Ekphraseis of works of art exist at several levels. There is the physical, observable reality of an object or objects, or the potential for such. That (potential) reality may then be depicted within a work of art. A literary artist imaginatively (re-)presents that depiction, in the ekphrasis itself, and may further imbue the resultant description with a symbolic value for the story in which it is set. Not all of these layers need exist, nor need the correspondence between them be precise or even real. An ekphrasis, for example, may describe a completely fictitious object, which itself, however, reflects a possible actuality in the physical world of the senses. Or the question of symbolic value may appear irrelevant, if the purpose of the ekphrasis is instead to provide relief from the temporal drive of the narrative.

This paper seeks to elucidate the two surviving ekphraseis with astronomical content from Euripides, one from his Elektra describing a shield of Akhilleus, and the other from his Ion describing a ceiling tapestry. I take the view that if we can discern and then understand a potential reality described in an ekphrasis, then it is worth asking whether this reality helps us to understand better the literary image and hence its possible symbolism too. The need to answer such a question is the greater with regard to texts involving astronomical material, as this tends to lie outside modern readers' experience or knowledge, but lay well within the day-to-day experience of people in antiquity.

(Greek Anthology 16.160, attributed to ‘Plato’)

Paphian Cytherea came through the waves to Knidos,
Wishing to see her own image.
Having viewed it from all sides in its open shrine,
She cried, ‘Where did Praxiteles see me naked?’

‘Through a glass, darkly:’ not just a hackneyed, Biblical phrase summing up our inability to apprehend God, but a pithy visualisation of the gap between divine truth and our perception of it. Yet Paul's words might also stand as an image for the trope of ekphrasis, the bewildering textual prism through which the frustrated reader attempts to view an enclosed and distant image. In this paper I will attempt to unite these two themes; one, the complexities of viewing and representing the divine, and two, the unrequited desire engendered by the ekphrastic text. Both of these rely upon an interplay of presence and absence which is, in a literary context, brilliantly communicated by the series of epigrams in the Greek Anthology dealing with images of gods, particularly, if we are to speak of desire, those which address images of Aphrodite.

What, exactly, identifies the ekphrastic at work? Some basic definitive properties can be agreed: ekphrasis is a descriptive trope that brings what it describes vividly before the imaginative gaze of its audience. It is through its vivid evocation of a scene or object unseen to this audience that the ekphrasis fulfils its purpose, and makes an emotional impact upon them. The affective power of ekphrasis thus draws its audience into the fictional world of its narrative, blurring the boundaries necessarily erected by its verbal frame, while at the same time the focus on crafted objects that we often see in ekphraseis (particularly in those on which scholars have predominantly chosen to concentrate)—and the break that an ekphrasis can create when it is interposed in a continuing narrative—serve to highlight the very createdness of this world.

So ekphrasis is on the face of it a well-defined literary figure, easily recognisable both by its intrinsic attributes and by its effects. Nevertheless the boundaries of ekphrasis are not as clearly defined as the summary above might suggest. Ekphraseis of art objects have commanded the most scholarly attention: they allow for discussion of the fashioning of the text as well as its function and they conform to modern understandings of what an ekphrasis looks like. But defined in classical terms, ekphrasis covers a far broader descriptive territory than does verbal representation of representative art alone and can include, as well as descriptions of objets d'art, descriptions of battles, of cities, of persons, places, times and events, of plants and animals, and of festivals…

Statius is the arch-describer. Even when it was universally agreed that his poetry was essentially second-rate hack-work, his ability to evoke the visual and his relationship to works of art provided fascination and interest. Yet the ekphraseis in the Thebaid have not received much detailed critical attention. This paper looks at the double ekphrasis of the prizes at the end of the chariot race in Thebaid 6. If ekphraseis tend to be ignored and passed over, if ekphraseis are moments outside narrative, still visions for the viewer in the text, interludes, as it were, then an ekphrasis within a set of games is doubly distant from the thrust of the text. For games themselves have suffered the same marginalisation: read as purely ‘decorative’ or ‘imitative’ their importance for understanding the wider realities of the text has often passed unnoticed. An ekphrasis, then, is indeed a sort of game, and, I would argue, this is particularly so in this case. For Statius uses this passage to make a new move in his poetic contests with his predecessors. He takes one Homeric object and one Virgilian object, decorates them with Ovid and sets them against each other. Hinds has read the Achilleid as an Ovidian epic but Ovid is also extremely important in the Thebaid and much more work is needed on this.

This paper returns at first to ancient definitions of ekphrasis as vivid description, including that of bodies or persons conjured up before the eyes of the reader. The passages from Ovid and Diodorus Siculus on which I focus (DS Library 32.10-12 and Ovid Met. 9.669-797), represent descriptions not of works of art, but of bodies. To complicate matters, these bodies as objects of description are also undergoing change from one sex to another; they are also events. Nevertheless, although they do not describe works of art, this literary trope (ekphrasis in the modern understanding of the term) does prove to be an important reference point for both these highly aware authors in their description of the phenomenon of sex-change. As generations of writers have done before them, Ovid and Diodorus Siculus allude to the tradition of ekphrasis as a means to reflect upon their own artistry and creative endeavour. They also invoke this trope to introduce into their narratives the issues of illusion and deception, and of viewpoint and interpretation, that are associated with this ekphrastic tradition. They use the concept of ekphrasis to problematise the relationship between text and reader, viewer and object of gaze, reality and appearance, seeing and believing.

