Ekphrasis

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Under Ekphrase or Ekphrasis (Greek ἔκ-φρασις: "Description", lat. Descriptio ; plural Ekphraseis) refers to a literary or rhetorical shape, through which (. For example, acts or landscapes) an object very clearly and visually described and the viewer is “presented” in an imaginative way (according to Quintilian ). In today's usage, every literary description of a work of fine art is often called an ekphrasis, but this reinterpreted use is controversial within art historical research.

The degree of clarity distinguishes the Ekphrasis from the factual report. It is a literary visualization strategy: The Ekphrase tries to “turn the listener into a spectator” (according to Nikolaus von Myra ) and to suggest a quasi synaesthetic , holistic experience. It is thus caught in the field of tension between observation and aesthetics .

Ekphrasis as a literary form

The specialization in the linguistic usage of art history is still alien to the ancient rhetoricians and authors , to them anything could be the subject of an ecphrase (e.g. people, places, events, objects). The definition of ekphrasis as a description of art took hold until late: The expression appeared in relation to works of art only in very few individual cases from the second half of the 16th century onwards by some French-speaking and Italian authors. “In art historical research, however, the term was only used popular after the middle of the 20th century. ”As a result of the later noticeable economic upturn, the term developed into an“ umbrella term ”(Tamar Yacobi) that was vague in definition and used ubiquitously, especially in visual science publications.

In the modern way of using the term, the ekphrasis often illustrates more of what is represented (the pictorial action) than the effect or perception of the picture . This has to do with the emphasis on storia (“narration”) as an outstanding visual quality since Leon Battista Alberti . A basic comparability of text and image (or their functionality) is assumed. This is why the relationship between word / literature and image is repeatedly discussed using the example of ekphrasis, for example in Horace ( “ut pictura poiesis” ), the Paragone (competition of the arts) or the subsequent Laocoon debate . However, this emphasis on narrative action must be called into question with the increasing resolution of the visual arts from narrative and representative tasks (see abstract painting ). Against the background of understanding it as a description of art, the definition of ekphrasis as verbal representation of visual representation ( James AW Heffernan ), i.e. ekphrasis as a double mediation of the real, as a depiction of what is depicted , is to be understood. In this understanding the description of a bouquet of flowers would not be an ecchrasis, but the description of the image of a bouquet.

Ekphraseis occur as a separate genre or as part of narrative texts. In the latter, they serve, among other things, for the emotional involvement of the reader / listener, as a parallel narrative, intratextual window or to bridge place and time. Belief in its convincing effect is often countered by the accusation that it is just superfluous jewelry.

Famous Ekphraseis include the description of Achilles' shield making in Homer's Iliad , the shield description based on it in Virgil's Aeneid , the imagines of Philostratus , the description of Hagia Sophia by Paulus Silentiarius or the poem Ode on a Grecian Urn by Keats . The poems of Albrecht von Haller were often used as an example of “poetic paintings” in the 18th century . In Charlotte Brontë's Villette , too , the Cleopatra chapter takes this form. In the 20th century, Henry James combined Ekphrasis with his technique of internalizing sensory impressions, for example in the description of a painting by Agnolo Bronzino in The Wings of the Dove . There are also numerous descriptions of images in contemporary literature, e.g. B. from Théodore Géricaults Raft der Medusa in Julian Barnes ' A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters , Orhan Pamuk's Red is my name or the works of the fictional artist Bill Wechsler in Siri Hustvedt's What I loved .

Oscar Wilde's The Portrait of Dorian Gray can be seen as an extreme formulation of the term , in which the relationship of the viewer to the image, its ekphrasis, “comes to life” and becomes the object of the ekphrasis. This exaggeration proves to be a successful literary concept and can be found in horror literature as a fundamental motif. Several of Stephen King's novels combine the idea of ​​Wilde with the ancient practice, according to which the ekphrasis is transferred to everyday objects. The form is thus close to psychological dramas such as Ingeborg Bachmann's Malina .

Newer definitions

Tamar Yacobi defines Ekphrasis as an intermedial quotation or re-presentation (“re-presentation”) - that is, as a representation of the second order - and thus as a form of transfer between different arts (“interart transfer”). Yacobi derives this definition from a synopsis of literary description and art-critical interpretation. A minimal definition therefore says: an originally autonomous picture of the world becomes part of a new whole through an eccphrastic transfer to the picture of an image and as a visual use in a verbal framework. Denis Leifeld transfers the term ekphrasis to the description of performances in the theater. He developed the spelling of close description, which “picks up the specific sensuality of the experiences and memories” made during a performance. "A plastic empathy with a past event" is sought with creative means. This notation is based on the assumption that the process of describing is always a creative and creative one; A descriptive representation, emphasizes Denis Leifeld, based on the basic assumptions of Ekprasis, is only an illusion.

