier in canto 19 merely from his representation of their prone figures when discovered by Vafrino and Erminia: Argante seems to be a Wretch that dyed in Rage, and Dispair, without the least spark of Piety. Tancred is Good, Amiable, Noble, and Valiant. There are two Circumstances in Tasso which finely raise these two Characters. When these Champions withdrew to fight ’twas in the view of the Christian Soldiers whose fury against the Pagan could hardly be restrain’d, Tancred protected him from them, and as they retired together cover’d him with his Shield: Afterwards when he had



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him at his Mercy, and Tancred would have given him his Life, and in a Friendly manner approach’d him with the offer, the Villain attempted basely to murther him, upon which provocation he dispatch’d him immediately with Scorn, and Fury. These Incidents could not be inserted in the Picture, but Poussin has told us by the Airs he has given them that either were capable of any thing in these several kinds.38

Once again, Richardson’s detailed knowledge of Tasso’s poem matches that of the artist himself, allowing the critic to interpret and appreciate Poussin’s subtle insinuation of character into the picture from beyond the specific moment in the source being depicted. Richardson also draws the reader’s attention to the most striking addition to Tasso’s poem, and indeed to the artist’s own earlier depiction of the scene, in his consideration of Poussin’s use of expression to convey a character’s inner emotions in the later version. In his preface to The Art of Painting, Dryden had observed that ‘to express the Passions which are seated in the Heart, by outward Signs, is one great Precept of the Painters, and very difficult to perform’,39 and Poussin himself suggested to Bellori that he should focus on the embodiment of the affetti in his ekphrastic descriptions in Le Vite. The later English critic seems to acknowledge Poussin’s achievement in this regard by generously attributing to the new owner of the picture, Sir James Thornhill, the observation that ‘the two Cupidons’, hovering above Vafrino and Tancred in the top left corner of the canvas, were intended as a visual representation of the conflicting emotions etched in Erminia’s face as she desperately tends to the wounded object of her love: Erminia must appear to have a mixture of Hope, and Fear, Joy, and Sorrow, this being the time she had discover’d Life in her Lover after having suppos’d him dead; to express this … must be exceeding difficult, and yet absolutely necessary, and that Strongly, and Apparently, that those who look upon the Picture may know to what End she cuts off her hair; and that ’tis not a Transport of Distracted Grief for the Death of him she loved, who is not yet recovered from his Swoon; because this Mistake would lose all the Beauty of the Story. For this reason the two Loves are admirably contrived to serve This purpose; … One of them, and that the farthest from the Eye has Sorrow, and Fear, the other Joy, and Hope evidently in his Face; and to express this yet more perfectly (and this is Mr. Thornhill’s Observation) the former has two Arrows in his hand to denote those Passions, and their Pungency; but the Quiver of his Companion is fast shut up with a sort of a cap on the top of it.40

Richardson’s insistence here on the necessity of a viewer of the picture being able to interpret correctly the emotions driving Erminia’s actions in Poussin’s depiction, in order not to ‘lose all the Beauty of the Story’, raises some important issues concerning the circumstances and capabilities of the target readership of his ‘Dissertation’, given that it is unlikely that he anticipated that his readership would have direct visual access to the Poussin picture. The Dutch engraver Gerard van der Gucht made a (half-size) reproduction of the original at some

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point between 1717 and 1734, while it was still in Thornhill’s possession, but this is not likely to have circulated widely. The critic seems to acknowledge the problem himself towards the end of the ‘Dissertation’, when he admits that ‘there are a great many Beauties we have not mentioned, and some that cannot be expressed in Words, nor known without seeing the Picture’ (pp. 91–2), highlighting the difficulty he faces in trying to convey adequately in words the visual beauties that he has observed and studied to a readership that he understands has not. The second issue concerns whether Richardson expected his readership to have any prior knowledge of the poem on which Poussin’s depiction is modelled. The brief plot summaries of Tasso provided, and the emphasis he places on the viewer’s ability to interpret Erminia’s emotional expression without any frame of reference to the narrative beyond the picture itself, again imply that he does not. However, if the critic is anticipating no direct knowledge in his readership of either the picture itself or indeed the literary source from which it derives, then it becomes clear that he is asking this readership to put a good deal of faith in his own judgment of the painting and, by extension, its relationship to Tasso’s epic poem: There is such a Grace and Greatness shines throughout that ’tis one of the most desireable Pictures we have yet seen; There is nothing to be Desired, or Imagin’d which it has not, nothing to be Added, or Omitted but would have diminish’d its Excellency. (p. 91)

Richardson’s final positive judgment on the manifold merits of the picture takes the form of a traditional paragone between the visual and the literary, emphasizing Poussin’s ability ‘to make use of the Advantages this Art has over that of his Competitor’ to come down firmly on the side of the painter: We will only observe further the different Idea given by the Painter, and the Poet. A Reader of Tasso that thought less finely than Poussin would form in his Imagination a Picture, but not Such a one as This. He would see a Man of a less Lovely, and Beautiful Aspect, Pale, and all cut, and mangled, his Body, and Garments smear’d with Blood: He would see Erminia, not such a one as Poussin has made her; and a thousand to one with a pair of Scissars in her hand, but certainly not with Tancred’s Sword: The two Amoretto’s would never enter in his Mind: Horses would he see, and let ’em be the finest he had ever seen they would be less fine than These, and so of the rest. The Painter has made a finer Story than the Poet, tho’ his Readers were Equal to himself, but without all Comparison much finer than it can appear to the Generality of them. (pp. 92–3)

In his ekphrastic analysis of this notable history painting, though, the pre-­ eminence of the visual representation over the poetic source can only be asserted by means of Richardson’s detailed verbal description of both, with the enargeia of the description having to convey to the reader’s imagination an image of both Poussin’s picture and Tasso’s original episode. Although the painter-critic’s detailed dissertation on the Thornhill Poussin and its Italian source ultimately finds in favour of the visual depiction of the story, the sustained comparison of



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both throughout seems to imply, if not quite yet openly admit, a more complex, symbiotic encounter between the two art forms. Only a few years later, in an essay ‘Of Painting and Sculpture’ in his Account of Some of the Statues, Bas-reliefs, Drawings and Pictures in Italy, &c (1722), Richardson was himself moved to modify his initial position, acknowledging a more reciprocal and thus productive relationship between the visual and the literary in a deliberation on ‘whether Painting and Sculpture more want the assistance of Language, than Language of those Arts’.41 Gibson-Wood concludes that, as his career as painter and critic progressed, the English critic came to accept more willingly that ‘it is when two or more systems are used simultaneously that the fullest and most perfect transmissions of ideas can take place’,42 as the specific example identified in 1722, probably recalling his recent account of Poussin’s depiction of Tasso’s poem, makes abundantly clear: In many cases any one of several ways of communicating our Ideas would be very Imperfect, and hardly of any use without the assistance of some other: … and thus tho’ a History-Picture conveys the Idea of Men, Women, &. to understand Fully what the Painter intended, a previous Knowledge of the Story by the help of Words is Absolutely necessary.43

Notes  1 John Dryden, De Arte Graphica. The Art of Painting (1695), in George R. Guffey and A. E. Wallace Maurer (eds), The Works of John Dryden (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), vol. 20, p. 38. For useful accounts of ‘Literature and the other arts’ in the eighteenth century see the essays by David Marshall and Dean Mace in H. B. Nisbet and Claude Rawson (eds), The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Volume 4: The Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 681–741.  2 Guffey, Works, p. 421, and Dryden, Art of Painting, p. 84. The quotation from Horace is also cited in Latin on the original title page of Dryden’s translation.  3 Dryden, Art of Painting, p. 111.  4 Giovan Pietro Bellori, Le Vite de’ pittori, scultori, et architetti moderni (Rome, 1672), p. 13; translation in Alice Sedgwick Wohl, Hellmut Wohl, and Tomaso Montanari (eds), Giovan Pietro Bellori: The Lives of the Modern Painters, Sculptors and Architects (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 62.  5 Dryden, Art of Painting, p. 45.  6 Ibid., p. 51.  7 Carol Gibson-Wood argues that ‘Richardson’s writings represent the most important contribution to English art theory of the first half of the eighteenth century’, in Jonathan Richardson: Art Theorist of the English Enlightenment (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 2.  8 Jonathan Richardson, An Essay on the Theory of Painting (London, 1725), p. 1.  9 Jonathan Richardson, Two Discourses (London, 1719), pp. 42–3. 10 Richardson, Two Discourses, pp. 13, 14. 11 Richardson, Two Discourses, p. 72.

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12 Jonathan Richardson, An Account of Some of the Statues, Bas-reliefs, Drawings and Pictures in Italy, &c (London, 1722), Preface. 13 Gibson-Wood, Richardson, p. 212. 14 The Italian term ‘affetti’ is glossed by the translator as ‘the outward display of emotions as depicted in art’ (Wohl, Bellori, p. 441). 15 Bellori, Le Vite, ‘Lettore’, and Wohl, Bellori, p. 50. 16 Stephen Cheeke, Writing for Art: The Aesthetics of Ekphrasis (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008), p. 19. 17 Murray Krieger, Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), p. xiii. 18 James A. W. Heffernan defines ekphrasis as ‘the verbal representation of visual representation’, in Museum of Words: The Poetry of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1993), p. 3. 19 Gibson-Wood, Richardson, p. 191. 20 Richardson, Two Discourses, p. 27. 21 See Roger de Piles, Cours de peinture par principes, avec un balance de peintres (Paris, 1708). 22 Richardson, Two Discourses, pp. 76–7. 23 Krieger suggests that ekphrasis is defined primarily by its enargeia, ‘the capacity of words to describe with a vividness that, in effect, reproduces an object before our very eyes (i.e., before the eyes of the mind)’ (Ekphrasis, p. 68). 24 Richardson, Two Discourses, pp. 77–8. 25 Poussin’s two earliest Tasso paintings, from the mid- to late 1620s, focus on the celebrated Rinaldo and Armida episode, although strikingly both represent the moment at which Armida unexpectedly falls in love with her avowed enemy in canto 14, rather than the more familiar scene in canto 16, set in what Jonathan Unglaub has described as the ‘ekphrastic overdetermination’ of Armida’s garden, which proved a more popular, if more obvious, source for visual interpretation (Poussin and the Poetics of Painting: Pictorial Narrative and the Legacy of Tasso (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 103). 26 The earlier depiction, generally referred to today as the St Petersburg picture, probably dates from around 1630, and the later version, purchased by Thornhill and now known as the Birmingham picture, dates from around 1633–34. 27 Lanfranco Caretti (ed.), Torquato Tasso: Gerusalemme liberata (Turin: Einaudi, 1971), pp. 603–4; translation quoted from Torquato Tasso, Jerusalem Delivered, trans. Anthony M. Esolen (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), p. 378. 28 Richardson, Two Discourses, pp. 78–9. 29 Caretti, Gerusalemme, p. 604; Esolen, Jerusalem, p. 378. 30 Richardson, Two Discourses, p. 81; Richard Verdi, Nicolas Poussin: Tancred and Erminia (Birmingham: Barber Institute of Fine Arts, 1992), p. 17. 31 ‘It is exactly this paucity of concrete imagery in Gerusalemme that grants the painter license to select material, to appropriate it through further elaboration, to truly become an imitator in Tasso’s fullest sense’ (Unglaub, Poetics of Painting, p. 109). 32 Richardson, Two Discourses, p. 82. 33 Caretti, Gerusalemme, p. 606; translation quoted from Torquato Tasso, The Liberation of Jerusalem, trans. Max Wickert (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 366. 34 Unglaub, Poetics of Painting, p. 129.



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35 Ibid., p. 223. 36 Anthony Blunt, Nicolas Poussin: the A. W. Mellon Lectures in Fine Arts, 1958 (London: Phaidon Press, 1967), p. 150. 37 Richardson, Two Discourses, pp. 83–5. The passage quoted from Gerusalemme is canto 19, stanza 104, l. 8 (see Caretti, Gerusalemme, p. 604). 38 Ibid., pp. 85–6. 39 Dryden, Art of Painting, p. 69. 40 Richardson, Two Discourses, pp. 87–8. Further references are included in the text. 41 Richardson, An Account, p. 91. 42 Gibson-Wood, Richardson, p. 213. 43 Richardson, An Account, p. 91.

Part II

Nineteenth-century encounters

5

Blind spots of narration? Ekphrasis and Laocoön digressions in the novel Catriona MacLeod

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Laocoön essay of 1766 has long been understood as a pivotal moment in the classical demarcation of the spatializing properties of plastic arts, its dwelling in and on ‘the frozen moment’, versus the temporal or narrative properties of literature.1 In a departure from long-standing theories of equivalence or convertibility between visual and verbal arts (such as the soonto-be-eclipsed ut pictura poesis tradition), Lessing insisted, via a virtuoso reading of Homer’s narrativizing description of the shield of Achilles in the Iliad, and a rejection of Laocöon’s agonising scream as a subject improper for a sculpture, on the representational spheres proper to each. The hierarchy obtaining in this apparently parallel presentation of visual arts has been noted by many critics since, with Lessing privileging poetry for its ability to enliven the imagination of a reader. The present chapter proposes to examine the long afterlife of this essay as it reappears, not in the form of a brief intertextual allusion, but rather as a discursive ‘foreign body’ (related to and akin to ekphrasis) within two canonical novels of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which themselves explore and test the relationship between narrative motion and visual or plastic spatiality. However, rather than being a stabilizing theoretical framework for the novels into which it is set, staking out as it were the trajectory of narrative, the often protracted digression on Laocoön, set within and against ekphrastic texts, may haunt and place pressure on the very narrative conventions it appears to uphold. My focus is on two experimental novels: Wilhelm Heinse’s Ardinghello und die glückseligen Inseln (Ardinghello and the Blissful Islands, 1787) and Adalbert Stifter’s Der Nachsommer (Indian Summer, 1857). These works are separated by seventy years, yet as we shall see, each pushes against the boundaries of description precisely by staging an internal dialogue in which their protagonists adopt and critique Lessing, often verbatim, in chapters that stall narrative action. They also provide a strong point of contrast as experimental responses to Lessing,

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taking the ekphrastic imperative to vivification to two extremes: the erotic orgy (Heinse) versus the deadening of description and desire (Stifter). Critical explorations of theories of ekphrasis by W. J. T. Mitchell, Murray Krieger, and others will also inform my considerations of the functions of Laocoön insertions into novels that thereby interrogate their own intermedial and remediating narrative praxis.2 My aim is not to insist, as so much scholarship on ekphrasis has done in the wake of Lessing (who never uses the term, drawing on the German notion of Bildbeschreibung), on an antithetical and hierarchical relationship between ekphrasis and narrative, but rather to move beyond a model of hostility and towards a more productive idea of friction in their encounter. In asking ourselves why, in surprisingly similar terms to those of Lessing – though on the face of it for purely formal reasons – narratology has also been at a loss to deal with ekphrasis, we may find covert but helpful leads. The black hole of narratology As Frauke Berndt has correctly noted, classical narratology has difficulties in accommodating two related phenomena: first, self-referential passages in which the narrator tells of his or her own narration, and second, descriptions, which constitute for Gérard Genette and others blockages to the necessary movement of narrative.3 Descriptions, in particular, are interruptive to plot, and come for Genette under the rubric of the expectant ‘pause’ – a notion that Berndt aptly terms a narratological panacea (‘Allheilmittel’) for all that threatens narrative structure. Indeed one might well refer to the ‘pause’ in Genette, in its ‘absolute slowness’, as Berndt does, as the ‘blind spot’ of narratology – or even as its black hole, greedily engulfing the energy of narrative.4 While narrative may coexist with description, the latter cannot exist independently, serving only decorative or explanatory functions. Indeed, Genette goes so far as to assert that ‘there are no descriptive genres’.5 In a striking passage from ‘Frontiers of narrative’, the formalism of Genette’s analysis swerves surprisingly into ideological territory, as Genette makes the claim that description occupies a servile (and, we should note, feminine) role in its relationship with narrative: ‘description might be conceived independently of narration, but in fact it is never found in a so to speak free state … Description is quite naturally ancilla narrationis, the ever-necessary, ever-submissive, never emancipated slave.’6 We should note here that ekphrasis, a particular descriptive mode, has also been cast as the inferior partner to interpretation in art history.7 There are, however, encouraging recent signs of critical interest in deepening the understanding of description as not always basic, servile, naïve, or mechanical.8 The two obstacles to narratology for Genette, self-reflections on the narrative act and description, are however connected and theorized, I argue, in the ekphrastic mode, which heightens run-of-the-mill description to a second-degree self-reflective praxis, since it always involves a self-awareness of the relationship between describer and object, as well of the different representational media.9



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This may help us understand Genette’s counter-intuitive elevation of Proust’s descriptions in Narrative Discourse: somehow immune to what he categorizes elsewhere as their inherent limitations, Proust’s ‘descriptions’ (he hesitates at even calling them by this name) are distinguished from those of nineteenthcentury realist novelists such as Balzac precisely, according to Genette, due to the aesthetic and perceptual mobility or ‘labor’ they activate in the triangular relationship between narrator, reader, and the object of observation: In fact, Proustian ‘description’ is less a description of the object contemplated than it is a narrative and analysis of the perceptual activity of the character contemplating: of his impressions, progressive discoveries, shifts in distance and perspective, errors and corrections, enthusiasms or disappointments, etc. A contemplation highly active in truth, and containing ‘a whole story’. This story is what Proustian description recounts. Suppose we reread, for example, the few pages devoted to Elstir’s seascapes at Balbec. We will see how jammed they are with terms designating not what the painting of Elstir is, but the ‘optical illusions’ that it ‘recreates’, and the false impressions it arouses and dissipates in turn: seem, appear, give the impression, as if, you felt, you would have said, you thought, you understood, you saw reappear, they went racing over sunlit fields, etc. Aesthetic activity here is not repose at all …10

Genette, then, despite having set description up along familiar lines as antithetical to or at best a supplicant to narrative, has nevertheless given us a productive angle on the potential mutual enlivening of the two precisely in the ekphrastic mode. Unnamed though it is in Genette’s account as ekphrasis, it comes close to what Tamar Yacobi, in a challenge to Lessing, calls ‘narrative ekphrasis’; that is, ekphrasis that unfolds along a temporal axis and thereby undoes the static spatialization, petrification, or statufications that have so often been associated with ekphrasis’s effects on narrative from Lessing to Murray Krieger.11 What Genette has also added, in his focus on the reception of the artwork by a viewer in Proustian description, may be related to Ruth Webb’s delineation of a tripartite, not binary relation between description and narration in ancient ekphrasis, which is based on the rhetorical concept of enargeia: where description is proper to objects, and narration to actions, ekphrasis in her analysis introduces the intellectual and affective response of an audience.12 Ekphrasis and the novel When Friedrich Schlegel programmatically declared the novel or, in German, ‘Roman’ as ‘a romantic book’ (‘ein romantisches Buch’), he was referring among other things to the novel’s experimental capaciousness for other genres, media, and modes – to the very hybridity, that is, that classical theorists in the wake of Lessing had viewed with suspicion.13 The Romantic novel, indeed the novel in a more general sense, promises to fulfil perfectly what word and image theorist W. J. T. Mitchell has claimed to be the case for all media and all representational systems, namely, that even in the face of ‘purity’ aesthetics

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such as Lessing’s classicism or modernism, they are inherently mixed.14 As I will elaborate in this chapter via readings of two paradigmatic novels from the German tradition, theoretical discourses on ekphrasis – as well as the ekphrastic impulse with which they are so frequently paired – situate themselves at the centre of novels’ reflections upon themselves as mixed-media genres and should not simply be disregarded, an exclusion practised by much of the scholarship, as digressive, peripheral ‘foreign bodies’ detracting from or irrelevant to narration. Astute and critically dominant as Mitchell’s agonistic reading of ekphrasis has been, pointing to ‘ekphrastic ornament’ as ‘a kind of foreign body within epic that threatens to reverse the natural literary priorities of time over space, narrative over description’, it does not account for ekphrasis as a discursive mode that productively drives self-theorization.15 As James Heffernan puts it, ekphrasis indeed ‘always explicitly represents representation itself’.16 When this ekphrastic self-reflexivity appears in the novel, we need to recall that this genre is in the process of self-constitution at the moment when Lessing intervenes – albeit via the genre of epic – to safeguard the boundaries between word and image. If ekphrasis is marginal, it is a marginality that moves in on the very centre of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novel. In the case of the theoretical passages that derive from Lessing, one can speak of a sort of hyper-ekphrastic presence in the novel. At the same time, I hope to show the variety of narrative strategies that may emerge from Lessingian ekphrastic discourse and that are not reducible to straightforward patterns of competition or complementarity. Another novel that I might equally have considered, Clemens Brentano’s early Romantic novel Godwi: Oder das steinerne Bild der Mutter (Godwi, or the Stone Statue of the Mother, 1800/1) exhibits a disintegrative tension between its stated programme of syncretism and its ekphrastic practice elsewhere throughout the novel that, as I have argued elsewhere, is designed to exclude and obliterate the sculptural medium.17 Wilhelm Heinse’s pre-Romantic work Ardinghello (1787) and Adalbert Stifter’s realist Der Nachsommer (1857), the examples I will be discussing here, deploy ekphrastic theory and practice to radically different ends, in one case to mobilize narrative and in the other to block it experimentally. In each case, a lengthy dialogue indebted to and quoting Lessing is placed at the central point of the novel, thus serving as a theoretical fulcrum around which the narrative organizes itself. In each case, the direct and extensive citation of Lessing should not be taken at face value, and in fact challenges or ­problematizes central concepts of the Laocoön essay. In a certain sense anticipating the Romantic novel, Heinse’s Sturm und Drang work is open to a variety of other genres, novelistic and otherwise, and incorporates a number of textual ‘foreign bodies’ that his prefatory note announces as having been found by chance in obscure Italian libraries:18 the reader encounters a montage of epistolary exchanges, travel notes (taken directly from Heinse’s own journeys in Italy), Florentine and Venetian Renaissance history, cryptic classical citations, and last but not least, extensive ekphrastic passages devoted to painting and sculpture. While it draws certain elements from the



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historical record (the lives of the Medicis), it cannot be classified as a historical novel; though it contains dramatic scenes of piracy and abduction on the high seas, it is not a conventional adventure novel. Heinse names his defining political and formal principle ‘Anarchie der höchste Gipfel der Menschheit’ (‘anarchy as the pinnacle of humanity’).19 A novel performs Lessing: from hostile stand-off to embrace Despite the novel’s announcement of its anarchic approach to its material and structure, Heinse’s work contains at its very centre a lengthy, thirty-page discourse responding to the debates on the respective representational powers of poetry and the visual arts in the immediate wake of Lessing’s Laocoön essay and drawing too on the terms of the Renaissance paragone. It goes so far as to restate approvingly the demarcations and the distinctions between the arts set out by Lessing’s precursor text.20 Renaissance artist Ardinghello’s conversation partner, the older Demetri, acts as a mouthpiece for Lessing’s theories that would patrol the boundaries between the so-called sister arts and hail the superiority of the verbal in what amounts to direct citation from Lessing: ‘Ein Dichter muß dem Maler immer in Schilderung körperlicher Gegenstände unterliegen: und geradeso geht’s dem Maler im Gegenteil mit Handlungen. Nichtsdestoweniger ragt doch die Poesie mit ihren willkürlichen Zeichen über alle ihre Schwestern hervor’ (‘The poet must always yield to the painter in the representation of physical objects: just as the reverse is true of the painter when it comes to plot. Nevertheless poetry with its arbitrary signs surpasses all its sisters’).21 As Lessing had summed it up in the seventeenth chapter of his essay, following key philosophers of the eighteenth century, among them Christian Wolff, Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, and Moses Mendelssohn, ‘the symbols of poetry are not only successive but arbitrary’.22 Demetri insists, even exceeding Lessing’s rhetoric of the plastic arts as ‘natural signs’, that statues and paintings will always revert back to dead matter: ‘Das schönste Bild, sei’s auch eine Venus vom Praxiteles, wird endlich ein Schatten ohne Saft und Kraft, es regt und bewegt sich nicht und verwandelt sich nach und nach wieder in den toten Stein oder Öl und Farbe, woraus es gemacht war’ (‘The most beautiful image, even if it be a Venus by Praxiteles, will in the end be a feeble shadow; it does not stir or move and gradually transforms back into the dead stone or the oil and pigment of which it was made.’)23 However, rather than reinstating the hierarchies of the arts upon which Lessing had insisted, the protracted conversation between Ardinghello and Demetri, which I classify as another generic insertion in the novel (namely, of art critical discourse), culminates in aesthetic concord rather than opposition, and in narrative motion rather than the Genettean ‘pause’, stasis, or blockage we might expect to be the result of such an abstract digressive passage. Laurence Rickels writes aptly of the novel’s overflowing of boundaries, though in terms of Heinse’s payment of a kind of road ‘tax’ to Lessing’s Laocoön ‘in the course

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of leaving it behind’.24 Rather than rendering a dutiful, perfunctory tariff to Lessing, I propose that this exceedingly long chapter demands to be read as a selfconscious transformation of Lessing’s conceptions from within. This transformational movement carries over into the novel’s treatment of ekphrases, which have been described generally and pointedly by Mitchell as always enacting violent, gendered power struggles of domination and submission between (male) viewing subject and mute (female) object.25 The younger Ardinghello is placed at a generational distance from the 40-year-old Demetri that closely parallels the twenty years separating Heinse’s novel from Lessing’s essay.26 Hailing life as the cornerstone of any artistic endeavour in any medium and noting the problem of poetry when it is too detached from material reality, Ardinghello succeeds in convincing his sparring partner of his vitalistic aesthetic.27 Their encounter, starting off as a performative public skirmish, in which Ardinghello views Demetri as an enemy armed with the power to deliver a fatal blow through his aesthetic position, ends in a passionate physical embrace: ‘Wir umarmten uns denn beide mit glühendem Gesicht und klopfendem Herzen’ (‘We then embraced, our faces glowing and our hearts beating fast’).28 Thus the two men physically enact a shift from hostile verbal stand-off to warm and bodily rapprochement, in a duplication of the content of their discourse: the paragone becomes at once an intellectual and physical encounter, and one that merges with others as this Lessing dialogue transitions into an orgy of aesthetic and sexual exchange.29 It may at first glance seem incongruous that such a theoretical, discursive moment in the novel, one appearing to place a bar to action, leads directly into a scene of astounding (and untheoretical) erotic activity, but according to the very aesthetic promoted by Ardinghello – and as I will consider now in a brief reading of the chapter’s conclusion – the pairing of abstract reflection with sensualistic action is no contradiction. Nor is the shift in register or away from what Genette would doubtless see as a ‘narrative pause’ signalled by a chapter break or gap on the printed page (as is the case between many other discursive forms that appear in the novel). No sooner has the argument between Ardinghello and Demetri concluded amicably with a warm embrace, than the men, along with a group of other artists, embark on a night of bacchanalian orgiastic celebrations. The women who accompany them are described successively as living women, as artists’ models, as nude antique sculptures, and, finally, as the trigger of orgasmic sensations again signalling overflow ‘wie donnerbrausende Katarakten, vom Senegal und Rhein, wo man von sich nichts mehr weiß’ (‘like thundering cataracts in Senegal and the Rhine, where one loses all awareness of oneself’).30 Gernot Frankhäuser’s work on the bacchanal with which this central chapter of Ardinghello concludes, with its helpful focus on dance history, shows that Heinse was informed by the theories set forth in Jean Georges Noverre’s Lettres sur la danse et sur les ballets (1760).31 There, Noverre had called for a ‘ballet d’action’, that is, for the inclusion of a strong narrative thread. Of particular interest for a consideration of this turning point in Ardinghello is Noverre’s demand that ballet



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represent and dynamize a series of paintings, which for Lessing should represent frozen moments. Thus Noverre anticipates the aesthetic debates around stasis and mobility that would be triggered by the tableau vivant genre or the related sculptural poses plastiques, increasingly popular entertainments by the end of the century. So associated with deathly, clichéd frozen moments had the tableau vivant become, since the sensational performances of Emma Hamilton, that the husband-cum-manager of the German mimoplastic artist Henriette HendelSchütz felt the need in 1814 to advertise his wife’s swift change of poses as more germane to narrative.32 The section of Heinse’s novel on which I have focused so far is simply the most pointed example of a programmatic ekphrastic interchange between the plastic and verbal arts in the novel, always enacted under the sign of erotic pleasure and promiscuity. (Writing in 1798 in the introduction to his journal Die Propyläen, intended as a platform for Classicism, Goethe would warn in sexual terms against the improper, if not degenerate or perverse consequences of mingling the arts.)33 The orgies and the arts cannot be separated in Heinse: the scenes of erotic coupling are always already pictures, while the ekphrastic descriptions of paintings and statues are not dry, technical art historical presentations, but propulsive erotic encounters exceeding even Winckelmann’s sensuous ekphrases.34 Heinse, the virtuoso ekphrasist, is quite ironically self-aware about the less than scintillating state of ekphrasis in contemporary letters, stating in the novel of the antique works that populate or even overcrowd the German eighteenth-century imaginary: ‘Man hat dieselben in Versen und Prosa bis zum Ekel beschrieben’ (‘These have been described ad nauseam in poetry and prose’).35 To conclude our look at the ekphrastic encounter in Heinse, I would like to provide an example, first, of an erotically charged encounter that immediately conjures up Winckelmann’s famous descriptions of the Belvedere Apollo. In the midst of Ardinghello’s description of a series of sensual women, he writes of one of the women’s mothers that she seemed to have accidentally acquired the features of the Vatican Apollo, ‘nur ohne Stolz und Zorn’ (‘without pride and anger’), words borrowed from Winckelmann.36 A second example of the seamless passage between erotic activity and description of an artwork is a passionate tryst that shifts without commentary to an ekphrastic description of Titian’s painting of the martyrdom of St Peter: waiting for a female lover in a church, he occupies the time until her arrival in a breathless ekphrasis punctuated with frequent exclamation marks, arguably more a part of or foreplay to the sexual experience than a ‘narrative pause’.37 Or consider, finally, a third example, in the final part of the novel, which is saturated with ekphrastic passages such as one describing a voluptuous Titian Venus as if she were inviting the viewer into her bed, or to watch her pleasuring herself: Diese ist eine reizende junge Venezianerin von siebzehn bis achtzehn Jahren, mit schmachtendem Blick, aufs weiße widerstrebende Sommerbett, im frischen

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Morgenlichte, faselnackend vor innrer Glut von aller Decke und Hülle, bereit und kampflüstern hingelagert, Wollust zu geben und zu nehmen … (She is a charming young seventeen- or eighteen-year-old Venetian girl, with a yearning gaze, straining against a white summer bed, stark naked, burning with desire, bare of any covering, defiant, and ready to give and receive pleasure …)38

The move that Heinse makes in this work, then, is to incorporate ekphrasis ever more fully into his novel, as a self-reflexively propulsive element. The metatextual reflection of book 3, as I have suggested, has several powerful effects. As a result of this passage, ekphrasis is placed at the centre of the novel as a trigger to narrative and erotic discharge. Furthermore, the self-reflexive discussion does not stand apart from the rest of the narrative or block it, in Genettean terms: like the ekphrastic passages themselves, it is, rather, productively constitutive of that narrative. Here I differ from readings of the inserted passage by scholars such as Erich Meuthen and Gert Theile, who both see it as a digressive and extraneous moment in the novel, and this is connected with my disagreement with the etymological reading of ekphrasis by Philippe Hamon, for whom the preposition ek (‘out’) signifies description’s position as prosthetic fragment apart from the narrative proper.39 A novel denies Lessing’s imperative: ut sculptura poesis Heinse opens the theoretical disquisition on the arts by ventriloquizing Lessing’s injunction against hybridity, but, as I have shown, concludes with the universal appeal of vitalism for all of the arts that seamlessly effects a transition between non-narrative theoretical digression, ekphrasis, and an orgiastic narrative action that also intermedially blends antique bacchanalia, eighteenthcentury ballet, painting, and sculpture. As a counterpoint to Heinse’s ‘Lessing effects’, let us turn now to Stifter’s novel of 1857, Der Nachsommer. Despite the seventy years that separate it from Heinse’s novel, Stifter’s monumental narrative shares with that earlier text a preoccupation with Lessing’s Laocoön essay which, in Stifter’s case, is reflected in its nostalgic, classical setting. It repeats Heinse’s strategy of inserting dialogue lifted from Lessing into the heart of the novel. Der Nachsommer was also understood by its readers from the outset in Lessingian terms. Stifter’s fiercest critic, Friedrich Hebbel, castigated the novel’s descriptive excesses as follows: Stifter had realized ‘daß dieser einst so gefährliche Laokoon in unseren Tagen niemand schadet, und faßte Mut’ (that this once so dangerous Laocoön can no longer harm anyone, and plucked up his courage).40 Stifter’s enormously long novel’s aesthetic protagonist, the conservator-collector Gustav von Risach, iteratively refers to Lessing’s concept of the spatiality of the plastic arts at the very midpoint of the narrative – like Heinse’s novel.The reference to Lessing is placed immediately before a central scene in the novel: that between Drendorf, the young protagonist for whom Risach serves as an aesthetic mentor, and a marble statue in Risach’s collection,



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thus promising an ekphrastic encounter. However, unlike the public dialogue between Demetri and Ardinghello, Stifter’s Lessing citation, that takes more the form of a pedagogical monologue delivered in private to Risach’s young protégé, Heinrich Drendorf, effectively brings narrative to a standstill, negating Lessing’s priorities. In the words of the older man: ‘Bewegung regt an, Ruhe erfüllt, und so entsteht jener Abschluß in der Seele, den wir Schönheit nennen’ (‘Movement stimulates, tranquility fulfils, and so that completion of the soul is achieved that we know as beauty’).41 On the face of it this halt seems to be part and parcel of Der Nachsommer’s nostalgic citation of classical values and ideology, of Stifter’s veneration of authors such as Lessing and Goethe, as whose heir he styled himself – after all, the central action of the plot is the rescue of an antique sculpture from its degraded place on an Italian marketplace, the work is set around a generation earlier than its publication date, and the only other thing that really happens is the thoroughly expectable and almost endlessly deferred marriage, in the final pages of the novel. But this points to the fact that it is the very mobility of narrative that is fundamentally at stake for Risach and the novel. Risach on the one hand preaches in his monologues the primacy of literature over the visual arts, in terms derived directly from Lessing’s demarcations between media: ‘Die Dichtkunst ist daher die reinste und höchste unter den Künsten’ (‘Poetry is thus the purest and most elevated of the arts’). All other art forms, and in particular the plastic arts of painting and architecture, are, he argues, involved in a constant ‘Ringen’ or ‘wrestling’ with ‘Stoff’ (‘matter’). Nevertheless, Risach warns against mobility, which is associated with eroticism, desire, and modern political and economic realities, in particular capitalist commodity culture. And when it comes to literature, Risach cannot divorce this medium successfully from the material world either, despite his positing of poetry as the purest of arts: as he puts it, ‘nur die Dichtkunst hat beinahe gar keinen Stoff mehr’ (‘only poetry has almost no matter any longer’; my emphasis).42 The ekphrastic imperative invades Stifter’s prose, but rather than animate or enliven the world of art objects, it enacts both a critique of modernity and its speed, producing an experimental narrative that can be connected with the static modernist prose of, among others, Thomas Mann, for example in Der Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain, 1924). Description, deeply connected with the world of things, is a problem for and in Stifter. One of the most prominent features of criticism of the novel from Friedrich Hebbel to Georg Lukács and onwards is its commentary on the universally acknowledged, indeed notorious, tedium of the monumentally static novel, whose 700 pages contain virtually nothing in the way of events and are replete instead with endless ekphrastic enumerations of objects in Risach’s collections, primarily the statue, and the discourses at the centre indebted to Lessing. One of the most peculiar facets of the artworks that appear throughout the novel is, however, the literary sidestepping of conventional ekphrastic descriptions. Etymologically, the term ekphrasis strongly implies animation, the giving of voice to an otherwise mute art object. The classical model explained

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by Ruth Webb, based on rhetorical enargeia – the vivid description of things, not necessarily artworks – also insists on the enlivening force of words. The opposite obtains for Stifter, where words rather seem to drain vividness from art, quotidian objects, and humans. Hebbel and many others since have emphasized and critiqued the role of description in Stifter, but too little attention has been paid to the peculiar form of description in Stifter’s works.43 It is a remarkably reduced mode, often confined to the repetitive enumeration of objects, which in the idiosyncratic punctuation reproduced in the critical edition are not separated by commas. Stifter’s late narrative wrestles incessantly with the problems entailed in animating the ‘thingness’ of the resistant material world and that incline to petrification themselves – both in the halting of narrative movement that occurs in this novel utterly stripped of plot and in the sclerotic or lapidary turn that description takes. Several works from Stifter’s prolific output as a visual artist also suggest a constant tension between the depiction of mobility and fixity, mirroring his concerns as a writer. Stifter was in the habit of placing river rocks in a vessel filled with water and of asking a servant to shake the container so that he could observe the swirling water as it appeared to animate the stones. Already in this anecdote about the removal of natural objects to a controlled interior e­ nvironment – Stifter did not paint en plein air – we can, however, see the impulse to manage motion and temporality, which operates throughout Der Nachsommer, from the ever-diminishing circles which Heinrich describes in his movements around the Asperhof estate, to the painstaking retardation of the flowering roses, to the need optically to counteract the sublime shimmer of marble.44 As Samuel Frederick has recently observed in his study of narrative digression in Stifter, this infiltration (Lukács would hold it to be an overwhelming) of narrative with description may cause the reader, indeed, to re-examine the conventionally understood distinction drawn, as we have seen above in the case of Genette, by narrative theorists between descriptive and non-descriptive narrations.45 Compared to the verbally pyrotechnic prose poems that Winckelmann wrote on sculpture such as the Belvedere Apollo, intended to animate their subjects through language, or the vitalistic drive of Heinse’s ekphrases, the descriptions of the marble statue at Risach’s estate are spare, repetitive, reduced in vocabulary, resistant. Risach, as we have seen, connects mobility with desire, while Genette, too, is atune to the erotics of the perceptual activity involved in Proustian description (ekphrasis), culminating in a forty-line description on a fountain’s jet of water (‘one could see it in the distance, slender, immobile, ­stiffened …’).46 Indeed the human protagonists (one hesitates to call them agents) in the novel are rendered themselves sculptural ‘Gestalten’ (‘forms’) or part of the appurtenances of the estate via passages that duplicate (or rather gesture towards) conventional ekphrases. Nothing is individual about the characters; their clothing and physical appearance receive only abstract attention. The white shimmer of Stifter’s world makes each object merge, undifferentiated, into the next, an effect heightened by the absence of commas. To read



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these ­passages is to encounter one iteration after the other of words such as ‘rein’ (‘pure’), ‘weiß’ (‘white’), ‘grau’ (‘grey’), ‘blaß’ (‘pale’), ‘ruhig’ (‘calm’), ‘engelschön’ (‘angelically beautiful’), ‘Gestalt’ (‘form’), and so on. The following passage, with its verbal equivalence of woman, staircase, and statue, via repetitions of the word ‘Marmor’ (‘marble’) in three sentences, can be taken as one typical example of this anti-descriptive (as well as anti-narrative) turn: Nach einer Zeit, da es bereits zur Stunde des Frühmales ging, hörte ich weibliche Schritte an meiner Thür vorüber der Marmortreppe zugehen, welche mit einem weichen Teppich belegt war … Ich ging nach einer kleinen Weile auch über die Marmortreppe an dem Marmorbilde der Muse vorüber in das Speisezimmer hinunter. Der Tag verging ungefähr wie der vorige, und so verflossen nach und nach mehrere. (After a while, when it was already approaching the breakfast hour, I heard feminine footsteps going by my door towards the marble staircase, which was covered with a soft carpet … A little later I also went down the marble staircase, past the marble statue of the Muse, into the dining room. The day passed more or less like the one before it, and so gradually passed more others.)47

When it comes to the artwork, most centrally the marble statue housed by Risach in a custom-made room, little in the way of concrete detail is divulged about its appearance beyond the white shimmer of its marble, nothing about its iconography, provenance, or author: this paucity of information or back story highlights the status of this art object as imaginary, subject to notional ekphrasis, to use John Hollander’s term,48 and places the focus squarely on the narrative technique of ekphrasis applied here, rather than on the realization of a known external artwork (much as the narrative is more interested in techniques of art preservation rather than in the artwork as artwork). As Margaret Anne Doody has put it, noting the perhaps counterintuitive prevalence of ekphrasis within the novel genre as a whole, ekphrasis exacts ‘a measure of detachment from the novel’, compelling the reader almost aggressively to consider a textual, or I would say intermedial, self-consciousness.49 Rather than castigating these extensive theoretical set pieces and strangely un-energetic ekphrases as examples of bad writing that nullify Stifter’s achievement as a novelist (in Alte Meister (Old Masters, 1985) Thomas Bernhard would call him the most boring author in German literature),50 I view them as placing pressure on the very narrative conventions of the nineteenth-century novel. Risach’s cautionary words about movement in art confine themselves to plastic artworks: and he selects, as Lessing had done in his reading of the Laocoön statue, and perhaps insisting too much, particularly violent examples of scenes that should not properly be represented visually (‘mißlich’ (‘unpleasant’), ‘verletzt uns’ (‘injures us’)) – a vulture descending upon its prey, horses jumping off a cliff, smoke rising from a cannon that has just been fired.51 It is for these reasons that the most – if not only – visually and verbally fascinating art work

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in the novel, Roland’s massive landscape painting, the only work approached at ekphrastic length, must be excluded from Risach’s estate. The artist is expelled (‘“Er sollte reisen’” (‘“He should travel’”)).52 The erratic, moving blocks (‘Findlinge’) depicted in the scene are the real blockages in the novel: Auf diesem wüsten Raume waren nicht Berge oder Wasserfluthen oder Ebenen oder Wälder oder die glatte See mit schönen Schiffen dargestellt, sondern es waren starre Felsen da, die nicht als geordnete Gebilde empor standen, sonder wie zufällig als Blöcke und selbst hie und da schief in der Erde staken, gleichsam als Fremdlinge, die wie jene Normannen auf dem Boden der Insel, die ihnen nicht gehörte, sich seßhaft gemacht hatten. (On this barren space were not to be found mountains or waterfalls or plains or forests or a smooth ocean with beautiful ships, but rather there were craggy cliffs, not standing upright in orderly forms, but sticking at an angle in the ground, like random blocks, or erratic boulders, like those Normans who had take up residence on the soil of an island that did not belong to them.)53

Risach does not need to address narrative’s relation to motion in these direct terms, because the art theoretical discourse itself, interrupted by ekphrases, performs its work from within. Stifter’s ekphrases, with the solitary exception of Roland’s monstrous painting, transform the novel ritualistically into a series of fixed, spatialized verbal artefacts (as Murray Krieger would have it54), a species of what we might call, to rewrite the dominant eighteenth-century concept of ut pictura poesis, ut sculptura poesis. That Lessing hauntingly presides over a narrative that at its very centre oscillates between ekphrastic practices of an extreme and radically unvivid type and a discursive analysis of word–image relationships only heightens the self-theorization and reversals of the novel at work.55 Via this discussion of ekphrasis, we can add a further aesthetic dimension to the excellent existing scholarship by Eva Geulen and Elisabeth Strowick that has discussed, respectively, Stifter’s self-conscious representation of the processes of description and of the representation of motion.56 Ironically, it is the biting critique offered by Stifter’s contemporary, the dramatist Hebbel, that astutely reveals what is at stake when, as Hebbel puts it, in a metaphor that aptly converts the narrative into a visual work, the artist’s palette itself becomes the painting: Das Äußerste der Dichtung scheint nun endlich in dem Stifter’schen Nachsommer erreicht zu sein. Was wird hier nicht Alles weitläufig betrachtet und geschildert; es fehlt nur noch die Betrachtung der Wörter, womit man schildert, und die Schilderung der Hand, womit man diese Betrachtungen niederschreibt, so ist der Kreis vollendet. (In Stifter’s Nachsommer we seem to have arrived at the extreme point of literature. What is not observed and depicted at length here; all that is missing is the observation of the words with which one is describing, and the description of the hand writing down these observations, and we have come full circle.)57



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The two German novels that I have briefly examined here, while complete opposites in terms of their narrative tendencies, and representatives of very different literary movements, have in common the legacy of Lessing, in the form of an experiment around the fulcrum of Laocoön and ekphrastic theory and practice, in each case pushing up against the edge of the medial dam Lessing had erected. The insertion of the Laocoön essay into a novel that is already substantially engaged in ekphrasis presents readers with set pieces that force us to encounter, confront, and interpret a narrative stumbling block, description itself, and that also constitute self-reflections on narrative stasis and mobility. Ekphrasis is not only always ‘explicitly a representation of a representation’, as James Heffernan puts it; it is also a description of a description. Ekphrasis, here exceeding the boundaries policed by Lessing, counters the suspicions and unease occasioned by description and noted by Sharon Marcus, Heather Love, and Stephen Best: that description is ‘defined by failure or falling short’ and by what it is not: ‘not interpretation, not explanation, not prediction, not prescription’. This conventional understanding of description as ‘insufficiently self-conscious of its own procedures’, already upended by ekphrasis, receives a further level of reflexivity in the two novels by Heinse and Stifter, which couple ekphrasis with second-order, hyper-ekphrastic set pieces.58 What these hauntings by Lessing reveal, finally, is not only the entanglement of the modern novel with theories and histories of representation, but also its observational stance on its own and the reader’s mediation.

Notes  1 Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry, trans. Edward Allen McCormick (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984). Important precursors to Lessing include the Earl of Shaftesbury’s Characteristicks (1714) and Abbé Dubos’s 1719 theory of signs, Critical Reflections on Poetry, Painting and Music, which anticipates Lessing’s distinction between ‘natural’ and ‘arbitrary’ signs of painting and poetry, respectively. See Moshe Barasch, ‘Unity and diversity of the visual arts’, in Modern Theories of Art 1: From Winckelmann to Baudelaire (New York: New York University Press, 1990), pp. 146–223 (esp. pp. 149–64); and ‘Lessing’s Laokoon: Context and Reception’, special issue of Poetics Today, 20:2 (1999). For an overview of the debate’s reverberations in the nineteenth century, focusing on the British context, see Roy Park, ‘“Ut Pictura Poesis”: The Nineteenth Century Aftermath’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 28(1969), 155–64.  2 My examples will derive from the German context, though Martin Meisel’s book Realizations has importantly tracked the significance of Lessing’s theories for the visually saturated Victorian novel, and George Eliot in particular, with her repeated turn to Lessing, would present a compelling British candidate for study (Realizations: Narrative, Pictorial, and Theatrical Arts in Nineteenth-Century England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983)). Dickens’s use of narrative montage, Meisel demonstrates, is antithetical to Lessing’s boundary model, and takes up the style of contemporary serial illustrated publications and proto-cinematic visual ­spectacles

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of the age such as the panorama, as well as of the British tradition of narrative painting, as in William Hogarth (p. 61). George Eliot directly engages with Lessing’s essay throughout her novels and criticism. Middlemarch, for example, contains an extended, set-piece dialogue between two male observers on the subject of a beautiful female statue, in which Will Ladislaw adopts Lessing’s position on the heightened potency of language (Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life, ed. David Carroll (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 189). Rebecca Rainof has argued recently that the Laocoön essay ‘scaffolds’ critical scenes in Daniel Deronda, and that the tableau vivant of Gwendolen Harleth can be read parodically as a send-up of Lessing’s model of sculptural decorum, which had castigated the insalubrious effects of the feminine (and, I would add, ‘effeminate’) imagination in favour of masculine restraint; see The Victorian Novel of Adulthood: Plot and Purgatory in Fictions of Maturity (Athens: Ohio State University Press, 2015), pp. 85–6.  3 Frauke Berndt, ‘Der literarische Text zwischen Narratologie und Mediologie’, presented in the ‘Narration’ seminar at the German Studies Association Annual Conference, Denver, October 2013. I wish to thank the other participants in the seminar for their valuable feedback, as well as the organizers and speakers at the 2013 Hull conference ‘Ekphrasis: From Paragone to Encounter’, and the graduate students in my spring 2014 seminar on ekphrasis at the University of Pennsylvania.  4 See Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983), p. 93.  5 Gérard Genette, ‘Frontiers of Narrative’, in Figures of Literary Discourse, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), pp. 127–44 (p. 134).  6 Ibid. See also D. P. Fowler, ‘Narrate and Describe: The Problem of Ekphrasis’, Journal of Roman Studies, 81 (1991), 25–35. On this point Genette is surprisingly similar to Lukács, who also dismissively cordons off description as a passive mode in ‘Narrate or Describe?’ (1936); see Georg Lukács, ‘Erzählen oder beschreiben?’, rpt. in Probleme des Realismus, 3 vols (Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1971), vol. 1, pp. 197–242.  7 David Carrier, ‘Ekphrasis and Interpretation: Two Modes of Art History Writing’, Journal of Aesthetics, 27 (1987), 20–31.  8 See, for example, the 2016 special issue of Representations, ‘Special Issue: Description Across Disciplines’, ed. Sharon Marcus, Heather Love, and Stephen Best, Representations, 135:1 (Summer 2016). See in particular the introduction by the editors, ‘Building a Better Description’, pp. 1–21.  9 Ruth Webb has been instrumental in recuperating the ancient meanings of ekphrasis as vivid descriptions of things in a wider sense, not necessarily artworks, as in the more modern definition. She draws attention to the shift in meaning occasioned by the nineteenth-century German reception of Philostratus and his gallery of paintings. See ‘Ekphrasis Ancient and Modern: The Invention of a Genre’, Word & Image, 15:1 (1999), 7–18. 10 Genette, Narrative Discourse, p. 102. 11 Tamar Yacobi, ‘Pictorial Models and Narrative Ekphrasis’, Poetics Today, 16 (1995), 599–649. Lessing holds too, of course, that the classic Homeric ekphrasis proceeds temporally, and is a description of a process, not an object: ‘We do not see the shield, but the divine master as he is making it’ (Laocoön, p. 95). See also Murray Krieger, Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992).



