Elsner: Art and Text

21

Art and Text

Jaś Elsner

1. Writing on art: The epigraphic habit. The inclusion of an essay on art

and text in this Companion to Latin Literature implies (on the editor’s part, at least!)

the proposition that the visual element is important for the writing of literary Latin. I

should like to open, however, by briefly raising the reverse proposition, namely the

importance of the written for visual culture. Most works of sculpture in the Roman

world – whether portraits or dedications or funerary memorials – were accompanied

by some kind of writing. So funerary altars had inscriptions, usually incised in a

specially designated panel, while the lids of sarcophagi had an epitaph inscribed or

sometimes painted in a framed section (perhaps flanked by erotes or other figures) at

the centre (e.g. Koch and Sichtermann (1982) 25-7). Normally we think of the lower

part of a sarcophagus as its most important element, with its large visual field, but

arguably the inscription which defines the deceased’s identity should make us give at

least equal weight to the lid. Often the inscribed texts that survive on Roman

monuments are simple, recording the dedicatee or donor or an artist’s signature.

Although art history has not given full recognition to the phenomenon, it is almost

impossible to imagine Roman art without the epigraphic habit that accompanied it –

helping to define objects for their patrons or viewers with something perhaps a little

like a museum label today [figure 1]. The text, including the style of the inscription’s

incised lettering and its language (whether Greek or Latin), functioned as a visual sign

as well as a literary one – giving an enhanced dignity and an inscriptional

monumentality even to relatively humble objects, as well as helping to determine their

meanings.

This widespread inscriptional culture – in which the text functions as

monument and as a visual supplement to artistic monuments – has deep roots in

Greece, looking back for instance to the wonderfully vivid epigrams that accompanied

archaic free-standing figure-sculpture, to the tribute and treasury lists erected in

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temples, to the great variety of inscribed votives and dedications in such panhellenic

sanctuaries as Olympia (e.g. Robert (1989), Millar (1983)). Just as some inscriptions

were simple and in prose, others were more complex – poems brief and lengthy, of all

kinds and of all literary levels. Just as art history has failed to do justice to the

textuality of Roman monumental culture, so literary studies have systematically

ignored (or at best underestimated) the monumental nature of inscribed texts as

fundamentally different in genre from their brethren on papyrus-rolls or writing-

tablets. For they are designed to be read in very different kinds of contexts, with

significantly different experiential frames envisaged for the reader (e.g. on response,

Woolf (1996) 25-34). Rarely are collections of such texts published with photographs

of the whole monument or of the images that accompanied the writing in its original

form (e.g. Courtney (1995); for an explicit call to consider the visual, see Sanders

(1991) 87-110).

Yet clearly the challenge to produce elegant verses for monumental contexts

exercised the finest Roman poets from the beginnings of Latin literature (Massaro

(1992) 3-61). We find epigrams (among the first elegiac couplets composed in Latin)

ascribed to Ennius in the early second century BC – which, even if they may be

impugned as spurious by some modern authorities, were certainly thought authentic

by Cicero and Seneca. For example, Ennius’ epigram on himself was clearly

designed to go alongside an image – perhaps a painting, statue or bust (Courtney

(1993) 42-3, no. 45):

Aspicite, o cives, senis Enni imaginis formam.

Hic vestrum panxit maxima facta patrum.

Look, citizens, on the portrait of Ennius in old age.

It was he that composed the great deeds of your fathers.

Like the best verse in this necessarily terse (indeed ultimately lapidary) genre, this

poem overturns the assumptions it initially sets up. The old age of the poet turns out

to be not a sign of decrepitude, but rather of his grandeur since he is the one who sang

of the still older ancestors, in a Republican culture deeply embedded in the values of

the maiores. Ennius the image and the object of the gaze becomes Ennius the artist

and composer of images of ancestral deeds in the second line. A second Ennian

epigram, on Scipio Africanus (who died in 183 BC) – restored from two citations in

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Elsner: Art and Text

Cicero – may well not have been carved on the great man’s tomb but was written as

though it were. It indicates the way that the monumental quality implicit in carved

inscriptions could be appropriated into non-epigraphic poetry (Courtney (1993) 39-40,

no. 43):

Hic est ille situs cui nemo civis neque hostis

quivit pro factis reddere opis pretium.

Here lies the man to whom no one, fellow countryman or foe,

can make due return for his services.

