Ekphrastic encounters

New interdisciplinary essays on literature and the visual arts

Richard Meek, David Kennedy, Richard Meek, David Kennedy

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781526125798
• eBook ISBN: 9781526125811
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art Theory & Criticism

This book offers a comprehensive reassessment of ekphrasis: the verbal representation of visual art. Ekphrasis has been traditionally regarded as a form of paragone (competition) between word and image. This interdisciplinary collection of essays 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. Ekphrastic encounters brings together leading scholars working in the field of word-and-image studies and offers a fresh exploration of ekphrastic texts from the Renaissance to the present day. Taken together, the chapters establish a new set of theoretical frameworks for exploring the ekphrastic encounter.

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 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 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.

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 catast...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: from paragone to encounter: David Kennedy and Richard Meek
• Part I: Early modern encounters
• Part II: Nineteenth-century encounters
• Part III: Modern and postmodern encounters
• Afterword: James A. W. Heffernan
• Index