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12 Webb, ‘Ekphrasis Ancient and Modern’, pp. 11–12. 13 Friedrich Schlegel, ‘Brief über den Roman’, Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe, ed. Ernst Behler, 28 vols (Munich: F. Schöningh, 1958–), vol. 2, pp. 329–39 (p. 335). Such classical criticisms of the novel as an ‘impure medium’ (‘unreines Medium’) are exemplified by Friedrich Schiller’s comments in a letter of 20 October 1797 to Johann Wolfgang Goethe, with whom he was corresponding on Goethe’s massive Wilhelm Meister Bildungsroman project. See Friedrich Schiller, Der Briefwechsel zwischen Schiller und Goethe, ed. Siegfried Seidel, 3 vols (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1984), vol. 1, p. 432. 14 W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Visual and Verbal Representation (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 5. 15 Ibid., p. 179. 16 James A. W. Heffernan, Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 4. 17 See Catriona MacLeod, ‘Sculptural Blockages: Wilhelm Heinse’s Ardinghello, Clemens Brentano’s Godwi, and the Early Romantic Novel’, Seminar, 49 (2013), 232–47. 18 Wilhelm Heinse, Ardinghello und die glückseligen Inseln, Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. Max L. Bauemer (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam jun., 1975), p. 220. All translations by the author. 19 Ibid., p. 7. 20 Ibid., p. 169. This takes place at the beginning of the debate, when Demetri declares the need to determine the boundaries of each art. 21 Ibid., p. 171. The conversation extends between pages 165 and 195 in this edition, and concludes the first volume (of two) in the novel, thus serving as the work’s fulcrum. Like Lessing, Demetri abhors history painting (p. 172). 22 Lessing, Laocoön, p. 85. On this intellectual trajectory, see David Wellbery, Lessing’s ‘Laocoön’: Semiotics and Aesthetics in the Age of Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). See also Mitchell’s ideological reading of the system of binaries in Lessing, including that between natural and arbitrary signs, ‘Space and Time: Lessing’s Laocoon and the Politics of Genre’, in Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. 95–115. 23 Heinse, Ardinghello, pp. 184–5. 24 Laurence A. Rickels, Aberrations of Mourning: Writing on German Crypts (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1988), pp. 102–3. 25 Mitchell, ‘Ekphrasis and the Other’, in Picture Theory, pp. 151–81. For another prominent theorist of ekphrasis as struggle, see Heffernan, Museum of Words. 26 Heinse, Ardinghello, p. 191. 27 Ibid., pp. 186–90, 197. 28 Ibid., p. 190. 29 The liberated licentiousness of these exchanges among temporalities (antiquity, the Renaissance, the eighteenth century) as well as media (literature, sculpture, painting, dance) is a distinct counter-model to the moralizing, even fraught, aspect of nineteenth-century ekphrasis discussed by Stephen Cheeke in Chapter 6 (below). 30 Heinse, Ardinghello, p. 197. 31 Gernot Frankhäuser, ‘Das Bacchanal im Ardinghello – ein imaginiertes ballet en action?’, in Wilhelm Heinse: Der andere Klassizismus, ed. Markus Bernauer and Norbert Miller (Göttingen: Wallenstein, 2007), pp. 246–67.

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32 Consider the related scene in Goethe’s Die Wahlverwandtschaften (Elective Affinities) in a chapter saturated with tableaux vivants where Luciane poses with her back turned to the audience. One wag calls out for the pose to be broken and the verbal narrative propelled forward with the words normally found at the bottom of a page of printed text, a meta-commentary on the intermedial problematic: ‘Tournez s’il vous plaît’ (Sämtliche Werke, ed. Dieter Borchmeyer et al., 40 vols (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1998), 1.8:429; Elective Affinities, trans. David Constantine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 148. On Hendel-Schütz, see August Langen, ‘Attitüde und Tableau in der Goethezeit’, Jahrbuch der deutschen Schillergesellschaft, 12 (1968), 194–258 (p. 220). 33 Goethe, ‘Einleitung in die Propyläen’, in Sämtliche Werke, 1.18:457–88; ‘Introduction to the Propylaea’, in Essays on Art and Literature, ed. John Gearey and trans. Ellen von Nardroff and Ernest H. von Nardroff (New York: Suhrkamp, 1983), pp. 85–6. 34 See Henry Hatfield, Aesthetic Paganism in German Literature: From Winckelmann to the Death of Goethe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964), p. 79. 35 Heinse, Ardinghello, p. 236. 36 Ibid., p. 93. 37 Ibid., p. 44–5. 38 Ibid., p. 331. 39 See Erich Meuthen, Eins und doppelt oder vom Anderssein des Selbst: Struktur und Tradition des deutschen Künstlerromans (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 2001), p. 24; Gert Theile, Wilhelm Heinse: Lebenskunst in der Goethezeit (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2011), p. 166; Philippe Hamon, La description littéraire: de l’antiquité à Roland Barthes (Paris: Macula, 1991), p. 8, quoted in Ruth Webb, ‘Ekphrasis Ancient and Modern’, p. 7. 40 Friedrich Hebbel, review of Der Nachsommer in Illustrierte Zeitung, 792 (4 September 1858), 158, quoted in Moriz Enzinger, Adalbert Stifter im Urteil seiner Zeit (Vienna: Hermann Böhlaus Nachf., 1968), p. 229. 41 Adalbert Stifter, Der Nachsommer, in Werke und Briefe, Historisch-Kritische Ausgabe, ed. Alfred Doppler and Wolfgang Frühwald, 10 vols (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1978–), 4.2:92. 42 Ibid., 4.2:39. 43 Cited in Enzinger, Adalbert Stifter im Urteil seiner Zeit, p. 229. Other contemporary criticisms reprinted in Enzinger’s volume and taking Lessing as their point of departure include those by Eduard Schmidt-Weißenfels (p. 220) and Emil Kuh (p. 287). See also Lukács’s influential 1936 Marxist critique of description ‘Erzählen oder beschreiben?’ 44 Two visual works by Stifter in particular, the sketch and oil painting that share the same title, Bewegung (Movement), are worth analysis, as they are roughly contemporaneous with the novel, which was published in 1857. The preliminary sketch of the stone block in a stream is composed of dynamic, choppy lines and contours, a technique that makes it difficult to distinguish between water and rock. Stifter’s finished painting, on the other hand, has lost or abandoned these mobile expressionistic traits and focuses, like his novel, on the massive, blocky, abstracted ‘thingness’ of the stone. See Catriona MacLeod, Fugitive Objects: Sculpture and Literature in the German Nineteenth Century (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2014), pp. 112–13, for a discussion of these works.



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45 Samuel Frederick, Narratives Unsettled: Digression in Robert Walser, Thomas Bernhard, and Adalbert Stifter (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2012), p. 147. 46 Genette, Narrative Discourse, pp. 102–3. 47 Stifter, Der Nachsommer, 4.1:255. 48 John Hollander, ‘The Poetics of Ekphrasis’, Word & Image, 4.1 (1988), 209–17. 49 Margaret Anne Doody, The True Story of the Novel (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996), p. 403. 50 Thomas Bernhard, Alte Meister, in Werke, ed. Martin Huber and Wendelin SchmidtDengler, 22 vols (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2008), vol. 8, p. 47. 51 Stifter, Der Nachsommer, 4.2:91–2. 52 Ibid., 4.3:120. 53 Ibid., 4.3:118. 54 See Krieger, Ekphrasis. 55 This makes it implausible to refer to the Lessing passages as an ‘inner-textual defense’ (see Robert C. Holub, Reflections of Realism: Paradox, Norm, and Ideology in Nineteenth-Century German Prose (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1991), p. 70). 56 See Eva Geulen, ‘Depicting Description: Lukács and Stifter’, Germanic Review, 73 (1998), 267–79; and Elisabeth Strowick, ‘Poetological and Technical Operations: Representation of Motion in Adalbert Stifter’, Configurations, 18 (2011), 273–89. 57 Cited in Enzinger, Adalbert Stifter im Urteil seiner Zeit, p. 229. 58 Marcus, Love, and Best, ‘Building a Better Description’, p. 1. My thanks are due to Sefy Hendler for encouraging me to think about the notion of ‘hyper-ekphrasis’.

6

The face of Beatrice Cenci Stephen Cheeke

The 22-year-old Beatrice Cenci, having been involuntarily confined and possibly sexually assaulted by her father Francesco, conspired with her stepmother Lucrezia and her brother Giacomo to have Francesco murdered, was found guilty and later executed in Rome, on 11 September 1599. For most of the nineteenth century it was believed that Guido Reni had painted Beatrice Cenci’s portrait on the eve of her execution. In fact, the portrait in question, ‘one of the most famous attractions of Rome’, is not by Guido Reni, and does not represent Beatrice Cenci.1 The misattribution may offer us an awkward lesson in how we encounter pictures, one famously spelt out by Mark Twain: A good legible label is usually worth, for information, a ton of significant attitude and expression in a historical picture. In Rome, people with fine sympathetic natures stand up and weep in front of the celebrated “Beatrice Cenci the Day before her Execution”. It shows what a label can do. If they did not know the picture, they would inspect it unmoved, and say, “Young girl with hay fever; young girl with her head in a bag”.2

‘Deprive her of her melancholy situation,’ wrote Hippolyte Taine, ‘and nothing remains but an amiable young lady.’3 Knowledge of the ‘situation’ could even, it seems, determine the colours of the painting, if we take Shelley’s insistence that Beatrice has golden hair, and Melville’s description of her as ‘seraphically blonde’, as the expression of a preference, rather than as accurate observation. (Her hair is coppery brown.4) Equally, though, we might ask how these sympathetic natures would have responded to the Cenci story had they not known the picture. ‘The History is written in the painting,’ Charles Dickens declared: ‘written, in the dying girl’s face, by Nature’s own hand.’5 If this is a mistake, it points to the ways in which an encounter with a pictorial representation might shape our understanding of an historical narrative; how a picture is sometimes able to broaden and deepen – to humanize perhaps – the moral interpretation we bring to a history.6



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Beatrice Cenci’s face as painted by Guido Reni seemed to throw light upon the Cenci story by illustrating a certain type of sorrowful suffering, which it might otherwise have been difficult to conceive. The preconception, in other words, worked both ways. In fact, no other conjunction of story and picture had stimulated such anxious meditation among literary visitors to Rome. Shelley possessed a copy of the portrait that had been ‘instantly recognised’ by his Italian servant, and he wondered at the ‘deep and breathless interest’ the story still awakened among the people there. He described it thus: The portrait of Beatrice Cenci at the Colonna Palace is admirable as a work of art: it was taken by Guido during her confinement in prison … . There is a fixed and pale composure upon the features: she seems sad and stricken down in spirit, yet the despair thus expressed is lightened by the patience of her gentleness. Her head is bound with folds of white drapery from which the yellow strings of her golden hair escape, and fall about her neck. The moulding of the face is exquisitely delicate; the eyebrows are distinct and arched: the lips have that permanent meaning of imagination and sensibility which suffering has not repressed and which it seems as if death scarcely could extinguish. Her forehead is large and clear; her eyes, which we are told were remarkable for their vivacity, are swollen with weeping and lustreless, but beautifully tender and serene. In the whole mien there is a simplicity and dignity which united with her exquisite loveliness and deep sorrow are inexpressibly pathetic.7

Melville, too, would comment upon the ‘expression of suffering about the mouth – (appealing look of innocence) not caught in any copy or engraving’.8 But there was more than stoic or pathetic resistance there; something about the portrait suggested a larger mystery that had suddenly become visible – visible, that is to say, in its mystery. In this respect the Cenci portrait seemed to haunt the observer as if it were a portrait from nineteenth-century Gothic fiction. Beatrice’s face would play a role in novels that drew upon the conventions of that genre, most famously in Melville’s Pierre or The Ambiguities (1852), and in Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun (1860). Her portrait suggested the interrupted, suspended moment in which a secret emerges into the light. In Stendhal’s words, she had the ‘astonished air of someone who happens to be surprised at the moment of weeping warm tears’, half-turning, repeatedly meeting the nineteenth century observer with the same effect.9 It was as if the male literary sensibility felt compelled to believe that it was the first to surprise Beatrice from her place of solitude. Dickens had even fantasized a genesis of the portrait in the moment when Guido looked into Beatrice’s face from a crowd of onlookers as she marched to the scaffold (replaying Dante’s first encounter with his own Beatrice): ‘I am willing to believe that, as you see her on the canvas, so she turned towards him, in the crowd, from the first sight of the axe, and stamped upon his mind a look which he has stamped upon mine as though I had stood beside him in the concourse’ (my emphasis): Through the transcendent sweetness and beauty of the face, there is something shining out, that haunts me… She has suddenly turned towards you; and there

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14. Guido Reni, Portrait of Beatrice Cenci (1600) is an expression in the eyes – though they are very tender and gentle – as if the wildness of a momentary terror, or distraction, had been struggled with and overcome, that instant; and nothing but a celestial hope, and a beautiful sorrow, and a desolate earthly helplessness remained.10



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What recurs in these prose ekphrases is the perception of a light shining out of her countenance, a chiaroscuro effect of radiance thrown into greater relief by a dark background. This was both a technical appraisal of the painting, and a moral interpretation of the face. De Quincey had reacted similarly: The same fine relief, the same light shining in darkness, arises here from the touching beauty of Beatrice, from her noble aspirations after deliverance, from the remorse which reaches her in the midst of real innocence, from her meekness, and from the depth of her inexpressible affliction. Even the murder, even the parricide, though proceeding from herself, do but deepen that background of darkness, which throws into fuller revelation the glory of that suffering face as immortalised by Guido.11

What did De Quincey mean by ‘real innocence’? And how, exactly, could Beatrice’s parricide be conceived as providing a darkness against which a ‘glory’ was thrown into ‘fuller revelation’ – how, in other words, is pictorial chiaroscuro translated into the terms of a moral or theological argument in which a victory over evil is claimed? This chapter will explore exactly what is at stake in this translation process, and how it is fundamental to the encounter between word and image. Shelley’s analysis of the kind of interest provoked by the painting and its conjoining story had been astute: ‘It is in the restless anatomizing casuistry with which men seek the justification of Beatrice, yet feel that she has done what needs justification; it is in the superstitious horror with which they contemplate alike her wrongs and their revenge; that the dramatic character of what she did and suffered, consists.’12 The dedication of The Cenci (1819) to Leigh Hunt had described Hunt as a person of ‘exalted toleration for all who do and think evil’.13 The implication of this striking statement is that Hunt would be the kind of person who would seek some sort of emollient understanding of Beatrice Cenci. But ‘restless anatomizing casuistry’ hints at the difficulty of doing so, given the facts of this case. ‘Casuistry’ was a form of moral reasoning often associated with the Jesuits and therefore considered especially doubtful by a Protestant sensibility. The moral reasoning that dissected the character of Beatrice in order to seek a final justification of her parricide received its impulse primarily from the portrait’s appearance of tenderness and innocence. In this, the question of ‘appearance’ seemed to be overlooked, as if the portrait simply told a visible and self-evident truth, a transparency in which the face was a sign for an underlying ‘real innocence’ that could not be doubted. The face was the truth, revealing an integrity and composure that resisted the ‘anatomizing’, disincarnating process of looking too closely at the facts of the case. The face insisted that at a ­fundamental level its beauty was connected to goodness. Shelley identified this ‘anatomizing’ reasoning not only with readers of the Cenci story, however, but with the Cenci themselves. In Act 2 of the play the prelate Orsino describes the family’s dangerous capacity to see into, and through, themselves and other people:

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’tis a trick of this same family To analyze their own and other minds. Such self-anatomy shall teach the will Dangerous secrets: for it tempts our powers, Knowing what must be thought, and may be done, Into the depth of darkest purposes … (2.2.108–13)

It is a ‘trick’ that aptly describes the play’s own daring to press the taboos of theatrical representation, and it is one most potently possessed by Beatrice herself, again as Orsino describes it: Her subtle mind, her awe-inspiring gaze Whose beams anatomize me nerve by nerve And lay me bare, and make me blush to see My hidden thoughts. (1.3.84–7)

Beatrice’s gaze, in other words, makes inner motive and desire transparent in others, at least to themselves, and this laying bare further stimulates desire for her. But Beatrice presents her own transparency of motive as a direct correlative of her innocent countenance. The transparency in which lurking motives are revealed in others is contrasted with her own transparency, in which no secret motive mars the picture. After the murder of her father, and in response to her stepmother and co-conspirator Lucretia’s fear of self-incrimination, Beatrice proclaims that the appearance of innocence can only be read in one way: She cannot know how well the supine slaves Of blind authority read the truth of things When written on a brow of guilelessness: She sees not yet triumphant Innocence Stand at the judgement-seat of mortal man, A judge and accuser of the wrong Which drags it there. (5.1.181–7)

It is not clear whether she means that she will be able to trick the authorities by keeping up an innocent appearance, or, that her innocence can never fail to appear, even to them. In fact, it is never established whether, or in exactly what sense, Shelley’s Beatrice thinks of herself as innocent in the final act of the play; to what extent she relies on an appearance of guilelessness to act as its own proof, or how far she convinces herself of this simple equivalence. A restless, anatomizing casuistry is hers until the very end, but the pathos of her character has its source in the picture; it is, in fact, entirely based upon Shelley’s memory of the effect of Guido Reni’s portrait. What is encountered in the picture is both a penetrating gaze that sees through and into the observer, a look of profound experience, and a look of simple innocence: the moral paradox is somehow declared in the image.



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The dilemma of how Beatrice appeared to herself, and of how her look was able to ‘anatomize’ others, would also fascinate Nathaniel Hawthorne, who twice visited the ‘dreadful pit’ in the Castel Sant’Angelo where she had been imprisoned.14 His reaction to the portrait, then in the Palazzo Barberini, in February 1858, was an intense one. The French and Italian Notebooks have two separate extended descriptions, of which this is the first: [As] regards Beatrice Cenci, I might as well not try to say anything, for its spell is indefinable, and the painter has wrought it in a way more like magic than anything else I have known. It is a very youthful, girlish, perfectly beautiful face, with white drapery all around it, and quite enveloping the form. One or two locks of auburn hair stray out. The eyes are large and brown, and meet those of the spectator; and there is, I think, a little red about the eyelids, but it is very slightly indicated. The whole face is perfectly quiet; no distortion nor disturbance of any single feature; nor can I see why it should not be cheerful, nor why an imperceptible touch of the painter’s brush should not suffice to brighten it into joyousness. Yet it is the very saddest picture that ever was painted, or conceived; there is an unfathomable depth of sorrow in the eyes; the sense of it comes by a sort of intuition. It is a sorrow that removes her out of the sphere of humanity; and yet she looks so innocent, that you feel as if it were only this sorrow, with its weight and darkness, that keeps her down upon the earth and brings her within our reach at all. She is like a fallen angel, fallen, without sin. It is infinitely pitiful to meet her eyes, and feel that nothing can be done to help or comfort her; not that she appeals to you for help and comfort, but is more conscious than we can be that there is none in reserve for her. It is the most profoundly wrought picture in the world; no artist did it, or could do it again. Guido must have held the brush, but he painted better than he knew. I wish, however, it were possible for some spectator, of deep sensibility, to see the picture without knowing anything of its subject or history; for no doubt we bring all our knowledge of the Cenci tragedy to the interpretation of the picture.15

‘I hated to leave the picture,’ Hawthorne would record of his second visit in 1859; ‘and yet was glad when I had taken my last glimpse, because it so perplexed and troubled me not to be able to get hold of its secret.’16 Melville would describe the same perplexity, of ‘the suggested fanciful anomaly of so sweetly and seraphically blonde a being, being double-hooded, as it were, by the black crape of the two most horrible crimes (of one of which she is the object, and of the other the agent) possible to civilized humanity – incest and parricide’.17 Again, his terms translate the pictorial contrast of blonde-and-black into a moral enigma or anomaly. The assumption that being the victim of rape conferred a dark stigma, only deepens the perceived anomaly. The portrait of Beatrice plays a central role in Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun (1860), published in England under the more interesting title of The Transformation. It is one of a number of works of art with which characters seem to exchange or share resemblances and identities during the course of the novel, and several different ekphrastic readings of the portrait seek to explain its effect. I would suggest, in fact, that the encounter with the face of Beatrice Cenci

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c­ rystallizes a central question in the practice of ekphrasis concerning the idea of reading pictures as moral or theological statements. Critics of Hawthorne’s novel have found something to dislike about all four of its central characters (Hilda, Miriam, Kenyon, and Donatello), but the ‘innocent’ Hilda has proved particularly easy to satirize.18 Permanently attired in white, living in a Gothic tower in Rome where she tends a shrine to the Virgin, attended by doves who seem sensitive to her moods, Hilda is ‘the most insistent exaggeration of purity in all of [Hawthorne’s] fiction’, as Frederick Crews put it.19 (And this in a body of fiction not afraid to exaggerate purity.) Despite, or perhaps because of this purity, she has managed to attain a high level of skill as a copyist of the Old Masters. Her method resembles a type of automatism that seems half mechanical and half magical, something akin to Holgrove’s daguerreotypism in The House of the Seven Gables (1851), and to the kind of artistry Hawthorne attributed to Guido Reni. As she is unable to persuade the Prince Barberini to allow her to copy Reni’s Beatrice portrait on the spot, she has sat before the picture ‘day after day, and let it sink into [her] heart’, until it ‘is now photographed there’.20 The resultant copy, according to her friend Miriam (who is a rather more individualistic painter), is ‘Guido’s very Beatrice’. Miriam, who bears a burden of guilt from her past that is subtly communicated while never really being fully explicated, asks Hilda whether she ‘“can interpret what the feeling is, that gives this picture such a mysterious force?”’ Hilda answers that while painting Beatrice Cenci she felt all the time that she [Beatrice] was ‘“trying to escape from my gaze”’: “She knows her sorrow is so strange, and so immense, that she ought to be solitary forever, both for the world’s sake and her own … She is a fallen angel, fallen, and yet sinless; and it is only this depth of sorrow, with its weight and darkness, that keeps her down upon earth, and brings her within our view even while it sets her beyond our reach.” (pp. 52–3)

Miriam, however, questions this notion of sinlessness, arguing that Beatrice’s ‘own conscience does not acquit her of something evil, and never to be forgiven’. But then she seems to change her mind: Beatrice’s sin may not have been so great; perhaps it was no sin at all, but the best virtue possible in the circumstances. If she viewed it as a sin, it may have been because her nature was too feeble for the fate imposed upon her. Ah … if I could only get within her consciousness! If I could clasp Beatrice Cenci’s ghost, and draw it into myself! I would give my life to know whether she thought herself innocent, or the one great criminal since time began! (p. 53)

This sounds like the ‘casuistry’ with which Beatrice’s crime, according to Shelley, is justified: that it is the best virtue in the circumstances. And in a sense it is the same problem Shelley wrestled with in the final act of his drama – to get within Beatrice’s own consciousness of herself, whether this is a state of false consciousness, of self-deception, or not. But the effort to get within her consciousness is really an effort to interpret the mysterious opacity of the Reni



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portrait, the sense of a pictorial chiaroscuro or contrast of light and darkness denoting a particular kind of moral complexity. Behind this lies a particular assumption about the encounter between language and pictures, what Roland Barthes described as a ‘conception of the image as an area of resistance to meaning’.21 The encounter between word and image produces a fundamental resistance which tends to be interpreted in favour of pictures, that is, it is taken as an index of the image’s ability better to express what lies beyond the limits of verbal explication. But this resistance in turn invites and facilitates a compensatory excess of language, in this case in the form of a casuistical reasoning, working to justify what cannot perhaps be justified, and always falling short of the expressive capacity of the portrait. Miriam’s own reasoning certainly recalls the masculine efforts of Shelley’s readers to justify Beatrice in terms of moral argument, and for many commentators the very urge to penetrate the ‘mystery’ of the portrait has a solidly masculine source. In the simple gendered paradigm sometimes adduced in theoretical accounts of ekphrasis, in which (male) language seeks to violate the repose, the passivity of the (female) image, one way of accounting for the fascination with the Cenci story among male writers would be to expose the kind of psychic disguise that is involved in the evocation of feminine ‘mystery’, or of places that evade the analysis of the mind, as one of sexual desire. Nineteenth-century gentlemen have thus merely been seduced by what Edith Wharton called ‘the pink-eyed smirk of the turbaned Beatrice’; they have fallen in love in some devilish way, or been unconsciously sexually stimulated by the association with the story of incest.22 ‘The Cenci tragedy’, as Jeffrey Meyers writes, ‘personified in the portrait that transformed the incest, parricide, prison and torture of the haggard Beatrice into the sexually exciting image of a violated virgin, had an enormous attraction.’23 If we accept this line of argument, Beatrice is violated again, so to speak, in the penetrative impulse of a moral reasoning that seeks justification for its own desire. Sympathy, far from being a benevolent impulse, emerges as a further aggression upon her person, a sublimation of desire, a return of her anatomizing stare: stripping, denuding, possessing. Desire in this sense explains the ‘mysterious’ metamorphosis through which she is transfigured, by which she becomes radiant – sexual – set like a jewel against her own darkness.24 Certainly, to a modern reader of Shelley’s drama, there may well be a sense in which the hints and euphemisms, the trailing ellipses and refusals to name the incestuous rape directly, seem doomed to produce (even if they are not motivated by) something like titillation – though this may also be a consequence of our inability to experience the finer quality of testing the strength of the taboo of naming such deeds on the nineteenth-century stage. The ‘desperate anxiety’ of The Marble Faun might only too obviously be read as both concealing and revealing a fear of female sexuality, symbolized in the Cenci story.25 Such an appeal to the seductiveness of the image of Beatrice, however, merely leaves us stranded in the circularity of desire and its sublimated images. In Hawthorne’s

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fiction the assumption that desire is the real or given, and that representation is the imaginary, is always, at the very least, a simplification. The semiotic question is a fundamental one, in this case between the intrinsic quality of innocence and its extrinsic sign (the face of innocence). The fact that we are concerned with portraiture, with a face, makes it especially complex, because the face is a figure for a particularly direct and immediate visual modality (indeed for the idea of unmediated encounter), and for the mask or appearance, the sign or cipher, which functions as a primary layer of disguise. In the nineteenth century the pseudo-sciences of physiognomy and phrenology made of face-reading a literalist obsession, something of course that filters through the literature of the period – whether in forms of scepticism or of credulity. It would be a mistake to assume that post-nineteenth-century readers have moved beyond the assumption that the face is there to be deciphered. Conceptualizing a quality or a phenomenon through evocation of its ‘face’ (the face of innocence, the face of suffering) is to employ a basic metaphor for understanding how that phenomenon orients itself towards the world, how it is encountered and contemplated, and how it desires to be met.26 Innocence orients itself towards the world in the face of Beatrice Cenci, as painted by Reni, we might say.27 At the same time, the fact that the face evokes the opposite sense, of the mask or the apparition, makes the simple assertion of a transparency between Beatrice’s face and her innocence problematic. Hawthorne’s novels and stories are haunted by faces that are dark, indistinct, unfathomable, misidentified, sometimes veiled or absolutely withheld from view.28 Anxiety over their true nature reveals the grip they have upon an imagination which worried about the effect of bringing knowledge of Beatrice’s story to the image, and which finally turned away from Guido’s picture at the Palazzo Barberini with relief. In Hawthorne’s writing, with his particular sensitivity to the phantomatic – what Henry James described as his ‘miasmatic conscience’ – we always return to the fundamentally ambiguous nature of figuration, which is at its most essential, and therefore most dangerous, in the face-to-face encounter.29 The shadowy repertoire of ‘forms’ (‘appearances’, ‘apparitions’, ‘figures’) reached deep into Hawthorne’s Puritan consciousness and memory, going back to the sense of guilt he examined in his art in relation to his ancestors’ involvement in the Salem witch-trials, in which the evidentiary case against the defendants often rested upon an appeal to such forms. Perhaps no other writer in the nineteenth century was so troubled and excited by the notion of ‘appearance’.30 One strand of the novel wants to suggest that looking into Beatrice Cenci’s face requires a particular courage; that there is a demand to be met in her look, which is not easily met nor easily understood, and which is analogous to those other moments when characters force themselves to look into the face of evil. At the same time the novel shrinks from the full acknowledgement of such a look, preferring to return to the notion of ‘purity’, the mechanical reproduction or faithful copy, which it associates with Hilda. Thrown into despair when she



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witnesses the murder of the Model by Donatello, and certain that she has also witnessed Miriam’s complicity in that murder, Hilda returns to her tower and notices in a mirror placed beside the Cenci portrait that her own face has begun to resemble that of Beatrice’s. ‘“Am I, too, stained with guilt?”’, she asks herself, in a dramatic moment Oscar Wilde would clearly absorb and in a sense repeat in reverse in The Picture of Dorian Gray. Hawthorne seems compelled to answer her in his own voice: Not so, thank Heaven! But, as regards Beatrice’s picture, the incident suggests a theory which may account for its unutterable grief and mysterious shadow of guilt, without detracting from the purity which we love to attribute to that ill-fated girl. Who, indeed, can look at that mouth – with its lips half-apart, as innocent as a baby’s that has been crying – and not pronounce Beatrice sinless! It was the intimate consciousness of her father’s sin that threw its shadow over her, and frightened her into a remote and inaccessible region, where no sympathy could come. It was the knowledge of Miriam’s guilt that lent the same expression to Hilda’s face. (p. 160)

The argument here is, in one sense, simply a way of acknowledging the vulnerability of innocence to evil – the shadow of sin thrown by one over the other. But Hawthorne’s intervention seems again to want either to forget, or to annul, the evil of Beatrice’s conspiracy to murder, while at the same time remaining ambivalent about the guilt attached to the victim of rape. Miriam’s understanding of Beatrice rests upon what the novel intermittently offers as the more radical notion of recognition. To look into the face of sin as Miriam does is to recognize one’s own part, not merely in the sense that one becomes tainted or stained, but in acknowledgement of an original co-presence there. It is a form of intimate consciousness, of inner resemblance, that is not simply a passive receptiveness to the shadow of another, but an active and participatory encounter. This order of recognition may therefore result in judging the sin differently, and more mercifully. But it also approaches the threshold of a radical antinomianism, the daring of Shelley’s The Cenci, in which moral judgements have been conspicuously reversed, and in which the ‘will’ has been taught ‘dangerous secrets’. Hawthorne’s imagination is drawn to and repelled by this position, against which he instinctively grasps at the notion of a counterbalancing purity. He consequently has difficulty deciding what there is to see in the Beatrice Cenci portrait. He wants to read there both an original innocence, and an innocence regained or redeemed. The first kind has never known sin, while the second seems to know some mysterious secret about the meaning of sin that cannot easily be grasped or told, one in which sin has been transfigured – the final effect of the Guido Reni portrait. These kinds of incompatibilities are sometimes attributed to the book’s supposedly ‘characteristic tone of having it both ways’, although it would be more generous to describe them as ambiguities.31 Hawthorne’s attraction to ambiguities has long been identified as central to his work, most famously in

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Matthiessen’s exposition of the ‘device of multiple choice’, and in Ivor Winters’s ‘formula of alternative possibilities’.32 Harry Levin had described ‘ambiguity’ as ‘the essential condition of Hawthorne’s belief’(my emphasis), and Frederick Crews outlined what he called the ‘timid ambiguity’ and the ‘gloomy ambivalence’ of The Marble Faun.33 Trying to translate the ambiguity of the Reni portrait into a moral argument, however, has the potential to lead in contrasting directions. One way is to the kind of relativism voiced late in Hawthorne’s novel by Kenyon (whose statements frequently seem fatuous): Ah, Hilda … you do not know (for you could never learn it from your own heart, which is all purity and rectitude) what a mixture of good there may be in things evil; and how the greatest criminal, if you look at his conduct from his own point of view, or from any side-point, may seem not so unquestionably guilty, after all. (p. 298)

The ‘side-point’, the ‘new line of sight’, is precisely what is at issue in Reni’s chiaroscuro, and what is most difficult to define about the portrait. But there is something appropriately flat in Kenyon’s ‘after all’ that suggests the easy slipperiness of evading a direct look at evil, or of suspending judgement in a generalized, oblique sympathy. Hawthorne was never prepared to give up the question of final moral evaluation and judgement, and would not be satisfied with abandoning the problem to relativism or casuistry. The most pressing question, then, is whether there is a meaningful moral content to the transfiguration attested to by viewers of Beatrice’s portrait: how the darkness of her sin and of her suffering is somehow redeemed in the light of her nature. One way of resolving this ambiguity would be to privilege the aesthetic category itself as a mode of real transformation, one in which moral darkness is somehow changed through the processes of Art. (Changed and finally redeemed.)34 Great artists such as Guido Reni, then, are able to transmute the substance of their flawed material into a kind of spiritualized gold. This is the basis of the reading of Hawthorne offered by Henry James, particularly in James’s objections to the argument of Émile Montégut that Hawthorne was a romancier pessimiste.35 James insisted instead that Hawthorne had inherited the old Puritan consciousness of sin, that he had been ‘haunted’ by the ‘urgent conscience’, but that he had inherited these things ‘minus the conviction’ (p. 48): The old Puritan moral sense, the consciousness of sin and hell, of the fearful nature of our responsibilities and the savage character of our Taskmaster – these things had been lodged in the mind of a man of Fancy, whose fancy had straightway begun to take liberties and play tricks with them – to judge them (Heaven forgive him!) from the poetic and aesthetic point of view, the point of view of entertainment and irony. This absence of conviction makes the difference; but the difference is great. (p. 46)

For James, then, there was something ‘insincere’ in Hawthorne’s handling of the themes of sin and sorrow. Hawthorne ‘contrived, by an exquisite process, best known to himself, to transmute this heavy moral burden into the very



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substance of the imagination, to make it evaporate in the light and charming fumes of artistic production’ (p. 22). The ‘aesthetic point of view’ in this account is inherently a position of irony, one in which a single moral centre is always rejected. Beatrice’s sin and suffering are therefore transmuted (or, in the sense of Hawthorne’s original title, transformed) into the finer material of beauty, which loosens and softens her moral outline, altering her substance, and neutralizing her participation in evil. Her portrait shines with the light of this transmutation. As a larger conception of Hawthorne as an artist, the subordination of the moral category to the aesthetic is an argument for the creative sovereignty of the relativist ‘side-view’, and James’s own fiction has a clear investment in this mode. But in its view of Hawthorne as light and airy and charming, it was never an entirely persuasive thesis. James simplifies both the complex relationship Hawthorne had with his Puritan inheritance, and the deeply ambivalent view he held of art and the artist. A different way of approaching the problem would be to accept both the primacy and authenticity of the moral question, and then to position Beatrice in relation to the larger, much discussed and often confused question of the ‘Fortunate Fall’. This is normally considered in relation to Donatello and his psychomachia, the spiritual and moral awakening from ‘Marble Faun’ to suffering man, but it may also be usefully applied to Beatrice. As a theological paradigm for the transmutation of darkness into light it has an obvious analogy with the aesthetic effect attributed to the Reni portrait. There are two significant moments towards the end of the novel when the doctrine is given provisional outline. The first is by Miriam: ‘Was that very sin – into which Adam precipitated himself and all his race – was it the destined means by which, over a long pathway of toil and sorrow, we are to attain a higher, brighter, and profounder happiness, than our lost birthright gave? Will not this idea account for the permitted existence of sin, as no other theory can?’ (p. 337)

The other is by Kenyon: ‘Is Sin, then – which we deem such a dreadful blackness in the Universe – is it, like Sorrow, merely an element of human education, through which we struggle to a higher and purer state than we could otherwise have attained? Did Adam fall, that we might ultimately rise to a far loftier Paradise than his?’ (pp. 356–7)

The philosophical and theological arguments against the notion of the Fortunate Fall are too various to be summarized here, but one obvious point to be made, and one immediately grasped by Hilda, is that it seems to allow for an essential ambiguity in the way sin is evaluated – ultimately (and ‘ultimately’ is as exposed a term as Kenyon’s ‘after all’).36 Is the presence of sin in the world a good or a bad thing, ultimately? And how would that ‘ultimate’ answer affect the present? It is the position of confusion that Milton’s Adam finds himself articulating in Book 12 of Paradise Lost, when, in Arthur Lovejoy’s phrase, he ‘expresses a

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serious doubt whether his primal sin … was not, after all, rather a ground for self-congratulation’:37 O Goodness infinite, goodness immense! That all this good of evil shall produce, And evil turn to good; more wonderful Than that which by creation first brought forth Light out of darkness! full of doubt I stand, Whether I should repent me now of sin By me done and occasioned, or rejoice Much more, that much more good thereof shall spring … 38

In a doctrinal sense, the concept of the ‘Fortunate Fall’ was certainly not a way to justify crimes; it did not alter the notion of what constituted a sin, but referred to the significance of sin in the fullness of time, at the end of time; and so Hawthorne would absolutely not have seen Beatrice’s parricide as in any way ‘happy’ in the sense (Miriam’s sense perhaps) that she had simply got rid of a violent murderer. Sin and guilt were an active stimulus to the fuller manifestation of God’s grace and mercy, and the ‘dangerous secret’ that in a moral sense everything was permitted, would be, from a Christian point of view, the wrong lesson to learn. Nevertheless, observers of Beatrice’s face perhaps stand in an analogous state of confusion as to whether this is a picture of darkness, or one in which we somehow ultimately witness the emergence of a redemptive ‘light out of darkness’. Every ekphrasis of the picture that interprets the formal chiaroscuro as a moral argument, is, in effect, drawing upon this sense of the emergence of light in the Christian schema of redemption. The difficulty lies in relaying the effect of an ultimate good to the temporal present. Even if we allow ourselves to be persuaded by the reasoning that aims to justify her parricide – as a contingent necessity, in which good comes out of evil – we must still face the fact of her terrible suffering and her sorrow. How is the darkness of that suffering made good? Is it the case that a painting, with its resistance to the temporal and linear explications of language, better functions as a signifier of that ultimate destination of the finally made-good? Or is this somehow to be deceived by the image? There is a fundamental distinction to be made between the notion of suffering as a kind of educative discipline – that there are types of suffering through which our natures are deepened or humanized (so that ‘trouble is the next best thing to enjoyment’, as Hawthorne would inform Longfellow); and the idea that radical evil will turn out to be a providential good, in the long run. Hawthorne was certainly aware of the difference, but it is perhaps the blurring of these notions that causes the uneasiness many readers have felt with the final chapters of The Marble Faun, and which is embodied in the ekphrases of the Reni portrait.39 A powerful objection to the enunciation of felix culpa of which Hawthorne seems closely conscious, however, is precisely that it is ‘a line of reasoning’.40 As such it cannot do justice to the nature of its subject. It fails as a summary of a knowledge that can only be gained in deep, extended time (‘over a long pathway of toil



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and suffering’), through purgatorial experience. Any formulation as a moral proposition or statement, as a justification of the ‘permitted’ place of sin and suffering in the universe, inevitably feels like a determination to have it both ways. As a consequence, it might seem that the ‘theory’ (Miriam’s word for it) is best left unexpressed (perhaps unviolated) by the casuistry of verbal explanation. Hawthorne’s insistence that Beatrice appears to be in a ‘remote and inaccessible region’, that she is ‘removed … from the sphere of humanity … in a far-off region’, acknowledges this difficulty. But although the mystery of what is in her consciousness is hidden from explication, it may, Hawthorne believed, be partly intuited through the encounter with her picture. In a theological sense, such an emphasis raises the image above the word in terms of its affective capacity to convey certain forms of spiritual reality, and it does so in a way that counters the traditional division of spatial art and temporal literature. In other words, in contradiction of the notion enshrined by Lessing that the temporal mode of painting is limited in comparison to that of writing, a picture may be able to offer us a sign of the most extended and mysterious results hidden within the longest processes of time; it is a type of fore-seeing or providential imaging. Hawthorne’s imagination, however, could not rest in this exalted idea of the artwork, this quasi-mystical notion of images. He looked beyond it for the sustaining light of which pictures were only ever partial refractions. In his writing, the trope of light and its various intensities is arguably the pervasive figure. Behind the face and from within the body rise degrees of light and levels of illumination met by and modifying depths of shadow. These properties signal the waxing and waning of understanding, they measure degrees of truth or falsehood, they calibrate emotion and make manifest spiritual realities.41 Through the trope of light-as-truth, Hawthorne was drawn to the paradox of a convergence of the visible and the invisible, compelled to think through to the very limits of light, and to the limits of the figure of light. There are passages in The Marble Faun in which Hawthorne ruminates upon the possibility of an afterlife in which a perfect transparency is the condition of bliss. On their wanderings through Tuscany and Umbria, the sculptor Kenyon and his companion Donatello discuss the merits of stained-glass windows: ‘There is no other such true symbol of the glories of the better world, where a celestial radiance will be inherent in all things and persons, and render each continually transparent to the sight of all … and perhaps this is to be the punishment of sin … not that it shall be made evident to the Universe (which can profit nothing by such knowledge,) but that it shall insulate the sinner from all sweet society by rendering him impermeable to light, and therefore unrecognisable in the abode of heavenly simplicity and truth.’ (p. 238)

Hawthorne took comfort in the metaphor in his Notebook, where he observed of himself: A cloudy veil stretches across the abyss of my nature. I have, however, no love of secrecy and darkness. I am glad, to think that God sees through my heart, and

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if any angel has power to penetrate it, he is welcome to know everything that is there.42

As Kenyon imagines it, we get a strong sense of a Puritan legacy, the hankering after a pure radiance, unstained and unmediated, not refracted or turned awry through intercession or interposition of any kind. When Hilda succumbs to the urge to make a confession in St Peter’s, Kenyon is quick to remind her of ‘“the pure, white light of Heaven!”’ (Hilda adds: ‘“I love the white light too!”’) And in her rejection of Miriam, Hilda appeals to the same idea: “Your powerful magnetism would be too much for me. The pure, white atmosphere, in which I try to discern what things are good, and true, would be discoloured.” ‘White light’ is both the essence and the obliteration of the visual. It is the annihilation of appearance, the cancelling of all form in a final, total visibility, in which there are no objects to see. This may be hostile to artistic representation and aesthetic form – Hawthorne had famously called for the frescoes of Giotto and Cimabue to be whitewashed over, and the Elgin marbles to be burned into lime. But it may also be a kind of apotheosis for such things. Hawthorne could never make up his mind about this. Photophilia and photophobia, iconophobia and iconophilia, converge at their limit, but it is a limit beyond all representation, whether verbal or visual. White radiance is heralded in the famous final sentence of the novel when Hilda is said to see ‘sunlight on the mountain-tops’. Just before that, the narrator has speculated as to the whereabouts of Hilda in the two days during which she goes missing (we eventually learn that she has been sheltered in the Cenci Palace). He suggests that she has been snatched away to a ‘Land of Picture’, where ‘Guido had shown her another portrait of Beatrice Cenci, done from the celestial life, in which the forlorn mystery of the earthly countenance was exchanged for a radiant joy’ (p. 351). The ‘Land of Picture’ is an extraordinary fantasy, an apotheosis of the museum that betokens the emptiness of all earthly picture galleries. Only there, is the face of Beatrice Cenci wholly transfigured; which is to say, outside the narrative and history of Beatrice, over and against the reality of Guido Reni’s portrait, beyond the Roman context, outside ekphrasis – only there, could Hawthorne conceive a portrait in which she both is, and is not herself. The chiaroscuro of the Reni portrait has been ‘exchanged’ for the radiance of the celestial life. Sin and suffering have been whitewashed. This would be a portrait gallery in which the possibility of misidentification had ceased, because the possibility of description was over. Notes   1 For a good summary of the history of the Cenci, and of the portrait’s reputation and provenance theories, see Louise K. Barnett, ‘American Novelists and the “Portrait of Beatrice Cenci”’, New England Quarterly, 53 (1980), 168–83. For most of the nineteenth century, the portrait was, in the words of Stuart Curran, ‘one of the most



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famous attractions of Rome; reproduced ubiquitously, the portrait was hardly less compelling to visitors than the Bernini fountains or the Sistine frescoes’ (Shelley’s Cenci: Scorpions Ringed with Fire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970), p. xi). For the sake of ease I will refer to the portrait as of Beatrice Cenci by Guido Reni.   2 Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi (1883; rpt. London: Penguin, 1984), p. 316.   3 Hippolyte Taine, Italy: Naples and Rome, trans. J. Durrand (London, 1867), p. 233.  4 Herman Melville, Pierre or The Ambiguities (1852; rpt. London: Penguin, 1996), p. 351.  5 Charles Dickens, Pictures from Italy (1846; rpt. London: Penguin, 1998), p. 148.  6 The notion discussed in the Introduction to this book, of an ekphrastic poetics focused upon ‘ideas of ethics, emotion, and intersubjectivity’ (see the Introduction, above), is central to my interpretation of the encounter with Beatrice’s portrait. On the losses and gains of the typical Victorian ekphrastic encounter, see the final chapter of Valentine Cunningham’s Victorian Poetry Now (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011). Cunningham writes of ‘this deictic aesthetic of presence and thereness’ with ‘always an accompanying experience of loss and absence’ (p. 490).  7 Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers (New York: Norton, 1977), pp. 239–40. Belinda Jack comments upon the likeness between the Amelia Curran portrait of Shelley (commissioned while he was writing The Cenci in 1819), and the Guido portrait, which was copied by Curran for the frontispiece of the first edition of the play in 1820 (Beatrice’s Spell: The Enduring Legacy of Beatrice Cenci (New York: Other Press, 2005), p. 57).  8 Jay Leda, The Melville Log: A Documentary Life of Herman Melville, 1819–1891, 2 vols (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1951), vol. 2, p. 557.  9 Stendhal, quoted in Bruce Hayley, Living Forms: Romantics and the Monumental Figure (New York: State University of New York Press, 2003), p. 203. 10 Dickens, Pictures from Italy, pp. 147–8. 11 Thomas De Quincey, ‘Percy Bysshe Shelley’, in The Works of Thomas De Quincey, 16 vols (Edinburgh: Adam & Charles Black, 1862), vol. 5, p. 28. 12 Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, p. 240. 13 Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, p. 238. 14 Nathaniel Hawthorne, French and Italian Notebooks, in Thomas Woodson (ed.), The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1980), vol. 14, p. 143. 15 Hawthorne, French and Italian Notebooks, pp. 92–3. 16 Ibid., p. 521. 17 Melville, Pierre, p. 351. 18 See, for example, the account given by F. O. Matthiessen in American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1941). 19 Frederick Crews, The Sins of the Fathers: Hawthorne’s Psychological Themes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), p. 217. 20 The Marble Faun (London: Penguin, 2002), p. 52. Subsequent quotations will follow in brackets. Useful for my purposes have been the following essays: Paul Brodtkorb, ‘Art Allegory in The Marble Faun’, PMLA: Proceedings of the Modern Language Association of America, 77 (1962), 254–67; Spencer Hall, ‘Beatrice Cenci: Symbol and

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Vision in The Marble Faun’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 25 (1970), 85–95; Jonathan Auerbach, ‘Executing the Model: Painting, Sculpture and ­Romance-Writing in Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun’, ELH: English Literary History, 47 (1980), 103–20; Timothy Sweet, ‘Photography and the Museum of Rome in Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun’, in Marsha Bryant (ed.), Photo-Textualities: Reading Photographs and Literature (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1996), pp. 25–42; Millicent Bell, ‘The Marble Faun and the Waste of History’, Southern Review, 35 (1999), 354–70; and Fritz Gysin, ‘Paintings in the House of Fiction: The Example of Hawthorne’, Word & Image, 5:2 (1989), 159–72. 21 Roland Barthes, Image-Music-Text, trans. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana, 1977), p. 32. 22 Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth (1911; rpt. London: Penguin, 1985), p. 53. In Belinda Jack’s opinion, Shelley ‘fell in love with the portrait’, and projected his own sadistic impulses onto the character of Francesco Cenci (Beatrice’s Spell, p. 80). 23 Jeffrey Meyers, Painting and the Novel (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1975), p. 11. 24 Louise Barnett has described the sexualisation of copies of the Beatrice portrait: ‘A Beatrice with exposed shoulders and cleavage was not unusual’ (‘American Novelists’, p. 176). 25 The phrase is from Crews, The Sins of the Fathers, p. 242. 26 See Lucy Hartley, Physiognomy and the Meaning of Expression in Nineteenth-Century Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Sharrona Pearl, About Faces: Physiognomy in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). For a rich discussion of the figurative ambiguity of the ‘face’ in literature, see the chapter titled ‘Face’ in John Frow’s Character and Person (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 226–63. 27 I am thinking here particularly of the well-known passages of Totality and Infinity (1969) espousing an ‘ethics of the face’. See Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. Alfonso Lingis (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1969), pp. 194– 212, rpt. in Dermot Moran and Timothy Mooney (eds), The Phenomenology Reader (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), esp. pp. 516–19. 28 One of the most striking examples from many would be ‘The Veiled Lady’ (Priscilla) of The Blithedale Romance, ‘a phenomenon in the mesmeric line’ (Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance (1852; rpt. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 5). 29 Henry James, Hawthorne (1879; rpt. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1997), p. 92. 30 See Graham Clarke, ‘To Transform and Transfigure: The Aesthetic Play of Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun’, in A. Robert Lee (ed.), Nathaniel Hawthorne: New Critical Essays (London: Vision Press, 1982), pp. 131–47. 31 David Howard, ‘The Fortunate Fall and Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun’, in Ian Fletcher (ed.), Romantic Mythologies (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967), pp. 97–136 (p. 101). 32 See Matthiessen, American Renaissance, p. 276; Ivor Winters, In Defense of Reason (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960), p. 170; and Frederick Crews, The Sins of the Fathers, p. 215. 33 Harry Levin, ‘Statues from Italy’, p. 192; Crews, The Sins of the Fathers, p. 218. 34 I have explored the idea of ‘transfiguration’ as an aesthetic mode more fully in



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Stephen Cheeke, Transfiguration: The Religion of Art in Nineteenth-Century Literature Before Aestheticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). 35 James, Hawthorne, p. 47. 36 For a classic summary of the notion of the Fortunate Fall, see A. O. Lovejoy, Essays in the History of Ideas (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1948), pp. 277–95. 37 Lovejoy, Essays, p. 277. 38 Paradise Lost, 12.469–76, quoted from Stephen Orgel and Jonathan Goldberg (eds), The Oxford Authors: John Milton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). 39 Quoted by Matthiessen, American Renaissance, p. 227. 40 R. R. Male, Hawthorne’s Tragic Vision (New York: Norton, 1964), p. 176. 41 Richard Harter Fogle concentrates on this dominant motif in Hawthorne’s Fiction: The Light and the Dark (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1952). 42 Quoted by Matthiessen, American Renaissance, p. 266.