The Ennian move from inscriptional culture as such to a self-consciously playful,

literary and in this case panegyrical mode, such as that practised above all by Martial

in later Latin (Sullivan (1991) 78-114) and also Statius (Newlands (2002) 38-43, 49-

50, 74), is paralleled by (indeed modelled on) the development of the literary epigram

in the Hellenistic Greek tradition (Bing (1988) 17-18, Cameron (1993) 1-6,

Gutzwiller (1998) 47-114). Collections of compilations like the third-century BC

Posidippus papyrus in Milan (which is thought -- rightly? – to be an early anthology

of the epigrams of a single poet, see Austin and Bastianini (2002) nos. 1-112) or the

Hellenistic Garland of Meleager, or in the later Roman period the Garland of Philip

and in Byzantium the Greek Anthology are testimony to the continued vibrancy of the

genre in Greek throughout the antiquity and the Middle Ages (Cameron (1993),

Gutzwiller (1998) 227-322). While later examples of this elegantly literary form of

what was once a monumental statement may relatively rarely have been inscribed, the

frequency with which works of art are addressed within epigram indicates that the

genre never wholly forgot its roots in material culture and its relations to the viewing

of art (Goldhill (1994), Gutzwiller (2001)). Indeed isolated examples could of course

always be composed for inscription, as in the Christian poems of Paulinus of Nola

inscribed alongside the mosaics of his basilica of St Felix at the end of the fourth

century AD (especially the tituli recorded in Paulinus’ letter 32 of about 403 AD, with

Goldschmidt (1940) 35-47, 97-8; also Conybeare (2000) 94-9).

When the inscription was of a complex literary kind, the textuality of art

works in several ways. An inscription may serve to play alongside the visual

depiction – extending its meanings through puns or allusions. Take the cinerary grave

altar of Titus Statilius Aper and his wife Orcivia Anthis, dating to about 120 AD

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[Figure 2]. The image has a bust of Anthis in a shell flanked by dolphins in the

pediment and a frontal togate image of Aper with a dead boar at his feet, a closed box

to his right and a boy (once, but no longer, winged) who may represent death. This

altar boasts two inscriptions, the first in prose at the base recording the names of the

deceased, Aper’s profession and the donors, Aper’s parents, Titus Statilius Proculus

and Argentaria Eutychia. The second, a verse epigram in four hexameters inscribed

in three lines above the prose as a sort of second textual base for the image, is more

personal (Courtney (1995) 164-5, 374, no. 176):

Innocuus Aper ecce iaces non virginis ira,

nec Meleager atrox perfodit viscera ferro:

mors tacita obrepsit subito fectique ruinam

quae tibi crescenti rapuit iuvenilem figuram.

Lo, you lie here harmless Aper (=boar)! Your flesh pierced neither

by the wrath of the maiden goddess (Diana) nor fierce Meleager’s spear.

Silent death crept up suddenly and wrought destruction,

seizing your youthful flourishing form.

The text puns on Aper’s name – shared with the dead boar depicted beside him –

while at the same time making explicit verbal reference to Aper as Meleager, standing

over the dead boar in a pose familiar from funerary sarcophagi of the second century.

The poem however denies the pun even as it makes it – claiming that Aper was not

slain, as Meleager was, as a consequence of the wrath of Diana nor, as the boar was,

by Meleager’s spear. The epigram works side by side with the image – both of them

alluding in different ways to the myth and together raising Aper’s status to a

mythological level. The epigram serves also to distance Aper from excessive

involvement in the irrelevant (and, worse, potentially negative) narrative implications

of the myth (Meleager’s love for Atalanta, his killing of his uncles and his mother’s

subsequent actions that caused his own death) by turning its theme to the pathos of

sudden death’s demolition of his youth. It thus helps to police the image’s meanings

by not only drawing verbal attention to its visual mythological references, but

attempting also to limit them.

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By contrast, take the epigram in eight elegiac couplets that survives in

fragmentary form from the lid of probably the greatest sarcophagus carved in the

fourth century Rome – that of the urban prefect Junius Bassus, who died in 359 AD

[figures 3 and 4]. The main imagery of the sarcophagus is a complex series of

Christian scenes showing Old Testament and Passion narratives as well as images of

the martyrdoms of Peter and Paul in the intercolumniations of a grand double-register

frontage. An elegantly carved prose inscription runs along the upper rim identifying

Bassus, the coffin’s recipient, describing his place on the cursus honorum (as prefect

of the city), his baptism as a Christian, and the precise date of his death (25 August,

359). The images on the lid, very poorly preserved, seem to have largely represented

the traditional Roman themes of a funerary meal and perhaps a family scene, but

neither necessarily or overtly Christian as in the images on the main part of the coffin