Novels have so much solid and monolithic bulk when they sit in a hand or on a shelf; inside, the pages are forests of symbols, as though even in books of such magnitude the sentences needed compression to fit on to pages. How different to poetic volumes, beguilingly slender, their pages brilliant with blank, white space, across which the spindly words stretch like gossamer. In terms of content, however, novels are rarely as monolithic as their physical form suggests. From earliest times since, the genre has dealt, centrally, with themes of metamorphosis, transubstantiation, the fundamentally permeable nature of the self. The solid material aspect of the novel often masks a central preoccupation with the fluidity of identity.

In the compass of this article, I want to explore the central role accorded by Heliodorus, arguably the greatest of ancient novelists, to questions of perceptual deception, to seeing and seeming; and in particular, I want to explore the role of artworks within Heliodorus' narrative economy. The narrative turns, as is well known, on the amazing paradox of an Ethiopian girl born white. Charicleia's skin colour is a visual trap, an illusion. Given that her freakish pigmentation is the result of her mother's glancing at an art-work at the moment of conception, Charicleia can almost be said to be a walking ekphrasis, an embodiment of the illusory traps of the unreal.

Picture yourself in a beautiful room, flooded with early morning light. It has a lofty ceiling, delicately gilded and glinting in the sunshine. The walls are adorned with paintings, in colour and detail as bright as Spring. What is one to do in the face of such beauty? Stand mute, gazing in wonder, or articulate the impact of the visual, rival it even, in words?

This is the question posed by Lucian's On the Hall, a rhetorical introduction or prolalia, probably written between 160 and 180 CE. The piece is framed as a debate about the merits of speaking in beautiful surroundings. While the first speaker confidently asserts that it is both desirable and beneficial to give oratorical displays within impressive surroundings, a second speaker, who only appears in chapter 14, suggests that such surroundings will instead overpower the speaker and distract his audience. Yet the debate does not only question whether beautiful surroundings help or hinder the epideictic orator. It also asks what the proper response of an educated man should be to visual beauty, and problematises the relationship between the visual and the verbal. While many of Lucian's other works give descriptions of works of art, or appeal to the reader's artistic knowledge, this essay puts the ekphrastic project itself in the spotlight, questioning whether words can ever truly compete with the impact of the visual.

I shall comment upon the way the elder Philostratus, author of Imagines, inscribes both the art of painting and his own interpretation of 65 particular paintings within a larger framework, which is composed of nature on the one hand, and the human perception of nature on the other. To get to this framework in a slightly oblique way, I will start with a brief reminder of Philostratus' often neglected classification of the arts.

In his Life of Apollonius of Tyana 8.7, Philostratus takes notice of the established opposition between the mechanic and the liberal arts (τέχναι βάναυσοι and τέχναι σοϕαί), but then proceeds to further divide the liberal arts into three groups: some are simply σοϕαί (poetry, music, astronomy, the art of sophist and orator); others are only seemingly liberal, ψευδόσοϕοι (the art of wizards or jugglers); between these two groups are situated the ‘less liberal arts’ or ὑπόσοϕοι τέχναι, namely painting, plastic art, sculpture, navigation and agriculture.

This paper will examine the central image of Ἱστοί (‘Looms’ or ‘Webs’), that of the web woven by the spider, as a Callimachean expression, or objectification, of the highly self-conscious treatment of art and play with illusion in the Imagines, that is, its play with the interaction of vision and text. In so doing, it will attempt to show in what ways Ἱστοί might be said to describe the artistic process of the work of which it forms a part, and to illuminate, from its context of painting and its ekphrastic oratory, something of the function and structure of ekphrasis itself. It will not be long enough to deal with the wider questions, about mimesis and the definition of ekphrasis, that it will perhaps have invited.

Simonides once called painting silent poetry and poetry articulate painting. Comparing the two ‘sister arts’ in the sixth or fifth century BCE, he wrote the first chapter of a story which, even if one thinks only of antiquity, is a rather long one, and in which many of the issues raised seem tremendously complex. In addition, many ancient authors wanted to add their own passages to this story, and quite naturally different writers arrived at very different conclusions about the two arts' respective relationships. Yet however different these conclusions were, no writer, as a writer, could avoid agreeing with Simonides on a basic thing: any statement about the visual arts is inevitably a hermeneutical effort to make the visual speak, and in doing so it equally inevitably implies a deficit of the visual arts: namely, that art cannot speak and needs some form of ‘translation’ to be communicated. Discussing art in written texts, then, cannot but entail implicitly a statement about writing's hermeneutical superiority; this is the case even if the statement may explicitly deny any such superiority. It has been argued that this deficit in art is real and that there does exist a ‘Hermeneutic Gap’ in painting; whereas verbal discourse, so the argument goes, operates with a ‘hermeneutic of understanding’, painting, by contrast, is bound to a ‘hermeneutic of calculated misunderstanding’. Certainly there are paintings for which such a statement is correct—but there may be as many cases in which a text only construes such a gap and uses it as a good opportunity to establish its own hermeneutic superiority by contrasting itself with an image which is supposedly less precise in communicating meaning.