7

Mirroring naturalism in word and image: a critical exchange between Émile Zola and Édouard Manet Lauren S. Weingarden

This chapter addresses ekphrastic practice from two directions: first, conventionally, as critical and literary writing about painting; second, expansively, as the starting point for exposing a dynamic exchange between writer and painter. Here I interrogate the theoretical and critical dialogue between the critic and writer Émile Zola and the painter Édouard Manet, a dialogue initiated by Zola’s ekphrastic act. This dialogue, however, raises important theoretical questions: what happens when a writer’s ekphrastic description of a painting becomes the pictorial model for his own literary and theoretical writing? What happens when a painter paints a critical response to the ekphrastic text inspired by his work? How does this critical and theoretical exchange exceed the limits of both text and image and activate a third level of cross-referencing? How might this cross-referencing signal, in turn, a complex, multivalent engagement between the ‘sister arts’? In exploring these questions, I have challenged the theoretical limits of both ekphrasis, which focuses on the picture within the text, and iconography, which focuses on a precise textual reference within the picture. I have therefore adapted three theoretical models, which have expanded the classical definition of ekphrasis and its rhetorical markers, to a word-and-image methodology that positions text and image on equal footing and in dynamic, dialogic exchange.1 To begin with, I build on Gérard Genette’s notion of transtextuality, and what he calls hypertextuality, in presenting Manet and Zola’s shared allegiance to Baudelairean modernity.2 According to Genette, transtextuality refers to ‘the textual transcendence of the text’, which he had earlier defined as ‘all that sets the text in a relationship, whether obvious or concealed, with other texts’.3 Genette further defines hypertextuality, a type of transtextuality, as ‘any relationship uniting a text B (which I shall call the hypertext) to an earlier text A (I shall, of course, call it the hypotext), upon which it is grafted in a manner that is not that of commentary’.4 In this Baudelairean context, ­hypertextuality



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f­unctions as a dynamic transformative process wherein the original text is quoted or indirectly alluded to in incrementally numerous secondary texts, whether verbal or pictorial. Liliane Louvel’s model of the iconotext provides a method for more precisely describing the productive interaction between text and image, wherein each medium exceeds its own signification as well as the ekphrastic paradigm. Louvel defines iconotext as ‘the attempt to merge text and image in a pluriform fusion’. ‘The word “iconotext”’, she adds, ‘conveys the desire to bring together two irreducible objects and form a new object in a fruitful tension in which each object maintains its specificity.’5 According to this model, the new iconotext ‘object’ occupies ‘the ontological space of the in-between’.6 It is precisely this in-between space that is the focus of my interrogation of the word-and-image dynamics between Zola and Manet. While Louvel’s definition of iconotext pertains to ekphrasis and textual analysis, she devises ‘a scale of pictorial description’ to identify degrees of ‘pictorial saturation’ within a wide range of ekphrastic texts. This spectrum registers, at one end, ‘pictorial analogy’ – wherein no specific painting is described and, at the other end, classic ekphrasis, wherein the art object is present. I have adapted Louvel’s iconotext and spectrum of ‘saturation’ to a word-and-image methodology to propose a hyper-pictorial reading of the text and a hyper-textual reading of the picture; what I call ‘para-iconotext’.7 In adapting Louvel’s model, I argue that what results from the Zola–Manet dynamic pertains not to a new genre, object, or form per se, but to a network of signification both intrinsic and extrinsic to text and image. My hybrid label para-iconotext thus combines the prefix para- with iconotext to refer to the historical context engendered by word and image exchanges.8 In this study, historical context is circumscribed by the formation of modernity as marked by cultural production and memory. As I will show, the para-iconotext emerges from the high degrees of pictorial saturation in the texts, and textual saturation in the images. These exchanges are marked by six signifying events: Zola’s critical writing on Manet, between 1866 and 1880, in which he transfers his own literary theory onto the artist and his work; Manet’s 1868 portrait of Zola, wherein the painter imposes his pictorial theory on his sitter; Zola’s appropriation of his own ekphrastic critical writing onto his naturalist theory of the novel, set forth in the 1868 preface to Thérèse Raquin; Manet’s appropriation of the minor character Nana, from Zola’s L’Assommoir (1877), for his 1877 painting Nana; Zola’s appropriation of Manet’s painting Nana for the mise-en-abyme in the novel Nana; and finally, Manet’s critical response to Zola’s annexation of the painter and his works to his naturalist agenda, a retort embodied in A Bar at the Folies Bergère (1882), Manet’s final masterpiece. W. J. T. Mitchell’s model of rivalry between the sister arts in ‘Ekphrasis and the Other’ offers a triad of ekphrastic relational positions: indifference, hope, and fear.9 This triad accounts for the changing dynamics of word and image relations, contingent with historical and cultural change. For this study, I have adapted Mitchell’s model to locate Zola’s and Manet’s moments of attraction and

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repulsion, within their dialogic exchange as it occurs across time, and changes within each enunciator’s creative and theoretical practices. These changing ekphrastic positions expose Zola’s co-option of Manet’s pictorial performance and, in turn, Manet’s mixed fear and resistance of the textual mutation of ­pictorial reception. While Louvel’s iconotextual model predominates my investigation of Zola and Manet’s verbal/visual exchanges, as I focus on the formal elements of text and image and their functions, each of the three models corroborate the modernist discourse that informed the writer and poet’s personal friendship and professional rivalry. This discourse emerges from Charles Baudelaire’s art criticism, particularly ‘On the Heroism of Modern Life’, written for the Salon review of 1846, and ‘The Painter of Modern Life’, written in 1859 and published in 1863. The latter essay is particularly pivotal; ‘The Painter of Modern Life’ manifests ekphrastic performance and initiates a schema for Zola’s and Manet’s verbal/ visual alliance. Historical context: Baudelairean modernism Baudelaire’s ekphrastic critical writing is at the crux of the Zola–Manet exchange. Viewed from Genette’s model of transtextuality, Baudelaire’s texts constitute the hypotext from which emerge two interrelated hypertexts – Zola’s critical and literary texts and Manet’s pictorial representations. However, since neither verbal texts nor pictorial images directly articulate this Baudelairean presence, Genette’s identification of a hypertext that includes indirect reference to the hypotext is especially germane. As he explains: [Hypertext] may yet be of another kind such as text B not speaking of text A at all but being unable to exist, as such, without A, from which it originates through a process I shall provisionally call transformation, and which it consequently evokes more or less perceptibly without necessarily speaking of it or citing it.10

This model of transtextuality, specifically, indirect allusion and transformative hypertextuality, provides the theoretical background against which I now review the Baudelairean discourse that informed the writer and painter’s – albeit friendly – interartistic rivalry. Both critical essays, ‘On the Heroism of Modern Life’ and ‘The Painter of Modern Life’, describe a modern art in which old paradigms are redefined by the new urban experiences that Paris engendered in the mid-nineteenth century. For Baudelaire, both the city’s densely diverse populace and ever-changing material fabric became both the force and subject of cultural renewal. In ‘On the Heroism of Modern Life’, Baudelaire first defined an aesthetic of contemporaneity in terms of urban subject matter. Here, Baudelaire extols Paris as a storehouse of and stimulus for capturing ‘our own type of beauty’. He thus argues that, rather than exalt ‘our victories and our political heroism’, artists should find inspiration in ‘scenes of high life and of the thousands of uprooted lives that



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haunt the underworld of a great city, criminals and prostitutes; the Gazette des Tribunaux and the Moniteur all prove to us that we have only to open our eyes to see and know the heroism of our day’.11 While these uprooted lives are the heroes of Baudelaire’s poetic works, they also figure as the subjects that Zola transcribed in the naturalist novel and Manet depicted in his urban-themed paintings. Among these urban types, both the writer and artist appropriated the Parisian prostitute as the modern ‘heroine’. As we shall see, this Baudelairean archetype becomes the originating nexus of their verbal/visual exchange. In ‘The Painter of Modern Life’ Baudelaire’s critical attention shifts from the subject matter of modernity to the artist’s visceral experience of modernity. Now, the artist becomes the hero, impassioned by the dynamism of an everchanging urban landscape and its populace. Baudelaire, in fact, wrote this 1859 essay within the context of the widespread demolition and rebuilding of Paris under the direction of Baron Eugène Haussmann between 1853 and 1870. During this period Parisians encountered spectacles of transformation amid the built environment and along the newly laid, widened boulevards animated by a myriad of urban types and conveyances. Baudelaire’s essay is both a celebration of modernity and a transcription of modernity rendered in ekphrastic form. Here, Baudelaire presents Constantin Guys, a watercolourist illustrator of popular life, as the exemplary painter of contemporaneity (Figure 15). In his assessment of Guys’s modernity, the artist’s sketchlike techniques and ephemeral transparency convey fleeting experiences of street life and physical engagement with the urban populace. According to Baudelaire, Guys’s excellence resided in his ability to capture the essence of modern life of which his artwork became the mirror. Given Guys’s example, Baudelaire asserted that the artist must submerge himself in the urban crowd and embody its vital essence. He thus proclaims: ‘The crowd is his domain … [the artist] establish[es] his dwelling in the throng, in the ebb and flow, the bustle, the fleeting and the infinite.’12 As the embodiment of the crowd, Baudelaire explains, the artist ‘may also be compared to a mirror as vast as this crowd; to a kaleidoscope endowed with consciousness, which with every one of its ­movements presents a pattern of life, in all its multiplicity’.13 For the purpose of interartistic comparison, I focus on the mirror-motif, and artistic mirroring, as a metaphor of Baudelairean modernity. For both Zola and Manet, this mirroring act was at the crux of their creative and critical endeavours; each extended Baudelaire’s aestheticization of the city and its people. This common ground notwithstanding, the writer and painter would subsequently take Baudelairean modernity into two different trajectories. This divergence is manifest in both the framing and depiction of the mirrored image. As a writer and critic, Zola exploits the tableau vivant, thereby freezing the frame and its content.14 As a painter, Manet exploits the cropped frame, fragmented figures, and technical facture. Ultimately, Manet refines these devices to mirror the fleetingness of modern life. This convergence and rupture begins with Zola’s ekphrastic critical writing about Manet’s painting in 1867.

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15. Constantin Guys, At the Theater (Au foyer du théatre; Ladies and Gentlemen) (1860–92)

The Zola–Manet exchange When Zola began writing about Manet in 1866 he invoked the mirror-motif as a critical tool for promoting Manet and his work as a modern way of seeing.15 Zola regarded Manet as a mirroring agent and his art as a mirror reflection of both his subjects’ physical appearance and their social character. In doing so, the critic transposed his literary theory onto the artist and his works. This transposition can be traced in the three critical reviews of Manet’s art that Zola wrote in 1866 and 1867. It was also during these years that Zola formulated his theoretical tenets of the naturalist novel. As we shall see, Zola’s theoretical writing is saturated with pictoriality, invoking pictorial analogy or hypotyposis. Extending Genette’s hypertextuality, Louvel defines hypotyposis as text that



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‘evokes a painting indirectly, thus producing a “painting-effect”’.16 This trope, in turn, issues from Zola’s own ekphrastic writing. Zola first published his naturalist tenets in the 1868 preface to the second edition of Thérèse Raquin (originally published in 1867). Here he explained his ‘analytical method’ as a defence against ‘accusation[s] of immorality’ in his novel. In this defence, Zola argued that he used the analytic method, inspired by ‘scientific curiosity’, as a means to perform ‘simply [as] an analyst who may have become engrossed in human corruption, but who has done so as a surgeon might in an operating theatre’. For Zola, the naturalist writer depicts these objective observations with ‘a clear and natural language’.17 As such, naturalist language functions as a mirror reflection of reality. In this respect, Zola’s 1868 description of his literary method echoes the analytic method he ascribed to Manet two years earlier. In his 1866 Salon review Zola praised Manet’s talent for its ‘simplicity and accuracy’, ‘that is to say, the exact observation of objects’.18 This earlier assessment of Manet suggests that Zola’s naturalist theories were not only shaped by science but the pictorial arts as well. In fact, in his 1868 preface, Zola compares his process of transcribing human nature to the painter’s process of mirroring physical nature: While I was busy writing Thérèse Raquin I forgot the world and devoted myself to copying life exactly and meticulously, giving myself up entirely to precise analysis of the human being. … The human side of the models ceased to exist, just as it ceases to exist for the eye of the artist who has a naked woman sprawled in front of him but who is solely concerned with getting on to his canvas a true representation of her shape and coloration.19

Zola’s pictorial notion of scientific objectivity owed much to his critical engagement, in 1867, with Manet’s Salon paintings and the artist’s one-man exhibition. In both reviews, Zola frames the painter’s creative process and a specific painting within his emerging literary doctrine. In his 1867 Salon review, Zola first identifies Manet as ‘an analytical painter’ and elaborates on the artist’s analytical method.20 The artist, he writes, is ‘an interpreter of that which is, and his works [consist] of a precise description made in a human and original language’.21 For Zola, the artist’s originality is only important for the way his observation is affected by his so-called ‘temperament’, that is, the faculty that heightens one aspect of nature over another. Accordingly, the critic opined that if I … were asked what new language Édouard Manet spoke, I would reply: he speaks a language of simplicity and exactitude. The new note that he contributes is one of blondness, filling the canvas with light. The translation that he gives us is a precise and simplified one, achieving its effect through large units and broad masses.22

Zola here posited the painter’s language as analogous with the naturalist’s writer’s language, asserting that both media function as an objective mirror of nature.

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16. Édouard Manet, Olympia (1863)

Zola’s review of Manet’s 1867 exhibition demonstrates how he applied his naturalist theory to a specific painting. In fact, Zola’s ekphrastic description of Manet’s Olympia (1863; Figure 16) constitutes the foundational text from which issues the word–image dynamic between writer and artist. First, Zola subsumes Manet’s technical facture (or sketchlike technique) into a naturalist model of the artist’s direct observation of nature. ‘At the first glance’, he reports, one only sees ‘a large pale spot on the black background’ and the disappearance of all details among patches of colour. However, Zola advises the viewer to ‘step back a bit’ in order to ‘reconstruct reality’. From here, he explains, ‘Each object falls into its proper plane. Olympia’s head projects from the background in astonishing relief, the bouquet becomes marvelously fresh and brilliant.’ Zola attributes this transformation of paint into reality to the fact that ‘the painter worked as nature works, in simple masses and large areas of light, [giving] his work … the somewhat rude and austere appearance of nature itself’.23 Zola then explains how the artist’s direct translation of physical nature extends to the artist’s translation of human nature. In order to extol Manet’s painting as an accurate representation of social realities, Zola identified Olympia as ‘a girl of our own times, whom we have met in the streets’. Here Zola at once rehearses Baudelaire’s mandate to portray the ‘uprooted lives’ of the modern city and attends to a specimen of the urban environment suited for a character in his own novel. In what Louvel calls a ‘mnemopictorial’ turn, Zola exposes his appropriation of Olympia to his naturalist literary theory in the 1868 preface to Thérèse Raquin.24 To be sure, the



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writer evoked his and his reader’s memory of this (infamous) painting when he compared the novelist’s analytical eye to ‘the eye of the artist who has a naked woman sprawled in front of him’. He likewise defends Manet’s moral integrity to counter indecency charges against the painting, and likewise anticipate his own defence against ‘accusation[s] of immorality’ in the 1868 preface. Zola thus describes the painted figure of Olympia as a girl of sixteen, doubtless some model whom Edouard Manet has quietly copied just as she was. …When other artists correct nature by painting Venus, they lie. Manet asked himself … Why not tell the truth? … As usual the public took good care not to understand what the painter wanted. There are even people who have looked for a philosophical meaning in the painting.25

This last statement deserves our attention since it denies meaningful content in Manet’s paintings, a denial repeated by Zola’s later claim that Manet never wanted ‘to put ideas in his paintings’.26 Both statements reveal Zola’s attempt to enlist Manet into the ranks of naturalism.27 However, in doing so, he rid the painter of any extra-pictorial intentions as well as rid his paintings of the transformative play with pictorial conventions. Manet, an avid reader of Zola’s novels and a personal friend of the writer, would have likely read Zola’s 1868 preface to Thérèse Raquin. This being the case, what would Manet have thought about Zola’s subjugation of painting to writing and his refusal of meaningful content in his art? To answer this question, we cannot rely on textual evidence, since Manet wrote little about his art. Instead, we can demonstrate that Manet painted Zola’s portrait in 1868 as a retort to the critic’s misinterpretation of the painter’s artistic method and pictorial intentions. Manet’s portrait of Zola also reveals how the artist, in turn, appropriated the writer and his writing to his own artistic agenda (1868; Figure 17). As other scholars have argued, Zola is ‘awkwardly misplaced’ among objects and images that are alien to him.28 Instead of placing Zola amid his own writings and literary activities (as is suggested in Nadar’s photographic portrait), the artist surrounded the writer with artworks and texts that shaped Manet’s own artistic practices. Zola holds an open book, Charles Blanc’s popular Histoire des peintres de toutes les écoles (1849–69), which Manet would have owned and relied on for its illustrations.29 The Japanese screen, behind the sitter on the left, and the Japanese print, in the upper right, refer to Manet’s engagement with Japanese art. This print is mounted with a reproduction of Velásquez’s The Drinkers, marking Manet’s admiration of Spanish art, and an engraving of Manet’s Olympia.30 Ironically, this Olympia turns her gaze towards Zola, in appreciation of his admiration for the painting. Directly below Olympia is a blue pamphlet inscribed with Manet’s name on its cover. This pamphlet marks another attribute of Manet; it is a reprint of Zola’s 1867 review of Manet’s work, published on the occasion of the artist’s one-man exhibition that took place in May 1867.31 Here, however, Manet reversed the writer’s appropriation of

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17. Édouard Manet, Émile Zola (1868)

his paintings by appropriating Zola’s writing: Manet replaced the pamphlet’s printed title with his personal signature used to sign the painting.32 Although Zola is oblivious to all the visual references to Manet’s artistic ‘sources’, we are not.33 For one thing, we recognize the pictorial cues from which Zola looks away. For another, compositional delineations compel the viewer to focus on pictorial images and the artist’s signature. Manet directs our gaze in a diagonal direction, first to scan the illustrated pages of the open book, then to follow the bookbinding to Zola’s hand, which, in turn, directs us to the artist’s signature. Similarly, Manet uses the L-shaped contours of Zola’s arm and torso to repeat the outline of the frame that holds the print collection. With these compositional devices, Manet reinforces the pictorial sources of his art. In viewing the Portrait of Zola as Manet’s indirect response to Zola’s naturalist interpretation of his art, we can also regard Manet’s more direct response to Baudelaire’s instruction for achieving the ‘double composition’ of modern beauty. In ‘The Painter of Modern Life’, Baudelaire defined modern beauty as a constant tension between ‘an eternal and invariable element’,



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and ‘a r­ elative circumstantial element [of] contemporaneity’. The artist can achieve this a ­ esthetic dualism and, ultimately, cultural renewal, by triggering in the viewer ‘the shock of surprise’. He does so by rendering the familiar ­unfamiliar and by presenting ‘the ever-new which eternally elud[e]s’, but still refers to, ‘the rules and analyses of the school’.34 Adhering to this prescript, Manet inserted pictorial references into the portrait in order to assert his creative transformation of tradition, a Baudelairean gesture that Zola had missed. Notwithstanding Manet’s reassertion of his painting’s autonomy and its traditions, Zola responded to the portrait in a literary way. Indeed, he used his 1868 Salon review to reassert Manet’s position as an analytical observer in the service of his naturalist theories. Here Zola echoed his 1868 preface to Thérèse Raquin, where he compared the writer’s process to the painter’s process, during which each creator forgets his subjects’ physical presence during moments of intense observation. Thus, in describing Manet’s performance while painting his portrait, Zola recalls, ‘Manet had forgotten me, he didn’t know I was there, he was copying me as he would have copied any human animal, with an attention, an artistic awareness, the like of which I have never seen.’ Like the disengaged writer who only records what he observes, so Manet painted both the inanimate objects and the living model with equal intensity and colour harmony. Zola thus concludes that ‘Manet is before all a naturalist. His eye sees and renders objects with an elegant simplicity.’35 Renewed rivalry: Nana chronology Nearly ten years after this critical exchange, Manet adopted one of Zola’s ‘uprooted lives’ from the writer’s novels, but did so in his own creative way (and in a way that denies an iconographic interpretation). Manet’s 1877 painting Nana (Figure 18) depicts a minor character, named Nana, who appears in Zola’s 1877 novel, L’Assommoir,36 and later reappears as the main character in Zola’s 1880 novel Nana. The chronology of Manet’s title-borrowing in relation to Zola’s two interrelated novels is an important one; it charts the transposition of text to image and from image back to text. Upon submitting his painting of a courtesan to the Salon jury, Manet had indeed titled it after the character who appears in L’Assommoir as the anti-heroine’s daughter.37 However, the depicted dressing-room scene is nowhere recorded in the saga where Nana first appears. In the 1877 novel, Nana grows from a playful infant to a seductive young woman. At the threshold of her career, Zola relates how Nana ‘would spend hours … in front of the bit of mirror that hung above the chest of drawers’.38 The 15-year-old Nana procures a rich 55-year-old bourgeois lover, whom she quickly abandons to pursue the life of a high-class prostitute. It was not until October 1879 – two years after Manet’s painting – that Nana figured as the main character of the novel Nana, Zola’s ninth instalment in the twenty-volume Les Rougon-Macquart series. This novel was first issued as separate chapters

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18. Édouard Manet, Nana (1877)

in the French newspaper Le Voltaire, and was subsequently published in its entirety in 1880. What is important here is that while Manet’s scene of a voluptuous woman performing her toilette before a mirror and her loverclient is of his own invention, this painted mise-en-scène provided Zola with a template for his own novel’s mise-en-abyme. While a formal description of the painting is useful at this juncture, we should not overlook how Manet also borrowed from non-literary media, particularly photography, to substantiate his pictorial modernity and to confound the viewer’s gaze.39 In the painting of Nana, the young woman stands before the mirror, applying make-up, but turns her head to pose before an implied but absent viewer. Both her pose and props recall contemporary photographic conventions and the photographer-qua-viewer’s voyeuristic gaze. As seen in a series of Louis-Camille d’Oliviers’ photographs, models were often posed in front of a ‘psyche’ mirror, a commonplace studio prop which reflected multiple views of the figure, and stared directly at the photographer.40 In both the photographs and the painting, the viewer is situated in front of the model, so that his/her



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gaze replaces the photographer’s gaze through the camera apparatus. Whether we imagine the camera or embody the viewer, we are inescapably ensnared in Nana’s own self-reflection. Here the camera’s mirroring is synonymous with the viewer’s optical mirroring. But Nana’s gaze is doubly reflected. Nana’s brazen self-image is mirrored not only in the viewer’s gaze, but also in her companion’s gaze. In each case, admiring gazes reproduce Nana’s self-image as it reflects back to her, creating a narcissistic circuit of self-absorption. It is for this reason that Manet rendered the actual mirror useless. Instead of reflecting Nana’s image, the oval surface reflects the painterly medium through which the artist has made Nana visually real. The mirror thus becomes a critical device to reflect upon the production and reception of the painted image: is painting a mirrored reflection (like a photograph) or a creative re-presentation of the real? Ensnared in the painter’s play with pictorial devices, we should now ask, to what degree does Manet as the ‘analytic observer’ conform to the naturalist painter that Zola configured? Before answering this question, I would like to insert a critical vignette which mirrors the (cultural) para-iconotext that I previously defined. In J. K. Huysmans’s 1877 review of Manet’s Nana, the writer conflated the painting and novel to produce a third dimension of meaning and provocation in the social imaginary.41 The painting had already enjoyed a succès de scandale before Huysmans rallied its literary counterpart. Rejected from the official Salon because of its lewdness, Nana was prominently exhibited in a shop window on a busy Parisian boulevard. As Huysmans reported, ‘From morning to night crowds gather before this canvas, and it draws screams of indignation from a mob stultified by the daubs of [the official Salon painters].’42 For Huysmans, Zola’s friend and follower, the association between Manet and Zola was ­immediate: he introduced the subject of the painting at the outset of his review: ‘Here is the subject of the painting: Nana, the Nana of L’Assommoir, powdering her face with rice powder, while a man watches.’43 Huysmans lauded Manet for presenting ‘the quintessential fille’.44 Following detailed and sensual descriptions of her undergarments and anatomy, Huysmans pronounced, ‘Manet was right to present us, in his Nana, with one of the perfect samples of the type of prostitute that his friend and dear master, Emile Zola, is about to depict for us in one of his next novels. Manet has made her appear as such as she will be forced to be, with her complicated, knowing vice, her extravagance, and her debauchee’s luxury.’45 In Huysmans’s ekphrastic description of the painting, extra-textual references to cultural practices exceed the image. This para-iconotext conflates an extant and a future novel, the popular imaginary of prostitution and debauchery, and the memory of illicit sex. Huysmans underscores this social dynamic: ‘If I were not afraid of hurting the prudishness of readers, I would say that M. Manet’s picture feels like an unmade bed, it feels, in a word, like what he wanted to represent – the show-off and hussy.’46

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As early as summer 1878, Zola had already made notes for his main character for the novel Nana, whom he describes with all the physical peculiarities of Manet’s painted Nana. Blonde, pink, Parisian face, very wide-awake, her nose slightly turned up, her mouth small and laughing, a dimple on her chin, her eyes blue and very bright, with golden lashes. … The nape of her neck an amber colour, with a tangle of little hairs. Smells of woman, very much a woman. Light down on the cheeks.47

Not only do such highly saturated pictorial passages function as hypotyposis, but the novel Nana reconstitutes the para-iconotext that the painting engendered. It is the saga of this courtesan’s career as well as the moral and financial destruction of every man who pursues her.48 Count Muffat is the most injured – he loses his fortune to Nana’s voracious appetite for material riches, commits adultery, and is humiliated by Nana’s betrayals with other men. The entire story, however, is captured in the mise-en-abyme, or ‘the mirror in the text’, placed at the exact centre of the novel.49 For this chapter, Zola appropriated Manet’s painting and the provocation that surrounded it, thus conflating ­hypotyposis with mnemopictoriality. For Zola, the mise-en-abyme also functioned as a mise-en-scène, lifted directly from the painted composition of two figures in a stagelike, interior setting. In the novel, Nana and Muffat are in her dressing room; he is seated and she is gazing at her naked body in the full-length mirror. Unlike Manet’s Nana who is distracted by an absent other, Zola’s Nana is ‘absorbed in her ecstatic contemplation of herself’.50 Muffat, however, is troubled by the story just published in a journal, titled ‘The Golden Fly’, which he reads to Nana. The story describes ‘the story of a girl descended from four or five generations of drunkards’, whose ‘rottenness that was allowed to ferment among the lower classes was rising to the surface and rotting the aristocracy. She had become a force of nature, a ferment of destruction, unwittingly corrupting and disorganizing Paris between her snow-white thighs.’51 This story, of course, mirrors both Nana’s history and Muffat’s corruption. Realizing this, Muffat at first is repulsed. He then gazes at Nana’s reflection in the mirror and becomes seduced once again by ‘her satin skin and the supple lines of her figure’.52 Yet Zola’s literary mise-en-scène differs from Manet’s pictorial composition. Importantly, this difference signals the ongoing rivalry between the sister arts at the heart of their relationship. For the novelist, Manet’s painted scene provided a stagelike setting in which to frame a narrative vignette that mirrored the novel in its entirety. The story within the story is thus frozen at the centre of the novel. Conversely, Manet’s painting is ambiguous and incomplete: the spatial composition is cropped, as is the male figure, the mirror’s reflection is subverted, and the narrative is complicated by Nana’s interaction with an absent figure. In conclusion, I will argue that Manet configured these pictorial ambiguities as a means to reclaim the independence of his art and to do so in the spirit of Baudelaire’s painter of modern life.



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Conclusion: mirroring ekphrastic relations Mitchell’s relational model of ekphrastic indifference, hope, and fear between text and image provides a useful scheme for charting Zola’s and Manet’s moments of attraction and repulsion across time and with changes occurring within each enunciator’s creative/theoretical practices. Although Mitchell’s model refers specifically to ekphrastic writing – ‘the verbal representation of visual representation’ – here I adapt the triadic relations between text and image to an overview of the dialogue between the sister arts engendered by Zola’s and Manet’s transcriptions of Baudelairean modernity.53 In the first instance, we can speculate that the writer’s and painter’s initial responses to Baudelaire’s modernist tenets emerge as what Mitchell calls ‘ekphrastic indifference’, arising from ‘a commonsense perception that ekphrasis is impossible’. Manet’s and Zola’s coincident presentations of Nana as the prostitute-qua-hero of modern life mark ekphrastic hope. In this second phase, ‘the impossibility of ekphrasis is overcome in imagination or metaphor.’ According to Mitchell’s definition, Zola had ‘discover[ed] a “sense” in which language can do what so many writers have wanted it to do: “to make us see”’.54 And, by extension, Manet had realized a ‘sense’ in which painting can ‘make us remember’ things both seen and read. In conclusion, I now elaborate on ekphrastic fear, as it pertains to Manet’s response to Zola’s appropriation of his art to literary ends. This third kind of ekphrastic relation constitutes ‘the moment of resistance or counterdesire that occurs when we sense that the difference between the verbal and visual representation might collapse and the figurative, imaginary desire of ekphrasis might be realized literally and actually’.55 As we shall see, Manet’s A Bar at the Folies Bérgère (1882; Figure 5) evokes a fear of ekphrasis and the stasis – both visual and conceptual – that literary collusion bears on his art. While developing his own theory, from 1875 to 1880, Zola variously called Manet ‘a modern artist, a realist, a positivist’ (1875), ‘a naturalist, an analyst’ (1876), and ‘one of the tireless workers of naturalism’ (1880).56 With these labels, Zola matched Manet’s art and method with the later positivist tenets he presented in ‘The Experimental Novel’, an essay published in 1880. Here Zola explained his experimental techniques of studying humans through their relationship with the social environment. While Zola aligned this experimental method with the scientist’s, he also aligned the artist with the experimental novelist. As he put it, ‘The artist has the same starting point as the scientist; he stands before nature, has an a priori idea, and works in line with that idea.’ Yet, Zola cautioned, the artist ‘diverges[s] from the scientist if he carries his idea out to the end without verifying its exactness by observation and experiment’.57 A Bar at the Folies Bergère (1882; Figure 19) can be seen as Manet’s response to Zola’s latest appropriations of his art. Manet began the painting in 1881, just one year after Zola had called him ‘one of the tireless workers of naturalism’ and had published ‘The Experimental Novel’. Manet’s retort is not just against

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19. Édouard Manet, A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882)

the assimilation of the visual by the textual,58 but also against the takeover of modernity by science. With A Bar at the Folies Bergère Manet reclaimed his Baudelairean modernity and, at the same time, disassociated himself from Zola’s positivistic determinism. Indeed, this painting can be read as a manifesto of ‘The Painter of Modern Life’. As previously stated, Baudelaire wrote the essay during the height of Haussmannization. In this context, Baudelaire defined modernity as fleeting, transitory, and fragmentary, and instructed the to act as both ‘a mirror as vast as this crowd’ or ‘a kaleidoscope endowed with consciousness, which with every one of its movements presents a pattern of life, in all its multiplicity’.59 Coincidentally, we should recall, Baudelaire prescribed that the artist foment cultural renewal by triggering in the viewer ‘the shock of surprise’ by presenting ‘the ever-new which eternally elud[e]s’ but still alludes to ‘the rules and analyses of the school’.60 Thus, for Baudelaire the new art must transform the familiar into the unfamiliar, must render embodied experiences of change in fragmented forms, and transmit the transience of urban life to the viewer’s psyche. In A Bar at the Folies Bergère Manet devised techniques that are shocking, transformative, and fragmented so as to present ‘a pattern of life, in all its multiplicity’. The painted mirror is central to these effects. In this mirror, which covers the entire background plane, fragmentation and sketchlike brushwork have ‘surprise’ effects because they contradict expectations for the finished



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surface and illusionistic depth of painted representation. Instead, the viewer is engaged in a visual snare, similar to Nana’s circuitous self-reflective gaze. First, the actual mirror subverts its function for mimetic reflection. For one thing, the barmaid’s reflection does not line up with her frontal position. And while the mirror reflects the man’s frontal position, his actual presence is omitted from the front of the bar. Instead, the viewer stands in his place, facing the barmaid. The viewer is, simultaneously, immersed in the spectacle of life reflected in front of him and performed behind him. No less so, he is immersed in the spectacle of paint-marks that transmit the fleeting and transitory, transforming his experience of reality. In this way, Manet responded to Zola’s naturalist appropriation of his art by demonstrating how the painted mirror (the painted canvas) sustains the transitoriness of modernity and its effects of rupture and fragmentation. In doing so, he complicated the encounter between the sister arts. For the artist may have recognized that when Zola appropriated his paintings to literary theory and writing, he fostered a mimetic pictorial realism to match his own naturalist ends. Whatever the degree of pictorial saturation in Zola’s ­ekphrastic writing, these texts subverted the experiential immediacy that Manet’s p ­ ainterly finesse sought to extend. Ironically, the mise-en-abyme in Nana comes closest to a point where visual and textual mirrorings converge, achieving perhaps a true iconotext, ‘a fruitful tension in which each object maintains its specificity’. That is, the story within the story, illustrated by Muffat reading ‘The Golden Fly’ to Nana, is also reflected in the mirror reflection of Nana’s gaze in Muffat’s gaze. To be sure, Zola adapted this scene from Manet’s Nana and profited from the para-iconotext the painting engendered. Manet, however, contested this mimetic interpretation of his paintings. Always reflecting on his medium in A Bar at the Folies Bérgère, Manet used the mirror to subvert mimetic reflections and to present, instead, a painting within a painting which is about painting. Here, finally, the viewer is caught in a visual snare that defies ekphrastic appropriation and prolongs the kaleidoscopic effects of modernity.

Notes  1 For a discussion of this word-and-image methodology see Lauren S. Weingarden, ‘The Place of Art Historiography in Word & Image Studies: Manet’s “A Bar at the Folies-Bergère” and the Naturalist Novel’, in Martin Heusser et al. (eds), The Pictured Word: Word & Image Interactions 2 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998), pp. 49–63.  2 I use the phrase ‘Baudelairean modernity’ in reference to Baudelaire’s critical writing on the visual arts, particularly ‘De l’héroïsme de la vie moderne’ (‘Of the Heroism of Modern Life’) in the ‘Salon de 1846’ and subsequently in his essay ‘Le peintre de la vie moderne’ (‘The Painter of Modern Life’), written in 1859 and published in 1862. In each of these essays, Baudelaire prescribed an aesthetic of dualities and acts of self-doubling as the visceral response to the urban experience and its expression in

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artistic form. In the latter essay, he specifically defined modernity as a phenomenon of dualities, at once fleeting and fragmentary yet eternal and immutable. As I have argued elsewhere, both Manet and Zola used parody to transform traditional art forms and thereby cultivate ironic self-doubling in their respective viewers and readers. See Weingarden, ‘The Place of Art Historiography’; and ‘The Mirror as a Metaphor of Baudelairean Modernity’, in Claus Clüver et al. (eds), Orientations: Space/Time/Image/Word, Word & Image Interactions 5 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005), pp. 16–36.  3 Gérard Genette, Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree, trans. Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), p. 1.  4 Ibid., p. 5.  5 Liliane Louvel, Poetics of the Iconotext, ed. Karen Jacobs, trans. Laurence Petit (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), p. 15.  6 Karen Jacobs, ‘Introduction: Infinite Dialogues’, in Louvel, Poetics of the Iconotext, p. 5.  7 My hyper-textual and hyper-pictorial reading of text and image aligns with Catriona MacLeod’s reading of a ‘second-order, hyper-ekphrasis’ in the present volume (Chapter 5, above). MacLeod demonstrates how ekphrastic relations exceed the classical model as well as medium-specific boundaries. Similarly, Jane Thomas considers how the interrelation between a sculpture and its epitaph exceeds the limits of each medium to function as ‘a conduit to [a] yet unrealized realm’ (Chapter 8, below). Both chapters point to the reconfiguration of the ekphrastic model during the nineteenth century, whether the creators were compelled by deliberate experimentation or by culturally driven critical discourse.  8 See OED, ‘para-, prefix1’. My usage of para- is distinguished from ‘paratext’, as defined by Genette as titles, headings, prefaces, epigraphs, dedications, acknowledgements, footnotes, and illustrations: ‘these provide the text with a (variable) setting and sometimes a commentary’ (Genette, Palimpsests, p. 3).  9 W. T. J. Mitchell, ‘Ekphrasis and the Other’, in Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995). 10 Genette, Palimpsests, p. 5. 11 Baudelaire, ‘The Salon of 1846’, in Selected Writings on Art and Literature, trans. P. E. Charvet (London and New York: Penguin, 1992), p. 107. 12 Baudelaire, ‘The Painter of Modern Life’, in Selected Writings on Art and Literature, p. 399. Baudelaire catalogued an array of urban types in Guys’s works, which he had previously lauded in ‘On the Heroism of Modern Life’. 13 Ibid., p. 400. 14 Louvel attributes the tableau vivant, or mise-en-scène, to the hypotyposis (see my discussion below); Poetics of the Iconotext, p. 50. 15 Literary and art historians today regard Zola’s art criticism of Manet as a transference of his literary theory onto the artist and his works. However, these writers have not considered how Zola used the mirror-topos as a critical device, the method on which I focus. For discussions of the intersection of Zola’s literary theory and art criticism, including on Manet, see William J. Berg, The Visual Novel: Emile Zola and the Art of His Times (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992), pp. 33–60; and Robert Lethbridge, ‘Manet’s Textual Frames’, in Peter Collier and Robert Lethbridge (eds), Artistic Relations: Literature and the Visual Arts in Nineteenth-Century France (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), pp. 144–60.



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16 Louvel, Poetics of the Iconotext, p. 51. Here Louvel differentiates between hypotyposis and ekphrasis: ‘Hypotyposis differs from ekphrasis in the fact that hypotyposis does not concern an art object as such.’ 17 Zola, ‘Preface to second edition’ (1868), Thérèse Raquin, trans. Leonard Tancock (London: Penguin, 1962), p. 27. 18 Zola, ‘M. Manet, Salon de 1866’, L’Evénement, 7 mai 1866 (www.cahiers-­ naturalistes.com/Salons/07–05–66.html). This text is the fourth article of the Salon. My translation; original text: ‘simplicité et de justesse’, ‘c’est-à-dire à l’observation exacte des objets’. 19 Zola, ‘Preface to second edition’, p. 23. 20 An expansion of his 1866 review, Zola’s 1867 salon review was dedicated entirely to Manet, with the title ‘Une nouvelle manière en peinture: Édouard Manet (1867)’, and was published in La Revue du XIXe Siècle, 1 janvier 1867. The review is translated as ‘A New Style of Painting’, in Linda Nochlin (trans. and ed.), Realism and Tradition in Art, 1848–1900; Sources and Documents (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: PrenticeHall, 1966), pp. 71–7. The 1867 essay was republished as a brochure for Manet’s one-man exhibition on the Place d’Alba, which opened in May, entitled Edouard Manet, étude biographique et critique (Jean-Pierre Leduc-Adine (ed.), Pour Manet (Bruxelles: Editions Complexe, 1989), p. 81), and later, with slight modifications, in Mes haines: causeries littéraires et artistiques; Mon salon (1866); Édouard Manet: étude biographique et critique (Paris: G. Charpentier, 1879). 21 Zola, ‘A New Style of Painting’, pp. 74–5. 22 Ibid., p. 74. Here, ‘blondness’ refers to Manet’s use of bright tones. 23 Ibid., pp. 76–7. This quotation is taken from the subsection, ‘Olympia’, which, as Nochlin notes, was elaborated from the 1866 version and later appeared in Mes haines (1879). 24 Louvel, Poetics of the Iconotext, p. 57. Louvel defines mnemopictoriality as ‘the memory of the painting in the text’. 25 Zola, ‘A New Style of Painting’, p. 77; my emphasis. 26 Ibid., p. 73. 27 When Zola aligned the new art with scientific observation he sought to distinguish it from romantic tendencies of emotional expression and spiritual aspiration. For this reason he denied any relationship between ‘the paintings of Edouard Manet and the poems of Charles Baudelaire’. Notably, Zola would have been referring to Baudelaire’s verse poems, published as Les Fleurs du mal (1857, 1861), which consist of romantic themes and techniques. Conversely, Baudelaire’s prose poems, Le Spleen de Paris, published posthumously in 1868, resist romanticism to treat modern Parisian topics and social types. While Zola admits ‘that a lively sympathy has brought the poet and the painter together’, he claims that ‘I can affirm [Manet] has never made the blunder, committed by so many others, of wanting to put ideas in his painting.’ According to Zola, Manet is only motivated by his talent for translating what and how he sees nature: ‘if he brings together several objects or several figures, he is guided in his choice only by the desire to obtain beautiful color areas, beautiful oppositions. It is silly to try to make a mystical dreamer out of an artist obedient to such a temperament’ (Zola, ‘A New Style of Painting’, p. 73). 28 Theodore Reff, ‘Manet’s Portrait of Zola’, Burlington Magazine, 117:862 (January 1975), 35–44. See also Berg, The Visual Novel, and Lethbridge, ‘Manet’s Textual Frames’.

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29 Reff, ‘Manet’s Portrait of Zola’, 36. 30 Ibid., 39. 31 Manet organized his 1867 one-man exhibition in protest against the official Salon. For a discussion of Zola’s and Manet’s collaboration in staging this event see Alan Krell, ‘Manet, Zola and the “Motifs d’une exposition particulière”, 1867. A Note on a Manet Letter; Public and Critics, 1865’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 99:1358 (mars 1982): 109–15. 32 Reff, ‘Manet’s Portrait of Zola’, p. 36. Lethbridge also asserts that the painting is evidence of Manet’s ironic, ‘visual wit’ as well as an articulation of ‘the contemporary debate about the relative autonomy of literature and painting’ (‘Manet’s Textual Frames’, pp. 156, 157). 33 As Lethbridge observes, ‘dangling eyeglasses suggest the perceptual blank of Zola’s gaze, oblivious not only of pictures in hand and around him, but also of the portrait painter’ (‘Manet and Textual Frames’, p. 157). 34 Baudelaire, ‘The Exposition Universelle 1855: I. Critical Method’, in Art in Paris 1845–1862: Salons and Other Exhibitions, trans. and ed. Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon, 1970), pp. 124–5. This portion of the review was first published in Le Pays, 26 mai 1855 (Mayne, ‘Introduction’, Art in Paris, p. xiii). 35 Zola, ‘Edouard Manet’, L’Événement illustré, 10 mai 1868 (www.cahiers-­naturalistes. com/Salons/10–05–68.html). Zola attributed Manet’s voice to the dialogue between himself and the artist, wherein the artist justifies his analytical observations: ‘[Zola:] C’est en remuant ces idées que j’ai vu la toile se remplir. Ce qui m’a étonné moi-même a été la conscience extrême de l’artiste. Souvent, quand il traitait un détail secondaire, je voulais quitter la pose, je lui donnais le mauvais conseil d’inventer. ‹Non,› me répondait-il, ‹je ne puis rien faire sans la nature. Je ne sais pas inventer. Tant que j’ai voulu peindre d’après les leçons apprises, je n’ai produit rien qui vaille. Si je vaux quelque chose aujourd’hui, c’ est à l’ interprétation exacte, à l’analyse fidèle que je le dois.›’ 36 L’Assommoir was published as instalments, beginning in April–June 1876, first in Le Bien public, and then in La République des lettres, between June 1876 and January 1877; it was published as a single volume in February 1877; see Robert Lethbridge’s ‘Introduction’ to Émile Zola, L’Assommoir, trans. Margaret Mauldon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. xiv. 37 As explained by Françoise Cachin in Manet: 1832–1883 (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1983): ‘The subject [of the courtesan] was in the air … and quite possibly Manet began his painting before he ever read L’Assommoir or heard Zola speak of it. But that Zola, in any case, gave him the idea for the title at the time of the Salon, in May 1877, is clear. Manet greatly admired L’Assommoir; a letter dated 28 April from the duchess of Castiglione-Colonna thanks Manet for sending her a copy autographed for her by the author. That was within a few weeks of the opening of the Salon’ (p. 393). Cachin also notes that Henriette Hauser, an actual actress and aristocrat’s (the Prince of Orange) mistress, posed for Nana (p. 394). 38 Zola, L’Assommoir, p. 350. 39 For detailed discussions of Manet’s use of censored/pornographic photography, see Lauren S. Weingarden, ‘The Photographic Subversion: Benjamin, Manet and Art(istic) Reproduction’, ALETRIA: Revista de estudos de literatura: Intermedialidade



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(Brazil) 14:225–45; and ‘Manet’s Realism and the Erotic Gaze: Photography and Censorship’, in Véronique Plesch, Catriona MacLeod and Jan Baetens (eds), Efficacy/ Efficacité: How To Do Things With Words and Images? Word & Image Interactions 7 (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2011), pp. 287–304. 40 As discussed by Elizabeth Anne McCauley in Industrial Madness: Commercial Photography in Paris, 1848–1871 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), the photographers’ (like the artists’) models were synonymous with women of illrepute and legitimate studio photography often morphed into the illicit picture-trade (pp. 149–85). For Louis-Camille d’Olivier’s studio photographs of nudes before the ‘psyche’ mirror see the George Eastman Museum, works of Louis-Camille d’Olivier (https://collections.eastman.org/people/45603/-/objects/list?page=2). 41 J.-K. Huysmans, ‘La Nana de Manet’, L’Artiste (Belgium), 13 mai 1877 (www.huys​ mans.org/artcriticism/nana.htm). 42 Huysmans, ‘La Nana de Manet’, trans. and quoted in Cachin, Manet: 1832–1883, p. 394. 43 Huysmans, ‘La Nana de Manet’, my translation. 44 Carol M. Armstrong, Manet Manette (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), p. 230. 45 Huysmans, ‘La Nana de Manet’, trans. and quoted in Armstrong, Manet Manette, p. 230. 46 Huysmans, ‘La Nana de Manet’, my translation; original text: ‘Le sujet du tableau, le voici: Nana, la Nana de L’Assommoir, se poudre le visage d’une fleur de riz. Un monsieur la regarde.’ 47 Huysmans, ‘La Nana de Manet’, trans. and quoted in Armstrong, Manet Manette, p. 230. 48 In Chapter 1 of Nana we are introduced to Nana when she is 18. However, based on the chronology in L’Assommoir, she would be 15. 49 Lucien Dällenbach, The Mirror in the Text (Cambridge: Polity, 1989), pp. 8, 35. 50 Zola, Nana, trans. George Holden (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), p. 222. 51 Ibid., p. 221. 52 Ibid., p. 220. 53 Mitchell, ‘Ekphrasis and the Other’, p. 152. 54 Ibid., p. 152. 55 Ibid., p. 154. 56 Zola, ‘Une Exposition de tableaux à Paris’, Lettres de Paris, juin 1875, Le messager de l’Europe (www.cahiers-naturalistes.com/Salons/00–06–75.html). My translation; original text: ‘un artiste moderne, un réaliste, un positiviste’; Zola, ‘Deux Expositions d’art au mois de Mai’, Lettres de Paris, juin 1876, Le messager de l’Europe (www.cahiers-naturalistes.com/Salons/00–06–76.html), my translation; orignial text: ‘C’est un naturaliste, un analyste.’ Zola, ‘Le naturalisme au Salon’, Le Voltaire, 18–22 juin 1880 (www.cahiers-naturalistes.com/Salons/18–06–80.html). My translation; original text: ‘un des infatigables ouvriers du naturalisme’. 57 Zola, ‘The Experimental Novel’, in George Joseph Becker (ed.), Documents of Modern Literary Realism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963), pp. 193–4. This caveat may be a warning to Manet, as per Zola’s criticism of Manet’s sketchiness in an article of 1879, written for a Russian newspaper: ‘[Manet’s] hand does not equal his eye. He has not been able to develop a technique for himself; he has remained the

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enthusiastic student, who sees distinctly what is happening in nature but is never sure of rendering his impressions completely and definitively’; quoted and translated in James H. Rubin, Manet’s Silence and the Poetics of Bouquets (London: Reaktion, 1994), pp. 124–5. 58 See Lethbridge, ‘Manet and Textual Frames’, p. 154. 59 Baudelaire, ‘The Painter of Modern Life’, p. 400. 60 Baudelaire, ‘The Exposition Universelle’, pp. 124–5.