(Malbon (1990) 104-14). What survives of the inscription (from line 7) reads, with

restorations, as follows corrected by Cameron (2002) 288-9):

hic moderans plebem patriae sedemque senatus,

urbis perpetuas occidit ad lacrimas.

nec licuit famulis domini gestare feretrum,

certantis populi sed fuit illud onus.

flevit turba omnis, matres puerique senesque,

flevit et abiectis tunc pius ordo togis.

flere videbantur tunc et fastigia Romae

ipsaque tunc gemitus edere tecta viae.

cedite, sublimes spirantum, cedite, honores!

celsius est culmen mors quod huic tribuit.

The man who governed the people of city and the house of the Senate

has died, to the everlasting tears of the city.

His slaves were forbidden to bear their master’s bier,

but that was the burden of the Roman people, who vied for the task.

The whole crowd wept – mothers, children and old men,

the reverent Senate wept, their togas put aside for mourning,

then even the rooftops of Rome seemed to weep,

and the very arcades along the street to groan.

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Give way, highest honours of the living! Give way!

Loftier still is the height assigned him in death.

Here, far from directly relating to the elegantly executed imagery of an unusually

grand sarcophagus in the way the Aper poem plays off the iconography of his

monument, the two inscriptions (prose and verse) strike different but equally personal

notes that contrast with the universal Christian message of the visual imagery. Bassus

the man is given his curriculum vitae and his dates in the prose inscription on the rim,

while the poem elevates him through its spectacular imagery of weeping into a

paragon of the lamented deceased. The last two lines, elegantly alluding to Propertius

2.34.65 (on how all former writers should yield their place to Vergil) play on the pun

in Bassus’ name (‘low’ in colloquial Latin) by referring to the heights which must

give way to him and the pinnacle he has achieved in death. Effectively, the personal

and Rome-centred account of a dignitary who had proved a loyal servant to his city is

used to supplement the Christian universalism of the main iconography. The literary

genre of the epigram and its tropes, but also the very act of its epigraphic incision,

work to provide a highly traditional (even antiquarian) link to the pre-Christian past of

the city. While the visual imagery promises what may be a rather impersonal

salvation in the kind of eternity proclaimed by Christ’s triumphant appearance

between Peter and Paul, enthroned over a personification of the world, in the central

scene of the upper tier, the text personalises the pathos and particularity of Bassus’

death, in an elegiac-metrical tradition going back to archaic Greek epigrams from ten

centuries earlier. That traditionalism (as opposed to the innovative implications of

Bassus’ Christianity) is further enforced by what appears to have been the highly

traditional and non Christian imagery of the lid, in whose centre the inscription stood.

2. Art within Writing: The Rise of Illustration. While texts frequently

made their way onto images, the reverse gesture – dramatic in its own way for the

reader of a specific papyrus roll or a vellum codex – was the intrusion of images onto

the written page. Early surviving examples in papyrus – such as the third century AD

fragment from Oxyrhynchus of a comic Greek Heracles poem with parodic sketches

of the hero’s battles (Nisbet (2002)) – give a hint of what may have been available in

the written Latin tradition before the codex took over from the roll as the dominant

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form of book in the fourth century [figure 5]. What is impossible to tell in the

absence of surviving evidence is how extensive and high quality the illustration of

rolls could be – as many as 700 separate illuminations have been estimated for the

most lavish roll editions of the Homeric epics (Weitzmann (1959) 37 and 41). Pliny

records (at Natural History 35.11) that Varro’s Imagines – an important text that

appears to have influenced both Vergil’s parade of heroes in Aeneid VI and the rows

of statues which adorned the Forum of Augustus – included 700 illuminated portraits

of famous men, each described in a short epigram of which two survive in later

florilegists (Horsfall (1983) 211). But with the rise of the codex – made of durable

vellum folios rather than fragile scrolls of papyrus, its pages protected by being flat

(unlike the permanently rolled format of papyrus) and out of the light, and its images

or particular passages of text easily found by turning pages rather than scrolling

through an entire roll –the fine art of illustration entered a new age. Of the non-

Christian antique books that survive, it was the text of Vergil that received the finest

decorative treatment, in two great fifth-century AD manuscripts now in Rome – the

Vatican Vergil of about 425 and the Roman Vergil of about 475. Ironically, Vergil’s

reflective passages on art itself (on which see below) are never chosen for illustration.

