This chapter explores how the revision of amatory poetics creates a throughline across all seven volumes of poems jointly written by Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper under the pen name of Michael Field. This chapter argues that Michael Field’s revision of the tradition of love poetry, and specifically the Renaissance tradition of courtly love poetry, opens a space for same-sex eroticism, feminist revision of male-centric tropes and the male gaze, and even calls into question the lyric voice as a construct. Bradley and Cooper’s poems complicate the lover/beloved binary through voice and poetic form, shaping the love lyric into a more apt vehicle for their own unique voice and position.

This chapter considers Michael Field’s collection of ekphrastic poems, Sight and Song, in the context of fin-de-siècle art criticism. It explains ekphrasis as a genre and that genre’s relationship with art criticism, as well as Michael Field’s relationship with both. Sight and Song claims to set down on paper the ‘poetry’ that is ‘incarnate[d]’ within their paintings of study. Michael Field try to use the volume to assert their authority as both poets and art critics, instructing their readers about their paintings of study and about how one ought to appreciate all paintings. This chapter explores how successful this project was and how it was informed by Michael Field’s own personal experiences within the predominantly masculine aesthetic and art critical communities.

Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper caught the new enthusiasm for Renaissance Italy among writers, artists, critics, and historians that was so prominent a feature of British culture in the second half of the nineteenth century. Particularly influential was Walter Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), which celebrates the multiple temporalities of the Renaissance, its reconciliation of pagan and Christian, and its capacious embrace of the ancient past and a dynamically conceived modernity. Michael Field’s collection of ekphrastic lyrics Sight and Song (1892) is dominated by the Renaissance art that inspired the art and writing of many in the poets’ circle, including Pater himself, Ruskin, Browning, Rossetti, Swinburne, the Berensons, Vernon Lee, Ricketts, Shannon, Beardsley, and Wilde. This chapter argues that it was these artists and writers, all drawn to fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italy, who collectively established the most significant context for Michael Field’s creative engagement with the Renaissance.

This chapter frames Thomas Mann’s engagement with physiognomic culture in his 1912 novella. The aesthetics of the face staged by Mann’s novella conjure a physiognomic hierarchy. At the top of this hierarchy, one finds the character of Tadzio portrayed as a neoclassical Greek sculpture. The mechanism for this projection is ekphrasis. At the bottom of the hierarchy, Mann’s novella constructs a series of racialized minor characters identified as facial types. The text nonetheless destabilizes this hierarchy through the figure of the barber, who gives Aschenbach a consequential makeover – a version of Loy’s “auto-facial-construction,” in this case relying on makeup. The chapter places the discussion of Tadzio’s “perfect face” in relation to the recent reassessment of Luchino Visconti’s cinematic adaptation of Mann’s novella in Kristina Lindström and Kristian Petri’s documentary, The Most Beautiful Boy in the World (2021). The conclusion: the veneration of youthful face comes at a cost.

Percy Shelley’s interest in the visual arts (painting and sculpture, but also monuments and landscapes) was much heightened by the years spent in Italy, where in letters and notebooks, he records a wide range of encounters and sharpened his powers of observation, perception, and description. This chapter presents several important contexts and instances, from accounts in his letters to Thomas Love Peacock of the paintings in Bologna that particularly moved him (such as Raphael’s St. Cecilia), to his ekphrastic verses on a painting of the head of Medusa, to his wide-ranging descriptive notes on sculptures in Rome and in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. These are situated historically in terms of increased access to, and engagement with, the visual arts in the period, and as important sites for Shelley to work through the imaginative transmutation of the visual into the visionary in his own poetry and poetic theory.

Lucian is a master of ekphrasis – the art of rhetorical description and notably the vivid verbal evocation of works of art. One particular aspect of Lucian’s art historical enterprise is a comparative aesthetic. This extends beyond the comparison of artworks with other things or people (in texts whose titles signal such comparison) to some of the forms in which Lucian chose to write, notably dialogic media (whether dramatic of reported). This comparative game knowingly plays with the inevitable competition of art and text that inheres in the verbal description of the visual. Beyond this, Lucian takes synkrisis or comparison – a central trope in the rhetorical handbooks – and exploits it so as to give voice to the marginal, to elevate the alien and to emphasise questions of multiplicity and diversity within empire. This ideological exploitation of description is what in part has made Lucian so attractive and controversial since the era of Renaissance Humanism. The apparently unproblematic arena of visual aesthetics is brilliantly seized – not only by Lucian but also many of his modern readers – as a site within which to reveal the place, voice, and importance of cultural, ethnic and subaltern identities not always in simple harmony with the hegemonic status quo of the Roman empire.