8

Close encounters of the third kind: Hamo Thornycroft’s The Mower and Matthew Arnold’s ‘Thyrsis’ Jane Thomas

On 8 April 1884 Hamo Thornycroft submitted a life-size plaster sculpture to the Royal Academy Exhibition.1 The catalogue entry that accompanied the piece featured the title – The Mower – and an epigraph: ‘Where are the mowers, who, as the tiny swell / Of our boat passing heaved the river-grass, / Stood with suspended scythe to see us pass?’ The lines were taken from the thirteenth decima of Matthew Arnold’s poem ‘Thyrsis’ (1866).2 Thornycroft dated the inspirational moment for the sculpture to a trip on the family steam yacht to the upper reaches of the Thames, with his close friend the poet and critic Edmund Gosse, in July 1882. On a stretch of the river, near Marlow in Buckinghamshire, he sketched a farmhand pausing from his labour in the field to watch them as they passed by. The incident called to Thornycroft’s mind lines from one his favourite poets, whom he described to his then fiancée Agatha Cox as ‘fine & true to nature’, adding: ‘his observation of nature is beyond most of the poets and he is of his age’.3 The sketch provided Thornycroft with the basis for the plaster sculpture which was commissioned and cast in bronze in 1894. Thornycroft’s account of the incident gives equal significance to the encounter and to Arnold’s lines, lifting the actual rural worker into a neo-Hellenic pastoral ideal while simultaneously grounding Arnold’s elegy in the everyday. In addition to establishing a complex and mutually enhancing dialogue between the two artworks, this hermeneutical framing of the real by art challenges the representational impulse of the ‘New Sculpture’. Regardless of Thornycroft’s intention, the 1884 plaster version of The Mower – enhanced by its epigraph – demonstrates what Oscar Wilde was to adumbrate less than four years later in ‘The Decay of Lying’, that ‘life holds the mirror up to art, and either reproduces some strange type imagined by painter or sculptor, or realises in fact what has been dreamed in fiction’ and, we might add, poetry. The energy of life, Wilde claims, ‘is simply the desire for expression, and art is always presenting various forms through which this expression can be attained’.4 This inceptive version of

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The Mower is particularly conducive to Stephen Cheeke’s concept of the intermedial artwork in which the conventional paragone of ekphrasis is replaced by a non-hierarchical exchange of meaning, and the vexed relationship between art and the real, the ephemeral and the transcendent, stasis and movement is variously and creatively acknowledged through the mutual intertextual enrichment of verbal and plastic media.5 Ekphrasis, as Grant F. Scott suggests, simultaneously quickens and stills life: ‘It breathes words into mute pictures; it makes pictures out of the suspended words of its text. It is as much about urgency as it is about rest, as much voyage as interlude.’ Its effect is ‘to preserve, memorialize, to aestheticize life’ while simultaneously ‘subject[ing] the aesthetic moment to the forces of time and contingency’.6 Thornycroft’s reverse ekphrasis goes further than simply transposing the conventional genre hierarchy of ekphrasis, or challenging its paragonal implication. It seems perfectly to exemplify this contradictory impulse, not only in its representation of the ‘pregnant moment’ – the suspended instance fraught with potential action – but also in its dialogue with Arnold’s poem in which, among other things, what has vanished for ever (the mowers) is substantiated and preserved in life-size, three-dimensional form.7 Arnold’s ‘Thyrsis’ is a pastoral elegy for his close friend and one-time fellow student, the poet Arthur Hugh Clough, who died in Florence in November 1861 at the age of 42. The narrator’s visit to the Cumner Hills above Oxford and the villages of South and North Hinksey becomes the occasion for an extended meditation upon change, transience, and loss as manifested in the immediate world of the villages themselves, the absence of those who once lived there and worked the surrounding fields, and the death of Clough, who companioned Arnold on walks to the area when both were students at Oxford. The decima concludes: ‘They are all gone, and thou art gone as well.’8 Although Thornycroft chose to omit this line from his epigraph, it is likely that visitors to the Royal Academy in 1884 would have been familiar with it, for Arnold’s poetry, and ‘Thyrsis’ in particular, were widely celebrated. Clough is addressed as the shepherd Thyrsis who, in Virgil’s Eclogues (VII), lost a singing match against the goatherd, Corydon. Thyrsis also appears in the Idylls (I) of the Greek bucolic poet Theocritus, as the inventor of pastoral poetry. In both Virgil and Theocritus, Thyrsis sings of the death of Daphnis the Sicilian shepherd, blinded by a jealous nymph and, in Theocritus’ version, mortally afflicted with unrequited love. Arnold’s ‘Thyrsis’ also references the story of Daphnis as recounted by the Alexandrian tragic poet Sositheus, in which the shepherd is forced to take part in a reaping match with the cruel Phrygian king Lityerses, who puts to death all who lose against him, but whose place is taken by a victorious Hercules.9 In ‘Thyrsis’ the contentious and forward-thinking Clough, energized by creative desire, is imagined as inhabiting ‘happier air’ and listening to the ‘immortal chant’ of the ‘Lityerses song’, sung by Daphnis as he reaps ‘the perilous grain / in the hot cornfields of the Phrygian king’.10 In this composite citation of the myths of Thyrsis, Clough is identified as a poet



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whose early promise was unfulfilled and unappreciated before he could ‘cut a smoother reed, / and blow a strain the world at last shall heed’; but the victor here is not Corydon, but ‘Time’.11 The reference to the absent mowers also establishes a complex elegiac connection between Clough and a type of rural worker fast disappearing from the countryside due to the spread of mechanical forms of farming. The dead poet and the vanishing mowers of mid-Victorian rural England are transmuted ‘out of the heed of mortals’ to the ideal, timeless pastoral landscape of Graeco-Roman myth, where they assume new identities as the shepherd/singer Thyrsis and the singing reapers of Phryrgia.12 We might also see Arnold, Clough’s champion, in the figure of the god Hercules. There are a number of questions relating to the status of an epigraph appended to an early plaster version of a sculpture which, as far as I am aware, was not attached to the final bronze cast commissioned by the Walker Gallery in Liverpool in 1894.13 An exhibition at the Henry Moore Foundation at Perry Green, Hertfordshire in 2003, and the accompanying book Henry Moore Plasters, argued strongly that the plaster should be viewed not as a means to an end but as a discrete work, indeed as a more authentic representation of the sculptor’s original conception, in that it frequently bears the traces of his or her direct modelling and carving of the material in a way that a bronze casting, executed by others, may not.14 For the purposes of this chapter I propose to treat the 1884 plaster version of The Mower as the original and inceptive version of Thornycroft’s sculpture and therefore deserving of study in its own right.15 I also propose that this version of the sculpture should be regarded alongside the epigraph which, like the title of the piece, has a hermeneutical function which it is my intention to explore.16 As John Dixon Hunt has suggested, it was common practice for painters, as well as sculptors, to append literary epigraphs to their work, or to be directed to do so by a patron or encouraged by The Art Journal, when exhibiting at the Royal Academy and elsewhere.17 The epigraph was seen to lend intellectual ‘weight’ to the piece, to signify that its creator was an ‘insider’ fluent in the cultural language of the upper middle class, and the practice was extremely popular with the typical Victorian gallery visitor. It also lends the ‘static’ work a narrative dimension or energy which, as James Heffernan explains, ‘makes explicit the story that visual art tells only by implication’.18 Heffernan is describing classic ekphrasis here, which he defines as ‘verbal representation of visual representation’.19 In the case of Thornycroft and others, the literary ‘handles’ pre-dated the art they accompanied, which could be regarded therefore as examples of ‘reverse ekphrasis’, visual (or in the case of The Mower the three-dimensional) embodiments of graphic texts. However, the term seems somewhat inappropriate when used of sculpture which, in both its pagan and Christian manifestations, took its inspiration from pre-existing texts that were written, oral, or performed: ancient myth or the Bible. Michelangelo’s David captures the pensive moment before the boy’s decisive victory over the Philistine giant Goliath. David’s pose itself echoes that of the Belvedere Apollo, depicted at the moment when the god’s lethal

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arrow has found its mark in the body of the Python guarding Delphi or that of the giant Tityos who attempted to rape the god’s mother, Leto. As noted above, Cheeke replaces the idea of the paragone, and its ‘implicit rejection or denial of the artwork in the crucible of the poem’, with the idea of a translation and interweaving of meaning in which a third intermedial artwork is revealed.20 I suggest that the first version of The Mower (1884), together with its title and epigraph, constitutes just such an intermedial artwork in which the complex textual and genre citations of the poem (gestured in by the epigraph) combine with those of the sculpture to produce an enhanced representation of the challenges of embodying the ‘real’ in art which, Cheeke suggests, is always at the heart of conventionally ekphrastic writing.21 While this theme is clearly available to readers of Arnold’s elegy and viewers of Thornycroft’s sculpture, when encountered as a separate and discrete works of art, the combination and interchange of meaning produced by the convergence of sculpture and epigraph results in a third, composite piece in which ideas of loss, desire, and nostalgia in the context of the material world, and the representation of that world in art are extended, enriched, and enlarged.22 Not only does the epigraph draw attention to the sculpture’s classical antecedents, it also deepens and enhances its elegiac dimension.23 The sculpture presents itself as a material response to the elegiac desire voiced in the poem, gesturing beyond the realities of life and death to the timeless mythical past, while at the same time pointing up the impossibility of ever truly apprehending the non-material realm. A further effect of the alliance of word and image in The Mower is to challenge accepted ideas of time and temporality. Epigraph and sculpture extend the temporal reach of the artwork in several directions, not only bringing the distant past into the contemporary moment of the sculpture but also translating both into the immediate moment of our encounter with it. In addition, the changes made by Thornycroft in the development of the piece from rough sketch to finished life-size plaster, and the hermeneutic enhancement achieved by the addition of lines from Arnold’s elegy for his dead companion, introduce a prophetic and admonitory note warning us of what we must all, eventually, confront. To meet the mower’s gaze is to be reminded of the inevitability of our own vanishing. In this way, the work of art is brought ‘into the realm of our contingency’. As David Kennedy has suggested, ‘adding death and incompleteness to [a transcendent] artwork enables it to fit with the world’s imperfection by adding a prosthetic imperfection to it’.24 ‘Thyrsis’ interweaves Greek and Roman pastoral poetry with Alexandrian tragedy, elegy, Romantic lyric, and quest narrative through the intertextual reference to Arnold’s earlier poem ‘The Scholar Gypsy’, in an attempt to articulate the full measure of the narrator’s immediate grief and his failed attempt to summon up the presence of his dead companion. The narrator knows that his words, however eloquent, will remain ‘wind-dispersed and vain’. The countryside he revisits and describes on a mild winter’s evening dissolves into a landscape of loss, a negative to the richly imagined midsummer landscape of his



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memory, which blends with Proserpine’s ‘Sicilian fields’, the ‘hot cornfields’ of Phrygia, and the bucolic landscape of Virgil’s Arcadia. By contrast, the revisited hills are ‘dim’, shaded by night, and veiled by the white fog. The earth beneath the narrator’s feet, the surrounding hills and the river below, even ‘the sweet city with her dreaming spires’ are effaced on one level by the evocation of the longed-for classical landscapes of the past, and on the other by the dismal reality of the narrator’s remembered present: ‘the great town’s harsh, heart-wearying roar’ which overwrites the rural landscape of Oxfordshire with the pressing realities of modernity and loss. ‘Thyrsis’ also melds elegy with quest narrative in its evocation of the Oxfordshire countryside of the narrator’s youth, and the search for the symbolic ‘Fyfield elm’ of ‘The Scholar Gypsy’: ‘That single elm-tree bright / Against the west – I miss it! Is it gone?’25 The scholar-gypsy of Arnold’s earlier poem seeks the secret of the ‘gypsy-crew’ who ‘had arts to rule as they desired / The workings of men’s brains, / And they can bind them to what thoughts they will’.26 The gypsies’ secret is the power of the poetic imagination – ‘the spark from heaven’ (171) through which the poet may communicate to others truth and beauty, or a transcendent idea of the ‘real’, through the medium of art. The narrator of ‘Thyrsis’ also seeks that ‘fugitive and gracious light’ that is ‘shy to illumine’. This light is not of the world but is the means through which the world may be accessed. In ‘Thyrsis’, the Fyfield elm is a sign that the scholar gypsy is still engaged on his quest, and an encouragement to the narrator to remain true to his. The link established by the epigraph between Arnold’s ‘Thyrsis’ and Thornycroft’s sculpture sets up a dialogue between the two art forms which brings all their citations to bear on the question of the perceived role of art in late Victorian England. In the intermedial artwork that is the 1884 version of The Mower, verisimilitude and idealism are balanced in such a way as to continually point up the duty of art to reach beyond the simply mimetic and connect the viewer or reader with the ideal world that lies beyond surface reality, while at the same time emphasizing the slippery nature of this ideal, which seems to evade specification whatever means are brought to bear upon it. The figure is a material embodiment of what, in Arnold’s ‘Thyrsis’, has vanished, and yet its pose suggests its own transience, as if the mower himself is on the verge of leaving the very space in which he is anchored. In this way, both poem and sculpture seem to acknowledge the illusory nature of the pleasing fictions of stability they seek to invoke. Peter Sacks has pointed out how in ‘Thyrsis’, although the tree stands as the figure of survival, Arnold [sic] cannot reach it. His power is diminished by a personified nightfall which, like age, ‘In ever-nearing circle weaves her shade,’ ‘let[ting] down her veil’ between the poet and the object of his quest … ‘I cannot reach the signal-tree tonight.’27

Likewise, although the narrator constantly seeks to summon up the presence of the dead Clough, his lost friend and companion has ‘crossed the unpermitted

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ferry’s flow’ to the underworld, leaving the narrator ‘sole in these fields’ and surrounded by ‘night’s shade’. He can only imagine Clough in another world, and hope to hear his voice as ‘a whisper … To chase fatigue and fear’ (235–6), for ‘Thyrsis never more we swains shall see’ (77). In Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign (1992), Murray Krieger reminds us that human communication is driven by our ontological yearning ‘to find an order or structure objectively – that would authorize the signs and forms that our subjectivity projects and that we then want – nay require – others to respond to and acknowledge as being there’.28 Both the visual and the verbal sign seek to represent the unrepresentable and ekphrasis, in its competitive mediation between two or more sign systems, emphasizes that ‘the myth of an achievable identity between word and world is indeed a myth’ (p. 234). Krieger claims that despite this, the ‘illusionary representation of the unrepresentable’ is ‘allowed to masquerade as a natural sign, as if there could be an adequate substitute for its object’ (p. xv). The 1884 version of The Mower, however, in its synthesis of various contrasting modes of representation, can be read as a disquisition on the act of representation itself. Epigraph and three-dimensional plaster unite in their attempt to stabilize a moment, while simultaneously expressing a sense of its fleeting, fugitive nature.

20. Hamo Thonycroft, The Mower (1894)



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Thornycroft’s The Mower was praised at the time by Gosse as ‘a figure of the life of today, seized in a position of perfectly natural grace, treated in the costume of his class’. It was, he opined, ‘a very noble statue in which the beauty of the every-day life of today was heroically captured for the art which had seemed most definitely to decline to touch it’ and he hailed it as ‘the pioneer of a whole class of statuary of a modern and “actual” kind’.29 Modern critics, however, have repeatedly contested the accuracy of Thornycroft’s representation of a rural labourer. Despite the techniques of heightened verisimilitude employed by the sculptor – the close attention to authentic dress and anatomical detail, the lifelike pose with its suggestion of incipient movement – The Mower presents a highly idealized and somewhat sentimental view of its subject. The evolution of the sculpture has been well documented.30 Thornycroft sketched the labourer from life and used the drawing as a basis from which to model the figure. The sketch was augmented by studio drawings from a model, Orazio Cervi: a Sicilian farm labourer who regularly walked from the Abruzzi to sit for Thornycroft for long periods.31 The transition from one to three dimensions was accomplished using small wax and plaster models, during which the original design was altered and refined, before the life-sized plaster statue was completed. In the final piece, the figure’s clothing was changed from a loose, collarless shirt with rolled-up sleeves, to a bib overall. The orientation of the mower’s body was altered from left to right, and the scythe was lifted so that the lower handle rests on the bent right hand that is tucked into the bib of the trousers, which has been loosened to fall into soft folds around the hips of the figure and to expose its finely detailed, naked torso. The long, sharp blade of the scythe now balances the sharply crooked elbow of the opposite arm, and the effect is to render it more visible, more prominent. The scythe itself hangs loosely from the bent thumb of the hand ready to be swung into action at any moment by the left, giving the figure the suggestion of movement from rest to a labour soon to be resumed. The imminent shifting of weight from the straight leg to the bent one, as the figure ‘turns’ back to his labour and away from the viewer, lends the piece a narrative energy achieved using techniques borrowed from ancient classical models. During this process, as Benedict Read has suggested, ‘the natural basis is being worked up, [through] a process of idealising natural observation (not incompatible with the practice of … arch-neo-classicists as John Gibson)’.32 We do not need the epigraph from Arnold, of course, to see how Thornycroft’s ‘Ideal-Real’ statue is in dialogue with the past. The contraposto, the attention to anatomical detail (augmented by a close study of human anatomy, especially in the dissecting room), and the expression of the piece are all testament to Thornycroft’s deep admiration for the great sculptors of ancient Greece.33 The figure references Michaelangelo’s David and, by association, Donatello’s sculpture of the same name (c. 1440) and the celebrated Belvedere Apollo from around the third century bc, considered by Winckelmann as ‘the sublimest ideal of art’.34 Indeed, it was never Thornycroft’s aim simply to present a realistic representation of an actual rural labourer of the time. He sought to harness

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classical ideals of beauty to the depiction of a modern subject, one that would be more meaningful to a broad spectrum of the gallery-going public. In addition, The Mower reflects the influence of the new French realists such as Jules Dalou, and Thornycroft’s avowed interest in democratic socialism.35 However, as he reminded his students at the Royal Academy in 1885, ‘Art must have an aim of its own, and that aim cannot be mere copying with scientific exactness’, or indeed the mimetic representation of classical models. The aim of art, he claimed, is the expression of beauty and grace: for it is by means of Art that the ever-changing and evanescent forms and effects in nature, which are constantly before man and which astonish & perplex him, can alone be arrested and permanently expressed. Art can thus interpret nature to man and teach him to perceive her beauty.36

Thornycroft’s assertion of the ‘interpretive’ role of art has much in common with Wilde’s notion of its ‘expressive’ function. While The Mower does succeed in capturing an evanescent moment in nature, it does so at the point of its dissolution – the narrative is stilled and in transition at the same time: this is a vanished mower, caught at the moment of his going. In addition, the ideal of beauty expressed in the figure is neither that of the original subject nor Thornycroft’s model – the Sicilian farmhand Orazio Cervio. Its effect is to bring the interpretive ‘essence’ of the ancient world into the modern arena. Studying Greek sculpture, Praxiteles and Phidias in particular, in the British Museum in 1868, Thornycroft notes how through ‘a careful watchfulness’ ‘we are made to perceive and feel the most sublime & terrific subjects’. Indeed, he defines the ‘Natural style’ as ‘a representation of human form, according to distinctions of sex and age, in action, or repose, expressing the affections of the soul’, and the ‘Ideal style’ as ‘the above selected from such perfect examples as may excite in our minds a conception of the supernatural’.37 In this respect The Mower is conceived as an Ideal rather than a ‘Natural’ piece and Thornycroft’s reference to the ‘selective’ eye of the artist chimes well with Wilde’s insistence that ‘selection, which is the very spirit of art, is nothing more than an intensified mode of over-emphasis’ through which beauty may be perceived .38 It is this ‘conception of the supernatural’, that which is above and beyond the natural world, that Thornycroft sought to communicate in his apparently very ‘natural’ piece, and the interrelation of both elements is a dominant feature of Arnold’s pastoral poem which superimposes the mythical landscapes of the Mediterranean upon the hills and fields of Oxfordshire. James Heffernan contends that in conventional ekphrasis, the verbal engagement ‘delivers from the pregnant moment of visual art its embryonic narrative impulse and thus makes explicit the story that visual art tells only by implication’.39 If we regard The Mower as an example of reverse ekphrasis, it becomes clear that we cannot simply reverse the paradigm. Rather than stilling the narrative impulse of the poem, the sculpture adds its own symbolic resonances to Arnold’s image of the vanished mowers. Both artworks are engaged in the act of embodying



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s­ omething that has its inception in the material world but has moved beyond it to become an idea or, more accurately; an ideal. John Fisher reminds us that the unique purpose of a title ‘is hermeneutical; titles are names which function as guides to interpretation’. Thus, the title of the 1884 first version of The Mower signifies something different from the same title appended to subsequent versions without the epigraph.40 Stripped of Arnold’s lines, the sculpture stands as a representation of something in Thornycroft’s world – experienced perhaps at first hand – with all the aesthetic, social, and political implications such an act of appropriation, representation, and display raises.41 As a Pastoral piece, the sculpture may have carried a certain elegiac charge for its Victorian viewers, nostalgic for a way of life that was rapidly disappearing in the face of the increasing mechanization of agricultural labour.42 The more educated among them may also have detected its classical antecedents. However, viewed through the lens of Arnold’s lines, The Mower is revealed as a material response to the narrator’s ubi sunt: Where are the mowers? Here is one of them, life-size and three-dimensional, right before our eyes but ready, at any moment, to steal away. With its epigraph, the sculpture is not any mower, not even, quite simply, the Mower to which the biographical record gives a time and an occasion: the rural labourer at rest from his mowing on the bank of the Thames on a particular day in July 1884. It is the Mower: the epitome of mowers, a composite rendition of the type, with all the mythological, symbolic and literary implications that have accrued to it from the time of Sositheus, and probably even earlier. The classical and mythical allusions bestowed upon the sculpture by Arnold’s lines deepen and extend its temporal reach, while the generic complexities of the poem combine with those of the sculpture to complicate its address to the real. Commentators on The Mower who have noted the addition of the epigraph have tended to overlook its ekphrastic significance, preferring instead to concentrate on the ideological and political implications of Thornycroft’s choice of subject and his application of classical and ideal notions of beauty to the depiction of the body of a labouring man. David Getsy notes how sculpture retained, well into the twentieth century, its essentially conservative and idealist and humanist commitment to a limited notion of the figurative that protected it from ‘the rapidly evolving conditions of modern life’ (p. 84). Indeed, The Mower displays few, if any, traces of the actual daily labour of a farm worker such as dirt, sweat, cut fingers, or calluses. While the clothes show evidence of being lived in, the sanitized anatomical perfection of the figure has more in common with a Classical nude than with a contemporary worker. (p. 84)

While he agrees that this has the effect of diluting the radical potential of the work, Getsy registers how the attribution of classical authority to contemporary demotic subject matter was in itself a revolutionary act, for the art of sculpture at least: forcing it out of the realm of the purely aesthetic into a more civic role. Not only is the labouring man presented as a fit subject for the art of sculpture,

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he is situated ‘as the possible subject for universal sympathy and identification’.43 For Getsy, then, the conflation of the classical with the contemporary, high art applied to what was perceived to be ‘low’ subject matter, provided Victorian sculpture with ‘a crucial stage of transition’ into the modern age. We might go even further than this to suggest that the encounter between the multiple narrative styles of Arnold’s poem and the various aesthetic styles of Thornycroft’s sculpture embodied in The Mower enacts the challenge to mimesis that was to become one of the defining tenets of postmodernism. Allied to this is the complex issue of amative and sexual desire manifested by The Mower arising out of the specific cultural, political, and personal ‘moment’ of its making. Michael Hatt has explored The Mower in relation to ‘Thyrsis’ and concludes that Thornycroft’s reading of the epigraph ‘is not about agricultural labour … it is too concerned with the finding of a symbol to stand against change, loss, ageing’.44 For Hatt, the sculpture enhances the homoerotic element that is ‘already at work in Arnold’s account of homosocial grief’.45 At best The Mower represents ‘an illusory subject of desire, one drained of class or agency’. At worst it is an erotic act of class appropriation. The surface of The Mower’s body is not a skin that speaks of dirt, sweat, scars, burns and scratches, but a skin to be touched, felt with pleasure, removed from the vulgar. The work of labour dissolves on the surface of the figure, and the solvent is the embodied gaze of the viewer. Here, the aura of the statue also creates an erotics of the labouring body, thereby warding off politics, separating labour and class to be touched, felt with pleasure. (pp. 49–50)

He places The Mower ‘on the boundary between the homosocial and the homosexual, relying upon normative male–male relations but simultaneously and necessarily [sic] invoking what lies beyond the norm: the Utopian space of male homosexuality’ (p. 26). Although Hatt stops short of reading the piece as ekphrastic, we can see how the mutual exchange and enhancement of meaning between sculpture and epigraph that he detects here constructs The Mower as an intermedial artwork that gestures beyond the real into what was, at that time, an ideal future Utopia based on an idealized classical past where ‘the affective bonds of bourgeois male homosexuality’ are no longer illicit. In conclusion, the relation and exchange of meaning manifested in the 1884 version of The Mower by the convergence of sculpture and epigraph establishes a dialogue in which the complex address to Art and Life is enriched and extended. The Mower is a composite artwork which does more than simply oppose various systems of representation – it combines them in a polysemic address to the conventional ekphrastic trope: the artist’s dilemma of how to find an equivalent for the ‘real’, which simultaneously reveals something beyond material reality, and how art might act as a conduit to that as yet unrealized realm. At the same time, The Mower challenges the notion that signs – whether visual, verbal, or spatial – are ever anything other than necessary but mediated systems through which we apprehend the world.



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For Heffernan, ekphrasis is distinguished from either iconicity or pictorialism ‘because it explicitly represents representation itself’. Though less experimental and far less challenging than Magritte’s famous Ceci n’est pas une pipe, The Mower nevertheless calls into question the assumption that signs can provide an exact and unmediated equivalent for what they signify.46 One effect of this is to reveal the ideological power-base behind late nineteenth-century sculpture, and this particular manifestation of the radical ‘New Sculpture’ movement. This is not, after all, a mower but a representation of a mower which, despite the attempt at representational fidelity, embodies Thornycroft’s at best naïve and at worst risible pretensions to full sympathy with ‘the hard-handed toilers’ who, in this example at least, appear to be in full control of their own destiny in a way that was simply not borne out by reality in the mid-1880s, when agriculture was suffering a widespread depression. We may add to this Michael Hatt’s critique of Thornycroft’s aesthetic and possibly erotic investment in the male body shaped by labour, which has the effect of defusing his middle-class radical protestations. Finally we may acknowledge the 1884 version of The Mower and its epigraph as testament not only to the partial, selective impulse of the artist but also, more importantly perhaps, to the shaping force of the language of cultural antecedents. Whether or not Thornycroft intended his sculpture to provide a radical critique of representation, this is one of the effects of the encounter between the verbal and the visual. The Mower and its accompanying epigraph also establishes an equally complex temporal relationship between a classical past, its own late Victorian ‘present’, its future – which is also the present moment of any subsequent viewing – and all further futures, bringing art into ‘the realm of our contingency’.47 Kennedy, drawing on Mack Smith, writes that ‘whatever is presented as “the present” in an ekphrasis not only contains something of the past but also anticipates something future’.48 This is clearly the case with The Mower. Thornycroft’s striking response to the ubi sunt of Arnold’s elegy results in a material manifestation of the vanished labourer and also the figure of death resting momentarily, with his scythe poised, while fixing the viewer in his languid yet interrogatory gaze.49 The Mower appears strikingly prophetic of the grim reaping of a whole generation of young men that would take place on the battlefields of Europe less than two decades after the sculpture was first exhibited. Figuring the imperfection or knowledge of death, The Mower connects not only with its contemporary moment but also with our own. At the same time it links past, present, and future through its gaze out beyond its own material reality, back to a classical Utopian past and forward to a Utopian future in which social, political, and sexual relationships were and are radically re-visioned. The complex temporal, intertextual, and spatial relationships that coalesce in the composite artwork that is Hamo Thornycroft’s first version of The Mower combine to reveal ethical, ideological, and moral dimensions which might otherwise remain hidden in what Cheeke describes as ‘the sensuous field of the visual’, or the logocentric pretensions of the verbal.50

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Notes  1 I am grateful to the Henry Moore Institute for awarding me a month-long research fellowship in 2013, which allowed me to undertake much of the research that informs this chapter in the Hamo Thornycroft archive. The plaster sculpture was completed on 6 April 1884, and revealed to select visitors to Thornycroft’s studio on ‘Show Sunday’, the following day. It was sent to the Royal Academy two days later. Although the plaster was much praised at the Academy, it was not cast in bronze on this scale until commissioned by the Walker Gallery, Liverpool in 1894, when a unique cast was produced. The bronze was then exhibited at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition from 7 May to 6 August of that year. See ‘The Exhibition of the Royal Academy of Arts, The One Hundred and Twenty-Sixth (Summer Exhibition), 1894’, Mapping the Practice and Profession of Sculpture in Britain and Ireland 1851–1951, University of Glasgow History of Art and HATII, online database 2011 (http://sculpture.gla.ac.uk/view/event.php?id=msib7_1217941512). Thornycroft had previously exhibited a full-sized plaster entitled Teucer at the 1881 Royal Academy Exhibition. The catalogue entry for this piece featured an extract from Alexander Pope’s translation of the Iliad.  2 Matthew Arnold, ‘Thyrsis’ in The Poems of Matthew Arnold, ed. Miriam Allott (London and New York: Longman, 1979). All subsequent references are to this edition.  3 Hamo Thornycroft to Agatha Cox, 4 October 1883 (Hamo Thornycroft Archive, Henry Moore Institute, TII-C-T [H] 71).  4 Oscar Wilde, ‘The Decay of Lying: a Dialogue’, The Nineteenth Century: A Monthly Review, 25 (Jan.–June 1889), 35–56 (p. 50).  5 Stephen Cheeke, Writing for Art: The Aesthetics of Ekphrasis (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008).  6 Grant F. Scott, The Sculpted Word: Keats, Ekphrasis and the Visual Arts’ (Hanover, NH and London: University of New England Press, 1994), pp. xi–xii.  7 Sculpted Word, p. 3. Lessing insists that, as the sculptor or painter can only depict the body acting in one moment in time, the chosen moment should be as suggestive as possible of future possibilities, thereby raising the viewer’s imagination to a higher level of intensity. See Ann Schmeising, ‘Lessing and the Third Reich’, in Barbara Fischer and Thomas Cox (eds), A Companion to the Works of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (Suffolk and New York: Camden House, 2005), pp. 261–80 (p. 271).  8 The Poems of Matthew Arnold, ed. Allott, l. 130.  9 Daphnis is rescued by Hercules, who overcomes Lityerses and beheads him with his own murderous sickle (The Poems of Matthew Arnold, ed. Allott, p. 548). 10 The Poems of Matthew Arnold, ed. Allott, pp. 537–50: ll. 175, 182–3. 11 The Poems of Matthew Arnold, ed. Allott, p. 547: ll. 178–80. 12 For Arnold the great figures of classical mythology appeal to ‘the elementary part of our nature, to our passions’, and it is this that makes them ‘eternally interesting’ (Preface to the First Edition of Poems 1853, in The Poems of Matthew Arnold, ed. Allott, pp. 129–42 (p. 132)). 13 A recent enquiry to the Walker Gallery confirmed that the 1894 bronze cast of the statue is not accompanied by its epigraph. 14 See Anita Feldman and Malcolm Woodward (eds), Henry Moore Plasters (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2011).



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15 Thornycroft produced smaller maquettes of the figure in plaster and wax and several bronze statuettes. According to the Tate Gallery website, ‘Many bronze statuettes of “The Mower” were produced in two sizes, 14 in. and 22 in. high, and shown at provincial and foreign exhibitions, and frequent references to these occur in the sculptor’s diary between 1902 and 1909’ (www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/­ thornycroft-sketch-for-the-mower-n04214/text-catalogue-entry). 16 This raises questions concerning the status of the epigraph in this initial version of the sculpture, and the significance of its absence from the final casting, which are beyond the remit of this chapter. 17 John Dixon Hunt, ‘The Fabric and the Dance: Word and Image to 1900’, in John Dixon Hunt, David Lomas, and Michael Corris (eds), Art, Word and Image: 2,000 Years of Visual/Textual Interaction (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2011), pp. 35–86 (pp. 77–85). Grant Scott suggests that the term ekphrasis can be seen to embrace catalogues, descriptions in museum guides, or titles of art works (The Sculpted Word, p. xii). 18 James A. W. Heffernan, Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 3. 19 Ekphrasis is defined by Heffernan as the ‘verbal representation of visual representation’ (Museum of Words, p. 4), and by Murray Krieger as ‘the attempted imitation in words of an object of the plastic arts, primarily painting or sculpture’ (Ekphrasis: the Illusion of the Natural Sign (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), p. 4). ‘Reverse ekphrasis’ is mentioned by Kreiger (p. xiii), but he does not explore the implications of the form. ‘Reverse ekphrasis’ has been cited by critics and practitioners of digital media, in which images are used to explain words, to register the increasingly imaged-based nature of our contemporary cultural economy. See, for instance, Jay David Bolter, Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext and the History of Writing (Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1991). 20 Cheeke, Writing for Art, p. 6. 21 Nils Clausen describes Arnold’s ‘Thyrsis’ as the most intertexual of his poems. Nils Clausen, ‘Pastoral Elegy into Romantic Lyric: Generic Transformation in Matthew Arnold’s “Thyrsis”’, Victorian Poetry, 48 (2010), 173–94. 22 John Dixon Hunt notes the long tradition of artists linking their work to literary sources in order to provide them with subject matter and a ‘handle’, and asks: ‘Did a literary basis help to make the artwork more authoritative? Did viewers grapple with what the visual was not telling them about the text?’ (‘Fabric and the Dance’, p. 82). 23 Michael Hatt reads The Mower in the light of biographical information as Thornycroft’s elegy for the loss of his close, amative friendship with his mentor the poet and critic Edmund Gosse, in the year of his wedding to Agatha Cox (‘Near and Far: Homoeroticism, Labour and Hamo Thornycroft’s Mower’, Art History, 26 (2003), 26–55). Unlike the epigraph, of course, this information would not have been available to viewers of the statue in 1884. 24 David Kennedy, The Ekphrastic Encounter in Contemporary British Poetry and Elsewhere (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), p. 5. 25 Arnold, ‘Thyrsis’, in The Poems of Matthew Arnold, ed. Allott, ll. 26–7. 26 Arnold, ‘The Scholar Gypsy’, in The Poems of Matthew Arnold, ed. Allott, pp. 357–69: ll. 44–7.

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27 Peter M. Sacks, The English Elegy; Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), p. 202. 28 Ekphrasis, p. 237. 29 Edmund Gosse, ‘The New Sculpture 1879–94’, New Art Journal, 56 (1894), 277–82 (p. 280). 30 See Terry Friedman, ‘“Demi-Gods in Corduroy”: Hamo Thornycroft’s Statue of The Mower’, Sculpture Journal, 3 (1999), 74–86; and David J. Getsy, ‘The Difficult Labour of Hamo Thornycroft’s Mower, 1884’, Sculpture Journal, 7 (2002), 44–57. 31 ‘Orazio Cervi has been sitting to me for the “Mower” from 10 till 5’ (Hamo Thornycroft to Agatha Cox, 4 October 1883 (Hamo Thornycroft Archive, Henry Moore Institute, TII-C-T [H] 71). 32 Benedict Read, ‘Introduction’ to Elfrida Manning, Marble and Bronze: The Art and Life of Hamo Thornycroft (London and Bernardsville, NJ: Trefoil Books, 1982), pp. 13–18 (p. 18). 33 In a birthday letter to Agatha Cox written on 24 August 1882, Thornycroft declared: ‘Greek art is so full of unassuming knowledge, so true to nature, so simple, so refined, so fascinating & stimulating to the imagination. I always feel the better & happier from contemplating it’ (Henry Moore Institute Archive, TH-C-T [H] 6). 34 Johann Joachim Winckelmann, ‘Description of the Apollo Belvedere’ (1759), trans. Henry Fuseli (1765), rpt. in Timothy Webb, English Romantic Hellenism, 1700–1824 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1982), pp. 128–9 (p. 128). 35 In March 1885 Thornycroft wrote to Agatha Cox: ‘During the last two years my political opinions have undergone a change & I am become a radical and feel infinitely happier for the change. Every workman’s face I meet in the street interests me, & I feel sympathy with the hard-handed toilers & not with the lazy do nothing selfish “upper-ten”’ (Thornycroft Archive, HMI). 36 W. Hamo Thornycroft, Lecture to the Sculpture Students of the Royal Academy, 1885, edited by David J. Getsy in ‘The Problem of Realism in Hamo Thornycroft’s 1885 Royal Academy Lecture’, The Volume of the Walpole Society, 69 (2007), 211–56 (p. 215). 37 Hamo Thornycroft’s Notebook on Sculpture, Henry Moore Archives, 16. 38 Wilde, ‘The Decay of Lying’, p. 43. 39 Museum of Words, p. 5. 40 John Fisher, ‘Entitling’, Critical Inquiry, 11 (1984), 286–98 (p. 288), cited by James A. W. Heffernan, ‘Ekphrasis and Representation’, New Literary History, 22 (1991), 297–316 (n26). 41 See Getsy, ‘Difficult Labour’, pp. 44–57. Hatt discusses the extent to which the labouring body becomes an object of erotic fascination for middle- and upper middleclass men (and, women too we might add), and how ‘class difference gave the bourgeoisie the licence to look’ (‘Near and Far’, p. 26). 42 The horse-drawn mechanical reaper was introduced into England in the 1870s and the 1880s witnessed a rapid expansion of its usage. Getsy suggests that during the last two decades of the nineteenth century almost half a million rural residents migrated to the towns, ‘fuelling popular fears that traditional English life was on the verge of extinction’. By the beginning of the 1890s the sight of a mower working the fields had become something of a rarity, and as a consequence, ‘the image of the mower or reaper and his scythe was becoming a powerful symbol of untainted, rustic



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Arcadia and of honest work in the popular imagination’ (Body Doubles: Sculpture in Britain, 1877–1905 (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2004), p. 80). Further references are included in the text. 43 Getsy, Body Doubles, p. 83. As Getsy notes, a reviewer for The Builder opined that a labouring man, executed on such a scale as The Mower, ‘hardly seems worthy of the dignity of art, though its expressive character and unaffected simplicity have secured it, and deservedly, much admiration’ (p. 83). 44 Hatt, ‘Near and Far’, p. 44. 45 Ibid., p. 31. For Hatt, the term ‘homoerotic’ does not denote weak, unconscious, or implied homosexual desire. It carries a different charge from either ‘homosexual’ or ‘homosocial’ and its conventions ‘can operate not only to contain desire, but contain the threat of class difference too’ (p. 28). Homoeroticism signifies ‘the marking of a limit for homosocial desire, even an admission of homosexuality in order to disavow it and redefine homosocial bonds as licit’ (p. 34). Further references to Hatt’s article are included in the text. 46 See ‘Ekphrasis and Representation’ for a discussion of Magritte’s Ceci n’est pas une pipe (p. 304). 47 Kennedy, The Ekphrastic Encounter, p. 5. 48 Ibid., p. 3. See Mack Smith, Literary Realism and the Ekphrastic Tradition (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995), p. 239. 49 The myth of Daphnis as recounted in the song of Thyrsis also features in Andrew Marvell’s poem ‘Damon the Mower’, with its remedy for those who seek to staunch the wound of unrequited love: ‘’Tis death alone that this must do: / For Death thou art a Mower too’. In addition, the specific mythological link with the figure of Thyrsis, and the prominence given to The Mower’s scythe in the final version of the sculpture, invoke the figure of Thanatos – the young, beardless male personification of death – who is also implied in Andrew Marvell’s ‘Mower’ poems; specifically ‘Damon the Mower’ (The Poems of Andrew Marvell, ed. Nigel Smith, revised edn (London: Routledge, 2007), p. 139). More obviously, perhaps, the figure is suggestive of the ‘Grim Reaper’. 50 Writing for Art, p. 5.