In relation to a lengthy set of diverse texts like Vergil’s poems, illustrations

perform a series of varying functions. They may inaugurate a poem – like a kind of

frontispiece, giving cues to specific sections and divisions – for instance by

illustrating the first portion of text, as in the first surviving image from the Roman

Vergil (fol. 1r), above the opening lines of the first Eclogue (1-5), which renders

Meliboeus speaking to Tityrus as the latter plays his pipe (Wright (2001) 14), or the

first surviving miniature of the Vatican Vergil (fol. 1 r), which is a full page

illumination in six scenes depicting the first 15 lines of Georgic III, and serves to

introduce both the poem and the second half of the Georgics as a whole (Wright

(1993) 8-9). The pictorial inauguration may be in the form of a generalised author

portrait, as in those eclogues that are monologues in the Roman Vergil (the second,

fourth and sixth of the seven that survive, fols. 3v, 9r and 14r with Wright (2001) 16-

18, 20) or in the lost author portrait from the front of Aeneid VII in the Vatican Vergil

(another half-way centre point, within a long poem), whose traces survive on the

largely blank page that preceded it (fol. 57v, Wright (1993) 60-1). Introductory

images may also serve to summarize texts in a general way, rather than illustrating

any particular aspect – as in the Roman Vergil’s illustration for the fifth eclogue

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which shows the dialogue of Menalcas and Mopsus that is the substance of the poem

(fol. 11r, Wright (2001) 19) or the same manuscript’s great opening (fols. 44v and

45r) of standard bucolic imagery generally relating to the themes of the third Georgic

(Wright (2001) 21-3) [figure 6].

In a long narrative poem, like the Aeneid, the miniatures are much more

directly illustrative of particular episodes and in this way form a kind of visual

commentary, heightening particular passages (at the expense of others). In the

Vatican Vergil, the pictures come thick and fast around the abandonment and death of

Dido (fols. 39v, 40r – these two being a full opening of two pages – and 41r, Wright

(1993) 38-43) and in Aeneas’ trip to the Underworld (fols. 47v, 48v and 49r – another

full opening, 52r and 53v, Wright (1993) 48-57). The emphasis of these subjects may

indicate an effort to claim a classic for Christianity, by emphasising issues of lust,

temptation and sin in the Dido episode and the visualisation of Hell, but they may

equally represent a pagan illustrative model for the kinds of illuminated manuscripts

of the Bible produced around the same period. The images do more than alleviate the

process of reading the text; they direct the reader to particular sections, as a kind of

emblematic signal to the subject-matter, through pictures.

Take, as an individual example, the Laocoon image from the Vatican Vergil

(fol. 18v) which appears below the text of Aeneid II.191-8 but illustrates II.201-224,

the bulk of which would have appeared on the now lost folio opposite (Wright (1984)

60-1 and (1993) 22-3) [figure 7]. Here three episodes within Vergil’s Laocoon story

are shown. On the left, he stands beside an altar as a beardless priest (naked to the

waist, skirted and with an axe, in the traditional iconography of a victimarius or

sacrificial slaughterer rather than a priest). Behind him is the temple of Neptune

whose statue can be seen in the doorway, and above this the temple of Minerva to

which the snakes escape at II.225-8. This imagery closely follows the text of II.201-

2, with the vividness of mactabat (‘he slaughtered’) perhaps justifying the unusual

choice of showing the priest as actual bull-slayer. In the upper left are the two snakes

approaching from the sea (as described at II.203-9), while in the right foreground – in

heroic nudity, billowing cape and larger scale – a bearded and long-haired Laocoon

and his two sons are killed by the snakes (as described at II.209-24). The miniature

closely follows the text (and its artist provides helpful labels for the figures, just in

case) and yet it transforms it radically. We have two Laocoons now – bearded and

beardless – rendering the narrative movement of the poem as a series of visual

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episodes, discrete from each other but united (i.e. discrete from other parts of the

Aeneid’s text) by being in a single picture frame. Yet some parts even of Vergil’s

Laocoon account are conflated -- such as the narrative of the snakes attacking the sons

and Laocoon vainly attempting to rescue them, which has become a single iconic

scene that may owe something iconographically to the famous marble group by

Hagesander, Polydorus and Athenodorus mentioned by Pliny at Natural History 36.37

and either identical with or replicated by the statue found in 1506 and now in the

Vatican.

