Ekphrasis and the Sister Arts

When a poem describes a painting or a sculpted shield, literature reaches across the border into the visual. Ekphrasis — the verbal representation of visual representation — is the sharpest test of the old idea that poetry and painting are sister arts.

Definition

The study of ekphrasis — the literary representation of a visual artwork — and of the broader 'sister arts' tradition that posits a kinship between poetry and painting.

Scope

Examines the verbal-visual relation in comparative literature: the classical doctrine of ut pictura poesis and the sister arts, Lessing's argument for the distinct limits of poetry and painting, and modern theories of ekphrasis as the verbal representation of visual art. Concerns how literature describes, rivals, and incorporates the visual.

Core questions

• What is ekphrasis, and how does language represent a visual image?
• Are poetry and painting genuinely sister arts, or fundamentally different media?
• What is at stake in literature's attempt to capture or rival visual art?
• How has ekphrastic practice changed from Homer to the present?

Key theories

Limits of poetry and painting

Lessing argued that poetry, unfolding in time, is suited to narrating actions, while painting, fixed in space, is suited to representing bodies, setting limits to the sister-arts analogy.

Ekphrasis and the natural sign

Krieger theorized ekphrasis as literature's attempt to achieve the immediacy of the visual 'natural sign', an aspiration that words can only imitate.

Poetics of ekphrasis

Heffernan defined ekphrasis as the verbal representation of visual representation and traced its history as a dramatic contest between word and image from Homer's shield of Achilles onward.

History

The sister-arts doctrine descends from Horace's ut pictura poesis and Simonides' saying that painting is mute poetry and poetry a speaking picture. Lessing's 1766 Laocoön broke with this by distinguishing the temporal and spatial arts. Modern ekphrasis theory revived in the late twentieth century with Krieger's 1992 and Heffernan's 1993 studies, which framed ekphrasis as a contest between verbal and visual representation.

Debates

Kinship versus rivalry of word and image

Whether ekphrasis expresses a harmonious kinship between the sister arts or a competitive struggle in which language strives to master or rival the visual image.

Key figures

• Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
• Murray Krieger
• James A. W. Heffernan

Seminal works

• lessing1984
• krieger1992
• heffernan1993

Frequently asked questions

What is a classic example of ekphrasis?

The description of the shield of Achilles in Homer's Iliad is the founding example: a long passage of poetry that depicts in words a richly worked visual object. Keats's 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' is a famous later instance.