Lucian is a master of ekphrasis – the art of rhetorical description and notably the vivid verbal evocation of works of art. One particular aspect of Lucian’s art historical enterprise is a comparative aesthetic. This extends beyond the comparison of artworks with other things or people (in texts whose titles signal such comparison) to some of the forms in which Lucian chose to write, notably dialogic media (whether dramatic of reported). This comparative game knowingly plays with the inevitable competition of art and text that inheres in the verbal description of the visual. Beyond this, Lucian takes synkrisis or comparison – a central trope in the rhetorical handbooks – and exploits it so as to give voice to the marginal, to elevate the alien and to emphasise questions of multiplicity and diversity within empire. This ideological exploitation of description is what in part has made Lucian so attractive and controversial since the era of Renaissance Humanism. The apparently unproblematic arena of visual aesthetics is brilliantly seized – not only by Lucian but also many of his modern readers – as a site within which to reveal the place, voice, and importance of cultural, ethnic and subaltern identities not always in simple harmony with the hegemonic status quo of the Roman empire.

Nicholas Kallikles’ poem 29 Εἰς τὰ ῥόδα is a rich and fascinating text which resists its classification as religious epigram and rather inscribes itself in the tradition of spring ekphrasis, of which it constitutes a good twelfth-century example. The relevance given to themes such as learning and rhetorical ability, whose importance is strongly stressed, and the analogies that the text shows with poems related to school contests suggest that it was probably intended to be performed as the opening of a school competition taking place in the theatron. The existence, in mss. Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Pal. gr. 92 and Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, conv. soppr. 2, of a schedos on spring attributed to Kallikles and showing some points of contacts with poem 29 supports this hypothesis and suggests that Kallikles, known mainly for his medical teaching, might have engaged for some time also in the teaching of grammar and rhetoric.

This chapter considers the ekphrastic essay in British history, from nineteenth-century art writing to twentieth and early twenty-first-century writing about photography and experimental essay films. If ekphrasis is the attempt to render visual representations in verbal form, the ekphrastic essay can also register the limits of that representation in our inability fully to depict or describe such experiences as strife, pain, and human suffering. Ekphrastic essays, this chapter suggests, take the problem of bearing witness as part of their formal logic, using the doubt and critical force of the essay form to trace the image of suffering. From Walter Pater’s meditations on the quiet despair of Botticelli’s Madonnas, to John Akomfrah’s three-screen examinations of climate change and colonial violence and John Smith’s small-scale films that challenge representations of the ‘War on Terror’, ekphrastic essays compel us to notice what we cannot so easily see.

Court poetry is the label given to skaldic poetry in dróttkvætt (court metre) or one of its many variations, delivered as praise of rulers by Icelandic, Norwegian and Orcadian poets. This chapter discusses its typical content, including battle, voyages, praise, self-referential allusions to poetry, and mythical and religious references, both Christian and pre-Christian. The characteristic techniques of skaldic poetry – complex metre, diction (especially kennings) and word order, including clause arrangement – are described in detail. The three main forms of skaldic poetry, the drápa, flokkr and vísur, are distinguished, and subgenres of skaldic poetry such as ekphrasis, genealogical and historical poems, and eddic-style praise poems are described. Other types of court poetry, not straightforwardly encomiastic, are also considered. The social context and purpose of court poetry is explained, and the chapter concludes with a survey of the transmission, influence and modern reconstruction of court poems. Court poetry was such a useful medium for entertaining warrior elites that it endured for four centuries, and the continued inventiveness of court poets is noted.

Understanding contemporary African American literature, this chapter argues, requires accounting for the rich, multifaceted dialogue between Black literary production and the visual arts. This chapter traces what Toni Morrison called the “alliances and alignments” between literature and the other arts by analyzing the aesthetics and themes of contemporary African American writing and examining the cross-arts influences that shaped it. The dialogue between African American literature and visual culture is part of a much longer tradition, and contemporary writers have built on many earlier precedents. But this chapter also unpacks how important historical changes, including developments in media technology and the rise of Black art institutions, have generated new and more numerous intersections between Black literary and artistic cultures since the 1970s. Focusing on three key spaces that provided material support and thematic inspiration for Black writers’ experiments with visual art – the home, museum, and university – this chapter examines how authors working in a range of literary genres, including novels, poetry, plays, screenplays, memoirs, and essays, engaged with a variety of visual arts, including painting, film, sculpture, and photography. The influences and aesthetics of visual culture, the chapter shows, powerfully infuse the work of many writers today.