3. Art Described: The Uses of Ecphrasis. While the direct alignment of

images and words through inscription or illustration represents a potent strand in

Roman culture’s combination of art and text, the move from inscriptional epigram to

what might be called purely literary epigram reflects what was to become a profound

use of visual art as a trope within Roman writing (for some reflections on Greek

origins see e.g. Zeitlin (1994) and Steiner (2001)). Whether in poetry, in letters (e.g.

Henderson, 2002) or in the prose novels, the rhetorical technique known as ecphrasis

or description, which came to be most characteristically associated with the

description of works of art, was to be used for special, often self-reflexive, often

vividly climactic purposes. In both Latin and Greek prose, the insertion of an

ecphrasis of a painting whose subject had thematic resonances with the rest of the text

was to have significant structural impact on the composition of fiction, particularly in

the use of a work of art as a kind of descriptive frontispiece, not so different in its way

perhaps from the frontispieces of early books. Sometimes, there is a striking

resonance between such descriptive insertions in literary texts and in works of art.

For instance, Catullus’ great poem 64 (from the first half of the first century BC) on

the marriage of Peleus and Thetis boasts a long ecphrasis describing the embroidered

coverlet of the nuptial bed with its images of the (hardly happy) liaison of Ariadne

and Theseus and the arrival of Dionysus (64.50-264). The famous roughly

contemporary painted frieze in the Villa of the Mysteries at Pompeii also interjects

into its main imagery (whose subject is still uncertain but is usually thought to reflect

the rite de passage into marriage) an epiphanic scene of Dionysus and Ariadne. To

argue for a direct connection is over-speculative, though the case for a strong visual

element in Catullus’ poem 64 has been well made (Fitzgerald (1995) 144-6).

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Likewise, the way in which the third century sophist Philostratus begins and ends his

two books of collected ecphraseis, written in Greek, with images of the seasons has

been linked to the visual use of seasonal imagery as a framing device in contemporary

mosaics and sarcophagi (Elsner (2000)).

But beyond a potential interrelationship of formal structure between art and

text, what proved especially attractive to Roman writers, in focussing on a described

work of art, was the chance to reflect figuratively upon their own writing, whether

prose or verse. In turning their attention to an apparently self-contained painting,

sculpture or building within their texts, writers could effectively step outside their

own work to picture it as a whole (what has been called the technique of mise en

abyme, with Dällenbach (1989)), or to draw out some of its less immediately obvious

meanings, or to dramatise some potential responses to their art by depicting responses

to the object described. The specific qualities of vividness (enargeia) and clarity

(sapheneia) prescribed by the rhetorical handbooks (e.g. Webb (1997a), Dubel

(1997)) allowed ecphraseis to stand as brilliant show-pieces within a larger text. But

the existence of a tradition of ecphrasis in Greek literature, reaching back to Homer’s

description of the shield of Achilles in the Iliad, meant that every such description

was inevitably a highly self-conscious display of intertextuality and more-or-less

subtle allusion (on the power of the Vergilian example for later writers like Statius,

Silius Italicus and Valerius Flaccus see respectively Harrison (1992) 51-2, Fowler

(1996), Hershkowitz (1998) 20-3).

These general comments may be exemplified by reference to the ecphraseis in

Vergil’s Aeneid – not only among the most complex examples of the topos in all Latin

literature but also certainly the most influential. (e.g. Dubois (1982) 28-51, Thomas

(1983), Ravenna (1985), Heffernan (1993) 22-36). Obviously I cannot here quote and

translate long sections of Vergil’s text. So what follows must necessarily be a

description of the ancient art of description in the absence of the object described

(which is no bad definition of ecphrasis itself!). There are numerous descriptions of

works of art within the epic which in each case extend beyond the object into a

narrative account of what its decoration depicts (detailed scholarly treatments of these

are listed in the section on Further Reading below) : the murals of Dido’s temple in

Carthage (I.453-93), the silver-gilt dishes chased with the deeds of Dido’s ancestors

(I.640-2), the cloak with the story of Ganymede given to the victor of the ship race

(V. 250-7), the bronze doors made by Daedalus for the temple at Cumae (VI.20-37),

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the cedar statues of the ancestors of king Latinus (VII.177-91), the shield of Turnus

(VII, 789-92), the shield of Aeneas (VIII.630-728), and the sword-belt of Pallas

(X.495-505).

