Reading a View: Poem and Picture in the Greek Anthology

Abstract

‘A picture is a silent poem, a poem is a speaking picture’ (attr. Simonides) ‘A picture is a silent poem, a poem is a blind picture’ (Leonardo da Vinci) How do words represent images? In what ways do visual signs function like (and unlike) verbal ones? And which medium better captures its represented subjects—pictures that are seen, or poems that are heard, written and read? These questions stretch the length and breadth of western literary criticism. Already in the Homeric description of Achilles' shield (Il.18.478-608), we find the respective resources of pictures and poetry pitched against one other, in a passage that plays with the respective visibility of words and the audibility of images. By the late sixth century BCE, the relationship between poetry and painting seems to have been theorised explicitly. Whatever the origins of the maxim attributed to Simonides—‘frequently repeated’, as Plutarch elsewhere describes it—a related sentiment was evidently widespread by the fourth century BCE. When Plato came to theorise the relationship in hisPhaedrus, he has Socrates define words and paintings in closely related terms: ‘the creatures that painting begets stand in front of us as though they were living entities,’ Socrates concludes; ‘ask them a question, however, and they maintain a majestic silence’ (ϰαὶ γὰϱ τὰ ἐϰείνης ἔϰγονα ἕστηϰε μὲν ὡς ζῶντα, ἐὰν δ' ἀνέϱῃ τι, σεμνῶς πάνυ σιγᾷ, Pl.Phdr.275d).Vt pictura poesis—as is painting, so is poetry’: that was how Horace famously summed up the analogy some four centuries later, giving rise to the so-called ‘sister arts’ tradition of conceptualising painting and poetry.

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