Part III

Modern and postmodern encounters

9

An artist of the bizarre: Stanley Spencer’s ‘ordinary’ ekphrases 1

Liliane Louvel

The relation between word and image has long been the subject of much controversy. Often envisaged as an agonistic relationship, or a locus of a competition between the arts, it has recently been seen in more harmonious terms as the site of an encounter between the visual and language; as a collaboration; and as what I call a transaction or a negotiation (wonderfully exemplified by the Belgian poet and artist Marcel Broodthaers).2 This newer model differs from the widely accepted conception that envisages it as a contest in true paragonal tradition, defended in the late twentieth century by James Heffernan.3 Michel Foucault saw the relation of language to painting as ‘an infinite relation’; we might also call it ‘un terrain d’entente’ for an encounter or the advent of an event.4 ‘Writing for art’, a phrase used by Stephen Cheeke, suggests a kind of combative act.5 It may mean writing in defence of art, not only writing on its behalf but also lending a voice to what Virginia Woolf termed the ‘silent art’.6 It is thus an ethical act coupled with an aesthetic one. To put this another way, it is a means of finding a common ground that exists between language and the visual – or what Ernest Gilman termed ‘a commonplace middleground’.7 It is the locus of the ekphrastic encounter, construed as the place where, thanks to ekphrasis, within ekphrasis itself, a hybrid way of coupling language with the visual is performed. The ekphrastic encounter has developed and found its favoured place within literature, whether in poetry, fiction, or drama. It is a moment of encounter between language and the visual. Within diegesis it may be a time when a character is confronted with a two-dimensional picture (or its variants, three-dimensional works of art triggering another kind of ekphrastic encounter) and reacts to it as an event which affects him or her. It is also a reading moment when the reader is confronted with a change in the text regime and moves on from the narrative to the descriptive. We can call it ‘the ekphrastic moment’, a reading moment or event from the point of view of phenomenology and

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r­ eception, or a particular textual moment pregnant with its narrative before and after. There is another realm of humanities where the ekphrastic encounter has been taking place ever since the philosophical concept of aesthetics was coined by Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten in the eighteenth century. It is the specialized description of a work of art for historical purposes. The limits between writing for art, art criticism, and art history have been studied, criticized, and appraised, but they still remain peripheral to the ekphrastic encounter and subsequent studies. Yet this confrontation truly performs an encounter and a negotiation between at least two practices: that of literary theory and/or criticism and that of art history. Art historians such as Ernest Gilman have criticized writers for taking advantage of this practice ‘because of their irreducibility’, and because of their incommensuratio, to borrow a term from theology.8 They find it unreliable and much too subjective. The whole point is a question of variations, nuances, and limits, and the difficulty lies in defining where subjectivity ends and objectivity begins. And, of course, being subjective is the ultimate sin for some art historians. Others such as Mario Praz, Pietro Longhi, Daniel Arasse, and Georges Didi-Huberman bring their subjectivity, sensitivity, and their own tastes into their analyses and choices of study, unashamedly claiming them as one more ‘sensitive’ guiding tool without giving up the rigour of their discipline. Of course, objective science (in particular when dealing with attribution and dating) owes much to modern advances, although we should remember the detective-like studies of detail by Morelli – akin to Freud’s and Doyle’s practices – as developed by Carlo Ginzburg in his famous essay ‘Traces. Racines d’un paradigme indiciaire’.9 Many writers were interested in art and wrote essays about it often collected as ‘Writings on Art’, thus perhaps pointing to their palimpsestic nature: for example, Ruskin, Pater, James, Woolf, the Goncourt brothers, Baudelaire, and not forgetting Diderot’s Salons.10 At the same time, many painters have left traces of their own thoughts and their own art theories and have written about art necessarily indulging in criticism in due course, including Hogarth, Reynolds, Van Gogh, Delacroix, Matisse, Kandinsky, Roger Fry, and the subject of the present chapter: Stanley Spencer. In what follows, I propose to try and reframe ekphrasis as a form of critical knowledge that, in turn, reframes the history of criticism. David Kennedy writes that ‘Ekphrasis and its subjects are signs under constant repair.’11 Repair or redefinition, reconsideration or reframing? Or even readjusting it to new needs and practices? This will also be the opportunity to introduce a kind of typology of ekphrastic practice and of classifying seven different types of ekphrasis. This is where the writings of Stanley Spencer, the painter, deserve close attention. Defence and illustration Artists have often found it necessary to express themselves either formally in essays on art, or informally in letters, notebooks, diaries, and prefaces, or even



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in interviews: Francis Bacon’s interviews with David Sylvester are a case in point.12 The Tate Gallery holds a precious (and considerable) archive of Stanley Spencer’s writings: letters, diaries, notebooks, and essays that he kept and wrote throughout his life. A selection has been published in Adrian Glew’s edition of Spencer’s Letters and Writings (2001). I propose to use Spencer’s writings as a key example of this particular type of ekphrastic encounter – when such an artist of the bizarre develops his own search for form while simultaneously expressing his philosophy of life as well as writing a ‘defence and illustration’ (to borrow one of Du Bellay’s titles) of his own works: An artist is not used to having to put a name to his feelings, but for myself this truth seems inseparable from such experiences as love, desire, faith, passion, intimacy, God, spiritual consciousness, curiosity, adventure, ingenuity. An artist wishes to absorb everything into himself: to commit a kind of spiritual rape on everything because this converts all things into being or revealing themselves as loveable, worshipful things snugly tucked up in the artist and his own special glory and delight. Distortion arises from the effort to see something in a way that will enable him to love it. It is unbearable for an artist to be continually seeing things in and through a film of apparent utter meaninglessness; he is engaged in a continual effort to remove this barrier.13

‘Writing for art’ takes on a very particular interest for the reader when it means having access to the origins of creation; that is, when an artist is engaged in developing his or her thoughts, even his or her art theory, as some are wont to do. Their writings are valuable because they often mingle ekphrasis together with theoretical developments or arguments to defend their art when it finds itself under attack. They are hybrid texts much in the same way that novels mingle narration and description. But here the artists mingle self-reflection (in the form of diaries and notebooks) together with an epistolary style of address (there is always a receiver at the other end), more or less theoretical developments (in essays, for instance) and personal accounts of their motivations. Stanley Spencer still remains a singular artist, usually classified as a typically British or even English painter, standing apart from the main trends of early twentieth-century art (although this should be revised, too). He lived apart from the major artistic life of his time, mostly residing in the Cookham area in Berkshire. Together with his brother Gilbert, he befriended artists at the Slade and later on such artists as Paul Nash, Richard Carline, David Nevinson, and Desmond Chute; he also knew the work and writings of Roger Fry and Clive Bell. He was a well-informed connoisseur of music and poetry – he wrote poems that are interspersed in his notebooks – read extensively, and was an amateur expert on Eastern architecture, sculpture, and philosophy. Traces of these interests may be found in his recurrent themes and figure-crowded pictures and in his will to mingle the sacred and the profane. He was also a great amateur expert on the metaphysical poets and was attracted to the world of fairy tales. He read the works of Lewis Carroll and Hans Christian Andersen

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throughout his life as well as the Arabian Nights, copying their illustrations as a young artist. Traces of Arthur Rackham’s illustrations may even be traced in some ekphrases, as we shall see. He was labelled an ‘illustrator’ by Roger Fry, although deemed a bad one, a piece of criticism which rankled all his life. One can imagine an artist’s resentment when accused of creating paintings that are no more than illustrations of texts or stories. Still there is something in it, for Spencer often described scenes in terms of story, which is the case with The Marriage at Cana. He endowed his paintings with what we may call creatively inspired ekphrases of invented lives and events. In a notebook entry dated January 1938 he writes: These husband & wife paintings & drawings & street worshipping scenes originated more or less in the Marriage at Cana … I had had the notion that I had wanted to write a complete story of the lives of each & all of the guests, their life story to be constructed on their receiving the invitation to the wedding, their journey to the wedding & circumstances taking place on the way, which would make each one ready to marry at the wedding itself & after to appear as married & with children, etc. … I made large & elaborate drawings from each [smaller one] & at the same time supplied them with a man or woman as the case may be & so continued the series that I had been doing in 1935 & 1936. I was, through these couples, able … to … experience the kinds of joy different types & kinds of people would or might experience for each other. Also I wanted to try and create real people. I had in the other pictures I did for my show been using myself & Hilda, but in these the people were of my own imagining …[&] were new people entering into my life & perhaps more vitally so than if they had actually done so in the flesh. … I have a mixture of emotions when I am drawing these couples … Then I did five separate compositions of a couple at different stages of undressing & expressing the feeling of adoration & joy at each stage … (p. 184; my emphasis)

In this extract Spencer demonstrates the extent to which a narrative enlivened his imaginative powers, setting him the task of ‘writing a story’ (the parallel is telltale) to accompany the figures. At the same time, the illusion of being allpowerful and creating entirely imaginary people enthralls him. The ekphrasis is ‘explanatory’, and not only describes the origin of inspiration but also contains technical details about how he set out to prepare the canvas by drawing elaborate scenes, ‘supplying partners’ to his people, the result being the joy he felt while creating such ‘vitally’ (although imaginary) familiar individuals. We can note here the use of action verbs: ‘I made’, ‘I supplied’, ‘I wanted to create’, and the overall presence of ‘I’. This kind of creatively inspired ekphrasis can be construed as both an ‘explanatory’ and an ‘illustrative’ one. Work-in-progress ekphrasis Reading ekphrases written by an artist is of particular import, for there is no division between the origin of the work of art and the comments passed about



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it before, during, or after its production. The writer describes what he meant to paint or be painted, and a close analysis of these is necessary to obtain access to his own world. As David Kennedy puts it, ‘ekphrasis is an account of a thing and the experience of its both tangible and intangible qualities’.14 I will use this formulation to emphasize the notions of experience and event. This kind of writing is close to a workshop sort of ekphrasis, close to the creation and the elaboration of a work of art. We might also call it a work-in-progress ekphrasis – the term seems more appropriate concerning the type of ekphrasis Heffernan calls ‘obstetric’.15 A good instance of this type of ekphrasis can be found in a letter to Spencer’s friend and lover, Daphne Charlton, dated 1941, in which Spencer writes about his work for the War Artists’ Advisory Committee (1940), creating his ­shipbuilding pictures: I have been trying to write down what I want this big shipbuilding picture to be. … But the variety of work done in a shipyard is inflamed by quite a different state of feeling from the variety that might be seen in a resurrection. It would be merely various … but I must somehow … give it an equivalent significance & dramatic import as I would any of the most religiously & sexually passionate pictures I have ever done. … I do like, in a picture that is going to be big & of considerable import, to have some culminating point where the final expression of our passions & desires can be clearly seen & shown & which acts as the case. The Furnace scene is big & important in its pictorial sense, but that is not enough. In the sheep & cow farming in Switzerland, there was that ceremony of praying as the sheep went by themselves back up into the mountains. But I would prefer something not so formal or … artificial. Religion as I mean it is implicit in everything as a heaven passing through everything … Love & passion, religious or sexual is the only thing I wish to express & anything I undertake must assist me to that end. I am sure I shall find a way of ‘getting my own way’ in this painting, as I did at Burghclere. (p. 204; my emphasis)

This ‘work-in-progress ekphrasis’ perfectly describes the pangs of the painter trying to find a pictorial solution to his work and vision, insisting on the meaning of his enterprise with ‘I want’, ‘I wish’, ‘I do like’, ‘I would prefer’, ‘I shall find a way’. At the same time he takes into account the specificity of his commission and the peculiarities of the place while retaining what is of import to him, what he wishes to express, and to which ‘anything’ he undertakes is submitted. A ‘work-in-progress ekphrasis’ insists on the unfinished project, whereas an ‘illustrative’ one concerns an already finished painting. One cannot ignore a more elusive kind of painting, which nevertheless was committed to writing. Spencer thus not only wrote about his paintings in the making but also of paintings-to-be. Notional ekphrasis Writing about his works, detailing his projects, developing his vision and desire for future works and projects, Spencer wrote what John Hollander describes

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as ‘notional’ ekphrases, or ekphrases dealing with imaginary paintings.16 For instance, in 1936, he regretted not having begun another Resurrection after the Burghclere Memorial, and details it in a startling letter. Later on, elements of this very present composition and details of it will be found scattered in The Resurrection Port Glasgow series: it would have helped to unify the many ramifications my thoughts had wandered into … This next Resurrection, I would wish to do, would not simply occur in a graveyard but, as it would be natural to suppose, just anywhere in the street; out of the gutters a lady magnificently attired would push the lid off a manhole & step out, some would come out from under the drawing room carpet or the floor boards of the kitchen others would stroll out of the side of a hill or emerge from a heap of wheat in a barn. Some would come out in blazing sunshine onto sunburnt plains where there was no sign of anything except themselves & what they were doing. Some people might emerge from just the patch of ground that seemed most to express my feeling about them. Thus, Uncle Julius might come up from under the step of his own front gate while his daughters would pull the step up to assist. The different Vicars would rise out onto the Chancel floor of the Church & meet each other round the altar. Others would step down from the recesses in the church walls & heads would appear among the hassocks … (pp. 172–3)

Needless to say, reading this description makes one somewhat uncomfortable, as it brings in elements of the fantastic and the unheimlich, even verging on the macabre, with figures erupting from the ground or the walls as ‘the different Vicars would rise out onto the Chancel floor of the Church & meet each other’. The repetition of ‘would’ and of ‘might’ endows the text with the modalities of the conditional and of the virtual. Spencer’s notional ekphrasis continues in this uncanny manner, which also anticipates some of his later pictures such as The Resurrection with the Raising of Jairus’s Daughter (1947). He then draws a parallel between the antics of some hundreds of ants he watched making their great July flight ‘scurrying about like lost people trying to find their way’ in all sorts of directions: ‘This was how one might imagine in a resurrection people in it, who had become winged, might use suitable places to fly from & make experimental efforts’ (p. 173). He then describes children as in a tale illustrated by Arthur Rackham: Children would sometimes resurrect among mushroom rings among rubbish heaps & among clumps of Kingcups & among the shingle of shallow slow running streams or out of the bottom drawer of their chest of drawers. To me the ordinary appearance of things now is not a true portrait of life’s likeness as I feel it essentially to be. Its actual physical surface appearance changes continually … (p. 173; my emphasis)

He concludes this disturbing Poe-esque remark (Poe evoked the lifelikeness of things in ‘The Oval Portrait’) by acknowledging the deceitful nature of constantly changing appearances under their physical surface. Then he goes as far as having the intuition of the reconstruction of happenings and their



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r­ epresentation through discourse – hence the distortions – similar to what he does in painting: reconstructing, interpreting, giving different versions of an episode or of a scene and thus imparting his painting with his own ‘vision’: ‘Remember that ordinary happenings are as much the result of the fabrication of people’s minds as my pictures are of mine’ (p. 173). Thus Spencer wrote his Lives which he each regarded as one voice: ‘Each Life can thus be regarded as one voice’ (p. 171) – a remark that also recalls Vasari’s Lives of the Artists. The Church House project he developed in 1938 as a kind of homage to Hilda and their married life also is described as a precise and Giottesque vision, reminiscent of the fourteenth-century frescoes in the Scrovegni chapel in Padua he liked so much, although the subject was very different. This time the tense used is the future, although the project was not completed but compositions were started (hence ‘will’ and ‘would’): Alongside one of the walls of the house or the church there will be a series of doors … In each of these rooms there will be on the end wall, a husband & wife seen together, & on each of the side walls will be seen the same husband in his work & his relationship to the world, & on the right wall the same wife in relationship to her world & her work, etc. So far I have done the compositions for each of these end walls and cubicles & some of the side walls. Each cubicle will be a different man & wife & each will be a small room or chapel set aside for the contemplation of married happiness. The figures in these small rooms will be fairly large as I shall wish them to seem to be the inhabitants of the rooms … the rooms will express in pictorial form as far as I am able, the atmosphere & feeling the room & each wall gives me … (p. 185, essay marked ‘[Church-House]’)

Of course there would be many more examples of these paintings-to-be Spencer dreamt and wrote about and sometimes managed to give a material shape to in one way or another. He had a very visual and concrete way of thinking about his paintings, and in his descriptions he never bypasses the technical problems he had to grapple with. His descriptions also helped him to act upon his readers thanks to his words, making his descriptions more vivid and thus having a performative effect on his addressees. Pragmatic ekphrasis Pragmatic ekphrasis designates an ekphrasis focusing on the more technical choices of the painter. In a notebook entry dated 6 December 1947 Spencer wrote a highly detailed account of the Burghclere Resurrection of Soldiers (Figure 21) and of how he chose to make of a crucial element a mainstay of his painting, the cross: The crosses throughout & the mules & limber & men in the central part of the picture form the main basis on which the picture is built. … This cross was placed on the graves or wherever men fell was placed there, as a symbol of hope for their ultimate resurrection & redemption & was looked upon & thought of as

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21. Stanley Spencer, The Resurrection of the Soldiers, Sandham Memorial Chapel, Burghclere (1923–27) such … The crosses represent the continually recurring fugue subject & the soldiers, the mules etc. are the varied harmonies through which the fugue subject (always the same) passes. In doing this it reveals the special nature, identity & meaning of the harmonies which come in contact with it … The cross is one of the forms through which the state of peace has been expressed. Here it is caressed as a sweetheart, & there it is forming a kind of door to a house so that a soldier can re-enjoy his old days of sitting in his doorway & chatting to his neighbour. It forms a home for



Stanley Spencer’s ‘ordinary’ ekphrases191 him … This picture is supposed to be a reflection of the general attitude & behaviour of men during the war. As soon as I decided in this it seemed that every army incident was a coin, the obverse of which was presented to me & on the unseen face of which was the Resurrection. (p. 142; my emphasis)

Here Spencer clearly explains the origin of his picking out of the cross as a symbol of his personal experience of the war and of the death of his comrades in arms. Crosses marked the place where soldiers had fallen and became omnipresent as a haunting symbol. They also, in true Spencerian manner, became the mark of hope in resurrection and a way to combat depression and death, which may be the obverse side of the coin. Therefore the shape of the cross became a necessary presence in the painting as well as its main compositional element. The words – basis, built, represent, expressed, forming, forms – prove it. Furthermore, what is of particular interest here too is that a very regular and codified musical form, that of the fugue, is pitted against that of the composition of the painting. Spencer was a music lover, and two arts help the painter here to try and communicate his ostensible intention and develop his technical choices in language. The last sentence clearly states how it all made sense, how the coin analogy reflects the sudden crystallization of his thoughts once he had found his ‘subject’ and the way to organize it, with an overt (‘every army incident’) and a covert face (its significance as part of the Resurrection). For Spencer, then, ekphrasis was a way of communicating his artistic aims and methods. In his letters in particular, he explains and develops his ideas to

22. Stanley Spencer, The Resurrection of the Soldiers, detail

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23. Stanley Spencer, The Resurrection of the Soldiers, detail



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his correspondents. It is a way of justifying his often puzzling manner and style as well as his aesthetic choices – which were much criticized. This was the case with the distortions (and he wrote an essay entitled ‘Distortions’), his repetitions (which he justified by referring to the influence of Buddhist statues), his taste for details, and his ‘grotesque’ characters and ‘abnormal’ figures that often shocked critics and spectators. Writing, then, was a way of clarifying his intentions, a way of developing his philosophy and ethics of art which were also linked to his religious vision. For, in his writings, we find a constant ‘association’ – a term he favoured – between art, religion, and love. He also used the term ‘fusion’ to denote what he attempted to achieve between them. All this required a hybrid or mixed textual space allowing room for descriptions, argumentation, and defence. It was also a space where his vision and his projects could be given free rein. In this way, in particular concerning his insistence on the importance of vision and imagination and in his aspiration to a transcendence, he was following one of his favourite models: William Blake, whose hybrid, illustrative work he admired so much. As noted above, David Kennedy sees ekphrasis not as paragonal but as a fruitful encounter; we can find a trace of this when Spencer uses language to focus on his pictures and understand them better himself and, in turn, make them better understood by the viewers. He defends them against criticism, argues and gives descriptive, ‘argumentative’, or ‘pragmatic’ kinds of ekphrasis. They were meant to change the reader’s opinion and his or her visualizing of Spencer’s paintings. These ekphrases were probably an attempt at producing an effect on the reader’s mind since they obeyed praxis and constituted a performative declaration. Having such an effect they were active in the sense of conditioning later viewings. Spencer’s writings may be performative in the sense that they strive to conjure up the image-to-be (a notional ekphrasis for instance) or images-that-are, for those he describes for himself. They are performative in the sense that they make things with words, out of words, by dint of words, and they render them visible to the reader’s eyes, or even to the painter’s very eyes, for notional ekphrases or no-longer-present pictures. They may thus be another way for him to contemplate paintings once they are gone, sold, and alienated from their creator: I don’t have my finished pictures with me for long so I must be allowed to have them back mentally for a little while. I live a complete life with each picture. Their reign seldom lasts more than a fortnight & yet these lives are momentous. The ‘Girl Adoration’ reigned in the dining room in September then the long ‘Village in Heaven’ reigned in its stead, then the ‘Old Man Adoration’ came to the throne. (p. 184; essay entitled ‘1937’)

This contemplation, once the work has been finished, finds its obverse equivalent in Spencer’s writings as the event at the origin of his creations. He willingly gives an account of them and thus, while describing his paintings, he also describes episodes of his life.

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24. Stanley Spencer, Sarah Tubb and the Heavenly Visitors (1933)

Ekphrasis as the description of a creative event In most of Spencer’s writings and in the ekphrases we have become conversant with by now, we can note that art often is the result of an event or of an advent, of something that happened to the painter, which came to his mind and is described in his writings as an experience. It was generally a response to a situation, to a literary event, or to a view or a vision which triggered his desire to paint it. He often declared that he responded to something he liked and ‘fell in love with’. This was the case with Sarah Tubb and the Heavenly Visitors (1933), as he explained to Tooth, his gallery owner: Usually, in order to describe any one picture of mine it means taking a seat & preparing to hear the story of my life … In the village, many years ago, lived an old couple (brother & sister) Tommy Tubb & Sarah Tubb. I remember them very well & seeing them going in & out of the gate in the picture. I remember my father describing how when one evening the ‘Northern Lights’ … was very clear & ­villagers wondered what it was, that ‘Granny Tubb’, Sarah Tubb’s mother, had knelt down in



Stanley Spencer’s ‘ordinary’ ekphrases195 her gate & prayed … This is I am aware not a satisfactory or explanatory explanation & I should think you might feel like Byron did about Coleridge ‘Explaining Metaphysics to the Nation’, ‘I wish he would explain his explanation.’ But if I see an old Grandmother in black kneeling in her gateway & texts lying about & greengrocers & shopkeepers adoring, I must paint it, because I like it very much & see it all very clearly. (p. 155; my emphasis)

The vividness of the description is rendered by the abundance of verbs related to seeing and by ‘seeing them going in & out of the gate in the picture’. There Spencer describes the brother and sister as if he were seeing them in the past and in the picture: the act of remembering and seeing the figures in the picture are put on the same level, seamlessly. The subject of the painting is the result of a story told by the father who described the scene which was an out-of-the ordinary event and triggered another event: the painting of the scene twice removed (told by the father and fantasized by the painter). Another telltale instance is that of the ekphrasis of a puzzling painting, The Lovers (The Dustmen) (1934), which he wrote in a letter to Gwen Raverat: I became so enamoured of the dustmen that I wanted him to be transported to heaven while in the execution of his duty & so I got a big sort of wife to pick him up in her arms while two children in a state of ecstasy hold up towards him an empty jam tin, a teapot & a bit of cabbage stalk containing a few limp leaves still attached to it. This scene occurs (Cookham people will say ‘ we have seen strange things today’) a little way from the centre of the road in the village & the street goes away in perspective (very good perspective) & the dustbins goes all up the sides on ’im so to speak … oh, yes & there are two sort of Triptych things either side. The left group is sort of … women onlookers, the right group is other dustmen & poor ragged men expecting & hoping for a rise also … There is some sort of terrible quality seemed to have crept in. I don’t seem to have got all of my own beloved self into it somehow. I am afraid everyone will wonder what it all means just as much as I do & Roger [Fry] will feel obliged to reiterate his remark that I fail as an illustrator. (pp. 153–4; original emphasis)

The description makes use of the present tense (this time the painting has been realized), and enumerates the people (the figures), objects, and activities involved. Then it moves on to more technical matters, in particular the importance of the perspective deemed ‘very good’, and the dustbins surrounding the main character going ‘all up the sides on ’im’ as a kind of enfolding backcloth. The composition of the picture, with its two symmetrical groups on either side of the main characters (women and dustmen), is likened to a kind of triptych. We know Spencer was a great admirer of the so-called Italian Primitives, and in particular of Giotto. The ekphrasis ends up acknowledging that ‘some sort of terrible quality seemed to have crept in’, as if the painting escaped the painter’s own will and verges on the unheimlich, as already noted. A disconsolate note concludes it when Spencer feels people will be at a loss to make sense of the

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25. Stanley Spencer, The Lovers (The Dustmen) (1934)

painting. We can also remember that Roger Fry’s remark about the ‘illustrative’ still rankled in 1932. The notion of an event, something that has to be visible for Susan Sontag, or pertains to an aesthetics of surprise – to borrow a phrase from Alain Badiou – is particularly fruitful in the case of Spencer.17 Indeed, his writings testify to his sense of a vision as an inspiring event and his habit of being on the lookout for subjects taken from everyday (often Cookham) life but rearranged in a bizarre, distorted, impossible way. A good instance of this, something we could call ‘the beginning of an idea’, is the intuition he had while walking in Port Glasgow, passing through the cemetery and undergoing a kind of pre-experience or preview of the composition of his next picture, the encounter with the physical shape of an idea: It was like arriving at an idea before I was ready for it. … There was something in the shape & way out of this cemetery, which made me think it might be the final



Stanley Spencer’s ‘ordinary’ ekphrases197 physical shape which my longing thought might take. … Now in this notion of the resurrection a Hill seemed to be the thing around which my thoughts hovered. A Hill of Zion arising in the midst of a resurrection. … The Hill notion first arose a). from the hill shape of the cemetery & b). from a wish I had of having some means of a dividing link between the left & the right of the picture. … When I did a minute drawing I saw that the picture would need to be between 40 & 50 feet long. (Letter to Hilda, August 1948, pp. 231–2)

The ekphrasis is written in a very logical way, marked by (a) the necessity of a Hill: when encountered as that of a cemetery it perfectly suited a resurrection as its logical place, then (b) when the Hill was recognized as necessary from a technical point of view, as a dividing line required for compositional purposes. Then the minute drawing, making it concrete, indicates the practical application of it, its future measures. Conversely, if ekphrasis may be the description of an event turned into a painting it may also, in turn, give rise to an aesthetic event for the reader similar to the ‘reading event’ experienced by Louis Marin. He called it ‘un événement de lecture’,18 which was the consequence of suddenly coming upon Stendhal’s drawings on the pages of one of his manuscripts. We have an example of this when coming upon illustrated letters Spencer sent to the Raverats, a suggestive instance of the intermingling of word and image, or also in his letters from the war.19 He sent such letters to Hilda or to other correspondents like Sir Michael Sadler, his letter to whom included a sketch for The Betrayal (dated 17 November 1921) and an ekphrastic sentence overlooking the drawing: ‘The disciples are all moving slowly away behind a wall above which their heads & part of their shoulders appear.’ This is underlined by another deictic sentence as a kind of postscript: ‘This is a portrait of a servant of the high Priest having his ear cut off. Peter’s cloak is not explained’ (p. 112). To Henry Lamb he sent a drawing for resurrecting men in 1922 accompanied by a small ekphrasis (once more a rather ghoulish one), and also by an interesting pragmatic deictic pointing to the sketch and making it more explicit and present: I have got a wonderful place for the Fresco stunt. A long concrete floored room with fireplace & overlooking Petersfield Churchyard, so that I am in immediate connection with the dead. They are buried in the side of a bank so that they only have to push the grave stone a little bit forward & lo they are in my room like this [extinct gentlemen, my window]. A very Cookhamesque place as you can see… (p. 114; my emphasis)

This form of word–image ‘apparatus’ is striking.20 It is not only meant to be explicit and to develop explanations and intentions, but also constitutes an aesthetic event which is usually construed as a reaction or a response to an art object. This is also what Spencer experienced in front of John Donne’s sermon and later in front of his own painting, as we saw above. David Kennedy notes the existence of ‘work-as-event’ in his discussion of Ashbery’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror: ‘The effect of Ashbery’s multiple reflections is to place the

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self-portrait somewhere between work-as-commodity and work-as-event or, perhaps more correctly, to suggest that a work of art’s life is an event every time it is encountered.’21 Such life-giving encounters require ekphrastic description and criticism while also providing the ideal locus for an encounter between two (often wrongly opposed) disciplines in what I will call ‘second-order’ ekphrasis. Second-order ekphrasis This kind of deep thinking about painting such as Spencer wrote truly stages an ekphrastic encounter of the ‘second order’. It is not one of the first order between image and language or between ekphrasis and narration or between reader and ekphrasis, but it is an encounter between two disciplines, art history and literature/writing on art dealing with an art already once removed from reality or what it represents (be it people, scenes, thoughts, or abstract or notional subjects). Thanks to ekphrasis, a transaction between art, writing on art, and art history renews and broadens the scope, bringing the particular flavour of the creator and his or her whims and pangs within the realm of scientific art criticism. Art criticism and art history cannot ignore those writings. They have to take them into account. Spencer tried his hand at something similar when he wrote an essay about his landscapes and clearly detailed the reasons why he painted them, although it never was ‘what [he] intended or wanted to do & having them only to get money’ (p. 202). Yet he was ‘interested to note several things about them. In a great number of them, they could be regarded as studies or preludes to a picture or pictures I might hope to do. These are those which have a definite emotion as their basis & on the strength of which the subject has been chosen’ (p. 202). Then he groups them roughly into several classes, including those which have attracted him by: 1. The special religious atmosphere they suggested 2. The domestic and homely atmosphere 3. My own sensitiveness to shapes & forms & composition, etc. (p. 202)

Spencer goes on to describe a fourth group, ‘based on the liking I have for my usual and more familiar abodes, namely my being able to make some sort of home or nest in it’. There he insists on the importance of a sense of place, and ‘what makes it there & nowhere else. I do so, I think, because a place is somewhere one can find rest in, just as a person is’ (p. 203). He also describes a fifth group ‘in which the selection seems capable of sympathising with & absorbing, I should think, all my emotions. It contains strong elements of the religious & domestic needs, but also a special atmosphere in which I find a piece that is not disturbed by having to absorb any of the varied desires I have’ (p. 203). This attempt at making sense of his painterly experience and choices is close to what an art historian might write in trying to sort and order a painter’s creation according to different painterly genres and subjects as well as to intentions and



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meaning. Spencer clearly analyses how some of his paintings served as backcloths for further figure paintings in the same way that short stories sometimes serve as a kind of laboratory for subsequent novels. Critical ekphrasis This nicely ties in with another type of ekphrasis closer to theoretical writing that might be termed ‘critical ekphrasis’. This term might be used when ekphrasis serves to criticize, re-create, and evaluate an artwork. Resorting to ekphrastic criticism verges on the genre of the manifesto because the pieces under scrutiny often only contain scattered elements of an art theory and the task of collecting them and consistently putting them together often is the role of reader-as-critic. In his chapter on prose ekphrasis, Stephen Cheeke draws upon Wilde’s The Critic as Artist to suggest that criticism itself can be seen as a starting point for a ‘new creation’, which adds ‘something more to the life of the artwork’.22 Cheeke goes on to describe the kind of ekphrasis found in criticism and commentary, such as Walter Pater’s writings on art, which we might call critical ekphrasis: Ekphrasis then is an example both of the creative act itself – through the Greek mimesis, imitating, copying – and of the secondary critical act of commentary, description, revelation. Indeed the verbal representation of visual representation is frequently a moment of significant creation (as Ruskin on Turner, Pater on Leonardo … ), and therefore potentially subject itself to critical commentary or appreciation, and at the same time it is a moment of criticism, a response to an art object, and thus always open to disagreement or correction. (pp. 185–6)

Cheeke suggests that Pater’s description of the Mona Lisa is ‘a distortion’ (p. 186), for describing a picture is already one, superimposing a kind of filter onto the picture, in between the picture and the reader’s eye, or what I have elsewhere termed the ‘pictorial third’.23 Thus Spencer’s ekphrases might be read as distortions of pictorial distortions themselves. We might also remember that Spencer wrote an essay entitled ‘Distortions’. Spencer raised a number of critical issues while writing about his art, including questions about the truth of a painting: ‘The truth is what I like when it comes to what I paint’ (p. 175); of ‘creative probity’ (p. 177); the question of anachronism when elements are ‘welded together as one experience’ (p. 170); the necessity of deformation and distortions; the sacred association of God–love–art; the functional relationship of objects; the laws of composition and perspective to be played with; and the association between music, painting, and poetry. Heuristic ekphrasis The link between art history and writing for art is a subtle one for, dealing with art, language, and the ethical and aesthetic issues at stake, this link may in turn reverberate with current ekphrastic practices and bring in more variations and

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nuances, or what David Kennedy has called ‘a form of critical knowledge’.24 This was the case for Stanley Spencer when he made a ‘discovery’ while painting and then writing about this painting. This enabled him to discover something about himself and about his artistic choices, thanks to a work painted in response to John Donne’s writings. He enjoyed reading Donne’s poetry and sermons. One phrase in particular puzzled him – ‘As I go to Heaven by Heaven’ – and he glossed it in one of his lectures at Oxford in 1922. Painting helped him make sense of it, typically so in a very visual way. In this lecture, he recalled the particular atmosphere of a room at his parents’ home: I loved the studious atmosphere of the room & I began to read an extract of a sermon by the metaphysical poet, John Donne. The lines that struck me were: ‘As I go to Heaven by Heaven’. I thought he meant literally by Heaven, as though he were getting a broad view of it when as, of course, he really meant ‘As I go to Heaven by the virtue of Heaven in me’. As soon as I came to the words ‘by Heaven’, I seemed to imagine Donne went past heaven, alongside heaven & as I was thinking like this seemed to see four people praying in four directions: I saw their exact relative positions within a moment in a second. Heaven was Heaven everywhere so, of course, they all prayed in all directions. Well, when I had done this picture, I found I had made another discovery. I liked it when the same thing seen in different places in a picture looked different. … I also noticed that the physical sense of the picture coincided with the spiritual; I mean, for instance, that the furthest figure in the picture was the most remote in a spiritual sense. These discoveries I made as a direct result of liking Donne & his poetry … (p. 118; my emphasis)

‘I seemed to imagine’; ‘seemed to see’; ‘I saw’; ’I saw their exact relative positions’; ‘went past heaven’; ‘alongside heaven’: the words testify to the visual and spatial quality of Spencer’s imagination, which serves as a kind of preview of the work to come. ‘[W]ithin a moment in a second’: once again we get the same swift revelation we saw above and which gives him his vision and imparts meaning to it. With ‘I found I had made another discovery. I liked it when the same thing seen in different places in a picture looked different’, Spencer insists on the heuristic import of his experience which brought him a fourfold revelation: one before painting and one once the work was done, as well as one about Donne’s meaning and one about himself and his aesthetic preferences. As we have seen, then, Spencer’s use of ekphrasis in his own writings on art is varied, and offers a wide spectrum of possible ekphrastic models. One hopes it will be possible to borrow some of the elements of the present study and combine them with our wider critical activity and future studies of ekphrasis. Analysing Spencer’s use of ekphrasis has helped me define different types of ekphrasis I have tried to classify.25 This might constitute a kind of renewal of criticism for the study of the figure. Thus we have encountered work-in-progress ekphrasis; notional ekphrasis; pragmatic ekphrasis; ekphrasis as the description of a creative (or creation-inductive) event; ekphrasis of the second order; critical ekphrasis; and heuristic ekphrasis. These different types demonstrate the plasticity of ekphrasis and the extent to which closely following an artist’s writings on – or indeed



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for – art may help in turn to move theory on. After all, ekphrasis is ‘a representation of thinking about a picture more than a representation of a picture’.26 To follow all the twists and turns of the artist’s thought is an experience at first hand, although those thoughts sometimes follow a whim of their own. Notes   1 ‘I felt without any alteration to either, that the religious experience & the ordinary life circumstances of my life … needed to be joined together in a kind of marriage in order that their full meaning could be attained’ (‘Beginning’, in Stanley Spencer, Letters and Writings, selected and ed. Adrian Glew (London: Tate Gallery Publishing, 2001), p. 33).  2 See David Kennedy, The Ekphrastic Encounter in Contemporary British Poetry and Elsewhere (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012); Liliane Louvel, Texte/Image: Images à lire, textes à voir (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2002).  3 See James A. W. Heffernan, Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993).  4 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1970; rpt. London: Routledge, 2002), p. 10.  5 Stephen Cheeke, Writing for Art: The Aesthetics of Ekphrasis (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008).  6 See Woolf, ‘Pictures and Portraits’, in Andrew McNeillie (ed.), The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Volume 3 (London: Hogarth Press, 1988), pp. 163–4; and ‘Walter Sickert: A Conversation’, in Virginia Woolf, Collected Essays, ed. Leonard Woolf (London: Hogarth Press, 1966), vol. 2, p. 241. See also Liliane Louvel, ‘“Oh to be Silent! Oh to be a Painter”, “The Sisters’ Arts”, Virginia et Vanessa’, in Virginia Woolf: Le Pur et L’impur, ed. Christine Reynier and Catherine Bernard (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2002), pp. 149–66.  7 Ernest B. Gilman, ‘Interart Studies and the “Imperialism” of Language’, Poetics Today, 10:1 (1989), special issue on ‘Art and Literature’, 5–20 (p. 20).  8 Gilman, ‘Interart Studies’, p. 7.  9 See Carlo Ginzburg, ‘Traces. Racines d’un paradigme indiciaire’, in Mythes, emblèmes, traces (Paris: Verdier, 1986), pp. 219–94. 10 See Lauren Weingarden’s discussion of Baudelaire in her chapter on Zola and Manet (Chapter 7, above). 11 Kennedy, The Ekphrastic Encounter, p. 85. 12 See David Sylvester, The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon, 3rd edn (London: Thames & Hudson, 1987). 13 Stanley Spencer, Letters and Writings, ed. Glew, p. 165. Further references are included in the text. 14 Kennedy, The Ekphrastic Encounter, p. 25. 15 Heffernan, Museum of Words, p. 1. 16 See John Hollander, ‘The Poetics of Ekphrasis’, Word and Image, 4 (1988), 209–19. 17 Susan Sontag, On Photography (1977; rpt. London: Penguin, 1979), p. 11; Alain Badiou, L’éthique: Essai sur la conscience du Mal (Paris: Hatier, 1993), p. 36. 18 Louis Marin, ‘Un événement de lecture’, in L’écriture de soi: Ignace de Loyola, Montaigne, Stendhal, Roland Barthes (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1999), p. 15.

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19 See Spencer, Letters and Writings, ed. Glew, p. 38. 20 The term must be understood in the way Agamben after Foucault understands it; see Giorgio Agamben, Qu’est ce qu’un dispositif? (Paris: Rivages Poches, 2007). 21 Kennedy, The Ekphrastic Encounter, p. 50. 22 Cheeke, Writing for Art, p. 183. 23 See Louvel, Le Tiers pictural: Pour une critique intermédiale (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2010). 24 Kennedy, The Ekphrastic Encounter, p. 85. 25 A point also raised by Laura M. Sager Eidt in Writing and Filming the Painting: Ekphrasis in Literature and Film (Amsterdam and London: Rodopi, 2008). She proposes four categories of ekphrasis: attributive, depictive, interpretive, and dramatic. In ‘Interart Studies’, Ernest Gilman also offers ‘representative/restitutive ekphrasis’, as well as ‘affective’, ‘hermeneutic’, ‘interpretive’, ‘pedagogic’, ‘pragmatic’, ‘speculative/thought’, and ‘ostensive’. 26 Michael Baxandall, Patterns of Intention (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), quoted in Gilman, ‘Interart Studies’, p. 12.

10

The graphics of ekphrastic writing: Raymond Pettibon’s drawing-writing Tilo Reifenstein

Ekphrastic discourse is commonly posited on an underlying, rarely questioned supposition, that of a categorical difference between verbal and – I am tempted to say so-called – sensuous representation. Ekphrasis, whether in James Heffernan’s oft-quoted dictum ‘the verbal representation of a visual representation’, John B. Bender’s ‘literary descriptions of real or imagined works of visual art’, Leo Spitzer’s ‘the reproduction, through the medium of words, of sensuously perceptible objets d’art (ut pictura poesis)’, or Murray Krieger’s ‘the imitation in literature of a work of plastic art’, appears to always already imply an oppositionality between language and sensuous perceptibility and especially language and visuality/visibility.1 Implicitly, any of these definitions makes language a purely intellectual matter, forgoing the necessity of sensory perception: to hear words being spoken, to read – namely, to see – sentences being written, to feel the embossing of Braille cells. Literature and language in this sense are removed from any necessity for material (aural/visual/tactile) dissemination and function as transcendent thought or inviolable logos. Or perhaps conversely, if language is communicated via any of these means, they must be characterized by a presumed transparency which permits unmitigated, even unmediated access to some lingual core, presumably somewhere beyond them, behind them, or in them. Although other framings of ekphrasis exist – for example those by George Sainsbury or Wendy Steiner which emphasize the particular vividness with which a subject matter is invoked and thus share a more direct link with the understanding of the term in classical literature – what is the scope of ekphrasis when, by definition, it frequently and a priori declares itself as beyond the sensuous and in particular beyond the visible?2 The graphic character of verbal texts cannot be disregarded (except under the mantle of a transcendent logos), particularly in a culture in which ekphrastic poetry and prose are commonly encountered as written text, in contrast to ancient oral traditions.3 This chapter will

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therefore consider the ekphrastic encounter between writing and images not as one that occurs between distinct rubrics of verbal and visual representation (for as soon as language is typographic or chirographic script, it is – t­autologically – visual), but as an encounter that is promoted in the shared space of visibility: in the graphic dimension common to both writing and drawing.4 Raymond Pettibon’s untitled work (All the windows …) (Figure 26) – a drawing with large sections of verbal script or, alternatively, a piece of writing with pictural elements – will be used to explore the graphic encounter between ekphrastic writing and drawing and between ekphrastic writing and the ‘object’ of its ekphrasis. The collocation of writing and drawing would usually promulgate a discussion of the supposed oppositionality or reciprocity of word–image relations and expound the characteristics of two different symbol systems. In contrast, the following study will propose the encounter as an opportunity to (re)introduce the graphic as a trait (shared) between writing and drawing. In accord with Kennedy and Meek’s understanding of ekphrasis in the Introduction to this book, ekphrasis is here approached neither as a site of antagonism nor as a convergence of the sisterly arts, but rather as a locus of a productive encounter. Born in 1957 in Tucson, Arizona, Raymond Pettibon is an American artist who first garnered acclaim in the Californian punk-rock scene in the late 1970s. Initially he became known for his album-cover and flyer designs, as well as selfpublished, staple-bound zines that were available via mail order. His notoriety within the punk scene rests especially on his design of the four-bar logo for the band Black Flag, but also for his ability to ridicule the scene for its insularity and double standards in the very work he produced for it. Pettibon works predominantly in ink on paper, often with gouache colouring and collage elements. Exhibitions of his work, however, also regularly include wall drawings produced in situ. While Pettibon’s early drawings (1978–81) included only short sentences, brief utterances that functioned as one-liners, his verbal texts have over time become longer or have included an accumulation of short utterances.5 Pettibon’s drawing-writings of the 1980s to late 1990s often contain large sections of writing that paraphrase, quote, or respond to canonical, especially nineteenth-century, writers. Usually, there are no explicit references to specific authors or sources, but Pettibon draws repeatedly on an eclectic literary mix, including Henry James, Mickey Spillane, John Ruskin, St Augustine, Charles Baudelaire, and Art Clokey.6 The verbal elements of Pettibon’s work, however, whether traceable to an intertextual referent or not, never provide a caption to the drawn parts, and neither are the drawings illustrations to the writing. Writing and drawing, rather, encounter each other in a fluid and complex entanglement of meanings which are irreducible to single narratives or internal clarity. Pettibon’s own professed interest in the aforementioned writers and their work is equally not for narrative or story, but for prose and the form their writing takes.7 Although all of Pettibon’s work seems concerned with the relationship of writing and image-making, only a number of his drawings appear to address the encounter of collocated verbo-pictural representation



Raymond Pettibon’s drawing-writing205

26. Raymond Pettibon, No Title (All the windows …) (1990)

directly by juxtaposing images and text that seem to depict and describe similar spaces, objects, and actions. The image in the centre of Pettibon’s untitled 1990 ink-and-tempera writing-drawing depicts through its negative space the arching forms of windows

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or gates. Surrounding these are verbal fragments which seem to describe either an architectural space or the visual representation of such a space: all the windows tend to the same conclusion. a wrack stained heavenly blue. but let me place you once more where we stood for a while. (a little more face to face.) and conscious, too, of lights by the way. and lighting our share

– staying taper-

square alway. vast illuminations. the dividing lines make us think of a reticle. abundance of waxlights. (between them they keep the thing going.) the chain millennium … connecting the dots of light bell rope steeple-steep and spire-higher and then there is the window in the rear wall and that window, too, is divided geometrically, into four perfectly identical squares. with that unerring proportion of light and shadow, emphasis and omission, remembrance and oblivion, whi●h conscious memory and observation will never know. i know too well how easily the picture left by the mind can be effaced by the mind.

The assembled sentences are fragmented, even fractured, allowing only selective glimpses rather than a panoptic surveillance of a space. The spasmodic character of these glances is furthermore emphasized as these (parts of) images or architectural structures do not appear in one continuous text block, but are themselves fitfully distributed across the cardboard backdrop and interrupted intermittently by other dissonant voices and the central pictural element.8 The fractions, moreover, do not constitute segmentation as they do not seem to follow pre-existing lines of division or construction of a building. How can one then talk of iconotexts or even ekphrasis? In Poetics of the Iconotext, Liliane Louvel distinguishes a number of features that contribute to determining the pictorial qualities of a text.9 Louvel uses these features to understand how verbal texts construct images or architectural spaces. The presence of certain technical vocabulary such as colours (‘stained heavenly blue’), perspective (‘dividing lines’, ‘divided geometrically’, ‘unerring proportion’, ‘reticle’), lines and forms (‘taper-square’, ‘identical squares’) may therefore be taken as initially affirmative markers of iconotextual or ekphrastic writing. Furthermore, the two phrases ‘but let me place you once more where we stood for a while’ and ‘(A little more face to face.)’ can be identified as ‘the staging of the opening … operators of pictorial description’.10 Such operators may function on a number of levels: visually, for example through typographic marks or blanks; grammatically, for instance in a particular use of punctuation or repetitive word/phrase structures; or literarily, through narrative frames. It is noteworthy that this staging occurs at the top of the work, and thus at the beginning of a linear reading, making the remainder contingent on this information. This particular spatial placement therefore seems to affirm a reading sequence associated with writing on the page rather than drawing on sheets.



