DESCRIPTIONS OF WORKS OF ART, OR 'ECPHRASES'
  • Ecphrasis

The description of a work of art in a literary text is called 'ekphrasis' (or ecphrasis). It introduces a medium -art- into another -literature-, and it is therefore in itself a source of complexity.

  • Literary motifs based on 'curious perspectives'

     Allusions to works of art in literature were frequently metaphorical, using the work of art as an analogy to substantiate a complex idea or feeling: the 'curious perspectives', being in themselves dual, were frequently taken as examples of contradictions in life: the mixture of good and evil in one person, the transition between life and deathÂ…suggesting motion or change

 

  • In Chapman's poem Ovids Banquet of Sence (1595), a statue near a fountain is 'cunningly to optick reason wrought' (l.24) so that it represents a weeping woman - Niobe - only when viewed from a certain distance. see the text in LION (University subscription). There is a shift between the stone of the statue, the woman represented, and the self-image produced by her tears flowing into the fountain ( statues in fountains were used to cause optical effects).
  • In Shakespeare's Antony and Clopatra (1607), Cleopatra describes the dual nature of Antony as a picture which is one way a Gorgon and the other way a Mars (II.v). See the Arden Shakespeare (a University subscription)
  • Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) describes the double personality of Cosmus de Medici in such terms in 'Democritus Junior to the Reader', and again in Pt.2, Sec.2, Mem.6, Subs.4, where he associates this duality to that of melancholy and mirth.