This chapter argues that Pliny’s description of his Tuscan villa (Ep. 5.6) engages in a complex intertext with Statius’ villa descriptions in the Silvae (1.3 and 2.2). The intertext involves Pliny recognizing and ‘correcting’ Statius’ combinatorial appropriation of Lucretius and Vergil’s Georgics. Statius alludes to the concept of nature in Lucretius and Vergil in order to justify his (polemical) celebration of the domination of nature by positioning it within the didactic tradition. In doing so Statius is able to praise the extravagance of his patrons and their villas. Chinn argues that Pliny acknowledges and elaborates this intertext by ‘correcting’ Statius’ Lucretian allusion and thereby positioning himself as the controller of nature and hence the object of praise.

Hogarth published two images in a series that, according to the record, should have been made from three. One image, from 1741, showed an enraged musician; the other, from four or so years earlier, a distressed poet. The third, one supposes, was of a harassed painter. This chapter reads the two images that Hogarth produced to speculate about the missing third. It focuses on the moods of artists, their rage and distress, against the backdrop of strategies of the paragone and ekphrasis. It investigates the consequences of choosing different instruments for art and thought, especially those that are bloody in association with the skinning of bodies. What we see in The Enraged Musician and in The Distrest Poet, we see elsewhere in Hogarth’s work regarding figure, icon, motif, expression, and meaning. Engaging lives of domesticity and professions, he commented on the production and reception of the arts. Reading the two images brings us to other images in his oeuvre as we seek insight into the missing image of the painter.

This essay provides an associatively structured overview of the wide field of painting and ekphrasis in Sebald’s work. Starting with Sebald’s collaborations with his friend and artist Jan Peter Tripp, the essay moves to his use of Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp (1632) in The Rings of Saturn. Then the essay then explores the role of battle paintings in Sebald’s writings, especially their use to discuss issues of representation of historical events. In the next step, figurations of melancholy in Sebald are discussed on the basis of Dürer’s engraving Melencolia along with the theme of pulverization relating to the painter Ferber in The Emigrants. The conclusion compares Sebald’s poetics to the epistemology of knowledge inaugurated by Aby Warburg’s Bilderatlas Mnemosyne.

This chapter explores the shared circumstances, collaborations, and socializing that drew modernist poets and painters together in New York, but also the critical discourse of medium specificity that insisted on the separation of their endeavors. William Carlos Williams established proximity with the Stieglitz Circle painters, admiring (and occasionally acquiring) their work, which he rendered in ekphrastic poems. While Wallace Stevens’ early career was also shaped by encounters with these artists, his poetry maintained a distance from while suggesting parallels with visual art. The chapter moves from Williams’ and Stevens’ contrasting approaches through Clement Greenberg’s assertions of medium-specificity to Frank O’Hara’s at once intimate and ambiguous relationship with midcentury American painting and painters. O’Hara’s collaborations with Grace Hartigan and Larry Rivers suggest close connections but no fixed relationships between writing and painting. The chapter concludes with Glenn Ligon, whose late-twentieth-century paintings catch the messiness of preceding word–image encounters but convey an urgent need for communication that extends beyond the dialogue between writing and painting.

In The Moor’s Last Sigh, Vasco Miranda describes the artist Aurora da Gama Zogoiby’s work as ‘“Epico-Mythico-Tragico-Comico-Super-Sexy-High-Masala-Art” in which the unifying principle was “Technicolor-Story-Line”’. This also seems like a fitting description for Salman Rushdie’s visual style of storytelling. This chapter maps the broader context of the writer’s engagement with visual art and culture. It begins by examining the playful and political mobilization of visual intertexts in The Moor’s Last Sigh through the links between the character Aurora Zogoiby and the Hungarian Indian painter Amrita Sher-Gil. It then juxtaposes the visual interweaving in the 1995 novel with The Golden House by considering the visually established connection between the DC Comics supervillain Joker and the then soon-to-be elected president of the United States, Donald Trump. Beyond this engagement with the visual on a narrative level, Rushdie has collaborated with artists such as Anish Kapoor and Tom Phillips. Many others have created visual artworks based on Rushdie himself and his fictional work. The last section of the chapter analyses Rushdie and Kapoor’s collaboration, Blood Relations, a project that attempts a convergence of verbal and visual media, linking debates around visual representation, political engagement, and aesthetic autonomy in the face of violence.

