Ecphrasis

Ecphrasis or ekphrasis (from Greek ek out + phrasis speaking, verb ekphrazein, to proclaim or call an inanimate object by name) in modern times is taken to be the graphic, often dramatic description of a visual work of art while anciently the word applied to a description of any things, persons, or even human experiences.

Contents

1 What is ecphrasis? 2 What are the arts represented by ecphrasis? 3 Notional ecphrasis 4 Plato's Forms (the "bedness" analogy), the beginning of ecphrasis 5 From form to ecphrasis 6 Socrates and Aristotle 7 Plato and Phaedrus 8 External links to examples of works of ecphrasis

What is ecphrasis?

Ecphrasis has been considered generally to be a rhetorical device in which one art tries to relate to another art by defining and describing the essence and form of that original art, and in doing so, "speak to you" through its illuminative liveliness. A descriptive work of prose or one of poetry, a film, or even a photograph may thus highlight through its rhetorical vividness what is happening, or what is shown in, say, any of the visual arts, and in doing so, may enhance the original art and so take on a life of its own through its brilliant description. The kinds of art described in this way may include painting, photography, sculpture, architecture, etc.

What are the arts represented by ecphrasis?

In this way, a painting may re-present a sculpture, and vice versa; a poem portray a picture; a sculpture depict a heroine of a novel; in fact, given the right circumstances, any art may describe any other art, especially if a rhetorical element, standing for the sentiments of the artist when he created his work, is present. For instance, the distorted faces in a crowd in a painting depicting an original work of art, a sullen countenance on the face of a sculpture representing a historical figure, or a film showing particularly dark aspects of neo-Gothic architecture, are all examples of ecphrasis.

Ecphrasis may be encountered as early as the days of Aphthonius' Progymnasmata, his textbook of style; or Homer's going to great lengths in the Iliad, Book 18, describing Achilles' shield, exactly how Hephaestus made it as well as its completed shape.
Ecphrasis flourished in the Romantic era and again among the pre-Raphaelite poets, but is still and always will be practiced.

Notional ecphrasis

Notional ecphrasis may describe mental processes such as dreams, thoughts and whimsies of the imagination. It may also be one art describing or depicting another work of art which as yet is still in an inchoate state of creation, in that the work described may still be resting in the imagination of the artist before he has begun his creative work. The expression may also be applied to an art describing the origin of another art, how it came to be made and the circumstances of its being created. Finally it may describe an entirely imaginary and non-existing work of art, as though it were factual and existed in reality.

Plato's Forms (the "bedness" analogy), the beginning of ecphrasis

Plato discusses forms in the Republic, Book X, by using real things, such as a bed, for example, and calls each way a bed has been made, a "bedness". He commences with the original form of a bed, one of a variety of ways a bed may have been constructed by a craftsman and compares that form with an ideal form of a bed, of a perfect archetype or image in the form of which beds ought to be made, in short the epitome of bedness.
In his analogy one bedness form shares its own bedness - with all its shortcomings - with that of the ideal form, or template. A third bedness, too, may share the ideal form. He continues with the fourth form also containing elements of the ideal template/archetype which in this way remains an ever-present and invisible ideal version with which the craftsman compares his work. As bedness after bedness shares the ideal form and template of all creation of beds, and each bedness is associated with another ad infinitum, it is called an "infinite regress of forms".

From form to ecphrasis

It was this epitome, this template of the ideal form, that a craftsman or later an artist would try to reconstruct in his attempt to achieve perfection in his work, that was to manifest itself in ecphrasis at a later stage.
Artists began to use their own literary and artistic genre of art to work and reflect on another art to illuminate what the eye might not see in the original, to elevate it and possibly even surpass it.

Socrates and Aristotle

In Socrates (and Aristotle), it is not so much the form of each bed but the mimetic stages or removes at which beds may be viewed, that defines bedness:

1. 1. a bed as a physical entity is a mere form of bed
   2. any view from whichever perspective, be it a side elevation, a full plan from above, or looking at a bed end-on is at a second remove
   3. a full picture, characterising the whole bed is at a third remove
   4. ecphrasis of a bed in another art form is at a fourth remove

Plato and Phaedrus

In another instance Plato talks about ecphrasis to Phaedrus thus:
"You know Phaedrus, that is the strange thing about writing, which makes it truly correspond to painting.
The painter's products stand before us as though they were alive,
but if you question them, they maintain a most majestic silence.
It is the same with written words; they seem to talk
to you as if they were intelligent, but if you ask them anything
about what they say, from a desire to be instructed,
they go on telling you just the same thing forever".

External links to examples of works of ecphrasis

Hephaestus Starts Achilles' Shield (http://www.webwinds.com/myth/hephaestus2.htm)

John Keats Ode on a Grecian Urn (http://www.bartleby.com/101/625.html)

Rilke's Archaic Torso of Apollo (http://www.polyamory.org/~howard/Poetry/rilke_archaic_apollo.html)

Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, Ashbery (http://www.people.virginia.edu/~djr4r/ashbery.html)

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