See also

literature

  • Frederick Alfred de Armas: Ekphrasis in the age of Cervantes . Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2005. ISBN 0-8387-5624-7 .
  • Andrew Sprague Becker: The Shield of Achilles and the Poetics of Ekphrasis . Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1995. ISBN 0-8476-7998-5 .
  • Emilie Bergman: Art Inscribed: Essays on Ekphrasis in Spanish Golden Age Poetry . Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979. ISBN 0-674-04805-9 .
  • Gottfried Boehm and Helmut Pfotenhauer : Descriptive art, description of art: Ekphrasis from antiquity to the present . Munich: W. Fink, 1995. ISBN 3-7705-2966-9 .
  • Siglind Bruhn : Musical Ekphrasis: Composers Responding to Poetry and Painting . Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon Press, 2000. ISBN 1-57647-036-9 .
  • Siglind Bruhn: Musical Ekphrasis in Rilke's Marienleben . Amsterdam / Atlanta: Rodopi, 2000. ISBN 90-420-0800-8 .
  • Siglind Bruhn: A Concert of Paintings: 'Musical Ekphrasis' in the Twentieth Century . In: Poetics Today 22: 3 (Fall 2001): pp. 551-605. ISSN  0333-5372
  • Siglind Bruhn: The Sounding Museum: Music interprets works of fine art . Waldkirch: Gorz, 2004. ISBN 3-938095-00-8 .
  • Siglind Bruhn: Europe's sounding pictures: A musical journey . Waldkirch: Gorz, 2013. ISBN 3-938095-18-0 .
  • Siglind Bruhn: Vers une méthodologie de l'ekphrasis musical . In: Sens et signification en musique , ed. by Márta Grabócz and Danièle Piston. Paris: Hermann, 2007, pp. 155–176. ISBN 978-2-7056-6682-8 .
  • Siglind Bruhn, Ed .: Sonic Transformations of Literary Texts: From Program Music to Musical Ekphrasis [Interplay: Music in Interdisciplinary Dialogue Volume 6]. Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon Press, 2008. ISBN 978-1-57647-140-1 .
  • Hermann Diels: About the art clock from Gaza described by Prokop, with an appendix containing a text and translation of the Ekphrasis horologiou de Prokopius from Gaza . Berlin, G. Reimer, 1917.
  • Barbara K Fischer: Museum Mediations: Reframing Ekphrasis in Contemporary American Poetry . New York: Routledge, 2006. ISBN 978-0-415-97534-6 .
  • Claude Gandelman: Reading Pictures, Viewing Texts . Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991. ISBN 0-253-32532-3 .
  • Stefan Greif: Painting can have a very eloquent silence. Descriptive art and visual aesthetics of the poets . Munich: Fink Verlag, 1998. ISBN 3-7705-3331-3 .
  • Jean H. Hagstrum : The Sister Arts: The Tradition of Literary Pictorialism and English Poetry from Dryden to Gray . Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1958.
  • James Heffernan: Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. ISBN 0-226-32313-7 .
  • John Hollander: The Gazer's Spirit: Poems Speaking to Silent Works of Art . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. ISBN 0-226-34949-7 .
  • Franziska A. Irsigler: Described faces. Ecphrastic portraits in the narrative art of poetic realism. Bielefeld: Aisthesis 2012. ISBN 978-3-89528-934-7 .
  • Gayana Jurkevich: In pursuit of the natural sign: Azorín and the poetics of Ekphrasis . Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1999. ISBN 0-8387-5413-9 .
  • Mario Klarer: Ekphrasis: Description of images as representation theory in Spenser, Sidney, Lyly and Shakespeare . Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2001. ISBN 3-484-42135-5 .
  • Gisbert Kranz : The pictorial poem: theory, lexicon, bibliography , 3 volumes. Cologne: Böhlau, 1981–87. ISBN 3-412-04581-0 .
  • Gisbert Kranz: Masterpieces in pictorial poems: Reception of art in poetry . Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1986. ISBN 3-8204-9091-4 .
  • Gisbert Kranz: The architectural poem . Cologne: Böhlau, 1988. ISBN 3-412-06387-8 .
  • Gisbert Kranz: The pictorial poem in Europe: On the theory and history of a literary genre . Paderborn: Schöningh, 1973. ISBN 3-506-74813-0 .
  • Murray Krieger: Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign . Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992. ISBN 0-8018-4266-2 .
  • Hans Lund: Text as Picture: Studies in the Literary Transformation of Pictures . Lewiston, NY: E. Mellen Press, 1992 (initially in Swedish as texts som tavla , Lund 1982). ISBN 0-7734-9449-9 .
  • Denis Leifeld: Bringing up performances. For performance analysis of performers in theater and art. transcript, Bielefeld 2015, ISBN 978-3-8376-2805-0 .