This chapter highlights and defines ‘theatricalism’ and ‘theatricality’ as critical terms, useful for understanding Roman culture. It provides examples of each, suggests how useful the terms are for describing Roman art, architecture, domestic décor, ceremonies and political life. It summarises how subsequent chapters will examine the concepts informing these terms and will use these to further out understanding of crucial aspects of Rome art and society. It also introduces the concept of ‘mixed reality’ and the practice of mnemonics, ekphrasis and phantasia as key examples of how theatricalism figured in Roman artistic, mental and cultural life.

This chapter highlights passages from Darwin’s early writings that explore phonetics and phonology in the natural world, illuminating how sound lies at the heart of Darwin’s observational methodology. Darwin’s handwritten notes and early manuscripts, for example, demonstrate that his writing process relies upon experiencing the sonic texture and physiological dimension of nature. In order to communicate this sonic texture, Darwin uses elaborate metaphors and descriptions to recreate his own auditory experience within the mind’s eye (or ear) of his readers, in a process of auditory ekphrasis. Darwin’s attempts to represent birdsong, as well as his admittedly imperfect attempts to compare the sounds of a variety of animals, informed his understanding of the boundaries that differentiated species from each other. Ultimately, Darwin’s approaches to labeling sound at the intersection of different physiological, behavioral, and cultural registers exemplify the productive nature of a sound studies methodology in Victorian studies and beyond.

This chapter examines the relationship between Wallace’s writing and works of visual art. Beginning with the many moments of ekphrasis that punctuate the writing, ranging from myths of tapestry-weaving to Leutze’s mural of Manifest Destiny, encompassing Bernini and Escher in Infinite Jest alone, this chapter explores the ways in which Wallace makes use of the language of images in his writing, situating narrative in conversation with visual culture and reaching beyond language to image, color and texture. Reflecting on prior scholarly attention to art positioned in Wallace’s writing, the chapter explores the connections between attention and aesthetic. The chapter also examines the ways in which visual cues appear in other ways in Wallace’s work, from the defecatory art of Brint Moltke in “The Suffering Channel” to the incidence of color as a motif throughout the work, specifically Wallace’s insistent references to clothing. The chapter highlights the materiality of these instances, attending to both the visual and the haptic elements of his narrative deployment of art in fictional worlds. This chapter works in concert with the next, delineating the intermediate nature of Wallace’s writing, poised between language, sense and image, and how his inclusion and occlusion of art recalibrate and reflect the relationships between author and reader.

Imperial ekphrasis is the topic of Chapter 8. The disinterest in the aesthetics of deception in Hellenistic epigrams is continued in the ekphrastic works of Callistratus and the Philostrati. They use the term apatē not infrequently but, by and large, do not tie aesthetic illusion to deception in an ethical sense. It is another text, commonly disregarded as simple and unsophisticated, that intriguingly plays with the ambiguity of apatē. I will argue that the Tabula Cebetis, besides toying with the recession of representational levels, also uses the personification of Apatē in the painting it describes to associate aesthetic illusion with moral corruption, thereby issuing a reading instruction for itself. In fact, it can even be argued that in the Tabula Cebetis the aesthetics of deception, which Lucian had marshalled to criticize protreptics, helps preempt this criticism.

This chapter explores the complicated relationships between visual, verbal and textual wonder in the Greek literary tradition. Thauma is shown to be an important term of aesthetic response by the beginning of the fourth century BCE. The place of thauma in Greek traditions of poetic ekphrasis is examined. The transition from the conception of a marvel as a purely visual object or as an oral report to the sense of a marvel as something which is written down is explored through texts from Plato, Alcidamas, Homer, Theocritus and Posidippus.

Language incarnates the structurally absent sense or meaning of the mind in the presence of concrete, sensory signifiers. Dante displays the wholeness of sense in the fragmentary form of letters and even exacerbates their disintegration. So eternity appears as broken in time. Techniques of ekphrasis play with the discrepancy between different sensory modalities, bringing out their inevitable incompleteness, in order to open a perspective on the unrepresentable. However, the divine Logos ever since Heraclitus has been apprehended as a binding together of all things in making Being manifest, as Heidegger shows. The λέγειν or tying–binding that is the essence of language also for Dante (Convivio IV. vi. 3–4), is revealed through the historicality of language as something transcending, commanding, and mastering all possible human acts. The root sense of the Logos as tying and binding (legare) lies at the heart of Dante’s sense of the poet as binder (auieo) tying all things together through vowels as the ties between letters composing words. These figures evoke the already gathered Gathering that conditions the very possibility of history and event in their radical possibility as disclosure (aletheia). The reader gathers (leggere) what is gathered together already in Scripture, as well as in the world through the Logos revealed as universal Justice.