Ekphrastic Image-Making in Early Modern Europe, 1500-1700

In epideictic oratory, ekphrasis is typically identified as an advanced rhetorical exercise that verbally reproduces the experience of viewing a person, place, or thing; more specifically, it often purports to replicate the experience of viewing a work of art. Not only what was seen, but also how it was beheld, and the emotions attendant upon first viewing it, are implicitly construed as recoverable, indeed reproducible.

This volume examines how and why many early modern pictures operate in an ekphrastic mode: such pictures claim to reconstitute works of art that solely survived in the textual form of an ekphrasis; or they invite the beholder to respond to a picture in the way s/he responds to a stirring verbal image; or they call attention to their status as an image, in the way that ekphrasis, as a rhetorical figure, makes one conscious of the process of image-making; or finally, they foreground the artist’s or the viewer’s agency, in the way that the rhetor or auditor is adduced as agent of the image being verbally produced.

Contributors: Carol Elaine Barbour, Ivana Bicak, Letha Ch’ien, James Clifton, Teresa Clifton, Karl Enenkel, Arthur DiFuria, Christopher Heuer, Barbara Kaminska, Annie Maloney, Annie McEwen, Walter Melion, Lars Cyril Nørgaard, Dawn Odell, April Oettinger, Shelley Perlove, Stephanie Porras, Femke Speelberg, Caecilie Weissert, Elliott Wise, and Steffen Zierholz.