It is worth noting that the poet is careful to vary the material forms and types

of the (imaginary) objects he chooses to describe, creating a deliberate variation

except in the case of the two shields of the opposed heroes Aeneas and Turnus, which

are paired in counterpoint (on the range of materials, see Simon (1982)). The actual

description is in several cases the result of a deliberate build-up in which the narrative

pace has been slowed – so that in Book I Aeneas and Achates survey the great

prospect of Dido’s new Carthage under construction (I.418-52) before focussing on

the temple paintings, while in Book VIII, Venus brings her son his new arms

(VIII.608-25), before the narrator turns the textual gaze onto the shield itself. The

pause in the pace of epic narrative allows a description which is at the same time the

insertion of different narratives – the Trojan war and Aeneas’ past in Book I, the

tragedies of Crete and especially of Daedalus in Book VI, the future history of Rome

culminating in Augustus himself on the shield in Book VIII, the crimes of the Danaids

on the baldric of Pallas. These new narratives – apparently works of art figured in

words – are expounded in the very language of the rest of the poem, but with the

special difference that the actors of the Aeneid can be portrayed as themselves

responding to art. As a result the reader is provided with an admittedly highly

complex, not to say ambiguous, paradigm of the range of responses he or she is

potentially to feel (Leach (1988) 311-19, Barchiesi (1997a) 275-8, Bartsch (1998)

335-7, Putnam (1998b) 269-75). At the same time, by being the account of the

Aeneid’s narrator and not of any particular internal actor (like Aeneas himself) the

ecphraseis allow the reader to learn what the epic’s protagonists cannot know

themselves, and thus to be aware both of the subjectivity of responses within the

poem and of the likely subjectivity of the reader’s own reactions to the poem (Boyd

(1995) 78-80).

The first of the ecphraseis poses the problem of emotional response –

something emphasised by the rhetorical handbooks (Webb (1997b)) – with eloquent

reiteration. Looking at the frescoes of the Trojan war, Aeneas weeps (lacrimans,

I.459) and pronounces some famous lines on the sorrows evoked by deeds (rerum,

I.462) – whether these be actual (the ‘real’ history of Troy and Aeneas’ part in that

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war), literary (effectively the passage is a summary of the Iliad’s narrative) or painted

(paintings being the immediate cause for Aeneas’ wonder (miratur, I.456) and his

tears:

sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt.

solve metus; feret haec aliquam tibi fama salutem (I.462-3)

And our misfortunes human pity breed.

This fame may help produce; suppress thy dread.

(Sandys, 1632, cited from Gransden (1996) 62)

The viewer’s misery (and Aeneas is hardly an ordinary viewer of course, but rather an

actor in what he is portrayed as viewing) is a repeated theme:

multa gemens, largoque umectat flumine vultum (I.465 cf. 470 and 485)

His heart with sighs, his face with rivers fraught…

(Sandys, 1632, cited from Gransden (1996) 62)

Yet the flood of emotion goes side by side with the theme of wonder at the handicraft

of the artist (I.455-6, 494) and a gaze concentrated on the object (which contrasts

explicitly with the averted gaze of Athena as she looks away from the supplications of

the Trojan women within the description itself at I.482):

dum stupet obtutuque haeret defixus in uno (I. 495)

…while yet amaz’d,

Dardan Aeneas on each object gaz’d…

(Sandys, 1632, cited from Gransden (1996) 63)

The wonder of this wonder – and what might be called the great aesthetic

problem raised by this ecphrasis about art in general (and about responding to epic

narrative like the Aeneid itself in particular) – is that:

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…atque animum pictura pascit inani

multa gemens (I. 464-5)

…his Tears a ready Passage find,

Devouring what he saw so well design’d

And with an empty Picture fed his Mind.

(Dryden, 1697, from Dryden (1997) 19)

That emptiness recurs within the described images too where Troilus’ chariot is

presented as a curru…inani (I.476, ‘an empty car’) – empty because its charioteer is

slain by Achilles and empty too because art is simply a poor imitation of what were to

Aeneas real events. The opening ecphrasis of Book VI reconfigures the dual

thematics of sorrow (dolor VI.31) and absence. Here

…tu quoque magnam

partem opere in tanto, sineret dolor, Icare, haberes.

bis conatus erat casus effingere in auro,

bis patriae cecidere manus. (VI.30-3)

Here hapless Icarus had found his part;

Had not the Father’s Grief retrained his Art.

He twice assay’d to cast his Son in Gold;

Twice from his hands he drop’d the forming Mold.