  • Michaela J. Marek: Ekphrasis and ruler's allegory: Ancient image descriptions in the work of Titian and Leonardos . Wernersche Verlagsgesellschaft , Worms 1985. ISBN 3-88462-035-5 .
  • Hugo Méndez-Ramírez: Neruda's Ekphrastic Experience: Mural Art and Canto general . Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1999. ISBN 0-8387-5398-1 .
  • Martin Antonius Menze: Heliodors “classic” eccphrase. The literary visuality of the "Aithiopika" in comparison with their forerunners in Homer and Herodotus and their reception in Miguel de Cervantes . Aschendorff Verlag, Münster 2017, ISBN 978-3-402-14457-2 .
  • WJ Thomas Mitchell: Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. ISBN 0-226-53231-3 .
  • Margaret Helen Persin: Getting the Picture: The Ekphrastic Principle in Twentieth-century Spanish Poetry . Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1997. ISBN 0-8387-5335-3 .
  • Michael CJ Putnam : Virgil's Epic Designs: Ekphrasis in the Aeneid . New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. ISBN 0-300-07353-4 .
  • Christine Ratkowitsch: The poetic ecphrasis of works of art: a literary tradition of large-scale poetry in antiquity, the Middle Ages and early modern times . Vienna: Publishing house of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, 2006. ISBN 978-3-7001-3480-0 .
  • Valerie Robillard and Els Jongeneel (Eds.): Pictures into Words: Theoretical and Descriptive Approaches to Ekphrasis . Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1998. ISBN 90-5383-595-4 .
  • Raphael Rosenberg: From the Ekphrasis to the scientific description of images. Vasari, Agucchi, Félibien, Burckhardt . In: Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte , 58 (1995), pp. 297-318.
  • Maria Rubins: Crossroad of Arts, Crossroad of Cultures: Ecphrasis in Russian and French Poetry . New York: Palgrave, 2000. ISBN 0-312-22951-8 .
  • Cristina Santarelli: L'ékphrasis come sussidio all'iconografia musicale: Funzione metanarrative delle immagini nel romanzo modern e contemporaneo . In: Music in Art: International Journal for Music Iconography . 44, No. 1-2, 2019, ISSN  1522-7464 , pp. 221-238.
  • Grant Scott: The Sculpted Word: Keats, Ekphrasis, and the Visual Arts . Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1994. ISBN 0-87451-679-X .
  • Mack Smith: Literary Realism and the Ekphrastic Tradition . University Park: Pennsylvania State U Press, 1995. ISBN 0-271-01329-X .
  • Leo Spitzer : The "Ode on a Grecian Urn", or Content vs. Metagrammar . In: Comparative Literature 7. Eugene, OR: University of Oregon Press, 1955, pp. 203-225.
  • Peter Wagner: Icons, Texts, Iconotexts: Essays on Ekphrasis and Intermediality . Berlin, New York: W. de Gruyter, 1996. ISBN 3-11-014291-0 .
  • Haiko Wandhoff: Ekphrasis: Descriptions of Art and Virtual Spaces in Medieval Literature . Berlin, New York: De Gruyter, 2003. ISBN 978-3-11-017938-5 .
  • Robert Wynne: Imaginary Ekphrasis . Columbus, OH: Pudding House Publications, 2005. ISBN 1-58998-335-1 .
  • Tamar Yacobi: Ekphrastic Double Exposure and the Museum Book of Poetry . In: Poetics Today , 34: 1–2 (Spring – Summer 2013), pp. 1–52.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Albert W. Halsall: Description , in: Historical Dictionary of Rhetoric , Vol. 1, Sp. 1495-1510.
  2. ↑ Raphael Rosenberg: To what extent Ekphrasis is not an image description. On the history of an abused term , in: Joachim Knape (Hrsg.): Bildrhetorik. Koerner, Baden-Baden, 2007, pp. 13-17.
  3. ↑ Fabian Jonietz: The book for the picture. The 'Stanze nuove' in the Palazzo Vecchio, Giorgio Vasari's 'Ragionamenti' and the legibility of art in the Cinquecento. Deutscher Kunstverlag, Berlin / Munich 2017, pp. 243–248, cit. P. 244; Oliver Kase: Learning to see with words. Image description in the 18th century. Michael Imhoff, Petersberg 2010, pp. 13-17.
  4. ↑ Tamar Yacobi: The Ekphrastic model. Forms and Functions, in: Valerie Robillard and Els Jongeneel (Eds.): Pictures into Words: Theoretical and Descriptive Approaches to Ekphrasis . Amsterdam: VU University Press, 1998, pp. 21-34, cit. P. 23
  5. ↑ Tamar Yacobi: Ekphrastic Double Exposure and the Museum Book of Poetry . In: Poetics Today , 34: 1–2 (Spring – Summer 2013), pp. 1–52.
  6. ↑ Denis Leifeld: Bringing Performances to Language. For performance analysis of performers in theater and art. transcript, Bielefeld 2015, ISBN 978-3-8376-2805-0 , p. 290.
  7. ↑ Leifeld: Bringing Performances to Language , p. 151.
  8. ↑ See Denis Leifeld: Performances bring up the language , p. 152.