Ekphrasis
Ekphrasis is a vivid literary description of a visual artwork or crafted object. It makes an absent or imagined object present through words.
Shield of Achilles: A description of an elaborate shield made by Hephaestus in Homer's Iliad. Homer's shield is an early, influential example of a crafted object made vivid through poetry.
Enargeia: A rhetorical quality that makes a verbal account seem vividly present to an audience. Ekphrasis often uses enargeia to make an artwork or object feel perceptually immediate.
Progymnasmata: A sequence of preliminary rhetorical exercises used in ancient Greek and Roman education. Ekphrasis became one of the exercises through which students practiced vivid description.
Ut pictura poesis: A Latin phrase meaning “as is painting, so is poetry,” from a line in Horace's Ars Poetica. The phrase invites comparison between poetry and painting, a broader concern than describing one artwork.
Ode on a Grecian Urn: A poem by John Keats that meditates on scenes imagined on an ancient Greek urn. Keats makes the imagined images on an urn the subject of reflection and address.
Apostrophe: A rhetorical device in which a speaker directly addresses an absent person, object, or idea. Addressing an artwork can make its silence and apparent presence part of the poem.
Theon of Alexandria: A Greek rhetorician whose surviving handbook discusses preliminary rhetorical exercises. Theon's handbook includes ekphrasis among the practices taught to aspiring speakers.
Iconography: The study of subjects, symbols, and conventional meanings represented in visual art. Iconography decodes visual symbols systematically, while ekphrasis gives an artwork a verbal literary presence.
My Last Duchess: A dramatic monologue by Robert Browning in which a duke discusses a portrait of his late wife. The portrait becomes a prompt for the duke's self-revelation and control.
Description: A verbal account of the features, appearance, or qualities of something. Ekphrasis is a specialized literary use of description, shaped by an artwork as its subject.