(Dryden, 1697, from Dryden (1997) 150)

This time it is the artist who weeps and the images’ emptiness (of Icarus) is testament

to that sorrow, while Vergil’s own intervention as descriptive artist makes present (as

text rather than gilded bronze or personal feeling) both Daedalus’ pain and Icarus’

fall. Arguably the supreme confrontation with this complex thematics of art’s

imitative fragility and yet its ability to signify so much within the Aeneid’s mounting

crescendo of ecphrasis lies in ‘the fabric of the shield beyond all words to describe’

(clipei non enarrabile textum, VIII.625). This unnarratable visual text is what Vergil

spends the next hundred odd lines describing – at great length for an ecphrasis but

13

with great brevity for the great history of Rome from Romulus to Augustus. This

time Aeneas’ wonder is at a future not understood rather than a past which one might

prefer to forget and the emotion is of joy rather than sorrow:

miratur rerumque ignarus imagine gaudet

attollens umeroque famamque et fata nepotum (VIII.730-1)

Unknown the Names, he yet admires the Grace;

And bears aloft the Fame and Fortune of his Race.

(Dryden, 1697, in Dryden (1997) 237)

Even this brief account has shown that the Aeneid’s ecphraseis link together

powerfully. As a group they offer a meta-reflection on art and its responses, on the

difficulties of writing epic and its emotive challenges. But within the fabric of

Vergil’s text as a whole they build a progressive argument. The first two – the

confrontation with the Trojan war at Carthage and the silver dishes with Dido’s

ancestors – render the genealogies of the epic’s opening protagonists. Yet the pre-

history of Dido is merely referred to and dismissed in a couple of lines – an ecphrastic

signal that her narrative is but a stage on the Trojan’s long journey beyond Carthage

and her love to Italy. The third – the cloak with the tale of Ganymede – returns to the

theme of Aeneas’ Trojan past, some of which had been portrayed on Dido’s temple

paintings. The first ecphrasis, as we have seen, is replete with emotion (Aeneas’ at

his own history, the reader’s through Aeneas at Homer’s great poem retold by Vergil).

The narrative on the cloak, by contrast – half-remembered as it were, so that

Ganymede is not mentioned by name – renders the distance Aeneas has come from

that past as his epic moves into its Italian future; indeed Aeneas gives the cloak away

as a prize to Cloanthus. In Book VI (where Icarus is not depicted but is named),

Aeneas and his companions are explicitly called away from their absorption in art by

the priestess:

non hoc ista sibi tempus spectacula poscit (VI.37)

Time suffers not, she said, to feed your Eyes

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Elsner: Art and Text

With empty Pleasures.

(Dryden, 1697, from Dryden (1997) 150)

As the time for action comes, the lures of art (and its descriptions) are to be resisted.

The cedar statues at Latinus’ palace give a narrative of ancestry to the Latins

at the opening of the epic’s second half – longer than that accorded to Dido and

announcing the past that Aeneas would acquire for his people through his marriage to

Latinus’ daughter Lavinia. The two shields placed at the ends of Books VII and VIII

pit Turnus against Aeneas, the former bearing a motif of his own ancestral mythology

(Io, Argus and Inachus) immured in the past, the latter carrying the future of Rome

and interjecting the climactic rhetoric of its ecphrasis into the Augustan present and

the time of the poem’s composition (rather as the Bassus sarcophagus’ inscriptions

firmly place the Christian mythologies of its imagery firmly into the contemporary

context of the urban prefect’s death). While the emblem on Turnus’s shield looks

back genealogically, that of Aeneas carries the epic action of the poem as a whole

onwards into its Augustan future – a future that is not part of the epic’s own narrative

but is nonetheless incorporated as the decoration of a work of art and thus included

within the Aeneid’s own art. Apart from this motif of panegyric through prophecy and

teleology culminating in Augustus through the apparent description of art, the

accounts of the shields have the effect of moving the Aeneid’s ecphrastic pattern from

a materialising of genealogy (that is at the same time an allegory in the figure of Io of

Turnus’ own fate at the hands of Juno) and an aesthetics of response, to a direct

involvement in epic action. The shields become – in different ways – emblems for the

two protagonists, like the shields of the heroes in Aeschylus Seven against Thebes

(with Zeitlin, 1982).

It is the last of the ecphraseis, that of Pallas’ baldric, that fully unites the

description of art with epic action, the thematics of aesthetic response and emotion

with the dynamic of a narrative plot. The image – an ‘abominable crime’ (impressum

nefas, X.497) – is sketchily described, its protagonists (like Ganymede) never named,

but its artist (like Daedalus) firmly announced as (the unknown) Clonus Eutychides,

whose name meaning ‘Din-of-Battle, Son-of-Success’ seems like a joke at the

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expense of the Homeric epithet (X.499). Turnus wrests it from the dead body of

Pallas and Vergil warns us that he will rue the act (X.500-505). That time comes at

the very end of the entire poem when Turnus pleads for his life before the triumphant

Aeneas. Aeneas wavers – his eyes rolling (volvens oculos, XII.939) – and then he

sees the sword-belt of Pallas which Turnus is wearing. In the poem’s last moment of

the viewing of art, Aeneas ‘feasted his eyes on the sight of this spoil, this reminder of

his own wild grief’ (ille, oculis postquam saevi monimenta doloris / exuviasque

hausit…, XII.945-6).