Nicholas Kallikles’ poem 29 Εἰς τὰ ῥόδα is a rich and fascinating text which resists its classification as religious epigram and rather inscribes itself in the tradition of spring ekphrasis, of which it constitutes a good twelfth-century example. The relevance given to themes such as learning and rhetorical ability, whose importance is strongly stressed, and the analogies that the text shows with poems related to school contests suggest that it was probably intended to be performed as the opening of a school competition taking place in the theatron. The existence, in mss. Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Pal. gr. 92 and Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, conv. soppr. 2, of a schedos on spring attributed to Kallikles and showing some points of contacts with poem 29 supports this hypothesis and suggests that Kallikles, known mainly for his medical teaching, might have engaged for some time also in the teaching of grammar and rhetoric.

This chapter considers the ekphrastic essay in British history, from nineteenth-century art writing to twentieth and early twenty-first-century writing about photography and experimental essay films. If ekphrasis is the attempt to render visual representations in verbal form, the ekphrastic essay can also register the limits of that representation in our inability fully to depict or describe such experiences as strife, pain, and human suffering. Ekphrastic essays, this chapter suggests, take the problem of bearing witness as part of their formal logic, using the doubt and critical force of the essay form to trace the image of suffering. From Walter Pater’s meditations on the quiet despair of Botticelli’s Madonnas, to John Akomfrah’s three-screen examinations of climate change and colonial violence and John Smith’s small-scale films that challenge representations of the ‘War on Terror’, ekphrastic essays compel us to notice what we cannot so easily see.

Court poetry is the label given to skaldic poetry in dróttkvætt (court metre) or one of its many variations, delivered as praise of rulers by Icelandic, Norwegian and Orcadian poets. This chapter discusses its typical content, including battle, voyages, praise, self-referential allusions to poetry, and mythical and religious references, both Christian and pre-Christian. The characteristic techniques of skaldic poetry – complex metre, diction (especially kennings) and word order, including clause arrangement – are described in detail. The three main forms of skaldic poetry, the drápa, flokkr and vísur, are distinguished, and subgenres of skaldic poetry such as ekphrasis, genealogical and historical poems, and eddic-style praise poems are described. Other types of court poetry, not straightforwardly encomiastic, are also considered. The social context and purpose of court poetry is explained, and the chapter concludes with a survey of the transmission, influence and modern reconstruction of court poems. Court poetry was such a useful medium for entertaining warrior elites that it endured for four centuries, and the continued inventiveness of court poets is noted.

Understanding contemporary African American literature, this chapter argues, requires accounting for the rich, multifaceted dialogue between Black literary production and the visual arts. This chapter traces what Toni Morrison called the “alliances and alignments” between literature and the other arts by analyzing the aesthetics and themes of contemporary African American writing and examining the cross-arts influences that shaped it. The dialogue between African American literature and visual culture is part of a much longer tradition, and contemporary writers have built on many earlier precedents. But this chapter also unpacks how important historical changes, including developments in media technology and the rise of Black art institutions, have generated new and more numerous intersections between Black literary and artistic cultures since the 1970s. Focusing on three key spaces that provided material support and thematic inspiration for Black writers’ experiments with visual art – the home, museum, and university – this chapter examines how authors working in a range of literary genres, including novels, poetry, plays, screenplays, memoirs, and essays, engaged with a variety of visual arts, including painting, film, sculpture, and photography. The influences and aesthetics of visual culture, the chapter shows, powerfully infuse the work of many writers today.

This chapter argues that Pliny’s description of his Tuscan villa (Ep. 5.6) engages in a complex intertext with Statius’ villa descriptions in the Silvae (1.3 and 2.2). The intertext involves Pliny recognizing and ‘correcting’ Statius’ combinatorial appropriation of Lucretius and Vergil’s Georgics. Statius alludes to the concept of nature in Lucretius and Vergil in order to justify his (polemical) celebration of the domination of nature by positioning it within the didactic tradition. In doing so Statius is able to praise the extravagance of his patrons and their villas. Chinn argues that Pliny acknowledges and elaborates this intertext by ‘correcting’ Statius’ Lucretian allusion and thereby positioning himself as the controller of nature and hence the object of praise.

Hogarth published two images in a series that, according to the record, should have been made from three. One image, from 1741, showed an enraged musician; the other, from four or so years earlier, a distressed poet. The third, one supposes, was of a harassed painter. This chapter reads the two images that Hogarth produced to speculate about the missing third. It focuses on the moods of artists, their rage and distress, against the backdrop of strategies of the paragone and ekphrasis. It investigates the consequences of choosing different instruments for art and thought, especially those that are bloody in association with the skinning of bodies. What we see in The Enraged Musician and in The Distrest Poet, we see elsewhere in Hogarth’s work regarding figure, icon, motif, expression, and meaning. Engaging lives of domesticity and professions, he commented on the production and reception of the arts. Reading the two images brings us to other images in his oeuvre as we seek insight into the missing image of the painter.