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Although this is certainly not at odds with the all-overness of marks in drawing, it does, however, emphasize and draw attention to the remainder of the verbal text which is disjointedly distributed and cannot therefore be read along the same lines – that is, along a straight line. The graphic scatteredness of the other paragraphs all over this drawing finds its small-scale counterpart in the stress on visual clues contained in discrete typographic elements. Although the place in question is not explicitly named, there are certain erratic utterances that place us in a vast church or cathedral. In reading the verbal text, we constantly meander between seeing and not seeing, visibility and invisibility, catching a glimpse and being blind in the space. The ‘abundance of waxlights’ which ‘between them … keep the thing going’ points at the dimensions of the space, while ‘steeple’ and ‘spire’ restrict the type of building further. Multiple occurrences of Mother Mary, as well as the accumulation of terms more commonplace in ecclesiastical contexts (for example, ‘taper’, ‘angel’, ‘waxlights’, ‘halo’, ‘leavened light’) underlines this notion. The reader-viewer of this drawing catches only occasional glances of a space that is seemingly mediated by the flickering candles in the gloom. The intermittent glimpses into the space are redoubled in Pettibon’s use of typographical framing effects that effectively capture glimpses of the eye emblematically. The parenthesizing of ‘(Full of Mother Mary.)’, ‘(White!)’, ‘(And blue flame)’, and ‘(Such things were nearly always shapes.)’ becomes the blinking of an eye, drifting from merely distinguishable object to object in a candlelit space. This (typo)graphical operator is twofold. Firstly, it is the opening of the eyelid, abbreviated to a parenthesis (framing the object together with the closing of the eyelid, concluded by a parenthesis). Secondly, this operator functions on a pictural level, as well: (❍) the object caught in the eye. The fragmentary dissipation of paragraphs, sentences, phrases, and occasionally single words in the drawing is, however, also indicative of Pettibon’s own reading habits. Pettibon has repeatedly stated that he is not interested in reading for narrative or plot, but that his reading has become more microscopic, more about dissecting the work. It may start on the level of the novel, then go down to theme or style, then to a paragraph and finally a sentence. Or the sentence itself becomes about structure, or the words in it. … Every text becomes related to another one, even in a different language, down to each individual word, which then becomes a clue into the etymology of the word, and then that etymological tree.11

As if dissected from a greater corpus, Pettibon’s drawing presents textual fragments to the viewer that may or may not share a common source and that may or may not contribute to the formation of a cohesive structure. It is as if Pettibon’s interest in the associative potential of fragments is put to the test when he (re)combines them in a single drawing. The artist himself and some

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of his critics, such as Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes and Ann Temkin, have commented on the relatedness of Pettibon’s own reading habits and those provoked by James Joyce’s Ulysses and Finnegans Wake.12 As a reader, Pettibon is drawn to narrative interruption or inconsistency; as a writer/drawer he similarly seeks to prevent singular meanings and wants to retain the openness of verbo-pictural associations. In the untitled drawing, Pettibon’s disruption of continuity and cohesion is, however, not limited to paragraphs, sentences, or phrases. Orthographic deviations are also observable. Pettibon’s ink splotches act as extra‑alphabetic characters that revise the spelling of verbal text. Orthography breaks down in ‘A wayfaring man may brea■ his fast’. A potential ‘k’ is replaced or blotted out by an un-utterable spot. Considering a drawing by Valerio Adami, Jacques Derrida describes this kind of obstinate sign, one that seemingly belongs to language but refuses to be legible, as a mark which no ‘glottic thrust of reading … snatches … from the surface’.13 Snatched from the discourse of language, the unpronounceable character draws forth its own orthography of a word whose meaning is irrevocably altered. It perhaps captures breaking visually by breaking the k. Or, near the bottom of the cardboard, the circular blot that seems to counter the abundance of round unfilled Os around it and also acts as a black hole which sucks in all the ‘light and shadow, emphasis and omission’, which will therefore remain forever unobserved and unknown, according to the speaker. How semantically important such marks and their interrelations are depends on whether they are approached as belonging to the study of drawing or writing. In drawing, the smallest mark may be semantically significant and is contingent on all marks around it. In writing, letterform deviation is permissible but semantically meaningless as long as the mark remains identifiable as a particular expression of one character. Pettibon’s writing not only includes graphic characters that are beyond the standard alphabet but also displays contingencies of marks associated with drawing. Trying to read Pettibon’s text therefore challenges certain conventions of writing. In the untitled drawing, reading either breaks down (because characters cannot be identified) or the reader accepts a modified orthography or new kind of lexicon. This lexicon, however, is open to reading, not as vocabulary, as it is precisely not vocal, but as graphism. Louvel points out how the incipit of A. S. Byatt’s prologue to The Virgin in the Garden ‘constitutes an emblematic example of the reader’s entrance into the story and … form[s] a typographic portico, at the top of the steps of the Prologue’: Prologue The National Gallery 196814 The parameters that allow Louvel to describe the incipit as an entrance and portico are not accessible in language as transcendent thought, but are



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e­ mbedded in the visibility of writing. Here writing’s visual aspects display their semantic value, which makes it difficult to describe them only in terms of supposed ornamental (i.e. semantically irrelevant) qualities. Leading, centring, font, and capitalization are the typographic and orthographic parameters that determine the (emblematic) reading of the text. Pettibon similarly employs his handwriting chirographically as an operator of and for vision. It is still common today to speak of someone’s hand when referring to the idiosyncratic style of his or her writing. Handwriting thus claims graphic qualities that are shared with drawing and exceed mere linguistics. The dual position between writing and drawing is preserved in the term ‘chirography’, which at once describes the drawing and the writing (graphein) of the hand (cheiro). The ‘wrack’ we are trying to picture crumbles further under Pettibon’s lopsided, irregular hand, with each uneven text block contributing a crooked wall. Pettibon’s writing is at once drawn and written. As he draws and pulls the inked nib across the paper, Pettibon’s ductus – the graphic quality of his lines – changes flexibly and deliberately. The German word Schriftzug draws out some of the versatility of Pettibon’s script. Contextually often translated as lettering, it actually describes the ‘pull/draw of script(ing)’, accentuating the physicality and materiality of writing and the particular visibility that each different pull or draw of the pen brings with it. In the untitled drawing, Pettibon uses a griffonage of irregular capitals as though to build this edifice as a mason, not a bricklayer. Just as the paragraphic fragments appear scattered, so individual letters skip on an invisible baseline which at times trails upwards and downwards. Towards the centre of the image, the text compacts to a a small cramped hand that adds dense compression to the whole structure’s appearance of imbalance and bad planning. The iconotextual or ekphrastic cathedral of Pettibon’s drawn and written text is constructed partly by the visual appearance of its very own scriptorial description. Hans Rudolf Reust’s observation about Pettibon’s drawings of individual letters can therefore be applied to the untitled drawing, as well. The artist’s drawing shows ‘writing without restricting [itself] to a linguistic analysis or calligraphic approach’.15 Letters are here neither reducible to a conventional understanding of writing as one of multiple interchangeable expressions of language, nor can they be contained as non-verbal pictures only. Reust suggests that Pettibon, as an artist, cannot help but apply the pictural qualities of drawing to writing. His work is thus characterized by a ‘heterotopic self-reflection’16 that applies the principles of one graphic mode to the other. Pettibon’s writing exceeds fundamental restrictions of the alphabet because it is also already drawing. It becomes apparent that Pettibon’s writing exceeds any merely allographic function. The infinite number of glyphs of his lettering are not variant forms (allographs) reducible to an underlying letter or grapheme; rather, the reading of each of his letters is irreducibly bound up in its graphic qualities and contingent on its surroundings. Similarly, the break, leading, and line length of a paragraph are not so much constituted by the pragmatics of writing but rather

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are constitutive of particular readings of this writing. Peter Schjedahl has previously commented how Pettibon’s work has the capacity to shift reading processes based on the absence of simple punctuation. He notes how the absence of a comma creates a semantic shift that can only be explained by something that is missing.17 In Pettibon’s writing, the blank is thus not a meaningless void but part of a structural framework for reading. The communicative semantic value of the text is embedded in its materially graphic form and therefore produces a setting in which writing cannot be reduced to a placeholder value of speech. When the graphic of Pettibon’s paragraphic, chirographic, and orthographic Schriftzüge comes to the fore, writing’s structural necessity as physical material is emphasized.18 Here, too, the material contingencies of writing trace the edges of language in a complex system of boundaries between signification and being. Differentiating verbal sign systems from drawing, musical transcription, and other symbol systems, Nelson Goodman explains in his germinal book Languages of Art that notational systems fulfil five characteristics.19 Though Goodman’s analysis may have lost traction with some sections of art historians, his detailed comparisons of writing systems and visual artefacts remain particularly valuable to word–image scholars interested in notational iconicity and Bildgrammatik.20 In brief, he proposes that notational systems are syntactically disjointed, with each mark only belonging to one character and all characters being in principle interchangeable because they form the same equivalence class. As an additional syntactical feature, these systems are finitely differentiated (articulate); the reader can assign to which character a mark belongs. Semantically, characters of notational systems are unequivocally consigned to one ‘compliance class’ of reference, no matter what the context.21 Still semantically, for a system to qualify as notational it has to be ‘disjoint’: that is, what it refers to may not overlap with the reference of another character. Finally, a true notational system is (semantically) finitely differentiated: it is unambiguously clear to which symbol an item in the field of reference conforms.22 Natural languages have notational qualities as they generally fulfil the syntactical requirements, but fall short semantically because they comprise homonyms (i.e. both homophones and homographs), which are ambiguous, and are insufficiently disjointed, as certain referents overlap (for example, writer, parent, and woman). Pictures fail both syntactically and semantically. In particular, Goodman describes pictures as ‘dense’: not only does the smallest difference between two marks (syntactically) produce two different characters (potentially within different equivalence classes), but two minutely different characters may (semantically) also have different referents.23 Both Goodman’s observations with regard to semantic as well as syntactic characteristics of writing appear to jar with the foregoing reading of Pettibon’s verbal texts, whose graphics were indissolubly linked to its reading. Pettibon not only expands, saturates and overlaps the fields of reference in his writing but also further dissolves writing’s semantic differentiation. If letters, phrases, or even paragraphs were isolated it would increase the lack of clarity towards what



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field of reference they are directed. Only in the contingency of the remainder of the work can they be directed towards a referent. Moreover, every forced ligature, every suppressed dot, every squeezed, mangled, unidentifiable letter also chips away at syntactic differentiation: it becomes increasingly difficult to tell which mark constitutes which letter and an excess of extra-alphabetic characters are introduced. As with the drawn element of this work, the writing (and its reading) becomes more obviously discontinuous, incongruous, contingent on everything around it. Reading individual elements relies exceedingly on the capturing of the surrounding components. The nonlinearity of the reading – so commonplace in reading of drawing – is doubly heightened, firstly, through the disjointed distribution of the text itself, and secondly through the seemingly irreverent and erratic dispersion of voices and references. If, as previously observed, Pettibon is a reader and writer of fragments, these fragments do not have to follow the rules of left-to right, top-to-bottom linearity of writing in Latin script. Pettibon describes his own reading as ‘swimming in words and letters’.24 His reading is non-consecutive and nonlinear; it progresses by linking disparate elements through the associative potential inherent in writing. And yet, this kind of reading is closely linked to viewing the all-overness of graphic marks in drawing. Pettibon’s own writing has thus taken on some of the syntactic and semantic qualities Goodman would have associated with drawing. In fact, it is as if the letters, syllables, words, clauses, and sentences are written and drawn upon with multiple hands. Derrida’s observation regarding Adami’s drawing in ‘+R (Into the Bargain)’ reverberates here: ‘Each letter, bit, or piece of a word is written with two hands, on each page, twice two hands: formal writing, discursive writing, picto-ideo-phonogram for a single concerto, dominated by a single instrument.’25 In the instrument that marks both writing and drawing, that re-marks every letter inside and outside language without limiting it to either, one re-cognizes the trait. The trait that is at once mark, trace, drawn line, brushstroke, and the feature (trait) common to both writing and drawing. It is the ductus that is shared, yet dissimilar, between the line drawn and the line written, both issuing from their common graphein, their shared debt and gift.26 Irreducible to either form or content, the trait marks the space between writing and drawing by connecting and separating the two, and yet it is not the originary difference between the two, because it neither arrives ahead of its two neighbours, nor is it without them. As Derrida proposes, in being nothing but the ‘gap, opening, differentiality, trace, border, traction, effraction [it is] structurally in withdrawal’, it is on the retreat, withdrawing itself; only marked in the two neighbours that it, in turn, marks.27 Removal and effacement are therefore structural traits of the trait, the trait is always already retrait (withdrawal/ retreat). In withdrawing, the trait re‑marks itself, re‑traces (retrait) itself, is at once ‘withdrawn/re-drawn’.28 The common trait of both writing and drawing ‘is never common, nor even one, with and without itself. Its divisibility founds text, traces and remains.’29

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Doubly marked, stroke by stroke – trait pour trait, Zug um Zug – carrying the traits of drawing but also writing, is also the centralized cavernous black frame that seemingly silhouettes Gothic windows, glimpsed from varying perspectives. The drawing is crude and seemingly reduces the depicted architecture to a giant chop mark, a character stamp, or hieroglyphic trace. It is itself a stylized picture abstracted into shorthand. What separates it from the discourse of language is that we do not know its pronunciation, and neither does it admit to being an extra-alphabetic character. In its negative space, or differently: in its absence and withdrawal is drawn the side elevation of a cathedral space with multiple parenthetically shaped entrances. It is a graphic reflexion of the multiplicity of assembled fragments and entrances of the space described and pictorialized by the paragraphs encircling it. This is therefore not an illuminated manuscript in which pictures surround words but rather the work of Pettibon as glossographer.30 The framing paragraphs act as glosses for a text drawn in the mystical tongue of the image. The drawing-writing returns itself to its ecclesiastical home by retracing itself in the image of the medieval gloss of the unexplained text, God’s unrepresentability, his words unfolded in marginalia. Yet, it is not only God’s logos, but also one that tries to contain the mysterious power of the image. This logos wants to take hold of the image, to control and contain it. And lastly, the logos that reduces writing to be a stand-in of speech; a logos that finds in each letter the allograph for an unspoken phoneme. Pettibon’s graphic sketch is, however, also the floor plan-cum-side elevation that navigates the cathedral space through its windows. It shows, perspectivally, the ground-floor aisle windows (or perhaps clerestory) either side of the nave, the central ones of the chancel, and, below, the smaller ones of the narthex. What it withholds is merely the transept set crosswise to the nave. In this church, nothing separates the nave from the chancel; it remains a church without a cross. The writing and drawing in Pettibon’s work has thus also drawn together Derrida’s two German lines and translations of the trait ‘toward where the two “families” cross – that of Riss … and that of Zug’.31 Derrida uses the trait to mark the connection that is also the separation between what is supposedly antithetical, such as drawing and writing. The German translations of trait, which Derrida uses to think about the irreducible difference yet shared path of Heidegger’s Dichten und Denken (poetry and thought), are especially fruitful for the word–image discussion promoted by Pettibon’s untitled drawing.32 On the one hand, there is the trait of ziehen, which retreats (retrait, zurückziehen) and withdraws (retrait, entziehen, verziehen): the ‘withdrawal, unappearance, and effacement of the mark of language’, but also the one to whom both drawing and writing are attracted (anziehen) and which draws them together (­zusammenziehen).33 The materiality of language is drawn forth and out (herausziehen) in Pettibon’s Schriftzug, which both writes and draws. Or differently, Pettibon’s drawing of a line (Linienzug) marks the hyphenation (trait d’union) of the compounds word-image and writing-drawing. It belongs to both and neither. And, on the other hand, there is the trait of reißen, the trait that



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cuts (reißen, Riss) both graphic neighbours, writing the graphics of drawing into writing and the graphics of writing into drawing, inscribing the one in the other. The trait that traces the lines (Risse) of the cathedral’s sketch (Umriss), its side elevation (Aufriss), its navigational floor plan (Grundriss, Abriss), its abstracted representation (Abriss), and finally its fragmented downfall (Abriss). Thomas Mießgang perhaps imagines this kind of reading of Pettibon’s work when he claims that ‘the French school’ and ‘deconstructive terms [such] as “dissemination,” “trace,” and “différance” appear … to fit the proliferation of ideas and the polystylistic expressive joy of [Pettibon’s] drawings as snug as a glove’.34 He does not offer any detailed consideration of his own, but the richness provided by the untitled drawing and Derrida’s trait hints at the dense net of readings that may be undertaken. Pettibon’s drawn writing or written drawing exploits and explores written language through its inky materiality. It shows the impotence of a desire that wants writing’s meaning to be a contained, higher content that is allographically located outside the visibility of script. To read the untitled drawing allographically is to transliterate it into a state of amorphous insubstantiality that is semantically irrelevant. This shapeless conception of writing looks for textual meaning outside its form and material and would, therefore, not only need to object to Louvel’s portico example in A. S. Byatt, but also reject any other (typo-/chiro-/ortho-/para-)graphic form, from italics, to capitalization, to line breaks, and so on. This implicitly also refutes any possibility of a successful transcription of Pettibon’s verbal text unless it reproduces the graphic characteristics of his writing. The foregoing ‘quotation’ from Pettibon’s untitled drawing-writing is therefore, at best, a mere allographic transcription that, in separating form from content, reinstates the false divisibility of writing and its visuality. In redrawing and retracing Pettibon’s words in an‑other graphic (allo‑graphic), the transcribed quotation also withdraws his writing from itself, and forces a retreat of writing into an allographic language of infinitely homologous and substitutable graphics. However, far from suggesting a recuperation of graphology, the morphology of script and type is rather a necessary consideration in the discourse about writing which is irreducible to, and not to be confused with, the discourse of language. Thus, the scope, in both senses, of writing lies (also) in the way it is written. Bryan Wolf similarly uses an inverse form–weight analogy to describe how language is ‘reified into objects’ with ‘weight and heft of its own’ when textual semantics are also graphic.35 This objecthood ‘“desublimates” language back to a physical state and empowers words by rendering them visual things’.36 This observation, however, appears biased or, at least, seems to betray an implicit expectation. The emergent power attributed to the new objecthood of language is the same usually attributed to images. Wolf recognizes that a conflict within Western tradition arises with the idea that words can manage and harness (the mysterious danger of) images but have to relinquish that selfsame control when they are de-sublimated to the same state. This is precisely at the crux of the expectational bias: language can only be lowered in its

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state if it had previously been raised up (sublimare). The expectant belief in the transcendental character of logos must precede any observation of language’s climb-down. This is the place where the amorphous insubstantiality of allographic reading coincides with the belief in a transcendent logos, allowing for unmediated access to truth, while implicitly advocating either a transparency or an invisibility of the material under scrutiny. To return one last time to Louvel’s markers for the pictorial in literary texts, it is useful to identify the general ‘immobility and absence of movement’ in the verbal text.37 Overall, it is characterized by a dearth of verbs, and most of those used revolve around (re)cognition (‘know’, ‘think’, ‘see’), stasis (‘place’, ‘stood’, ‘staying’), or are auxiliary (‘can’, ‘will’, ‘make’). The choice of verbs presents a glossal stasis that broaches Lessing’s insistence38 for language to describe actions rather than depict objects and spaces. The rejection of this notion in Pettibon’s work is perhaps further emphasized by tracing the provenance of an earlier line of this untitled drawing to the oft-ekphrastic writer Walter Pater. ‘But let me place you once more where we stood for a while’, taken from Pater’s ‘Vézelay’ (1894), inaugurated the iconotextual character of this piece (as noted above), and Pater’s own subsequent pictorial description constructs an ecclesial space comparable to Pettibon’s. As Pater’s narrator crosses the church’s aisle, perspectives shift and the gaze is constantly drawn from one detail to the next.39 Architectural features are presented in quick succession, seemingly only guided by the eyes’ erratic movement through the space. Pettibon excerpts ‘But let me place you once more where we stood for a while’, thus announcing the description to follow, and then exploits the material space of the cardboard substrate to capture the unsettled gaze of the reader as viewer and the viewer as reader. Pettibon, a voracious reader, is clearly aware of the ekphrastic nature of Pater’s text and, in responding and answering to it, he also manages to translate and transpose it into his own picto-ideo-phonogrammic way.40 Furthermore, as if to celebrate his own picto-architectural construction, Pettibon takes his leave with another quotation, ripped out of context, but part of a text that is exemplary in expressing how place and materiality encourage sensory perception and engage the body to trigger involuntary memory. Near the bottom of the work, Pettibon quotes from Proust’s Time Regained (1927): And here too was the proof of the trueness of the whole picture formed out of those contemporaneous impressions which the first sensation brings back in its train, with those unerring proportions of light and shade, emphasis and omission, memory and forgetfulness to which conscious recollection and conscious observation will never know how to attain.41

The trueness of Pettibon’s whole picture, then, is that he has created a text, both visually and verbally, that engages the memory and imagination in a way that (re)constructs a place out of seemingly erratic scraps, which are dispersed and co-mingled. His construction occurs through a complex verbo-pictural interweaving in which words and pictures share visibility and visuality. Pettibon’s



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work emphasizes how writing is graphic and pictural in order for it to function pictorially. In considering the diverse graphic qualities of writing, this chapter has considered the ekphrastic encounter of pictures and words through their shared common graphic qualities. Applying Louvel’s markers for iconotextual and ekphrastic texts to the reading of Pettibon’s untitled work, it has demonstrated that the pictorial qualities of writing are irreducible to a sublimated understanding of writing as transcendent logos, but are, rather, bound up in the complex interlocking of verbal and pictural characteristics of writing itself. Writing irrepressibly remains a graphic trace, funambulating the trait common to pictures and scriptorial language. Ekphrasis in this way is thus irreconcilable with any notion that categorically seeks to differentiate writing and literature from visibility or sensuous perceptibility. To oppose verbal and visual representation is, therefore, to forget that the rubric of writing is not identical with the one of language. Thus both Claus Clüver’s chapter – the final one in this section – and the foregoing discussion, coincide in their objection to the aspect of visuality in Heffernan’s definition of ekphrasis. Though Clüver’s argumentation is concerned with the explicit limitations placed on the object(s) of ekphrases, my own has been with the implicit disregard of the material contingencies of writing. Pettibon exemplifies how writing in general possesses pictural qualities which are syntactically and semantically significant for its signification. The complexity opened up by the volatile effect that graphic considerations introduce to the reading of written texts – a process that is always bound to be insufficient and perpetually to-be-continued – should, however, not encourage a conflation of writing and speech into a general allographic linguistics that disregards and is deaf to the traits of the very (written and oral) verbal texts under scrutiny. The intricate operation of reading will not become easier or more containable – quite the opposite, in fact – but the plurality of graphic traits proposes a rich encounter between words and images. Notes  1 James A. W. Heffernan, Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 3; John B. Bender, Spenser and Literary Pictorialism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972), p. 51; Leo Spitzer, ‘The “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, or Content vs. Metagrammar’, Comparative Literature, 7 (1955), 203–25 (p. 207), original emphasis; Murray Krieger, ‘Ekphrasis and the Still Movement of Poetry; or Lakoön Revisited’, in Frederick McDowell (ed.), The Poet as Critic (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1967), pp. 3–26 (p. 5).  2 George Sainsbury, A History of Criticism and Literary Taste in Europe: from the Earliest Texts to the Present Day, 3 vols (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood, 1902), vol. 1, p. 491, s.v. ἔκφρασις; Wendy Steiner, The Colors of Rhetoric: Problems in the Relation between Modern Literature and Painting (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1982) p. 41. For more details on the historical and ideological changes and

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uses of different ekphrasis definitions, see, for instance, Ruth Webb, ‘Ekphrasis Ancient and Modern: The Invention of a Genre’, Word & Image, 15:1 (1999), 7–18; and Grant F. Scott, ‘The Rhetoric of Dilation: Ekphrasis and Ideology’, Word & Image, 7:4 (1991), 301–10.  3 For a consideration of the spatiality of poetry and the implicit tautology of Heffernan’s definition of ekphrasis, see Shahar Bram, ‘Ekphrasis as a Shield: Ekphrasis and the Mimetic Tradition’, Word & Image, 22:4 (2006), 372–8 (pp. 376–7).  4 Etymologically, the Latin graphicus and the Greek γραφικός for both drawing and writing, depiction and description, are reiterated here (OED, s.v. ‘graphic’).  5 See Thomas Mießgang, ‘My Messiah Will Rise … to Kill Again’, in Ilse Lafer, Thomas Mießgang, and Gerald Matt (eds), Raymond Pettibon, trans. Wolfgang Astelbauer (Nuremberg: Verlag für moderne Kunst, 2006), pp. 182–90 (p. 186).  6 See, for instance, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, ‘Raymond Pettibon: After Laughter’, October, 129 (2009), 13–50 (p. 28); Michael Kimmelman, ‘The Underbelly Artist’, The New York Times, 9 October 2005, www.nytimes.com/2005/10/09/ magazine/09pettibon.html; Pettibon in Chrissie Iles, ‘Raymond Pettibon Interviewed by Chrissie Iles’, in Chrissie Iles et al., A Decade in Conversation: A Ten Year Celebration of the Bucksbaum Award, 2000–2010: Interviews with Paul Pfeiffer, Irit Batsry, Raymond Pettibon, Mark Bradford, Omer Fast (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2010), pp. 32–41 (p. 37).  7 Pettibon in Mike Kelley, ‘By Way of Norman Greenbaum: Raymond Pettibon Interviewed by Mike Kelley’, in Ralph Rugoff (ed.), Raymond Pettibon (New York: Rizzoli, 2013), pp. 160–6 (p. 166); Pettibon in Robert Storr, Denis Cooper, and Ulrich Loock, Raymond Pettibon (London and New York: Phaidon, 2001), p. 137; Pettibon in Jim Lewis, ‘A Conversation with Raymond Pettibon’, Parkett, 47 (1996), 56–67 (p. 61). However, for a reconsideration of narrative in Pettibon’s work, see Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, ‘Raymond Pettibon: Return to Disorder and Disfiguration’, in Ann Temkin and Hamza Walker (eds), Raymond Pettibon: A Reader, illustrated edn (Philadelphia, PA: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1998), pp. 225–33 (p. 226); Boris Groys, ‘The Drawing Rescues Poetry’, trans. Catherine Schelbert, Parkett, 47 (1996), 74–7 (p. 77).  8 The terms ‘pictural’ and ‘pictorial’ are not used interchangeably throughout this chapter. The obsolete word ‘pictural’ is employed to describe pictures as graphic depictions (i.e. literally ‘of or relating to pictures’). This usage is in line with the original French versions and most of the English translations of Jacques Derrida’s writing, as well as related commentary (see below). ‘Pictorial’, on the other hand, may additionally refer to verbal images, as is common practice when a verbal text is said to evoke a particular image, picture, or graphic quality.  9 Liliane Louvel, Poetics of the Iconotext, ed. Karen Jacobs, trans. Laurence Petit (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), p. 90. 10 Ibid. As in this case it would be more appropriate to speak of an ‘opening operator of architectural description’, it is necessary to point out that Louvel’s indicators are chiefly concerned with pictorial description, i.e. description of paintings. 11 Pettibon in Grady Turner, ‘Raymond Pettibon’, Bomb, Fall 1999, www.bomb​ magazine.org/articles/raymond-pettibon. 12 Pettibon in Turner; Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes, Joyce in Art (Dublin: Lilliput Press, 2004), p. 291; Ann Temkin, ‘“What’s Better Science than Creating Me?”’, in Temkin and Walker (eds), Raymond Pettibon, pp. 238–43 (pp. 242–3).



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13 Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 160. 14 Louvel, Poetics of the Iconotext, pp. 104–5. 15 Hans Rudolf Reust, ‘Shifting between Image and Language’, in Lafer, Mießgang, and Matt (eds), Raymond Pettibon, pp. 196–200 (p. 199). 16 Reust, ‘Shifting between Image and Language’, p. 199. 17 Peter Schjeldahl, ‘Rayball’, in Temkin and Walker (eds), Raymond Pettibon, pp. 234–7 (p. 234). 18 Johanna Malt adopts a different but comparable approach via Jean-Luc Nancy in Chapter 11, below. 19 Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols, 2nd edn (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1976). 20 For a pertinent example of art historical use but also critique of Goodman’s Languages of Art see, for instance, James Elkins, ‘Marks, Traces, Traits, Contours, Orli, and Splendores: Nonsemiotic Elements in Pictures’, Critical Inquiry, 21 (1995), 822–60 (pp. 827–8). German word–image scholarship and the Bildwissenschaften branch of art history in particular draw on Goodman’s theoretical structure; see, for example, Klaus Sachs-Hornbach and Klaus Rehkämper (eds), Bildgrammatik: Interdisziplinäre Forschungen zur Syntax Bildhafter Darstellungsformen, Bildwissenschaft (Magdeburg: Scriptum, 1999), and Sybille Krämer, Eva Cancik-Kirschbaum, and Rainer Totzke (eds), Schriftbildlichkeit: Wahrnehmbarkeit, Materialität und Operativität von Notationen, Schriftbildlichkeit (Berlin: Akademie, 2012). 21 Goodman, Languages of Art, p. 153. 22 Alessandro Giovannelli, ‘Goodman’s Aesthetics’, in Edward N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2010 http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/ sum2010/entries/goodman-aesthetics/. 23 Goodman, Languages of Art, pp. 226–7. 24 Pettibon in Denis Cooper, ‘Interview: Dennis Cooper in Conversation with Raymond Pettibon’, in Storr, Cooper, and Loock (eds) Raymond Pettibon, pp. 6–31 (p. 8). 25 Derrida, Truth, pp. 159–60. 26 Jacques Derrida, Memoirs of the Blind: The Self-Portrait and Other Ruins, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 30. 27 Jacques Derrida, ‘The Retrait of Metaphor’, in Psyche: Inventions of the Other, ed. Peggy Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg, trans. Peggy Kamuf, 2 vols (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), vol. 1, pp. 48–80 (p. 75). 28 Ibid., p. 77. 29 Derrida, Truth, p. 11. 30 I am indebted to Nikola Piperkov, whose ideas helped to shape the discussion on glosses and the maplike character of Pettibon’s drawing in this chapter. 31 Derrida, Truth, p. 193; original emphasis. 32 Derrida, ‘Retrait’, pp. 72–7. Martin Heidegger, Unterwegs zur Sprache, 5th edn (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1975), pp. 241, 251ff. 33 Derrida, ‘Retrait’, p. 75. 34 Mießgang, ‘My Messiah Will Rise … to Kill Again’, p. 188. 35 Bryan Wolf, ‘Confessions of a Closet Ekphrastic: Literature, Painting, and Other Unnatural Relations’, Yale Journal of Criticism, 3:2 (1990), 181–203 (p. 182).

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36 Ibid., p. 183. 37 Louvel, Poetics of the Iconotext, p. 90. 38 Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laokoon oder Über die Grenzen der Malerei und Poesie (Teddington: Echo Library, 2006), pp. 80–1, 88–9. 39 Pater’s original reads: ‘But let me place you once more where we stood for a while, on entering by the doorway in the midst of the long southern aisle. Cross the aisle, and gather now in one view the perspective of the whole. Away on the left hand the eye is drawn upward to the tranquil light of the vaults of the fore-church, seeming doubtless the more spacious because partly concealed from us by the wall of partition below. But on the right hand, towards the east, as if with the set purpose of a striking architectural contrast, an instruction as to the place of this or that manner in the architectural series, the long, tunnel-like, military work of the Romanesque nave opens wide into the exhilarating daylight of choir and transepts, in the sort of Gothic Bernard would have welcomed, with a vault rising now high above the roof-line of the body of the church, sicut lilium excelsum. The simple flowers, the flora, of the early Pointed style, which could never have looked at home as an element in the half-savage decoration of the nave, seem to be growing here upon the sheaves of slender, reedy pillars, as if naturally in the carved stone. Even here indeed, Roman, or Romanesque, taste still lingers proudly in the monolith columns of the chevet. Externally, we may note with what dexterity the Gothic choir has been inserted into its place, below and within the great buttresses of the earlier Romanesque one’ (Walter Pater, ‘Vézelay’, in Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays (London: Macmillan, 1910), pp. 126–41 (pp. 139–40)). A second quotation, seemingly taken from Pater’s ‘Apollo in Picardy’, is the line: ‘The scribe’s hand had strayed here into mazy borders’ (Walter Pater, ‘Apollo in Picardy’, in Miscellaneous Studies, pp. 142–71 (p. 144)). 40 See, for instance, Temkin and Walker (eds), Raymond Pettibon. 41 Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past: Time Regained, trans. Andreas Mayor, 12 vols (London: Chatto & Windus, 1970), vol. 12, p. 240. A further identifiable quotation, ‘A wayfaring man may break his fast’, is probably taken from Charles Montagu Doughty, Travels in Arabia Deserta (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. xix, 517.

11

Ekphrasis/exscription: Jean-Luc Nancy on thinking and touching art Johanna Malt

The central paradox of ekphrasis, at least if we approach it in what W. J. T. Mitchell calls the indifferent mode, is that writing a visual image into language is also writing it out.1 In the incorporation into language, the work of visual art is evoked, made present in a transposed, translated, re-processed form, but in its visual essence it is also excluded. The visual image becomes an absence around which another system – that of language – temporarily organizes itself. Indeed, any object ‘depicted’ in text is absent from it in a way that it is not within a visual representation. As Mitchell puts it, ‘A verbal representation cannot represent – that is, make present – its object in the same way a visual representation can. It may refer to an object, describe it, invoke it, but it can never bring its visual presence before us in the way pictures do. Words can “cite” but never “sight” their objects’ (p. 152). It is in these terms that ekphrastic writing has become a test case, even a battleground for theories of representation, and especially for theories that present language as marked by an essential absence or that see it as always haunted by that which it can never wholly encompass. The image in the ekphrastic encounter comes to stand for the ‘other’ of language, for that which it must necessarily exclude even as it seeks to account for it. For Mitchell, the figurative nature of ekphrastic writing, in which the image cannot ‘literally come into view’, means that it lends itself to such thinking about otherness: It means that the textual other must remain completely alien; it can never be present but must be conjured up as a potent absence or a fictive, figural present … The ekphrastic image acts, in other words, like a sort of unapproachable and unpresentable ‘black hole’ in the verbal structure, entirely absent from it, but shaping it and affecting it in fundamental ways. (p. 158)

Theories that operate on this principle conceive of the ekphrastic relation in various ways, as we shall see, as a kind of haunting of language in which it organizes itself in relation to an absence that defines it. The defining absence of

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the image comes to stand for a more general (and sometimes less well-defined) absence that characterizes all language, all signifying systems. With its recurrent returns to the question of what (linguistic) signification excludes, the thinking of contemporary French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy sheds light on the problem of ekphrasis without apparently being concerned with it at all. To a large extent Nancy’s work fits the model in which language is organized in relation to an absence. Nancy conceives of signification as always excluding something, as having a ground which is logically prior to it and which it cannot therefore encompass. What sets his thought apart, however, is both the nature of that ground and the way in which he articulates its presence and relationship to signification. Though he makes little explicit reference to ekphrasis as such, his whole aesthetics centres on this relation of constitutive exclusion. And while he moves to centre stage a sense that theories of ekphrasis rarely engage with, namely touch, we will see that the encounter between textual and visual modes is in fact central to his broader project. Ekphrasis Mitchell’s terms (ekphrastic indifference, hope, and fear) are a useful shorthand for designating the continuum of positions which theories of ekphrasis occupy. At one end is Mitchell’s ‘ekphrastic hope’, which treats ekphrasis more or less as enargeia, and in which language is seen as capable of representing the image and whatever the image itself can express. In this mode, language itself gains new spatiality and stillness from its encounter with the spatial form of the image, and what is more, ‘the estrangement of the image/text division is overcome and a sutured, synthetic form, a verbal icon or imagetext, arises in its place’ (p. 154).2 At the other end of this spectrum, ekphrastic fear views the domain of the image as having an impenetrable, even deathly, force against which language is powerless to defend itself. Its power threatens to castrate language (the key figure of this mode is the Medusa) and turn readers into idolaters; ekphrasis seen from this perspective becomes ‘a magical technique that threatens to fixate the poet and the listener’ (p. 156). Mitchell’s ekphrastic indifference, somewhere in the middle of this spectrum, views writing and the image as locked in a stand-off of incompatibility which, in its more optimistic incarnation as ‘ekphrastic ambivalence’, ekphrastic writing itself thematizes and reflects upon critically. In the ambivalent mode, such writing accepts the ekphrastic encounter as an ethical one, a model for all encounters with otherness, whether that otherness can be overcome (as ekphrastic hope would maintain) or can result only in domination of one party by the other (as in ekphrastic fear). As ambivalence, ekphrastic writing works through ‘the problems staged for it by the theoretical and metaphysical assumptions about media, the senses and representation that make up ekphrastic fear and indifference’ (p. 164). This working-through is not a binary operation of the relation between text and visual image but a triangular one, whose third term is the reader. As Liliane Louvel observes Chapter 9 in



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this volume, it treats the text–image encounter as both experience and event. In such an encounter, as Claus Clüver notes, the text verbalizes an experience of reading an image or other visual form.3 It is also possible to see a second spectrum within theories of ekphrasis, or of the relationship between text and image – one that maps only partially onto Mitchell’s. Here, one extreme would be a semiological approach in which the image is treated as nothing other than a kind of text. Such a view would maintain that there is, Mitchell proposes, ‘semantically speaking (that is, in the pragmatics of communication, symbolic behaviour, expression, signification) no essential difference between texts and images’ (p. 161) At the other extreme would be a position which holds that the material essence of the image and the embodied experience of its viewing make it irreducible to a signifying system.4 But this is indeed a spectrum of positions, none of which would surely claim that the image does not signify at all by means at least analogous to those of language. The most common position thus lies somewhere between the extremes, and obliges anyone taking it to acknowledge a double quality of the image, in which signification may coexist with some other non-signifying presence; something which might be experienced phenomenologically as sense, spacing, embodiment, or pure optical stimulus. This means that in the ekphrastic encounter, language comes up against both a close family member and an impenetrably inaccessible other, the two of them embodied in the same visual image to which language addresses itself. Peter Wagner uses a telling image in describing such an encounter: Ekphrasis, then, has a Janus face: as a form of mimesis it stages a paradoxical performance, promising to give voice to the allegedly silent image even while attempting to overcome the power of the image by transforming and inscribing it.5

And though the Janus-faced doubling is here attributed to ekphrastic writing, it is implicitly governed by the hybridity of the image. It is getting to grips with a double-faced object that forces ekphrastic language into a double position of its own. Wagner goes further at this point in his account of ekphrasis. Following Jacques Derrida, he locates the fissure between the visible and the readable not between the image and the word, but within each. Refusing the opposition between readable, signifying language and visible, embodied presence in the image, he argues for ‘a common ground shared by the image and the word’, a ground which he identifies as that of ‘rhetoric, spacing, “inhabitation”’.6 In this sense, while his optimism about the possibility of a common ground between word and image leans towards ekphrastic hope, Wagner’s notion of ‘inhabitation’ takes us back towards those theories that see language itself as haunted by its inassimilable other. Wagner offers Janus as an image of a doubling inherent to both language and image. Others offer different figures, notably Thomas Baldwin, whose recent book draws on Derrida, Roland Barthes, and art historian Georges Didi-Huberman in elaborating a theory of what he calls ‘spectral’

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ekphrasis, in which the picture is a kind of ghost haunting the ekphrastic text, both present and absent within it. A version of Mitchell’s ekphrastic ambivalence, Baldwin’s account stresses the instability of the ekphrastic text (and by extension all text), in which representation oscillates between presence and absence, between mimetic transparency and opaque materiality: The working through of ekphrasis requires a thinking of the relationship between word and image not in terms of linguistic transparency or radical displacement, as either presence or absence … but rather as oscillation, an unstable coming and going – an experimentation on and manipulation of the image in or by the text rather than its outright obliteration.7

Didi-Huberman’s own psychoanalytically inflected account offers yet another figure for a language divided from its own other within: the symptom. In this theorization of the ekphrastic encounter, it is once again the material, embodied dimension of language or the image that all signifying systems repress within themselves. Once again, the discourse is that of a return of that repressed: In the lucid waking state presupposed by our customary relation to the visible … something – a remainder, a stamp of oblivion – comes or comes again just the same, bearing its nocturnal trouble, its virtual power. Something that alters the world of represented forms just as a material [une matière] will come to alter the formal perfection of a line. Something that must indeed be called a symptom, to the extent that it is true that there are no symptoms – in Freud’s sense – without some work of forgetting.8

Didi-Huberman situates the symptom as occurring at the meeting point, or inhabiting the ‘entre-deux’ of two theoretical systems: the semiological and the phenomenological. And indeed this is what all such figures of doubling do: they try to account for both text and visual image as a meeting point of two paradigms. Jean-Luc Nancy’s work on language and representation is also in this spirit. In a sense, what Nancy offers in his allusive and wide-ranging writing on aesthetics is just another figure for the inherent doubling produced by signification, including by the ekphrastic encounter. As we shall see, his notion of ‘exscription’ describes the writing-out that all writing undertakes – not of the visual image per se, but of something he calls ‘sense’, and which is best understood as a kind of phenomenological ground of all being and all sense-making. Though he steers well clear of the psychoanalytic register of repression and haunting, Nancy, like Didi-Huberman, treats signification as excluding something, the very absence of which is signification’s condition of possibility. This is something like Mitchell’s ‘black hole in the verbal structure’: signification organized by what it constructs as outside its borders. On one level, Nancy’s entire project situates itself at the point of intersection identified by Didi-Huberman: between semiology and phenomenology. He continually seeks to account for non-signifying, embodied existence within a



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poststructuralist paradigm. But what sets his thinking apart, and what the rest of this chapter will explore, is the role of proximity and contiguity within it. For him, the doubling of representation is enacted at a boundary where presence and absence meet and touch one another. And in his own most ekphrastic texts, Nancy performs a deconstruction of the logic of proximity and distance in visual art, making touch counter-intuitively central to it, as we shall see. Here Nancy offers his own account of that fissure, or ‘line of demarcation’ between the readable and the visible that runs through every image, through every text. Exscription One of the central terms in Nancy’s thinking on aesthetics and representation is ‘exscription’. He coins this word to describe the relationship between, on the one hand, signifying systems into which ‘signs, images or ciphers’ insert the body and, on the other, ‘this body we’ve projected, there, ahead of us, approaching us’.9 As the word itself suggests, ‘ex-scription’ expresses the idea that, for Nancy, writing is always a writing-out, an expulsion of that which cannot be accounted for in language. The latter, the pre- or non-signifying existence which underpins all being for Nancy, is ‘naked, merely naked, and exscribed in advance from all writing’.10 Elsewhere, Nancy explains exscription in these terms: Writing exscribes meaning [le sens] every bit as much as it inscribes significations. It exscribes meaning or, in other words, it shows that what matters – the thing itself and, finally, the existence of everything that is ‘in question’ in the text – is outside the text, takes place outside writing.11

All writing is the creation of a boundary between what writing includes and what is other to it. It is a boundary between two systems: one in which being signifies and one in which it simply is and ‘makes sense’ as such. What is ‘outside’ the text is not its referent, since the referent is itself a category belonging to the order of signification. But the twofold particularity of Nancy’s model lies first in the mutual dependency of these two systems, which construct themselves in their opposition to one another, and secondly in the very material way in which the boundary is conceived and described. Exscribed being or sense is always pressing against writing, weighing upon it with the force of its materiality, and Nancy’s language vividly describes this relation of contiguity, of being outside but ‘up against’ – ‘à même’: There is only exscription through writing, but what’s exscribed remains this other edge that exscription, though signifying on an edge, obstinately continues to indicate as its own-other edge. Thus, for every writing, a body is the own-other edge: a body (or more than one body, or a mass, or more than one mass), is therefore also the traced, the tracing, and the trace. (p. 87)

The idea of the ‘own-other edge’ expresses this separation in contiguity, and again, in a text entitled ‘The Weight of a Thought’, the boundary between

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s­ ignification and material sense is described in strikingly physical terms, though interestingly Nancy reverses the relation of interior and exterior here, placing writing outside the sense that exceeds it. This inversion emphasizes the chiastic mutual dependency of writing and the being it exscribes: Sense needs a thickness, a density a mass, and thus an opacity, a darkness by means of which it leaves itself open and lets itself be touched as sense right there where it becomes absent as discourse. Now, this ‘there’ is a material point, a weighty point: the flesh of a lip, the point of a pen or of a stylus, any writing insofar as it traces out the interior and exterior edges of language. It is the point where all writing is ex-scribed, where it comes to rest outside of the sense it inscribes, in the things whose inscription this sense is supposed to form.12

Clearly there is a danger here. The risk is that sense in Nancy’s scheme becomes simply (and potentially rather banally) the place of the unsayable, and that if we bring the notion of exscription to bear on ekphrasis, we are back where we started in an unreconstructed version of ekphrastic indifference. If the visual image is on the side of what is written out or exscribed, it not only becomes a definitive and essentialized other of signification, but takes on a privileged status as sense, as the expression of what writing cannot mobilize. This is not how Nancy sees the relation between words and images. Just as for Didi-Huberman, for Nancy the visual is not to be placed unproblematically on the side of the ‘real’ which language exscribes. Indeed, we might say that both writing and picturing exscribe, producing a double or chiasmatic other of themselves at their limit, bringing that other into being as what weighs upon them as excluded. Painting, for example, insofar as it is partly a mode of signification, might be said to exscribe that within it which is not reducible to signification, just as language is shadowed, according to Nancy, by that which it constructs as excluded from it. Oscillation/distinction In one of his richest and most suggestive volumes on aesthetics, Nancy, for whom all art is in several senses intrinsically double,13 focuses on the category of the image as a way of designating this ‘other’ of the signifying dimension of the work of art. Here, Nancy refers to that dimension itself as the image, in that the image is always sacred – not in the sense of religious, but as that which is always separate, apart, which withdraws:14 The sacred signifies the separate, what is set aside, removed, cut off. In one sense, then, religion and the sacred are opposed, as the bond is opposed to the cut. In another sense, religion can no doubt be represented as securing a bond with the separated sacred. But in yet another sense, the sacred is what it is only through its separation, and there is no bond with it. … The sacred is what, of itself, remains set apart, at a distance, and with which one forms no bond (or only a very paradoxical one). It is what one cannot touch (or only by a touch without contact).15



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In order to avoid the conflation of sacred and religious, he refers to this separateness as ‘the distinct’, exploiting (as he does so often, a fact that makes his work notoriously difficult to translate) the full etymological resonance of ‘distinct’, which has its origins in the Latin stigma, meaning brand, mark, or incision, to emphasize the coming into being of distinction by the drawing of a line or the marking of a boundary. The image, as distinct, is both distant and different. Impalpable, it continually sets itself apart with the energy or force that, for Nancy, is the other defining feature of the sacred. It is thus best understood as a kind of movement of separation or distinction by which the image separates itself from the world of things and ‘presents itself as pure presentation’.16 This kind of pre-signifying separation is central to all of Nancy’s thought about sense. It is a primary spacing or distinction that is experienced materially as the intuitive, non-conceptual sense of our being-in-the-world. The centrality of aesthetics in Nancy’s thought stems from the fact that it is art (understood here as the image-distinct) that, in its pure act of showing, shows us the coming into being of this spacing or distinction. In another essay, imagining the primal scene of art in the first cave painting, Nancy develops this idea of art as a showing of showing and thus a separation from itself: In a single blow, in the same first gesture, about twenty-five thousand years ago, the animal monstrans shows itself. It would show nothing if it did not show itself showing. It shows in a stroke the stranger that it is, it shows the strangeness of the world to the world, and it also shows its knowledge of monstration and of its estrangement. For ‘to show’ [montrer] is nothing other than to set aside, to set at a distance of presentation.17

This is the sense of the image as understood in The Ground of the Image. It is not a mimetic imitation of an object, and what it shows is always first and foremost its own status as image.18 The image is a kind of supplement to the thing, a bracketing, the resemblance of a thing to itself: It is neither the thing nor the imitation of the thing (all the less so in that it is not necessarily plastic or visual). It is the resemblance of the thing, which is different. In its resemblance, the thing is detached from itself. It is not the ‘thing itself’ (or the thing ‘in itself’), but the ‘sameness’ of the present thing as such.19

Following the logic of this separation between signifying discourse and its other (sense, image-distinct) the image, for Nancy, is not reducible to the visual. All works of art, in that they are the showing of a showing, contain images: ‘The image is not only visual: it is also musical, poetic, even tactile, olfactory or gustatory, kinesthetic etc.’ (p. 4). Indeed, two of Nancy’s main examples in the essay are literary: a description drawn from a novel by Edith Wharton and a line of poetry from Rilke. Once again we are dealing with a theory that sees each work of art, whatever its form, as divided within itself, from itself: between inscription and the sense exscribed, between signifying discourse and the image.