Again the thematics of personal suffering (cf dolor at VI.31), identification

and memory (cf. VI.26 for monimenta) arise in the face of a work of art, this time

with the response postponed for two books from the initial description and its impact

altered by the epic’s intervening action – notably the death of Pallas and the defeat of

Turnus. Where Aeneas had stood transfixed and tearful before Dido’s paintings, and

transfixed until the priestess called him away at Cumae, where Daedalus had been so

moved by dolor that he could not complete the images planned for the temple door,

now grief gives way to vengeful fury and Aeneas strikes. That mindful anger in

Aeneas’s response to the sword-belt is effectively an echo of Juno’s anger at the

opening of the epic, which initiated its action. As monimentum, and especially a

monimentum that is active in stirring its audience to emotive response, the art-work of

the sword-belt merges with the artwork that is the poem as a whole.

4. Conclusion. I have been highly selective in my examples of art and text –

whether epigraphic, illustrative or ecphrastic, favouring instances of the highest

culture above the less grand or ambitious, and in the case of ecphrasis giving

scandalously short shrift to everything but Vergil (including the whole of elegy and

especially Ovid’s masterly and repeated turns to art in the Metamorphoses ), let alone

the prose examinations of art in the novels or such texts as Pliny’s letter 3.6, with

Henderson (2002)). But I hope that the general case has been made for a deep and

persistent engagement of word and image in (Greco-)Roman culture. In particular,

the remarkable development of ecphrasis into a most complex meditation on the

nature of the work of art and its reception has proved fundamental in shaping the

Western tradition of reflecting on the nature of art itself.

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Elsner: Art and Text

[My thanks are due to the editor and to three other Latin ‘H’s for their very useful

comments and advice – in alphabetical order, Philip Hardie, John Henderson and

Nicholas Horsfall].

Guide to Further Reading

On the inscriptional culture of Greece and Rome see e.g. MacMullen (1982),

Meyer (1990), Woolf (1996). On the cinerary grave altar of Titus Statilius Aper see

Kleiner (1987) 213-6 and Koortbojian (1996) 229-31, on the sarcophagus of Junius

Bassus Apollonj Ghetti, Ferrua, Josi and Kirschenbaum (1951) 220-2 and fig. 171,

Malbon (1990) 3-90, Cameron (2002), Elsner (2003) 82-7, 89. On ekphrasis in

general and its uses in literature see e.g. Friedländer (1912) 83-103, Downey (1959),

Pernice and Gross (1969), (e.g. Ravenna (1974), Bartsch (1989),Fowler (1991), Laird

(1996), Webb (1999), Harrison (2001a); on ekphrastic techniques in the Latin novels

cf. Schissel von Fleschenberg (1913), Slater (1990) 91-101, Elsner (1993), Conte

(1996) 14-22, Laird (1997) and Slater (1998).

On the murals of Dido’s temple in Carthage (Aeneid I.453-93) see e.g.

Williams (1960a), Clay (1988), Barchiesi (1994) 114-24, Putnam (1998a) 23-54); on

the Ganymede cloak (V.250-7) see Boyd (1995) 84-88, Putnam (1998a) 55-74, Hardie

(2002b)); on the bronze doors of the temple at Cumae (VI.20-37) see Fitzgerald

(1984), Paschalis (1986), Sharrock (1994) 103-11, Putnam (1998a) 75-96); on the

shield of Turnus (VII, 789-92) see e.g. Breen (1986), Gale (1997)); on the shield of

Aeneas (VIII.630-728) see e.g. Hardie (1986) 97-109, 120-4, 336-76, Putnam (1998a)

119-88); and on the sword-belt of Pallas (X.495-505) see e.g. Breen (1986), Conte

(1986) 185-95, Putnam (1998a) 119-88, Harrison (1998a)).

On ekphrasis in Ovid’s Metamorphoses see e.g. Leach (1974), Solodow (1988) 203-

31, Hardie (2002a) 146-50, 173-226.

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