In theory, a culture’s responses to its artworks should tell us what that culture thought important or interesting about them, and thus should help to illuminate not only its expectations and reactions to them, but also (because all artists envisage their work in terms of an audience) their makers’ intentions and achievements. Yet as a leading philosopher of art once perceptively remarked, “The spectator will always understand more than the artist intended, and the artist will always have intended more than any single spectator understands.” Moreover, in practice, literary responses may be shaped, wholly or in part, by the protocols of genre and (in this period) specific literary, social, political, and courtly agendas, which may set priorities, select subjects, and guide reactions. But even skewed and filtered responses are better than none.

This chapter explores responses of several different kinds. Analogies between Hellenistic literature and art – for example, between Alexandrian pastoral poetry and tomb painting (Figure 158) or between Eastern Greek (so-called Asiatic) rhetoric and the baroque (Figures 8, 46, 57–60), occasionally mentioned in earlier chapters – must be left aside. The topic is too vast and slippery. Instead, we focus on direct responses either to particular objects or to particular artists and styles.