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In another essay in the same volume, Nancy addresses the relationship between these two elements of the work in more detail, coining another term as the counterpoint to the distinct. This is one of the few places where he uses the word ekphrasis, and it is interesting to note a link here to Peter Wagner’s image of the Janus-face. Nancy moves to prevent the image-distinct becoming a fixed point identifiable with sense or the absence of signification. Given the importance of the movement of coming to presence or to visibility, and of withdrawing or separation, Nancy is keen to emphasize the relational nature of his understanding of the image. The language of this passage is dense with connotations and worth quoting at some length: The two [text and image] show what it means to show – to manifest, to reveal, to place in view, to shed light on, to indicate, to signal, to produce. They show, and in showing they show that there are at least two kinds of showing, heterogeneous and yet stuck to one another, collated, pressed and compressed together (like the stones in an arch), attracting and repelling one another. (p. 64)

This is the sense of mutual exclusion touched on above; the sense in which signification (designated here as text, although this is a shorthand, since, as we have seen, both images and texts contain signifying and imaging dimensions) and its non-signifying other are up against one another in a relation of contiguous mutual exclusion, defined by the border at which they meet, each as the other’s limit. Here that limit is described as a horizon, emphasizing it as both a dividing line and a condition of possibility: Image and text are therefore distinguished as soul and body: each is the limit of the other, its horizon of interpretation. The horizon of the image is the text, with which it opens an indefinite power to imagine, before which the image is only a closure, a closed contour. But the horizon of the text is the image, with which it opens an indefinite power to imagine, before which the text is only an impotency, a permanent postponement of images. (pp. 69–70)

What is more, the function of each which, as we have seen, is always a kind of monstration, is to show itself and in the same gesture to point towards its other. Hence this mutual exclusion is also a mutual construction, a mutual dependency: Image and text are the two holy species of a single withdrawn presence. The two aspects, the two sides or faces presented to the eye of the body and the eye of the mind for an absence of surface, for an absent sense that has no facial value. The presentation of the absent always oscillates between the presence of a form and the presence of a sense; one always refers back to the other. Neither one, consequently, truly fixes a presence. Each one bears itself as an immobilisation, in itself, of presence (here is the image, here is the text, everything is there) – and as an immediate reference in the direction of the other: here is the image, it means …; here is the text, it represents … (p. 73)

Two terms stand out here. First of all, the notion of oscillation, a term used by Baldwin in his Barthesian account of ekphrasis. Here, Nancy uses it to describe



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the continual coming and going of something, not across a boundary (for this boundary, being an ever-receding horizon, cannot be crossed), but of two modes or worlds that meet at it, the appearance of one being the absence of the other, and vice versa. But to describe these as ‘worlds’ is to risk being drawn into the language of immanence and transcendence (a common temptation when reading Nancy, given the nature of his rhetoric) and we must tread carefully here. The second term that stands out in this passage is ‘presence’, albeit as ‘withdrawn presence’. It would be tempting to see this as designating the transcendent, that which withdraws beyond the horizon of our worldly existence. But when Nancy asks the question, what (or rather who) is the absent here – ‘Who is the one that would be located precisely at the intersection of this double reference, at the place where the meaning of the image encounters the meaning of the text without either one ever being the meaning of the other?’ (p. 75) – the answer is a surprising but illuminating one: what Nancy terms the ‘Oscillator’ (l’Oscillant). Once again, etymology does a lot of work here, oscillation being derived from the Latin word for mouth, and by extension, face, but oscillum meaning also a little face or mask, specifically a mask of Bacchus hung up in vines to blow in the wind and scare away birds. Nancy’s ‘Oscillator’ (capitalized throughout) is thus a mask, like Wagner’s Janus-face, that is the meeting point of textual and visual, or signifying and imaging modes in art. Two aspects of this image are worth dwelling on. The first is that unlike Wagner’s Janus, the Oscillator mask looks only in one direction. Wagner, an exponent of ekphrastic hope, as we saw, uses the double nature of the Janus face to bring together word and image in a single aesthetic object that looks in two directions at once. Nancy’s mask, on the other hand, looks only in one, and thus renders impossible the synthesis Wagner finds in the Janus image: The Oscillator, then, swings between mouth and face, between speech and vision, between the emission of sense and the reception of form. But what appears to move towards an encounter does not do so at all: on the contrary, the mouth and the look are turned forward in parallel, turned into the distance, toward an infinite perpetuation of their double and incommunicable position. Between mouth and eye, the entire face oscillates. (p. 75)

Indeed, this evocation of mouth and eye and of word and image held in a grimacing mask of non-communication that transfixes the onlooker as it dances in the wind of expression certainly looks very much like an account of ekphrastic fear. Isn’t the Oscillator simply another Medusa – a ghastly scarecrow that stops the desiring viewer in his or her tracks?20 This brings us to the second notable feature of the figure. What is important here is the sense of the Oscillator as a mask – not a face, but a facelike apparatus that conceals the face and deflects us from a real presence or (as in the grapes) from an object of desire.21 And unlike the Medusa, the Oscillator is not an image of the image itself, or of image culture. It is not seeing that transfixes, but the perpetual ekphrastic encounter itself, the oscillation of the mouth and the eye, between mouth and eye. Returning to the

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problem of transcendence evoked above, we are left with the question: what is it that the Oscillator masks or conceals? Is it the ‘real presence’ that withdraws from our world beyond its horizon? Or is it the very absence of that presence, its withdrawal? Is the Oscillator mask a kind of fetish that sustains our belief in a presence by both concealing an absence and paradoxically drawing attention to it? Is the encounter between signification and non-signifying being in fact a problem of transcendence? The answer is of course that it is none of these, and to understand that is to grasp both Nancy’s aesthetics and the broader philosophical project which it comes to figure. For what stands behind the mask of the Oscillator is neither a presence nor an absence but rather the fact that there is presence or absence – the fact of separation, of presentation. This fact of separation is the foundation of all sense for Nancy, and presentation is the manifestation of it. His own immediate answer in The Ground of the Image to the question of what is behind the Oscillator’s mask is none other than the Distinct – capitalized here to distinguish it from the image-distinct discussed above, though the latter is an expression of the former: ‘The Distinct is set apart: the distinct mark of sense, its trait. It is the stigma, that is, the incision that separates.’22 It is nothing other than the fact of distinction, of separation, what separates an individual instance of being in time and space from ‘sense’ as its condition of possibility. As mentioned above, sense is conceived by Nancy as a ground of existence or of disclosure, as the background or ‘fond’ (as in the book’s original title Au fond des images) from which any instance of being must detach itself. Sense precedes language and signification proper because it precedes and exceeds any specific instantiation of being in time and space. It is thus distinct as an excess, as what withdraws from any specific presence, what remains over and above each instance of being that distinguishes itself. I mentioned above that one of the distinctive features of Nancy’s version of ekphrastic indifference or the ekphrastic paradox is the emphasis it places on contiguity – on the weight of the other that presses on that which excludes it. This brings us to a final aspect of Nancy’s thought that offers a useful counterpoint to the eternal oscillation of the eye and the mouth, namely the centrality to it of the notion of touch. For it is through the logic of touch that Nancy thinks about separation, and also about the act of presentation that is at the origin of all art. Touching ‘Touch is proximate distance’, Nancy claims, and it is this paradox of contact and distance that makes touch so central to his thinking on art.23 His book Noli Me Tangere: On the Raising of the Body (2003) starts from an ekphrastic account of the depiction of a particular touch, but ultimately proposes a theory of touching as the primary structure of relationality – of the possibility of all relations. In it, Nancy explores the iconographic tradition of the ‘Noli me tangere’ in European painting, that is, depictions of the scene described in John 20:17, where Mary



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Magdalene encounters the newly risen Christ by his empty tomb. Mary reaches out to touch him but Christ recoils, saying ‘do not touch me’, although as Nancy points out, the original Greek expression is better translated as something like ‘do not try to hold on to me’. As he puts it, ‘Christ does not want to be held back, for he is leaving.’24 As elsewhere in his work, Nancy uses a scriptural instance as his basis, but this not a theological argument; rather, he uses the doubleness of the resurrected body to think through the doubleness of all contact, all presence, which is always also a withdrawal or departure. The risen Christ is both present and already gone, and to touch him with the touch Mary proposes – to try to hold on to him – is to refuse to acknowledge this withdrawal inherent in presence, and the temporal dimension of the touch, which is also its ethical dimension and indeed its condition of possibility: To touch him or to hold him back would be to adhere to immediate presence, and just as this would be to believe in touching (to believe in the presence of the present), it would be to miss the departing [la partance] according to which the touch and presence come to us. Only thus does the ‘resurrection’ find its nonreligious meaning. (p. 15)

Touch, for Nancy, must always be thought of with withdrawal, detachment, and letting go. For if it is not to congeal into identity and appropriation, it must entail or envisage a distance. After all, once touch becomes sticking and agglomeration, there is no longer touching of one thing or one being by another: Without this detachment, without this recoil or retreat, the touch would no longer be what it is, and would no longer do what it does … It would begin to reify itself in a grip, in an adhesion or a sticking … There would be identification, fixation, property, immobility. ‘Do not hold me back’ amounts to saying ‘Touch me with a real touch, one that is restrained, non-appropriating and non-identifying’. Caress me, don’t touch me. (p. 49)

The distinction between the touch as caress and the grip that threatens to hold back the risen Christ is what allows for distinction at all. For Nancy, the very possibility of relationality is contained in the structure of the touch, which is punctual, ‘non-appropriating’ – a presence that withdraws in the moment of its manifestation. For if it did not, it would be reduced to fixity, i­ncorporation, and sameness, rendering a relation impossible. Touch as he conceives it is a r­ elation predicated on a certain distance, on the ground of spacing or separation that is sense. This idea is developed elsewhere in connection with the founding gesture of art which, as we have seen, is an act of presentation, showing, or monstration. But it is striking in Nancy’s account that even before the making of a mark, the human being’s touch is itself a kind of showing, in that it creates this ‘distance of presentation’: For the first time, he touches the wall not as a support, nor as an obstacle or something to lean on, but as a place, if one can touch a place. Only as a place in which to let something of interrupted being, of its estrangement, come about. The

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rock wall makes itself merely spacious: the event of dimension and of the line, of the setting aside and isolation of a zone that is neither a territory of life nor a region of the universe, but a spacing in which to let come – coming from nowhere and turned towards nowhere – all the presence of the world.25

This, according to Nancy, is how we should interpret the negative or stencilled handprints that are the earliest known images made by humans: ‘The hand posed, pressed against the wall, grasps nothing. It is no longer a prehensile hand, but is offered like the form of an impossible or abandoned grasp. A grasp that could as well let go. The grasp of a letting go: the letting go of form’ (p. 72). Here, then, neither seeing nor hearing or speaking is at the origin of art. It is touch, as the creation of a space, the delineation of a distance of showing that is its foundation. In the same volume, Nancy develops this idea through the notion of the vestige. Following Thomas Aquinas, he lays out a distinction between what we might in other terms call iconic and indexical forms of sign, between the image and the vestige. For Aquinas, the world bears two kinds of marks of God’s presence. The first follows the logic of resemblance, man as imago Dei, made in God’s image. The second is the vestigial mode, the index that ‘represents only the causality of the cause, but not its form’ (Aquinas’ example is smoke as the effect of fire).26 And it is this second mode that defines art for Nancy, not the mode of mimetic resemblance. He argues that art has always been a kind of vestige, even when it was thought about in theological and/or mimetic terms: ‘Art is smoke without fire, vestige without God, and not presentation of the Idea. End of image-art, birth of vestige-art, or rather, coming into the light of day of this: that art has always been vestige’ (p. 96). Drawing attention to the meaning of the word vestigium as ‘footprint’, he returns to the idea of a gestural and temporal spacing that we saw in the touching of the cave wall.27 Art is the footprint of a passing that spaces and rhythms the world: ‘the step cuts a figure, but this figure is not an image … The step of the figure, or the vestige, is its tracing, its spacing’ (p. 98). Just as the touch of the hand opened up the space of showing, of the coming-to-presence of sense, so the step figures art as the trace of a gestural contact: ‘That art is today its own vestige, this is what opens us to it. It is not a degraded presentation of the Idea, nor the presentation of a degraded Idea; it presents what is not “Idea”: motion, coming, passage, the going-on of coming-to-presence’ (p. 98).28 What remains of art In the spirit of Nancy’s atheistic haptology, I would like to draw this discussion to a conclusion by looking at two works of art that might illuminate this notion of art as vestige. One is explicitly Christian and has a surface logic of resemblance. The other is a literalization of the logic of the vestige, of art as a gesture of showing. The first work is an early sixteenth-century painting of the Ascension by Juan de Flandes, held in the Prado, Madrid (Figure 27).29 In it, the



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27. Juan de Flandes, The Ascension (1514–19)

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Virgin and disciples cluster round a small hillock on which Christ’s footprints are left as he ascends towards heaven, his feet disappearing out of the top of the frame. These divine footprints can be understood very much in the light of Nancy’s account. They emerge from a contact which is always already a leaving – a touch ‘en partance’, in Nancy’s sense. Just as in the example of the ‘Noli me tangere’ scene, the fact of it being the divine body emphasizes the touch as the meeting of two modes of existence which are up against one another, but each of which constructs the other as beyond its limit. In this case, the print is the very interface between Christ’s incarnate body and his divinity which is always beyond, withdrawing from the carnal world. But the divinity of the being incarnated here is only an intensification of a generalized phenomenon which is not specific to the body of Christ. The choice of a theological example is not about elevating the ‘beyond’, the transcendent, the inexpressible, in this case to divine status. Rather it is the opposite. The very notion of a resurrected God is, according to Nancy, an account of the separation that runs through the world as conceived in Western culture. But it is a human notion, and that separation is not between this world and another, but within the world which we inhabit, ‘What “is not of this world” is not elsewhere: it is the opening in the world, the separation, the parting and the raising.’30 Such images made by contact – vestiges in the sense outlined above – have taken on a life of their own in modern and contemporary art, where casts, imprints, and traces of the body, or of other non-art objects abound.31 I will give just one example here from an artist who has continually explored this logic of the vestige, Giuseppe Penone (born 1947), and closely associated with the ‘Arte Povera’ movement. In Guanti (‘Gloves’), a pair of two colour photographs from 1972 (Figure 28), we see only Penone’s outstretched hands. Closer inspection reveals that on one hand he wears a fine latex ‘glove’, made from a mould of his other hand and turned inside-out, so that the concave lines of the hand have become convex ridges. Here, the gesture of spacing by touch is explored in the creation of a showing, a resemblance that touches the body, up against it in the most literal and concrete way and yet not it – distant from it by a barely perceptible displacement, the showing of a touch. This calls to mind the Nancean handprint on the cave wall: ‘the very reality of the real, detached from any use, impracticable, untreatable, even untouchable … an impalpable and impassive film on the surface of the rock: the rock itself is transfigured, surfaced, but still solid’.32 I have suggested elsewhere that modern vestigial or indexical forms such as Penone’s can be seen as a kind of last resort of representation that persists in modern art once ‘higher’ iconic or symbolic forms have been undermined or discredited.33 But what Nancy shows is that art is always and first a vestige or the trace of a contact. Such contact images are also a useful figure for the ekphrastic paradox I began with – the organization of signification around an absence. An imprint or vestige is produced by a contact that must end. The imprinted surface can only become visible once the contact that produced it is lost; it is organized in relation



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28. Giuseppe Penone, Guanti (1972)

to an absence. I mentioned above the danger that in thinking about signification as doubled by a non-signifying other, we romanticize that other as inaccessible truth or transcendence. And if we align the image unproblematically with the latter, then the ekphrastic encounter becomes a kind of eternal penance by which we vainly hope to move from purgatorial excluded contiguity to full presence. Nancy’s response to such a danger is bracing. The vestige is, he says, ‘not the imprint of knees but the trace of the step … Idolatry and iconoclasm have their place only in relation to the Idea.’34 Just as his account of art as vestige has no place for the Idea, his version of ekphrasis makes the deadlock of ekphrastic ambivalence into a virtue. It becomes the Oscillator that masks and at the same time, like the fetish, reveals the primary separation of sense as the ground of all existence. There is no Idea, no presence, only the movement of the renvoi, the trace of a passing touch. If Nancy’s account of touch and the vestige offers such a useful corrective to the danger of idolatry, it is not least in that it is horizontal, reliant on proximity and resolutely non-hierarchical. It does not propose writing as a bloodless or desiccated ‘pis-aller’, from which the ‘truth’ of ineffable being is always destined to escape. In Nancy’s thought, signification and presence, the readable and the visible are articulated in a relation of mutual touching and withdrawal which is lateral, metonymic, and works in both directions. If this is what Mitchell might term an ambivalent account of ekphrasis, it is not

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a ­relation of indifference. Rather, the signifying surface and its non-signifying other are turned towards one another in a non-appropriating embrace. Notes  1 See W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 152–3. Mitchell proposes three modes or ‘moments’ of thinking about ekphrasis: indifference, hope, and fear. Further references are included in the text.  2 Mitchell refers here particularly to Murray Krieger’s argument in Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992). See also Liliane Louvel, Poetics of the Iconotext, ed. Karen Jacobs, trans. Laurence Petit (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011).  3 See Chapters 9 (above) and 12 (below).  4 See for example Richard Wollheim, ‘What the Spectator Sees’, in Norman Bryson, Michael Ann Holly and Keith Moxey (eds), Visual Theory: Painting and Interpretation (Cambridge: Polity, 1991), pp. 101–50.  5 Peter Wagner, ‘Introduction: Ekphrasis, Iconotexts and Intermediality – the State(s) of the Art(s)’, in Peter Wagner (ed.), Icons–Texts–Iconotexts: Essays on Ekphrasis and Intermediality (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1996), p. 13.  6 Ibid., p. 33. Tilo Reifenstein’s contribution to this volume explores similar ground, arguing that text should be thought about as sharing sensuous dimensions with the image, notably through the graphic as a shared trait (Chapter 10, above).  7 Thomas Baldwin, The Picture as Spectre in Diderot, Proust, and Deleuze (Oxford: Legenda, 2011), p. 30.  8 Georges Didi-Huberman, Confronting Images: Questioning the Ends of a Certain History of Art, trans. John Goodman (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005), p. 158; translation modified.  9 Jean-Luc Nancy, Corpus, trans. Richard A. Rand (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), p. 11. 10 Ibid. 11 Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘Exscription’, in The Birth to Presence, trans. Brian Holmes et al. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), p. 338. Further references are included in the text. 12 Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘The Weight of a Thought’, in The Gravity of Thought, trans. François Raffoul and Gregory Recco (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1997), pp. 79–80. 13 Nancy is influenced by Hegel in this, notably by the latter’s view that art always involves a dialectic of ideal content and sensuous form, though Nancy rejects Hegel’s assertion that art will be superseded by philosophy as the expression of pure ideal content. For Nancy, himself a highly lyrical and literary writer, philosophy, insofar as it happens in and through language, can never be independent of its own sensuous form. See Nancy, ‘Portrait de l’art en jeune fille’, in Le Poids d’une pensée (SaintFoy and Grenoble: Griffon d’argile/Presses Universitaires de Grenoble, 1991), pp. 33–63. For a lucid general account of Nancy’s engagement with Hegel’s aesthetics, see Ian James, The Fragmentary Demand: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Jean-Luc Nancy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), pp. 206–20.



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14 An important phrase in Nancy’s lexicon is ‘en partance’: parting, separating, in the process of withdrawing. 15 Jean-Luc Nancy, The Ground of the Image, trans. Jeff Fort (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), p. 1. I will return later to the paradox of touching without contact. 16 James, The Fragmentary Demand, p. 227. 17 Jean-Luc Nancy, The Muses, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), p. 70. 18 Nancy dwells on framing here, and on the ways in which the image detaches itself from a background (un fond) and from things that are not images, things that are ‘Vorhanden’, ready-to-hand in the Heideggerian sense. The Ground of the Image, pp. 7–9. 19 Nancy, The Ground of the Image, p. 8. Further references are included in the text. 20 The French adds weight to such an interpretation, as the word for a bird-scarer, épouvantail, is stronger than its usual English translation ‘scarecrow’ in two senses. First, the word ‘épouvante’ means horror or terror and ‘épouvantail’ can also mean a spectre or haunting image of fear. Secondly, the absence of an object of the scaring (in English the crow), generalizes it, rendering the fear less circumscribed and leaving humans prey to it as well as birds. 21 There is no scope to do so here, but it would be interesting to examine this image in relation to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s notion of ‘faciality’, elaborated most fully in their A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (London: Athlone Press, 1988). 22 Nancy, The Ground of the Image, p. 75. 23 Nancy, The Muses, p. 17. 24 Jean-Luc Nancy, Noli Me Tangere: On the Raising of the Body, trans. Sarah Clift, Pascale-Anne Brault, and Michael Naas (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), p. 15. Further references are included in the text. 25 Nancy, The Muses, p. 75. Further references are included in the text. 26 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 1a, q.45, art. 7, cited in Nancy, The Muses, pp. 94–5. 27 He calls the foot ‘the opposite of the face’ (p. 97), the face being the site of divine resemblance. 28 Nancy makes this argument in the context of a discussion of Hegel and the idea of the ‘end of art’. 29 This way of depicting the ascension is relatively unusual, though several versions seem to have been produced in Spain and the Netherlands from the late fifteenth century. An early example, a late fifteenth-century altarpiece by Martín de Soria in the Francisco Godia collection, shows this scene in the upper panel above a lower panel depicting Pentecost. A version from around 1500 by Michel Sittow, a painter from Estonia working at the Spanish court, is in the National Gallery, London. A 1513 version by the German Hans Süss von Kulmbach in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York shows the feet disappearing but not the footprints. 30 Nancy, Noli Me Tangere, pp. 47–8. 31 Examples can be found in the work of Marcel Duchamp, Yves Klein, Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, Bruce Nauman, Rachel Whiteread, Pascal Convert, and Janine Antoni, to name only a few. For a fuller discussion of the contact-image in relation to Nancy’s

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thought, see Malt, ‘The Image in its Absence’, in Carla Taban (ed.), Meta- and ­Inter-Images in Contemporary Visual Art and Culture (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2013). 32 Nancy, The Muses, pp. 75–6. 33 See Malt, ‘Leaving Traces: Surface Contact in Ponge, Penone and Alÿs’, Word & Image, 29:1 (2013), 92–104 (p. 92). 34 Nancy, The Muses, pp. 98–9.

12

On gazers’ encounters with visual art: ekphrasis, readers, ‘iconotexts’1 Claus Clüver

Some twenty years ago, responding to the recent books on ekphrasis by Murray Krieger and James Heffernan, I presented a long conference paper entitled ‘Ekphrasis Reconsidered: On Verbal Representations of Non-Verbal Texts’ in which I proposed a rather radical revision of the concept of ‘ekphrasis’ underlying those earlier studies.2 Although reducing a concept to a single phrase without further commentary and explanation is always likely to lead to misunderstandings, it is correct to suggest that Heffernan’s position at the time is aptly summed up by his own catchy definition of ekphrasis as ‘the verbal representation of visual representation’.3 I accepted the first part of this phrase, and still do, but proposed a profoundly different formulation for the second, suggesting that the most appropriate and useful understanding of the concept of ‘ekphrasis’ could be condensed to ‘the verbal representation of a real or fictitious text composed in a non-verbal sign system or medium’.4 My criticism was triggered by the fact that Heffernan’s phrase, reinforced in the same year by W. J. T. Mitchell, reflected the traditional restriction of the objects of ekphrastic representation to visual representations of the phenomenal world in paintings, graphic works, or sculptures.5 The discourse was supported by the misconstrued Horatian phrase ut pictura poesis and the idea of the ‘sister arts’, buoyed by the ancient saying attributed to Simonides of Ceos that painting is silent poetry and poems, speaking pictures. Krieger had emphasized the contrasting view based on Leonardo da Vinci’s sense of a paragone among the arts with regard to their power of representation; he suggested that this rivalry tended to lean in favour of the poets, who could incorporate, as it were, the visual in the verbal text and add those qualities that it is easier for words to achieve than for painting. I had already dealt in earlier studies with verbal representations of images that were either highly abstract, ranging from Cubist art to the later paintings of Mondrian, or entirely non-representational, such as the Concrete art of Max Bill.6 By the end of the twentieth century, such works had

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been fully integrated into the narrative of the mainstream of Western culture and had resulted in verbal representation both in art-historical and in literary texts. But such texts were excluded from the established discourse on ekphrasis, as were poems or passages in narratives representing such architectural structures as bridges or cathedrals, since these structures did not represent objects in the phenomenal world. But there exists a genre of poems on architecture, in German called ‘Architekturgedichte’, equal to, though much smaller than, that of ‘Bildgedichte’ (poems on pictures, including sculptures). The German scholar Gisbert Kranz spent years collecting thousands of ‘Bildgedichte’ and writing a history and a theory covering the types, functions, and intended effects of such poems.7 Many of these would deal more with the artists and with the contexts of the creation and reception of their work. By no means all ‘Bildgedichte’ are ekphrastic, and many contain at best ekphrastic passages, which is why ‘Bildgedicht’ as understood by Kranz is not synonymous with ‘ekphrastic poem’. But Kranz included poems on non-representational images and also published a collection of ‘Architekturgedichte’.8 My own earlier studies of intersemiotic transposition, restricted to various forms of word–image relations, had led me to two publications by the Portuguese poet Jorge de Sena. His Metamorfoses (1963) consisted of nineteen poems on sculptures, paintings, photographs, and architectural interiors, and thus not all of them ‘visual representations’; his Arte de Música of 1968 was subtitled Trinta e duas metamorfoses musicais (Thirty-Two Musical Metamorphoses), and thus explicitly declared that it was an extension of the earlier project.9 The compositions it represented ranged from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, and some of the poems dealt more with specific composers than with their work; some were focused on performance, an aspect absent from poems on images. But I concluded that in function and largely also in form de Sena’s verbal representations of images and of music showed great similarities, which encouraged me to consider the Musikgedicht, when representing compositions by themselves or in performance, to be an ekphrastic genre.10 Reflections on verbal representations of dance reinforced my idea to fold these and similar texts into the summary definition cited at the outset and to use ‘ekphrasis’ as the overarching term. I thus hoped to expand the scope of scholarly examination to verbal texts representing creations composed in a range of other media, inviting comparisons and also distinctions in the manner of representation. Twenty years later I have come to realize that using ‘ekphrasis’ as the general term was making it less precise and also less functional, exactly because of the existence of a time-hallowed discourse concerning visual images as objects of ekphrastic representation. It was also unnecessary, because ‘verbal representation’, if defined and understood accordingly, is already an efficient general term covering this type of transposing non-verbal ‘medial configurations’ into the verbal medium, as distinct from ‘adaptation’, which denotes a different process of transposition and can have a great variety of media as source as well as target media.11 I have also realized that my use of the semiotics-based term ‘text’ for



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any complex sign in any sign system will always compete with ‘text’ as a label for verbal configurations. I was furthermore willingly drawn into the discourse on ‘intermediality’ which has since absorbed most ‘interarts studies’ where I had previously located my work in this area. I have therefore reformulated the brief version of my definition: Ekphrasis is the verbal representation of real or fictive configurations composed in a non-kinetic visual medium. This formulation requires explanatory comments, here kept very brief. ‘Verbal representation’ covers texts in any medium, written, spoken, sung, or electronically conveyed. The texts may be literary (entire poems or passages in poems, narratives, plays, libretti, or film scripts), critical, or (auto-)biographical, or serve still other functions.12 Ekphrastic representation consists in verbalizing aspects of images or sculptural or architectural configurations in ways that make these represented objects ‘clear and distinct’ to the mind without literally showing anything (with its reference to viewing the German ‘anschaulich’ conveys this textual quality more adequately).13 Other forms of verbal reference, such as citation by title (‘Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks’, ‘Michelangelo’s Pietà’) or allusion to genre, style, or subject (‘a late Gothic crucifixion’, ‘a Cubist still life’), do not constitute ekphrastic representations. Media are only accessible to experience as media products, or configurations.14 The range of visual media is large, especially if moving pictures or mixed and plurimedial media are included. But the analysis and interpretation of verbal representations of films, TV programmes, video games, and the like requires different considerations, terminologies, and methods than the discussion of ekphrastic representations of configurations in ‘non-kinetic’ visual media, of which there are many, with nowadays very porous boundaries.15 Alexander Calder’s mobiles may certainly be objects of ekphrastic texts, and so may many installations, earth works, and other complex configurations, some of which may require a performative or other interactive participation by viewers. Besides configurations known to exist, which therefore invite comparison with the ekphrastic text, there are many verbal representations of fictive paintings or other visual configurations, most frequently passages encountered in literary narratives. They usually refer to thematic, stylistic, or generic conventions familiar to the assumed readers, which will allow them to form a mental image. Besides these, there exist ekphrastic texts dealing with objects known to have existed but now lost, which makes it difficult to assess the relationship between text and image, and others that represent objects whose existence cannot be ascertained. John Hollander coined the label ‘notional ekphrasis’ to cover all of these possibilities; but it would not be intelligible without commentary, and so I have not included it in my brief definition.16 The second half of that definition avoids any reference to ‘visual representation’. Traditionally, definitions of ‘ekphrasis’ were restricted to artworks representing aspects of extra-artistic, phenomenal reality; before the twentieth century, that was all Western visual art would do. ‘Representational art’ was held to ‘depict’ what words would ‘describe’ – hence the idea of the paragone, the comparison of the

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power of representing objects in the phenomenal world. When the avant-garde revolutions produced artworks with no concerns for representing such objects at all, some critics spoke of ‘non-representational art’; but the term is misleading, because such art does ‘represent’ in a number of ways. We have learned to deal with the semiotic implications of forms and of the materials used and to construct meanings for Abstract Expressionist paintings and the Concrete work of Max Bill as a designer, painter, and sculptor. Also, cathedrals carry multiple meanings, and bridges certainly can be interpreted. But since ekphrastic texts do not necessarily foreground the representational aspects of highly abstract or non-figurative art I prefer to omit this quality of the objects represented from my brief definition, especially because the phrasing might be confusing.17 But such brief definitions tend to omit much more. They say nothing about the role of the reader of the text and the viewer of the image represented by the text, when one might argue that the observer’s gaze ought to be the central concern of the discourse on ekphrasis. This has at times been the case. Among American critics, Hollander extracted the phrase about ‘the gazer’s spirit’ from a poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley and made it the title of his own book on ekphrasis.18 And Mitchell focused on this quality in a very different approach. A more extensive and accurate definition should state that ekphrasis verbalizes perceptions of, or reactions to, characteristic features of visual configurations that actually exist, and that it will also suggest the perceived existence of such configurations in virtual, or fictive, reality and imply a viewer’s gaze at these objects. If the real or fictive image is the product of a visual encounter with the phenomenal world, the ekphrastic representation will usually suggest the producer’s way of representing that world according to the semiotic and cultural conventions of the age. This statement can be shown to apply even to a very short text by the Brazilian poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade (1902–87), published posthumously: Quadro I (Mondrian) Universo passado a limpo. Linhas tortas ou sensuais desaparecem. A cor, fruto de algebra, perdura. (Picture I (Mondrian). The universe made clean. / Crooked or sensuous lines disappear. / Color, the fruit of algebra, endures.)19

Drummond’s poem effectively verbalizes his view of Mondrian’s work during the final decades of his career, the paintings in which the materials have been reduced to a few straight horizontal and vertical black lines and usually one or two of the primary colours carefully placed as if by calculation against a clear background. These are the prominent characteristics shared by Mondrian’s paintings of the 1930s and early 1940s. The poem offers an informed reading of ‘a Mondrian’, but not of a specific painting: in a literary text, that would be very difficult to achieve for this kind of image, although an art-historical or critical text might do it. The poem is as reduced in its materials as the paintings to



Ekphrasis, readers, ‘iconotexts’241

which it refers by the collective title ‘Quadro I (Mondrian)’. Neither in the poem nor in the ‘picture’ it represents is there a reference to any detail of the extrapictorial world. But the poem’s first line, ‘Universo passado a limpo’, states in a highly condensed form that this art has a connection to the phenomenal world: it is an art of utmost abstraction. ‘Desaparecem’ in line 2 refers to a process, and so does ‘perdura’ in line 3. The poet, obviously drawing on information gleaned from elsewhere, perceives Mondrian as still engaged with the world of sensual, natural phenomena. As I read it, he is addressing a reader familiar with Mondrian’s work who is equally well informed. Minimal as it is, the poem conveys a sense of the poet’s encounter with what he reads as the record of the artist’s interpretation of ‘the universe’, and its very structure suggests Mondrian’s way of recording it. The idea that ekphrastic poems are the result of the poet’s encounter with visual works of art is neatly condensed into the title of Pedro Tamen’s 1995 collection of ekphrastic poems of his own, Depois de Ver (‘After Looking’). The poems are printed side by side with the images with which they engage. One poem presents various ways of verbalizing the process of abstraction which, as the poet sees it, Manuel Amado’s pictorial representation of a view of the sea in Janela para o Mar (‘Window to the Sea’, 1992; Figure 29) has already undergone.20 Tamen’s ‘Como se Constrói uma Casa’ (‘How to Build a House’)21 begins by offering these instructions: No princípio pega-se num mar que os olhos previamente transformaram num mar inexistente por fora da memória. Para tal, uma janela serve: desoculta e dá luz. Com essa luz depois é que se lava or ar. (1–8) (First get hold of a sea / which the eyes have earlier transformed / into a sea that does not exist / outside of memory. / For this, a window will do: / it reveals and gives light. / With this light later / the air is washed.)

We hear the voice of someone who has looked intensely at an image made up primarily of a representation of the two objects named in the painting’s title. But one of these objects is immediately removed into the imaginary realm. The window, which dominates the image, is made the starting point for the metaphorical construction of a house penetrated by ‘a haze of colour / which, once it floats among the things, / removes from our eyes / the splinter of the real’ (‘uma bruma de cor / que ao pairar entre as coisas / nos retira dos olhos / o cisco do real’ (11–14)). The reproduction of the upright oil painting (81 x 65 cm) shows the right side of an open window extending beyond the upper edge, with the shutter

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containing regularly placed slits opening out from the frame, and the actual window, cut off by the right edge of the image, opening inward at the same angle as the shutter. The window’s four glass panes are separated by thin strips of wood that continue the near-horizontal direction of the shutter’s slits. The two-level windowsill that dominates the lower fourth of the image forms two

29. Manuel Amado, Janela sobre o Mar (1992), reproduced in Tamen, Depois de Ver, p. 61



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wide diagonal bands leading at a low angle to the lower left corner. Below it on the right is a dark triangle representing the wall beneath the window; it extends upwards as a narrow dark band seen through the window panes. This dark vertical cum triangle firmly delimits the image on the right and is contrasted to the open light areas on the left. A more detailed, ‘objective’ description of the painting as one might read it in a scholarly study might be phrased as follows. The entire scene falls into clear geometric patterns. The upper two-thirds of the image are dominated by vertical shapes, with the slitted shutter forming the central rectangle. On its right-hand side are the vertical frame post and the rectangle of the open window. On its left-hand side is a slightly wider rectangle composed of sky and sea, cut off below by the diagonal of the windowsill. The portion of the painting representing the sky is somewhat larger than that representing the sea. Both are lightest around the straight horizon. Light falling from the left into the open space designates a bright, clearly marked pentagonal area, cutting at a high angle across the shutter and the bottom of the window which has its lower sides running parallel to the windowsill and on the left parallel to the bottom of shutter and window. There are no visible brush strokes on the window parts, which are white in the light and then different shades of grey and greenish grey in the shadow, where the colouring looks somewhat uneven. The sky changes colour to a faint blue towards the top. The sea appears to be treated to suggest a slightly rough surface, its blue darkening with tints of green towards the bottom. There is no trace of a human presence. While the painting’s title adequately names the scene represented, the overall visual impression is one of clean geometric shapes carefully organized in an asymmetrical, balanced arrangement of lines and using a limited palette of colours. It is this effect that the poem’s lines quoted so far emphasize, as they remove the possibility of seeing the image as a representation of ‘the real’. The third and fourth stanzas add to the scene walls and objects and glances of people that the image does not show and the words leave insubstantial. The final stanza opens with: E assim passou a ser uma casa de ausência não só de gente dentro, também de casa mesmo. (33–6) (And thus came into being / a house of absence / not only of people inside, / but also of the house itself.)

It refers to the house as ‘constructed / of paint and latency’ (‘construída / de tinta e latência’ (37–8)) and concludes with four rhymed phrases: Remundo exagerado, sono purificado,

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nada reformulado, Mondrian recheado. (43–5) (Reworld exaggerated, / sleep purified, / nothing reformulated, / Mondrian filled in.)22

Under this viewer’s intensive visual scrutiny, a pictorial scene that at first glance might remind us of some of Edward Hopper’s late views of the sea through a door or a window is verbally turned into an image somewhat resembling a Mondrian. The reading that the voice of the poem constructs for us may lead to a place we did not expect, but is likely to make us see that the image has indeed greater affinities to Mondrian’s much more radical abstractions than to the atmospheric studies of light and shadow in empty spaces habitually constructed by Hopper. As I read it, it is indeed the very last phrase, ‘Mondrian recheado’, which makes the preceding stanzas fully intelligible as verbal equivalents to the process of abstraction motivating the painter’s representation. The text contains practically nothing that has been ‘transposed’ from the image, and it is intended to be juxtaposed with a visual reproduction in order to make sense. My description above is perhaps a poor substitute, but the poem emphatically verbalizes a reading of the image, which is, in essence, the nature of all ekphrastic representation. The idea that the poets verbalize their encounter with the images they represent was thematized by the Swiss Eugen Gomringer in a poem he created in 2010 for publication, on a separate sheet, in a vertical folder containing seven sheets with designs by the graphic artist and sculptor Heinz-Günter Prager, in an edition of seven.23 The sheets measure 77 x 55.5 cm. The dark blue-grey

30. Heinz-Günter Prager, sieben begehren (2010), images 5 and 6



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cover has ‘PRAGER’ printed in black near the top and ‘sieben begehren’ (seven desires) near the bottom. The order of the untitled white sheets with the graphic designs is fixed. Each shows a black rectangle, all except the fourth vertical, of a different height, centred, the second and sixth narrow, the horizontal fourth and the vertical fifth nearly square (Figure 30). Each black shape contains from two to four freely drawn ovals that look like tilted circles, none of them touching, though all are directed towards each other in different ways. Some are wholly contained in the black shape while others are cut off by the edge. A stark contrast is formed by one or two clearly defined smaller white rectangles in each field which, because of the aquatint etching technique, appear to be resting on top of the loosely drawn ‘circles’, each in a different position. Each field thus contains an interplay between loose and rigidly defined forms, and the changing relations among the strictly sequenced variations can be read as a visual representation of what the folder’s title suggests as ‘seven forms of desire’. The sheet with the poem, which comes first, has ‘eugen gomringer’ near the bottom. The text consists of a title and of seven two-line stanzas, each beginning with ‘die sieben arten’ (the seven ways) and followed, in stanzas one to five, by a verb: ‘sich zu begegnen’ (to meet), ‘sich zu berühren’ (to touch), ‘sich zu begehren’ (to desire one another), ‘auseinanderzukreisen’ (to circle apart), and ‘loszulassen’ (to let go). Stanza six reads ‘the seven ways / to make it like prager’, and stanza seven, ‘the seven ways / to see it like gomringer’. The title reads: ‘the game of circles / with two with three with four’. das kreisspiel zu zweit, zu dritt, zu viert die sieben arten sich zu begegnen die sieben arten sich zu berühren die sieben arten sich zu begehren die sieben arten auseinanderzukreisen die sieben arten loszulassen die sieben arten es wie prager zu machen die sieben arten es wie gomringer zu sehen 24

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This text is a self-referential verbal expression of a poet’s interpretive encounter with visual configurations. The seven stanzas correspond to the seven sheets with graphic images and to their repetition with variations. But since there are only five verbs there seems to be no correspondence between the verbs and the untitled images. The verbs suggest a sequence from encounter to separation, with ‘sich begehren’ (to desire one another) representing a climax, but the fixed sequence of the non-figurative images does not follow such narrative logic. ‘Seeing it like Gomringer’ provided the title ‘sieben begehren’ on the cover of the folder, which, along with the poem, may direct the viewer’s response. But while it insists that these images demand interpretation, it also makes Gomringer’s way of seeing relative. This includes his way of seeing Prager’s manner of art making, which implies the idea of seeing and interpreting this particular work as part of the artist’s oeuvre. Not only in its statements, but emphatically in its formal structure and its naming of circles and circling the poem refers to the non-figurative visual work. Like Tamen’s poem, although for very different reasons, it requires to be received in its allotted space. But it cannot be understood as an intermedial transposition, even less so than ‘Como se Constrói uma Casa’. Theorists of intermedial relations, which are considered to cross borders separating media, have classified these relations either as media combinations or as intermedial references. When we restrict our view to word-and-image interactions, we encounter numerous ways in which texts, available in some audible or visual form or a combination of both, are combined with images, configurations of a variety of visual media. These can be either two- or three-­ dimensional still images or forms, or kinetic images, usually products of plurimedial media such as cinema or television. Examples of visual references to texts are book illustrations or sculptures of literary characters or scenes, such as Laokoön. References to images occur in many kinds of texts for many purposes. But there is also a tradition of constructing a third type of intermedial relation, and in particular of word-and-image interactions. The German term for this type is Medienwechsel (change of media), in English usually designated as intermedial transposition or transformation. Adaptation in all of its forms has often been classified as one major type of Medienwechsel. With regard to word-and-image relations, ekphrasis is widely considered as a prime instance of intermedial or intersemiotic transposition. That is how I have treated it in a number of studies.25 But theorists like Irina Rajewsky consider this a ‘genetic’ category, designating a process that in the end results in an intermedialer Bezug, or intermedial reference, from a product restricted to one single medium to configurations in another.26 In Rajewsky’s view, an ekphrastic text is the result of such a genetic process, a text in the verbal medium referring in numerous different ways to configurations in another, a visual one. The three poems we have considered so far all refer intensively to their respective sources of visual inspiration, but it would be difficult to consider them as the results of a process of intermedial transposition. They are not verbal



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reproductions or transformations of a visual source, but verbalizations of an encounter. The opposite is true of my own descriptions of the works by Amado and Prager, which attempted to convey in words what I saw in the reproductions, in order to give the reader some sense of the images without suggesting my reaction or interpretation – although my approach, which I called ‘objective’, may have been influenced not only by the task of making Tamen’s and Gomringer’s readings plausible, but also by the way the poets formulated these readings. The concept of a Medienwechsel applies indeed to my own descriptions, which were meant to offer verbal equivalents to what I perceived (as my mind filtered and organized the visual sense impressions). But, as Rajewsky’s theory predicts, these descriptions end up as verbal texts containing intermedial references. It appears questionable to make the concept of a Medienwechsel, of an intermedial transposition or, in the now fashionable but linguistically flawed neologism, a ‘transmediation’, the most salient characteristic of ekphrasis. It is this concept on which the traditional discourse has focused and which has led to the idea of a paragone. Instead, it seems best to focus on an ekphrastic text as the result of an encounter, of a viewer’s engagement with the object of an intensive gaze. The record left by a poet’s encounter will necessarily be different from that of a student of intermediality – less so, perhaps, because of a different sensibility and temperament but because they work with different objectives and certainly within different generic conventions and traditions. The student of intermediality is, of course, not usually engaged in producing the kind of readings I have offered here for the purpose of enabling the reader to create a clear and distinct mental image of the reproductions printed side by side with the poems. What does engage our interest is the response of two classes of readers, although this interest is often not adequately taken into account in theories of ekphrasis and of intermediality. There is the response of the gazer as it has been formulated within the conventions of various ekphrastic genres and the objectives they may serve. And there is the response, to some extent manipulated by the text, of its reader, which ought to be of at least equal interest as the writer’s interpretive gaze and his or her verbalization of it. Here, I can do no more than briefly deal with two rather different aspects of readers’ reactions. In some ekphrastic poems the voice we hear may be perceived both as the voice of the viewer contemplating the image and simultaneously as that of the visual artist vocalizing what he perceived and the manner in which he portrayed it. Such instances may induce the reader to approach the text as an intermedial translation, even though on the surface that may not be quite obvious. I have previously analysed a few poems where we may also hear the painter’s voice, most extensively Anne Sexton’s ‘The Starry Night’.27 Once the reader decides to read the text as a translation, the reading process will inevitably consist of a back-and-forth between text and (actually perceived or remembered) image. On the material level, the text remains a monomedial verbal construct referring in diverse ways, and possibly on several levels, to a configuration in a visual

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medium. But in terms of reader response criticism the reader engages with an intermedial translation both as a genetic process and as a product. In their essay ‘C. S. Peirce and Intersemiotic Translation’, João Queiroz and Daniella Aguiar quote Haroldo de Campos’s statement that (intramedial) ‘translation is a privileged form of critical reading’ that will lead to ‘an understanding of the most profound workings of the artistic text’,28 and they insist that this view also applies to translation across media boundaries.29 Reading ekphrastic texts as translations, where appropriate, is the most extreme form of approaching such texts as intermedial transpositions or, as Lars Elleström prefers, ‘transformations’.30 At the opposite end is the engagement with ‘the gazer’s spirit’ as manifest in texts, primarily but not exclusively lyric poems, that may refer to images even without transposing them. The other aspect involving readers’ reactions appears on the surface to be concerned with a concept concerning texts and not their reception. It has been more extensively explored in connection with the use of ekphrasis in literary narratives, which present fictive visual images at least as frequently as existing ones, in a great variety of ways and for many different functions and effects determined by the nature of the narrative. They occur as ekphrastic passages in prose narratives but also in such forms as Robert Browning’s rhymed ‘dramatic monologues’. They may be rendered by an extra-diegetic narrator or as the perceptions of intra-diegetic figures in accordance with their characterization in the text. Like ekphrastic poems, such passages may embellish or subvert the visual images and are not bound by rules of fidelity. George Perec’s Un cabinet d’amateur: histoire d’un tableau (1979) is a meticulous documentation by means of an exhibition review, the owner’s autobiography, a scholarly thesis, and excerpts from auction catalogues of the art collection of a self-made GermanAmerican millionaire brewer, Raffke, with questionable taste but expert advisers, and of its lucrative dispersal in two auctions.31 On the final page we are informed that the works, many by famous artists, as well as the documentation of their provenance, were all intentionally produced fakes – and so was the entire story with its intricate facts and several minute descriptions. A recent counterpart in a very different vein is Barbara Shapiro’s 2012 novel The Art Forger, a first-person account by a young artist paid to secretly copy a fictive Degas painting included in the real 1990 theft of artworks from the Gardner Museum in Boston, worth millions of dollars and yet to be recovered.32 Her perfect copy is discovered on its way to India and restored to the museum as the real work, until she herself unmasks the fraud and is made to prove her ability to produce such work. This is all part of a complicated thriller that includes descriptions of paintings and drawings and copying techniques in a world of museums and galleries, the art market, collectors, forgeries, and duped experts. Among the many ways in which novelists have presented their own reading of the work of individual painters, often informed by a substantial knowledge of its art-historical contexts, I shall highlight only a few exhibited in



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­ nglish-language novels published in recent decades. Some concentrate on an E individual painting, real or fictitious, with the ekphrastic passages frequently given to viewers who have some connection to the works observed. Here are two contrasting approaches. The painting analysed in detail in Michael Frayn’s Headlong (1999) is suspected by the protagonist to be the missing sixth painting from Pieter Brueghel’s series ‘The Months’, each of the surviving five representing two. He establishes its identity by comparing it to the other works in the series and drawing on much art-historical information, careful to keep his suspicions and his findings from the owners of the anonymous work which he attempts to acquire before its real value is known. He succeeds, but the painting goes up in smoke in a car crash in the end.33 Tracy Chevalier’s Girl with a Pearl Earring (1999) deals with a real painting and relates its creation as experienced and observed by the work’s fictional model, a servant in Vermeer’s house who secretly assists the master in his work and narrates her story well after she has left her service.34 The work’s origin may have been a discrepancy perceived by the novelist between the depicted girl and the precious jewel she is shown to wear – the relations of the servant girl to the pearl earring are thematized until the very end. Rendering the image of the painter’s private life, of his artistic activity, and of the vicissitudes of his professional career as seen through the eyes of an unusually sensitive girl from a different social background is an unusual way of portraying an artist and his world. Other writers have used more conventional strategies to achieve this task, often by creating the artist’s own fictionalized account, thus assigning their own reading of the works (supported by substantial research) to the voice of the artist. Susan Vreeland based her 2002 novel The Passion of Artemisia on the recent rise in the reputation of Artemisia Gentileschi as a major painter of her time and used the known facts of her life to have the artist relate her own experiences along with descriptions of her work.35 Equally fictive but based on ascertainable facts and illustrated with several of his paintings are the lost diaries of Frans Hals extensively quoted in Michael Kernan’s novel of the same title (1994), which contrasts the world of Hals with that of the graduate student who finds and ‘authenticates’ the diary in New York.36 Ali Smith’s novel How to be Both (2014) takes place both in the 1460s and 450 years later and centres on two works by Francesco del Cossa: his St Vincent Ferrer in London’s National Gallery and his frescoes for the Hall of Months in the Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara.37 The first part of the novel focuses on a modern adolescent girl called George who becomes fascinated with these works by del Cossa, which are described mostly through her eyes, and with the dearth of information about the painter. Her encounters with the works are mostly placed in the context of her relations with her deceased mother. The second part is presented in the voice of the artist, a woman who has adopted a man’s clothes and identity and relates her life, including her training and work as a painter, and who is present in her paintings even now, witnessing George’s attachment to her/his St Vincent. Ali Smith’s novel is the latest and

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most unusual book in the long line of Künstlerromane reaching back into the eighteenth century, many of which are traditionally presented as a sub-genre of the Bildungsroman, the traditional ‘novel of education’. Verbal representations such as the many forms in which the works of del Cossa are set before the reader in How to be Both, just like verbal representations of the performance of a song or a symphony, a ballet or a high-wire act, a play or a film, create what we call ‘images’ of visual, aural, kinetic or performatic phenomena in the reader’s, viewer’s, or listener’s mind. Many of Rajewsky’s investigations, elaborating on the work of Werner Wolf and others, are dedicated to ways in which intermedial references are brought about.38 But there is a still different view of the nature, if not the materiality, of verbal texts representing, evoking, or referring to, visual images. Taking over the term ‘iconotext’39 and working primarily with passages found in literary narratives, Liliane Louvel has over the past two decades been engaged in developing what she calls a ‘poetics of the iconotext’, staying shy of labelling it a theory. Large portions of two of her books were conflated and published in English (belatedly) in 2011 under exactly that title,40 a year after she had published her third book on the topic, Le Tiers pictural: Pour une critique intermédiale.41 Any reduction of such intensive work drawing on a rich array of theoretical and critical sources and referring to a wide range of visual images and literary passages to a few paragraphs risks not only oversimplification but also distortion. I will state only those of her basic concerns and findings, as I understand them, that I will need in order to ask a few questions regarding the nature as well as the limitations of her understanding of ekphrasis and iconotexts, and then to inquire into the relation of that concept to the concept of intermedial reference as developed by Wolf, Rajewsky, and others. In particular, I shall introduce considerations of reader reception into our understanding of these two concepts. Louvel uses the metaphor of ‘saturation’ to indicate the special nature of ‘iconotexts’, which are texts ‘saturated’, to a lesser or greater degree, with ‘the pictorial’. Its presence is indicated by certain ‘markers’, which may either be explicit and present in the text as such, producing a direct citational effect; may be clearly acknowledged and asserted by the author in his or her correspondence, critical essays, etc.; or may be indirectly, and yet undeniably, encoded in the text. 42

In an essay called ‘Nuances du pictoral’43 Louvel identified seven ‘increasing degrees of pictorial saturation’, here listed in their English translation in Poetics: the painting-effect (no direct reference to painting in general or to a particular painting) the picturesque view the hypotyposis (‘convertibility of saying into seeing’ [Louis Marin]: ‘Picture the scene’; suggesting enargeia) the (literary) tableau vivant



Ekphrasis, readers, ‘iconotexts’251 the aesthetic arrangement (e.g., Katherine Mansfield, ‘Bliss’: evocation of a still life) the pictorial description the ekphrasis 44

Texts exhibiting any of these degrees of ‘pictorial saturation’ are ‘iconotexts’ in Louvel’s usage. They incorporate ‘the pictorial’ in such a way that they are received by the reader as neither purely verbal text nor purely image, but rather as a fusion of the two into a third kind of text, ‘le tiers pictural’. Any reader aware of the markers will receive an iconotext as such a fused entity, a ‘texte/image’ involving a ‘double perception: voir et lire double’.45 A concept that suggests the existence of a special kind of text raises a series of questions. The first concerns its mode of existence. It is not an instance of Medienkombination. Materially, it is a purely verbal text. But the pictorial is so indelibly encoded in it (to change the metaphor) that any reader aware of the markers will inevitably perceive text and (a more or less clearly defined) image simultaneously. The fusion occurs in the reader’s mind in the act of reading. What are the extent and delimitation of such texts? Louvel’s seven categories, which are again employed in Le Tiers pictural, are found only in literary texts, as we commonly understand ‘literary’. In fact, Louvel’s discussion is restricted to narrative fiction. And ‘the pictorial’ stands for ‘images’, for pictorial representations by two-dimensional objects ranging from paintings to graphic works to tapestries and photos and even mirrors. She does not discuss sculptures or entire architectural structures, and it is not clear from her account whether the set of textual references would have to be modified for poetic iconotexts.46 The reference to the pictorial at any of the degrees of saturation in a literary text will create an image in the reader’s ‘inner eye’ by a process of ‘allusion’ that will result in a ‘double vision’ that Louvel compares to the ‘double exposure’ in photography, except that in the ‘texte/image’ the reader experiences a simultaneous exposure to two media.47 She contrasts this allusive quality in literary texts with the precision of the description of images in critical or art-historical writings, which will not generate this double vision. Ekphrasis, the ultimate degree of the fusion of the textual with the (representational) iconic, is again reduced to a purely literary category. The concept of the ‘iconotext’ as it has been promoted by others than Louvel, most notably Peter Wagner, is much ampler and vaguer than ekphrasis and covers instances of media combination as well as intermedial reference. If we were to accept the term ‘iconotext’ in a more restricted sense of covering textual references to and representations of visual configurations without the idea of the saturation of a verbal text with ‘the pictorial’ to the point of a fusion, would we not then have to ask whether verbal representations of a film or the cinema, of a musical composition or its performance, or of a dance should deserve their own labels? Given the disagreements among the proponents of the term ‘iconotext’, which has probably prevented it from becoming more current, a multitude of such labels could hardly be useful.