This essay provides an associatively structured overview of the wide field of painting and ekphrasis in Sebald’s work. Starting with Sebald’s collaborations with his friend and artist Jan Peter Tripp, the essay moves to his use of Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp (1632) in The Rings of Saturn. Then the essay then explores the role of battle paintings in Sebald’s writings, especially their use to discuss issues of representation of historical events. In the next step, figurations of melancholy in Sebald are discussed on the basis of Dürer’s engraving Melencolia along with the theme of pulverization relating to the painter Ferber in The Emigrants. The conclusion compares Sebald’s poetics to the epistemology of knowledge inaugurated by Aby Warburg’s Bilderatlas Mnemosyne.

This chapter explores the shared circumstances, collaborations, and socializing that drew modernist poets and painters together in New York, but also the critical discourse of medium specificity that insisted on the separation of their endeavors. William Carlos Williams established proximity with the Stieglitz Circle painters, admiring (and occasionally acquiring) their work, which he rendered in ekphrastic poems. While Wallace Stevens’ early career was also shaped by encounters with these artists, his poetry maintained a distance from while suggesting parallels with visual art. The chapter moves from Williams’ and Stevens’ contrasting approaches through Clement Greenberg’s assertions of medium-specificity to Frank O’Hara’s at once intimate and ambiguous relationship with midcentury American painting and painters. O’Hara’s collaborations with Grace Hartigan and Larry Rivers suggest close connections but no fixed relationships between writing and painting. The chapter concludes with Glenn Ligon, whose late-twentieth-century paintings catch the messiness of preceding word–image encounters but convey an urgent need for communication that extends beyond the dialogue between writing and painting.

In The Moor’s Last Sigh, Vasco Miranda describes the artist Aurora da Gama Zogoiby’s work as ‘“Epico-Mythico-Tragico-Comico-Super-Sexy-High-Masala-Art” in which the unifying principle was “Technicolor-Story-Line”’. This also seems like a fitting description for Salman Rushdie’s visual style of storytelling. This chapter maps the broader context of the writer’s engagement with visual art and culture. It begins by examining the playful and political mobilization of visual intertexts in The Moor’s Last Sigh through the links between the character Aurora Zogoiby and the Hungarian Indian painter Amrita Sher-Gil. It then juxtaposes the visual interweaving in the 1995 novel with The Golden House by considering the visually established connection between the DC Comics supervillain Joker and the then soon-to-be elected president of the United States, Donald Trump. Beyond this engagement with the visual on a narrative level, Rushdie has collaborated with artists such as Anish Kapoor and Tom Phillips. Many others have created visual artworks based on Rushdie himself and his fictional work. The last section of the chapter analyses Rushdie and Kapoor’s collaboration, Blood Relations, a project that attempts a convergence of verbal and visual media, linking debates around visual representation, political engagement, and aesthetic autonomy in the face of violence.

This chapter highlights and defines ‘theatricalism’ and ‘theatricality’ as critical terms, useful for understanding Roman culture. It provides examples of each, suggests how useful the terms are for describing Roman art, architecture, domestic décor, ceremonies and political life. It summarises how subsequent chapters will examine the concepts informing these terms and will use these to further out understanding of crucial aspects of Rome art and society. It also introduces the concept of ‘mixed reality’ and the practice of mnemonics, ekphrasis and phantasia as key examples of how theatricalism figured in Roman artistic, mental and cultural life.

This chapter highlights passages from Darwin’s early writings that explore phonetics and phonology in the natural world, illuminating how sound lies at the heart of Darwin’s observational methodology. Darwin’s handwritten notes and early manuscripts, for example, demonstrate that his writing process relies upon experiencing the sonic texture and physiological dimension of nature. In order to communicate this sonic texture, Darwin uses elaborate metaphors and descriptions to recreate his own auditory experience within the mind’s eye (or ear) of his readers, in a process of auditory ekphrasis. Darwin’s attempts to represent birdsong, as well as his admittedly imperfect attempts to compare the sounds of a variety of animals, informed his understanding of the boundaries that differentiated species from each other. Ultimately, Darwin’s approaches to labeling sound at the intersection of different physiological, behavioral, and cultural registers exemplify the productive nature of a sound studies methodology in Victorian studies and beyond.