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Louvel’s investigations into the factors that trigger readers’ responses to allusions to the pictorial in narrative fiction, which necessarily rely heavily on phenomenology, are not very distant from the theoretical investigations into intermediale Bezüge, the category of intermedial reference where scholars like Rajewsky and Wolf have placed ekphrasis among many other forms.48 Their efforts at systematizing the kinds of references from configurations in one medium to another, or to configurations in another medium, and the ways in which these references are encoded, tend to be focused on the media product and not its reception. In the specific instance of textual references to images, these theories usually do not include a reflection on the reader’s performance, on how the verbal clues are processed to result in a mental image of a visual configuration. Do these theories also permit us to think that the clues embedded in the text result in a double perception? An adequate theory of reader reception would guide an analysis of an ekphrastic text to consider not only how we are led to remember a known image or to construct a forgotten or fictive one in our minds, but how the text makes us construct the viewer’s gaze that has shaped the way in which the image is verbally conveyed – or how readers are made aware that they are confronted with a representation filtered by the viewer’s perception of the image. This may not be of critical interest for all kinds of intermedial reference, but is certainly important for the reception of literary ekphrases.49 Whose voice do we hear in Anne Sexton’s ‘Starry Night’, and how do we respond to the possibilities offered by the text? How does a reader construct and then process the difference in the way del Cossa’s St Vincent is represented in How to be both when seen through the eyes of the modern girl George and when verbalized by its fictionalized creator in her/his autobiographical account? Theories about modes of reference should be attentive to this double reception – which is not the same as the double perception of Louvel’s ‘iconotext’. What I have presented here leads to a significantly extended version of the one-line definition I offered at the outset: Ekphrasis is an enargetic representation of non-kinetic visual configurations as semiotic objects. It verbalizes a real or fictive viewer’s perceptions of, or reactions to, characteristic features of configurations that actually exist, or suggests the perceived existence of such configurations in virtual, or fictive, reality. Its materials are purely verbal. It produces a mental image of configurations in a non-kinetic visual medium, making them anschaulich without literally showing anything. It implies a viewer’s gaze at these objects; if they are the product of an encounter with the phenomenal world, it suggests the producer’s way of representing that world according to the semiotic and cultural conventions of the age. Ekphrasis is a parallel procedure to verbal representations of configurations in other than non-kinetic visual media, including such a kinetic visual medium as film. Many but by no means all instances of ekphrasis can be read as intermedial transpositions. As literary texts, ekphrases can be free-standing or integrated as ekphrastic passages in other texts, including plays, libretti, and filmscripts. There are many kinds of markers that compel the attentive reader to receive certain verbal texts as



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ekphrastic – depending on the concept of ekphrasis accepted in the respective interpretive community. The present definition may persuade those who read it now, but as a cultural construct it is bound to change.50 Notes  1 This chapter elaborates and modifies aspects of my essay on ‘Ekphrasis and Adaptation’, in Thomas Leitch (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Adaptation Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 459–76), with which it therefore shares a number of theoretical considerations.  2 Claus Clüver, ‘Ekphrasis Reconsidered: On Verbal Representations of Non-Verbal Texts’, in Ulla-Britta Lagerroth, Hans Lund, and Erik Hedling (eds), Interart Poetics: Essays on the Interrelations between the Arts and Media (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997), pp. 19–33. See Murray Krieger, Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992); and James A. W. Heffernan, Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993).  3 Heffernan, Museum, p. 3.  4 Clüver, ‘Ekphrasis Reconsidered’, p. 26.  5 W. J. T. Mitchell, ‘Ekphrasis and the Other’, in Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 152.  6 Cf. note 25, below.  7 Gisbert Kranz, Das Bildgedicht, 3 vols (Cologne: Böhlau,1981–87).  8 Kranz, Das Architekturgedicht (Cologne: Böhlau, 1988).  9 Jorge de Sena, Metamorfoses, 1963; Arte de Música, 1968, in Obras de Jorge de Sena: Poesia II, 2nd edn, curated by Mécia de Sena (Lisbon: Edições 70, 1988), pp. 51–212. 10 Cf. Claus Clüver, ‘The Musikgedicht: Notes on an Ekphrastic Genre’, in Walter Bernhart, Steven P. Scher, and Werner Wolf (eds), Word and Music Studies: Defining the Field (Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1999), pp. 187–204. 11 The Greek verb ἐκφράζειν refers to a verbal activity. For etymological and historical reasons, but also as a practical matter, such terms as ‘musical ekphrasis’ or ‘filmic (cinematic) ekphrasis’ should not be admitted if they are used to designate musical or filmic representations of visual configurations: if used broadly to designate any kind of intermedial transposition, the term ‘ekphrasis’ will become redundant and useless. 12 In her contribution to the present volume (Chapter 9, above), Liliane Louvel has identified in the writings of Stanley Spencer seven types of ekphrasis according to their functions, and refers to functional categories of ekphrasis proposed by Laura M. Sager Eidt and, earlier, by Ernest Gilman. 13 Ancient rhetoric insisted on the quality of ἐνάργεια (enargeia), in Latin perspicuitas, to be present in ekphrasis. Usually rendered in German as Anschaulichkeit, it is a term difficult to translate into English; the usual ‘clear and distinct’ as equivalent to ‘enargetic’ does not render the visual implication of the German anschaulich; cf. Claus Clüver, ‘Quotation, Enargeia, and the Functions of Ekphrasis’, in Valerie Robillard and Els Jongeneel (eds), Pictures Into Words: Theoretical and Descriptive Approaches to Ekphrasis (Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1998), pp. 35–52. 14 For the purposes of the present investigation it is not necessary to define ‘medium’ more precisely than as a means of communication conveying a message from (a)

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sender(s) to (a) receiver(s) via (a) technical medium/a in accordance with conventions accepted by a culture at a particular historical moment. 15 Heffernan bundles ‘Ekphrasis in Prose Fiction and Cinematic Ekphrasis’ together and discusses at length Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman as an example of both; see James A. W. Heffernan, ‘Ekphrasis: Theory’, in Gabriele Rippl (ed.), Handbook of Intermediality: Literature–Image–Sound–Music (Berlin and Boston, MA: Walter de Gruyter, 2015), pp. 45–7. As I read it, his analysis of the fictional representation of film makes my point that this kind of representation should be separated from representations of non-kinetic visual representations. The label ‘cinematic ekphrasis’ is here as misleading as is the use of the same label to designate the filmic representation of visual configurations (cf. note 11 above). 16 John Hollander, ‘The Poetics of Ekphrasis’, Word & Image, 4:1 (1988), 209–17. 17 In his introductory essay to the ‘Ekphrasis’ section in Gabriele Rippl’s 2015 Handbook Heffernan still insisted on calling ekphrasis ‘the verbal representation of visual representation’ and highlighted exactly the representational implications of ‘abstract art’ by analysing a reading of a Jasper Johns painting by Leo Steinberg; he continued restricting ekphrasis to graphic art and sculpture. See Heffernan, ‘Ekphrasis: Theory’, in Rippl (ed.), Handbook, pp. 35–49; see also his earlier essay ‘Ekphrasis, Art Criticism, and the Poetry of Art’, in Ole Karlsen (ed.), Krysninger: Um moderne nordisk lyrikk (Oslo: Unipub forlag, 2008), pp. 24, 29–31. David Kennedy has queried this restrictive focus on representation, arguing that it does not account for more recent developments in critical theory, or postmodern ekphrases that engage with visual configurations in which ‘representation’ is of little or no concern (see The Ekphrastic Encounter in Contemporary British Poetry and Elsewhere (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), esp. pp. 9–10). 18 John Hollander, The Gazer’s Spirit: Poems Speaking to Silent Works of Art (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995); cf. Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci in the Florentine Gallery’, rpt. in Hollander, Spirit, pp. 143–4. 19 Carlos Drummond de Andrade, ‘Quadro I (Mondrian)’, in Farewell (Rio de Janeiro: Record, 1996), p. 35. 20 This is the title used by the artist in giving his permission to reproduce the image. 21 Pedro Tamen, ‘Como se Constrói uma Casa’, in Depois de Ver (Lisbon: Quetzal Editores, 1995), p. 60. 22 Quotations authorized by the poet. 23 Heinz-Günther Prager and Eugen Gomringer, sieben begehren, portfolio with 8 sheets, 77 x 55.5 cm (Rehau: institut für konstruktive kunst und konkrete poesie, 2010), edition of 7. Rpt. in Annette Gilbert (ed.), nichts für schnell-betrachter und bücherblätterer: Eugen Gomringers Gemeinschaftsarbeiten mit bildenden Künstlern (Bielefeld: Kerber, 2015), pp. 207–11. 24 Eugen Gomringer, ‘das kreisspiel: zu zweit, zu dritt, zu viert’, in Gilbert (ed.), nichts für schnell-betrachter, p. 208. Quotation authorized by the poet. 25 Besides those already listed (Clüver, ‘Ekphrasis Reconsidered’; ‘Quotation, Enargeia’; ‘The Musikgedicht’), see the earlier ‘Painting Into Poetry’, Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature, 27 (1978), 19–34, and ‘On Intersemiotic Transposition’, Poetics Today, 10:1 (1989), 55–90. 26 So in Irina O. Rajewsky, ‘Border Talks: The Problematic Status of Media Borders in the Current Debate about Intermediality’, in Lars Elleström (ed.), Media Borders,



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Multimodality and Intermediality (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 51–68 (esp. pp. 55–6). 27 See Clüver, ‘On Intersemiotic Transposition’, pp. 62–68; see also Clüver, ‘Painting Into Poetry’, ‘Ekphrasis Reconsidered’, and ‘Ekphrasis and Adaptation’. The initial lines of Tamen’s poem seemed to me to have this double identity of the poet’s and the artist’s voice; but the final lines definitely excluded that possibility, especially the phrase ‘Mondrian recheado’. The poem cannot be read as a translation. 28 Haroldo de Campos, ‘Translation as Creation and Criticism’, trans. Diana Gibson and Haroldo de Campos, in Novas: Selected Writings, ed. Antonio S. Bessa and Odile Cisneros (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2007), p. 325. 29 João Queiroz and Daniella Aguiar, ‘C. S. Peirce and Intersemiotic Translation’, in Peter P. Trifonas (ed.), International Handbook of Semiotics (Dordrecht: Springer, 2015), pp. 201–15, quotation on p. 207. 30 Lars Elleström, Media Transformation: The Transfer of Media Characteristics Among Media (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). 31 Georges Perec, Un cabinet d’amateur: histoire d’un tableau (Paris: Balland, 1979). 32 B. A. Shapiro, The Art Forger (Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2012). 33 Michael Frayn, Headlong (London: Faber & Faber, 1999). 34 Tracy Chevalier, Girl with a Pearl Earring (London and New York: Penguin, 1999). 35 Susan Vreeland, The Passion of Artemisia (New York: Viking, 2002). 36 Michael Kernan, The Lost Diaries of Frans Hals (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994). 37 Ali Smith, How to Be Both (New York: Pantheon Books, 2014). 38 See, for example, Werner Wolf, The Musicalization of Fiction: A Study in the Theory and History of Intermediality (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999). 39 For a broader definition of the term that precedes Louvel’s use and includes references to earlier uses see Peter Wagner’s ‘Introduction’ to the essay collection he edited, Icons–Texts–Iconotexts: Essays on Ekphrasis and Intermediality (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1996), pp. 15–17. 40 Liliane Louvel, Poetics of the Iconotext, ed. Karen Jacobs, trans. Laurence Petit (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011). For an extensive discussion, see my review of the book in H-France Review 12 (2012): www.h-france.net/vol12reviews/vol12no161cluver. pdf. 41 Louvel, Le Tiers pictural: Pour une critique intermédiale (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2010). 42 Louvel, Poetics pp. 89–90. 43 Louvel, ‘Nuances du pictoral’, Poétique, 126 (April 2001), 175–89. 44 Louvel, Poetics, pp. 90–9. 45 Louvel, Le Tiers pictural, p. 240. 46 But there is a long exploration of the façade of a building described in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights in Louvel’s Tiers pictural, pp. 118–34. 47 In Le Tiers pictural (p. 251) Louvel discusses the term as applied in Tamar Yacobi, ‘Ekphrastic Double Exposure: Blake Morrison, Francis Bacon, Robert Browning, and Fra Pandolfo as Four-in-One’, in Martin Heusser et al. (eds), On Verbal / Visual Representation: Word & Image Interactions 4 (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2005), pp. 219–27, where it refers to ‘texts which simultaneously evoke – montage

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fashion – a number of discrete visual sources’, in an allusion ‘to photographic doubletake’ (p. 219; my emphasis). 48 Beginning with Irina O. Rajewsky, Intermedialität (Tübingen: Francke, 2002), and recently again in Werner Wolf, ‘Intermedialität: Konzept, literaturwissenschaftliche Relevanz, Typologie, intermediale Formen’, in Volker C. Dörr and Tobias Kurwinkel (eds), Intertextualität, Intermedialität, Transmedialität: Zur Beziehung zwischen Literatur und anderen Medien (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2014), pp. 11–45. 49 Kennedy has made this a principal concern in The Ekphrastic Encounter. 50 In a recent essay I substantially expanded my demonstration that Heffernan’s theoretical restrictions, questionable from the outset, are no longer viable, although prominently featured in Rippl’s Handbook. I emphasized instead the position developed by David Kennedy in the same volume (Kennedy, ‘Ekphrasis and Poetry’, in Rippl (ed.), Handbook, pp. 82–91). See Clüver, ‘A New Look at an Old Topic: Ekphrasis Revisited’, Todas as Letras – Revista de Lingua e Literatura (Universidade Mackenzie, São Paulo, Brazil) 19:1 (2017), 30–44 (http://editorarevistas.mackenzie.br/index. php/tl/article/view/10365/6406).

Afterword James A. W. Heffernan

This volume freshly demonstrates that ekphrasis is probably the most Protean of all critical terms we have. Some years ago, I argued that for the sake of critical utility, it should be used to denote a particular kind of writing: poetry or prose about works of visual art, or the verbal representation of visual representation. But I must admit that visual art has nothing directly to do with the earliest known definition of ekphrasis, which comes to us from Ailios Theon of Alexandria, generally assigned to the first century of our era, who defined ekphrasis simply as a way of describing just about anything visible. Since Theon’s definition is quoted nowhere in this volume (though Richard Meek refers to Theon in his essay on Kyd), I quote it here, transliterated from the Greek: Ekphrasis esti logos periegematikos, enargos hup’ upsin agon to deloumenon. (Ekphrasis is exhibitionistic [literally ‘leading around’] speech, vividly leading the subject before the eyes.)1

By this definition, the Spanish General’s vivid description of two armies in Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy is indeed ‘a notable example of ekphrasis’, as Meek calls it. On the other hand, as this volume repeatedly shows, nearly all critical discussions of ekphrasis – or critical applications of the term – situate it in the inexhaustibly fertile borderlands between literature and visual art. Here it embraces far more than the particular kind of prosopopeia that Jean Hagstrum once assigned to it when, tracing the word to its Greek roots ek (out) and phrazein (tell, declare, pronounce), he argued that it should be used to denote poetry that makes the silent work of visual art ‘speak out’.2 To launch her essay on Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece, Rachel Eisendrath cites a perfect example of such envoicing in Pietro Aretino’s description of Titian’s lost painting of the Annunciation, where the mouth of the angel Gabriel is said to be uttering ‘Ave’ – presumably without the aid of an inscribed scroll or banderole such as Richard Meek considers in his essay on Kyd (and is also shown here in the Roundel with Annunciation to the Virgin

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(Figure 5)). But this volume, which considers ekphrasis as above all a moment of fruitful encounter between word and image, stretches the term to include almost any kind of interaction between the two, including (for instance) ‘postmodern works of art that combine words and images’, as the editors say in the introduction, or paintings inspired by the reading of texts, as Liliane Louvel’s essay on Stanley Spencer explains. The latter category, one of seven that Louvel enumerates, comes very close to making ekphrasis include illustration, which is of course not a kind of writing but a kind of depiction: visual representation of verbal representation. Yet in explaining how Matthew Arnold’s elegy ‘Thyrsis’ (1866) inspired Hamo Thornycroft’s sculpture of The Mower (1884), Jane Thomas finds this process exemplifying ‘reverse ekphrasis’.What then should we make of the Proteus that ekphrasis seems to have become? Though my own approach to ekphrasis has been faulted for its overemphasis on antagonism between image and word, these essays demonstrate that the concept of ekphrasis as encounter opens it up to a stimulatingly wide range of approaches. Nevertheless, it is not clear that all encounters must be harmonious, for like the biblical Jacob, the writer engaged in ekphrastic encounter may now and then, at least, end up wrestling with the angel of visual art. A further problem is that when ekphrasis is made to include not just various kinds of writing but also various kinds of visual art, it may lose some of its edge as an instrument of critical analysis. Some twenty-five years after defining ekphrasis as the verbal representation of visual representation, I have come to see the limits of this definition. Putting his finger on one of them, Claus Clüver plausibly argues that ekphrasis should be made to include writing about non-representational painting and sculpture as well as architecture. But he unwittingly alludes to another arbitrary restriction when he defines ekphrasis as ‘the verbal representation of real or fictive configurations composed in a non-kinetic visual medium’. Must that visual medium be non-kinetic, as I myself presumed in my original definition? Must visual art always be ‘still’ in both senses – silent and unmoving – as Keats famously wrote of his unravished urn? Unfortunately, or rather fortunately, the history of art never stands still, and a few years ago in my own native city of Boston, Massachusetts, USA, the Museum of Fine Arts exhibited a would-be ‘still life’ called Pomegranate by the Israeli artist Ori Gersht (Figure 31).3 When examined for more than a few seconds, this digital picture of a pomegranate, a cabbage, and pumpkin turns out to be a high-definition film of the pomegranate struck by a bullet and then exploding its seeds in slow motion. As this picture shows, art endlessly challenges our capacity to define it, to systematize it, to theorize about it. Soon after encountering Gersht’s kinetic painting, I was asked to participate in a conference on fictional cinema: descriptions of imaginary films in novels such as Manuel Puig’s Kiss of the Spider Woman, wherein one prisoner diverts another by reciting the plots of invented films. Until this conference came along, I had never thought that films could be objects of ekphrastic representation, but since films are plainly works of visual representation, I see no reason to exclude them, and I have since published an essay on what I call ‘cinematic ekphrasis’,4



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31. Ori Gersht, digital film still from Pomegranate (2006)

which might be added to the seven types of ekphrasis enumerated by Louvel or the nineteen types that Jerzy Jarniewicz finds in the poetry of Derek Mahon. Who’s counting, after all? Or do we even need to count? Rather than counting, it might be helpful to consider the usefulness of one basic critical distinction in the history of ekphrasis. On one hand, as I noted above, ekphrasis was originally defined as writing – or rather speech – that is vividly descriptive, that makes no reference to visual art but nonetheless aims to help us visualize an object as clearly as possible. By the fifth century of our era, ekphrasis had come to signify the description of visual art, but the original meaning never died. The best evidence for its survival is the work of the late Murray Krieger, who published the first notable book on it – Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign – in 1992. Since Kennedy and Meek have much to say about Krieger in their immensely informative Introduction, I will confine myself to one simple point. Though Krieger approvingly cites Leo Spitzer’s definition of ekphrasis as ‘the poetic description of a pictorial or sculptural work of art’,5 Krieger’s book has very little to say about poetry that represents such works. Instead, he treats ekphrasis chiefly as the verbal counterpart of visual art: ‘word‑painting’. As ‘the sought-for equivalent in words of any visual image, in or out of art’, it ‘include[s] every attempt, within an art of words, to work toward the illusion that it is performing a task we usually associate with an art

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of natural signs’.6 Ekphrasis thus gratifies our lust for natural signs – for the immediate presence of the object signified – by defying the ‘arbitrary character and … temporality’ of language (p. 10). It offers us a verbal icon, ‘the verbal equivalent of an art object sensed in space’ (p. 9). For Krieger, then, visual art remains a part of ekphrasis, but rather than serving as an object of representation, visual art may be simply a model of representation. In the latter case, the ekphrastic writer aims to do with words something very like what the visual artist does with images. But the writer’s chief object is just what it was for Theon’s budding rhetorician: to represent visual objects as vividly as if they were ‘objects sensed in space’ that we could walk around and see from all sides. Though Krieger’s definition of ekphrasis is thus inflected by the example of visual art, he conceives of ekphrasis as essentially word-painting: writing that aims to depict – figuratively – anything visible and still, ‘in or out of art’. This kind of writing is essentially what G. E. Lessing defined as pictorialism, which he strongly distinguished from the verbal representation of visual art. When a poet imitates an artist, writes Lessing, he either ‘takes the other’s work as his model’ (my emphasis) or ‘borrows [the artist’s] manner of presentation’ to describe something else.7 In the Aeneid, for instance, if Virgil had based his account of the death of Laocöon and his sons (Aeneid, 2.212–24) on the ancient Rhodian statue of Laocöon that is now in the Vatican Museum, he would have imitated not the statue itself, but rather the death of Laocöon in a manner ‘borrowed from the statue’; he would have lifelessly copied the sculptor’s way of representing Laocöon’s death. But Virgil, Lessing insists, conceived his Laocöon without recourse to any work of art. Furthermore, Lessing argues, when Virgil describes the shield of Aeneas in Book 8 of the Aeneid, he takes as his model ‘the work of art, not what is represented in it’. His own work, therefore, is ‘original’, and ‘he creates as a genius’ (p. 45). In other words, while Lessing deplores pictorialism (verbally imitating an object in the manner of a painter or sculptor), he admires the verbal imitation of a work of art, which is what I have previously defined as ekphrasis. Reconsidering this fundamental distinction in light of the present volume, I must admit that all such distinctions – all theoretical formulations – must be regularly tested against particular examples, which of course tend to complicate them. When, for instance, the eponymous heroine of Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece describes a painting of the fall of Troy, the editors aptly note (in their introduction) that her words recall not only Aeneas’ description of the fall of Troy but also Philostratus’ descriptions of paintings in the Imagines, so that ekphrasis becomes intertextual as well as intermedial, weaving the description of a visible event into the description of a painting. Likewise, in comparing the frontispiece of the 1615 edition of Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy to Hieronimo’s description of – or rather prescription for – a painting (‘Draw me like old Priam …’), Richard Meek finds the frontispiece ‘inspired’ by Hieronimo’s ekphrastic words, especially since the cry made by the figure he prescribes (‘The house is



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a-fire …’) is echoed – so to speak – by the banderole of words (‘Alas it is my son Horatio’) fluttering from the mouth of the Hieronimo illustrated in the frontispiece. While ‘both play and frontispiece create distinct … pictures’, as Meek notes, the lines between ekphrasis and illustration, as well as between ekphrasis and words displayed within a picture, are suggestively crossed. Should they be erased altogether? I don’t think Meek is suggesting that, for he clearly distinguishes between ekphrasis and illustration, between writing about pictures and pictures themselves. But what is the relation between words about a picture and words displayed within one? When René Magritte calligraphically depicts the words ‘This is not a pipe’ beneath the image of a pipe in a painting titled Trahison des Images, are the painted words ekphrastic? Do they even qualify as a description of the image? Or do they exemplify the sort of antagonism between word and image that this volume seeks to transcend? Whether or not they do, it seems to me useful to distinguish between writing about art on the one hand and words within pictures on the other – whether in composite art (such as that of Magritte or, for that matter, William Blake) or in pictures made of words alone, such as those of the contemporary American artist Christopher Wool.8 For Tilo Reifenstein, such pictures demonstrate that written language shares ‘visibility and visuality’ with pictures. By combining pictures and words, Reifenstein argues, the work of Raymond Pettibon contests the concept of writing as ‘transcendent logos’ and displays instead its graphic qualities, the ‘pictural characteristics of writing itself’. To buttress his argument, Reifenstein might well have noted that the very word graphic springs from a polysemous Greek verb (graphein) that could mean either ‘write’ or ‘depict’: even now, we use ‘biography’ to mean ‘life-writing’ and ‘graphic’ to mean ‘pictorial’. Yet, in spite of that teasing slippage, picture-making and writing (in alphabetic, nonideogrammatic languages) remain fundamentally different systems of representation. For that reason I still believe that writing about visual art should not be classified with visual art itself, including even art that showcases the visuality of words. If we wholly erase the line between visual art and the written word, can they any longer have the kinds of encounter explored by this volume? Leaving that question open, and leaving open too the question of just what ekphrasis is, I am happy to consider what various contributors have discovered from probing specific encounters between pictures and written words, including, of course (to be absolutely unambiguous), printed words. Since the essays are chronologically ordered, they range from studies of Renaissance works through the long nineteenth century to our own time. In their introduction, the editors briefly identify three phases of what might be called the history of ekphrastic or what I am tempted to call simply intermedial encounters: early modern (late sixteenth to early eighteenth centuries), nineteenth century, and twentieth and twenty-first. As examined here, early modern works feature encounters that might be construed as paragonal but turn out, it is argued, to exemplify the interdependence of pictures and words – their symbiosis. In the

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long nineteenth century, we are informed, the relation between literature and visual art reflects the impact of Lessing’s Laocoön by accenting the competition between the two even as it displays their interaction. And in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, works such as Pettibon’s combine image and text so intimately that they become intermedial hybrids, irreducible to the straightforward categories of visual or verbal. As laid out here, then, the history of ekphrastic or intermedial encounters is a story of gradual integration, a story in which the paragonal competition between image and word gradually gives way to full co-operation. To show, for instance, that Andrew Marvell contests the paragonal competition between painting and poetry, Keith McDonald suggestively argues that, instead of ‘upstaging the visual’ in Marvell’s Latin poems on Robert Walker’s portrait of Oliver Cromwell, ‘language … becomes part of a heuristic enquiry that exposes the potency and limitations of both forms’. McDonald may be right, but I wonder if Marvell’s language forecloses all competition. According to McDonald’s description of a copy of the now lost portrait, which was sent to Queen Christina of Sweden, it depicts Cromwell ‘opulently dressed as a private dignitary rather than his customary armour’, wearing a chain given to him by the queen and a medallion featuring the three crowns of Sweden. In Marvell’s prospopopeial Latin poem (‘In eandem Reginae Sueciae transmittam’) the painted figure is made to speak far more than the ‘Ave’ that Aretino plausibly extracts from the mouth of Titian’s angel. Addressing the queen, he defines his wrinkles (presumably visible in the portrait) as the sign of long warfare that he continues to wage even while insisting that this shadowy image (‘umbra’) submits its brow to you (‘tibi submittit frontem’) and will not be forever savage to kings (‘regibus usque truces’). As represented by Marvell, then, the portrait itself stages a competition between Cromwell’s stubbornly regicidal bellicosity and his belated deference to royalty, which is shrewdly hedged by ‘usque truces’: this tireless fighter sets no deadline on just when he will cease to be savage (perhaps when he’s dead?). The competition thus imputed to the portrait prompts me to wonder just how much of the almost self-contradictory mindset expressed by Marvell’s speaker is independently signified by the painting. Are they shown in this instance to be equal in both ‘potency and limitations’? Moving from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century, Part II of this collection includes Stephen Cheeke’s study of the way various writers, especially Hawthorne, represented a supposed portrait of Beatrice Cenci. Cheeke has distinct advantages here. Besides being unequivocally ekphrastic in representing a work of visual art, his examples range generically from what might be called art criticism, as in Shelley’s description of the portrait, to the readings of it made by various characters in Hawthorne’s novel, The Marble Faun. Yet Cheeke’s argument is complicated by two problems. First, he says himself that the painting described in all his examples ‘is not by Guido Reni, and does not represent Beatrice Cenci’.9 This means that her gruesome history is not ‘written in the painting, written in the dying girl’s face’, as Dickens asserted, but rather



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32. Guido Reni, Saint Cecilia (1606)

projected onto the painting by those who bring that history to it. Without such knowledge, would the chiaroscuro in this portrait – a radiant countenance set off by a dark background – by itself signify the intersection of good and evil that all these writers find in it, as Cheeke suggests? If anything, the background in Reni’s portrait of Saint Cecilia (Figure 32) is much darker than that of the would-be Cenci portrait. But could anyone construe the chiaroscuro of Saint

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Cecilia as a sign that Cecilia herself – a Christian martyred in ancient Rome – was somehow tainted with evil? A further problem is that in Hawthorne’s novel, some of the characters are so much caught up in the history of Beatrice that they are not even describing her portrait at all. As a copyist, Hilda knows the painting intimately and is clearly describing its effect upon her when she says that Beatrice was ‘trying to escape from my gaze’ all the while she copied the portrait. But in weighing her guilt and innocence, in arguing by turns that Beatrice is conscience-racked and guilty ‘of no sin at all’, Miriam refers only to the indeterminacy of her historical character, not to the equivocal significance of her expression in the portrait or the complexity of its chiaroscuro. Nevertheless, these objections are largely marginalized if not totally vanquished by Cheeke’s analysis of Hawthorne’s exquisitely calibrated response to the portrait of Beatrice. Reminding us that ‘Hawthorne’s novels and stories are haunted by faces that are dark, indistinct, unfathomable, misidentified, sometimes veiled or absolutely withheld from view’, he aptly observes that ‘Anxiety over their true nature reveals the grip they have upon an imagination which worried about the effect of bringing knowledge of Beatrice’s story to the image’. Given Hawthorne’s own consciousness of what he projects on to the painting, his response is fictively mediated through Hilda and Miriam, whose contrasting responses constitute what might be called a Blakean dialogue of innocence and experience. In the portrait, Cheeke argues, Hawthorne ‘wants to read … both an original innocence, and an innocence regained or redeemed. The first kind has never known sin, while the second seems to know some mysterious secret about the meaning of sin that cannot easily be grasped or told, one in which sin has been transfigured – the final effect of the Guido Reni portrait.’ Essential to this argument is the provocative but also, I think, persuasive claim that in the eyes of Hawthorne, the portrait subordinates morality to aesthetics, ‘neutralising [Beatrice’s] participation in evil’ and shining ‘with the light of this transmutation’. Since the chiaroscuro of the portrait speaks profoundly to Hawthorne’s fascination with all the moral meanings of light and dark, it may well constitute, as Cheeke suggests, a pictorial alternative to Milton’s famous argument about the providential rationale for the fall. In Hawthorne’s reading of the picture, Cheeke writes, its chiaroscuro ‘has been “exchanged” for the radiance of the celestial life’. Turning from nineteenth-century encounters with a celebrated portrait to contemporary theorizing about language and art, Johanna Malt sets W. J. T. Mitchell’s theory of ekphrasis against the aesthetics of Jean-Luc Nancy, who ‘makes little explicit reference to ekphrasis as such’ but whose theory of signification posits that language always leaves something out – just as, for Mitchell, the ekphrastic image is the unpresentable (or unrepresentable) ‘black hole’ in the universe of language: ‘entirely absent from it, but shaping it and affecting it in fundamental ways’. By means of what Nancy calls ‘ex-scription’, Malt explains, all writing draws ‘a boundary between two systems: one in which



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being signifies and one in which it simply is and “makes sense” as such. What is “outside” the text is not its referent, since the referent is itself a category belonging to the order of signification.’ If this paraphrase of Nancy’s words is accurate, the boundary he defines is something less than crystal clear. If ex-scripted or excluded ‘being’ ‘simply is’, does it simply amount to what Archibald MacLeish famously wrote about a poem – that it ‘should not mean / But be’?10 Except in deictic discourse, which refers to a specific material object ready to hand (‘Pass me that book, please’), the nouns and verbs of language signify only conceptual objects ‘belonging to the order of signification’, as the above paraphrase says. Since the gerund ‘being’ is itself paradigmatically conceptual, accessible not phenomenally but only by means of noumenal intuition, how can ‘being’ stand outside or ‘make sense’ (itself a profoundly ambiguous phrase) outside the boundary of linguistic signification? Fortunately, however, the strength of Malt’s essay does not stand or fall on the answer to this question, let alone on the strength of Nancy’s other distinctions, for she adroitly distils from his theory of signification a potent way of defining ekphrasis: it represents not a simulacrum of the visible world but an indexical trace of it, a vestige of it. With the aid of this concept, and also of Nancy’s fascinating analysis of the relation between touching and letting go of the risen Christ, Malt finely glosses the divine footprints in Juan de Flandes’s painting of Christ’s ascension as well as the pair of hands – one actual and the other vestigial, ‘a resemblance that touches the body’ – in Giuseppe Penone’s late twentieth-century Gloves. In my own encounter with this collection of essays, I have raised a number of questions and am thereby liable, I suppose, to the charge that I have read them in a spirit of paragonal resistance. To this charge I plead guilty, since I have never learned how to read with my critical intelligence turned off. But I must also salute the great strengths of this volume. Besides fundamentally rethinking the concept of ekphrasis, besides resituating it in the capacious embrace of encounter, every contributor to this project has shed fresh light on one or more particular examples of this encounter. The result is a resoundingly rich contribution to the unending history of ekphrasis as both a Protean concept and a specific set of practices: of encounters between language and visual art that may range from the paragonal (I gently maintain) to the symbiotic. Notes  1 Quoted in R. H. Webb, ‘The Transmission of the Eikones of Philostratus and the Development of Ekphrasis from Antiquity to the Renaissance’ (PhD Dissertation, Warburg Institute, University of London, 1992), p. 35. My translation.  2 Jean H. Hagstrum, The Sister Arts: The Tradition of Literary Pictorialism From Dryden to Gray (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1958), p. 18n.  3 Pomegranate can be viewed at: www.youtube.com/watch?v=ci2AA_5Yg7E.

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  4 ‘Notes Toward a Theory of Cinematic Ekphrasis’, in Fictional Cinema: How Literature Describes Imaginary Films, ed. Stefano Ercolino, Massimo Fusillo, Mirko Lino, and Luca Zenobi (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht Unipress, 2015), pp. 3–17.   5 Leo Spitzer, ‘The “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, or Content vs. MetaGrammar’ (1955), rpt. in Essays on English and American Literature, ed. Anna Hatcher (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1962), p. 72.   6 Murray Krieger, Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press), p. 9, my emphasis.   7 Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry, trans. Edward Allen McCormick (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), p. 45.   8 Some examples of Wool’s work can be viewed at: www.wool735.com.   9 Cheeke slightly overstates the present state of expert opinion. Though still identified as Reni’s portrait of Beatrice on the website of the Palazzo Barberini, where it hangs (www.barberinicorsini.org/en/opera/portrait-of-beatrice-cenci), the attribution has been questioned (rather than simply denied) by art historians such as Jutta Gisela Sperling, who writes that ‘Reni might not have authored the painting, nor does it necessarily represent Beatrice’ (Roman Charity: Queer Lactations in Early Modern Visual Culture (Bielefeld: Transcript-Verlag, 2016), p. 127). The misattribution probably arose from the fact that Guido was deeply interested in portraits of turbaned young women and depicted St Cecilia that way in 1606. See Richard Spear, The ‘Divine’ Guido: Religion, Sex, Money and Art in the World of Guido Reni (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), pp. 54–6. 10 Archibald MacLeish, ‘Ars Poetica’, in Margaret Ferguson, Mary Jo Salter, and Jon Stallworthy (eds), The Norton Anthology of Poetry (New York: Norton, 2004), p. 1381.

Index

Index

Note: page numbers in italic refer to illustrations Acheson, Katherine 71, 85 Amado, Manuel Janela para o Mar 241–4, 242, 247 Anderson, Hans Christian 185 Apthonius Progymnasmata 6 Aquinas, Thomas 230 Arasse, Daniel 184 Aretino, Pietro 27–8, 257 Arnold, Matthew ‘The Scholar Gypsy’ 168–9 ‘Thyrsis’ 17, 165–75, 258 Ashbery, John Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror 197–8 Augustine 36, 204 Bacon, Francis 35, 38, 185 Baldwin, Thomas 221–2, 226 Barish, Jonas 52, 65 Barthes, Roland 133, 221 Baudelaire, Charles 144, 146–7, 157, 184, 204 Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb 113, 184 Bell, Clive 185 Bellori, Giovan Pietro 91–2, 94–5, 100, 101 Belsey, Catherine 13–14, 28, 33 Belvedere Apollo 115, 117, 167, 171 Bender, John B. 203 Berndt, Frauke 110 Bernhard, Thomas Alter Meister 119 Bernini, Gian Lorenzo 72

Best, Stephen 121 Bill, Max 237, 240 Blake, William 191, 193, 261, 264 Blunt, Anthony 99 Botticelli 31 The Birth of Venus 72 Primavera 72 Braider, Christopher 6 Brentano, Clemens Godwi: Oder das steinerne Bild der Mutter 112 Broodthaers, Marcel 183 Browning, Robert 248 Brueghel, Pieter 249 Bull, Malcolm 8 Burke, Edmund 9 Burrow, Colin 33–5, 39 Byatt, A. S. 213 The Virgin in the Garden 208 Camden, William 28 Carline, Richard 185 Carroll, Lewis 185 Cave, Terence 61 Cenci, Beatrice 16, 126–7 Chapman, George 77 Charles I 72 Charlton, Daphne 187 Cheeke, Stephen 3, 12, 86, 166, 168, 175, 183, 199 Chevalier, Tracy 249 Chute, Desmond 185 Cicero 28, 53 Clokey, Art 204

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Clough, Arthur Hugh 166 Crews, Frederick 132, 136 Cromwell, Elizabeth 82–3 Cromwell, Oliver 16, 78–84, 86 Cunningham, Valentine 11–12, 29, 73, 84 Dalou, Jules 172 d’Antonio, Biagio, and Workshop The Triumph of Camillus 7 da Vinci, Leonardo 237 Paragone 5, 261 de Andrade, Carlos Drummond 240–1 de Campos, Haroldo 248 de Flandes, Juan The Ascension 230–2, 231, 265 del Cossa, Francesco 249 de’ Medici, Lorenzo 28 de Peiresc, Nicolas-Claude Fabri 35–6 de Piles, Roger 91, 95 De Quincey, Thomas 129 Derrida, Jacques 208, 211–13, 221 de Sena, Jorge 238 Dickens, Charles 126, 127–8, 262 Diderot, Denis Salons 184 Didi-Huberman, Georges 184, 221–2, 224 Diehl, Huston 62 Donne, John 71, 197, 200 Doody, Margaret Anne 119 Dryden, John 82, 84, 91–3, 101 Du Bellay, Joachim 185 du Fresnoy, Charles 91–2 Dutton, John 82 Dutton, William 78 Eliot, T. S. ‘Burnt Norton’ 8 The Waste Land 12 Elleström, Lars 248 Enterline, Lynn 42 Erasmus 31, 35 De duplici copia 30 Erne, Lukas 56 Fairfax, Sir Thomas 72, 81 Farago, Claire 5

Fisher, John 173 Flinck, Nicholas 95 Foucault, Michel 183 Fränkhauser, Gernot 114 Frayn, Michael 249 Frederick, Samuel 118 Fry, Roger 185, 186 Genette, Gérard 110–11, 114, 116, 118, 144, 146, 148 Gentileschi, Artemisia 249 Gersht, Ori Pomegranate 258, 259 Getsy, David 173 Gibson-Wood, Carol 94, 95, 103 Gilman, Ernest 184 Ginzburg, Carlo 184 Giorgione Sleeping Venus 73, 74 Glew, Adrian 185 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 115, 117 Goldberg, Michael 1–3 Sardines 2 Gombrich, E. H. 33 Gomringer, Eugen 244–6, 247 Goncourt brothers 184 Goodman, Nelson 210–11 Gosse, Edmund 171 Gozzoli, Benozzo The Feast of Herod and the Beheading of Saint John the Baptist 58, 59 Guelen, Eva 120 Guercino Allegory of Painting and Sculpture 4 Guys, Constantin 147 At the Theater 148 Hagstrum, Jean H. 4–5, 257 Hals, Frans 249 Hamilton, Donna 49, 61 Hamilton, Emma 115 Hamon, Philippe 116 Harrow, Susan 12–13 Hatt, Michael 174–5 Haussmann, Baron Eugène 147 Hawthorne, Nathaniel The French and Italian Notebooks 131



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The House of the Seven Gables 132 The Marble Faun 16, 127, 131–40, 262, 264 Haydon, B. R. 10 Hayes, Christa-Maria Lerm 208 Hebbel, Friedrich 116, 117–18, 120 Heffernan, James A. W. 9–10, 71, 112, 121, 167, 172, 175, 183, 203, 215, 237 Heinse, Wilhelm Ardinghello und die glüuckseligen Inseln 16, 109, 112–16 Hendel-Schütz, Henriette 115 Hippolytus 28 Hobgood, Alison P. 54 Hollander, John 119, 187–8, 239, 240 Homer Iliad 6, 109 Hopper, Edward 244 Horace 5–6, 84, 85, 91–2, 237 Hulse, Clark 4 Hunt, John Dixon 167 Hunt, Leigh 129 Huysmans, J. K. 155 iconotext 18, 145–6, 155–6, 159, 206, 209, 214–15, 250–3 intermedial relations 3, 17, 18, 65, 71, 86, 110, 116, 119, 166, 168–9, 174, 239, 246–8, 250–3, 260–2 James, Heather 39 James, Henry 134, 136–7, 184, 204 Jarniewicz, Jerzy 15, 259 Joyce, James 208 Keats, John ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ 10–11, 258 Keefe, Anne 13 Keilen, Sean 30, 35 Kennedy, David 13, 71, 168, 175, 184, 187, 193, 197, 200 Kernan, Michael 249 Kranz, Gisbert 238 Krieger, Murray 8–9, 50, 62, 95, 110, 120, 170, 203, 237, 259–60

Kyd, Thomas The Spanish Tragedy 15–16, 49–65, 55, 257, 260–1 le Heup, Isaac 78 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 139, 214, 260 Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry 8–9, 16, 109–21, 262 Levin, Harry 136 Livy 36 Longhi, Pietro 184 Louvel, Liliane 18, 145, 148–9, 206, 213, 214–15, 250–2 Love, Heather 121 Lukács, Georg 117, 118 McKeown, Adam 6 MacLeish, Archibald 265 Magritte, René 175, 261 Mahon, Derek 15, 259 ‘Courtyards in Delft’ 12 Manet, Édouard 17, 144–59, 150 A Bar at the Folies Bergère 17, 157–9, 158 Émile Zola 152 Nana 153–6, 154 Olympia 150 Mann, Thomas Der Zauberberg 117 Mantua, Duke of 72 Marcus, Sharon 121 Marin, Louis 197 Marino, Giambattista La Galeria 72 Marlowe, Christopher Dido, Queen of Carthage 59 Martz, Louis 72 Marvell, Andrew 16, 70–87 Advice-to-a-Painter poems 71, 72, 84, 86 ‘The Character of Holland’ 71, 78 ‘The Coronet’ 72 ‘A Dialogue Between the Soul and Body’ 72 ‘Dignissimo suo Amico Doctori Wittie’ 79

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Marvell, Andrew (cont.) ‘An Elegy Upon the Death of My Lord Francis Villiers’ 75–6 ‘The Gallery’ 71, 72–5 ‘An Horatian Ode’ 78, 81 ‘In eandem Reginae Sueciae transmissam’ 78–81, 262 ‘In Effigiem Oliveri Cromwell’ 78–81 The Last Instructions to a Painter 71, 84–7 ‘A Letter to Doctor Ingelo’ 81 ‘The Nymph Complaining for the Death of her Fawn’ 74 ‘A Poem Upon the Death of His Late Highness the Lord Protector’ 82–4 Upon Appleton House 74, 76–8, 81 Meek, Richard 33 Melville, Herman 126–7, 131 Pierre or The Ambiguities 127 Mendelssohn, Moses 113 Methuen, Erich 116 Meyers, Jeffrey 133 Michelangelo 31, 167, 171 Miller, Peter N. 35 Milton, John 78–9, 264 Paradise Lost 137–8 Mitchell, W. J. T. 9, 18, 110, 111–12, 114, 145, 157, 219, 220–2, 264 Mondrian, Piet 237, 240–1 Montégut, Émile 136 Nancy, Jean-Luc 18, 222–34, 264–5 Nash, Paul 185 Nevinson, David 185 Norgate, Edward 72 Noverre, Jean Georges Lettres sur la danse et sur les ballets 114–15 Ogilvie, Brian W. 35 O’Hara, Frank ‘Why I Am Not a Painter’ 1–3 Ovid 12, 27 Metamorphoses 42 Oxenbridge, John 82

paragone 3–15, 18, 28, 43, 48–9, 57, 61, 65, 71, 85, 91, 93, 102, 113–14, 166, 168, 237, 239, 247, 261–2, 265 Pater, Walter 184, 199, 214 Penones, Giuseppe Guanti 232–3, 233, 265 Perec, George 248 Petrarch, Francesco 28, 29 Pettibon, Raymond 17, 204–15, 261 All the windows 205–15, 205 Philostratus Imagines 7, 33, 260 Plett, Heinrich 78 Pliny 31, 39 Plutarch Moralia 5 Poe, Edgar Allan ‘The Oval Portrait’ 188 Poliziano, Angelo 28, 29, 37 Popple, William 82 Porter, Chloe 14 Poussin, Nicolas Tancred and Erminia 16, 93–103, 97 Prager, Heinz-Günter 244–6, 247 sieben begehren 244 Praz, Mario 184 Preston, Claire 6 Proust, Marcel 111, 118, 214 Puig, Manuel Kiss of the Spider Woman 258 Queiroz, João, and Daniella Aguiar 248 Quintilian Institutio Oratoria 53, 63–4 Rackham, Arthur 186, 188 Rajewsky, Irina 246–7, 250, 252 Raphael The Sacrifice at Lystra 10–11, 11 Read, Benedict 171 Reni, Guido 126, 134, 136–7, 137, 138, 140, 262–4 Portrait of Beatrice Cenci 128 Saint Cecilia 263–4, 263 Reust, Hans Rudolf 209 rhetoric 6, 11, 33, 51–2, 53, 58–9, 61, 63–5, 76, 86, 111, 118, 221, 260



Index271

enargeia 6, 14, 51–4, 77–8, 81, 96, 102, 111, 118, 220, 250 hypotyposis 6, 148, 156, 250 pragmatographia 51 topographia 58 Richardson, Jonathan 16, 93–103 Rickels, Laurence 113–14 Robortello, Francisco 50 Roundel with Annunciation to the Virgin 32 Ruskin, John 184, 204 Sacks, Peter M. 169 Sainsbury, George 203 Schjedahl, Peter 210 Schlegel, Friedrich 111 Schoenfeldt, Michael 70 Scott, Grant F. 10–11, 15, 80, 166 Sexton, Anne 252 ‘The Starry Night’ 247 Shakespeare, William Hamlet 35, 37, 59–61 The Rape of Lucrece 6–8, 15, 28–44, 59, 257, 260 Sonnet 16 48, 57, 64 Titus Andronicus 38, 42, 54 Venus and Adonis 39 Shapiro, Barbara 248 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 126–7, 129, 132–3, 240, 262 The Cenci 129–30, 135 Shirley, James 76 Sidney, Philip The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia 38 Simonides 5, 237 Smith, Ali 249–50, 252 Smith, Mack 175 Sofer, Andrew 56 Spencer, Stanley 15, 17, 184–201 The Lovers (The Dustmen) 195–6, 196 The Marriage at Cana 186 The Resurrection of the Soldiers 189, 190, 191, 192 The Resurrection Port Glasgow 188 The Resurrection with the Raising of Jairus’s Daughter 188

Sarah Tubb and the Heavenly Visitors 194–5, 194 Spillane, Mickey 204 Spitzer, Leo 203, 259 Sprat, Thomas 82 Stanley, Thomas 76 Stanyhurst, Richard 37 Steiner, Wendy 8, 203 Stendhal 127, 197 Stifter, Adalbert Der Nachsommer 16, 109, 112, 116–21 Stone Peters, Julie 50 Strowick, Elisabeth 120 Susenbrotus Epitome Troporum ac Schematum 51 Sylvester, David 185 Taine, Hippolyte 126 Tamen, Pedro 241–4, 247 Tassi, Marguerite 49, 57–8 Tasso, Torquato Gerusalemme liberata 16, 95–103 Temkin, Ann 208 Theile, Gert 116 Theocritus 166 Theon 51, 257, 260 Thornhill, Sir James 95, 101–2 Thornycroft, Hamo The Mower 17, 165–75, 258 Thucydides 6 Titian 27, 115, 257 Venus of Urbino 73–4, 75 Twain, Mark 126 Unglaub, Jonathan 99–100 Unton, Sir Henry 58, 60 ut pictura poesis 5–6, 8, 9, 14, 78, 84, 86, 91, 109, 120, 203, 237 van der Gucht, Gerard 101–2 Van Dyck, Anthony 95 van Heemskerck, Maarten 30 Vasari, Giorgio Lives of the Artists 189 Verdi, Richard 98 Vermeer, Johannes 249 Villiers, Francis 75

272 Virgil 31 Aeneid 6–7, 37, 53, 59, 260 Eclogues 166 Vreeland, Susan 249 Wagner, Peter 221, 226, 227, 251 Walker, Robert 78–81, 79 Waller, Edmund 71, 82, 86 Instructions to a Painter 84 The War of Troy (tapestry) 34 Webb, Ruth 51, 111, 118 Wharton, Edith 133 Wilde, Oscar 172 The Critic as Artist 199 ‘The Decay of Lying’ 165 The Picture of Dorian Gray 135

Index Winckelmann, Johann Joachim 115, 118, 171 Wolf, Bryan 213 Wolf, Werner 250, 252 Wolff, Christian 113 Wool, Christopher 261 Woolf, Virginia 183, 184 Wyatt, Thomas 51 Yacobi, Tamar 111 Zeuxis 31 Zola, Émile 17, 144–59, 151–3 L’Assommoir 153–5 Nana 153–6, 154 Thérèse Raquin 17, 149–51