Ekphrasis is recurrently defined around the enargeia (vividness) and saphēneia (clarity) of the associated rhetorical description. According to such definitions, ekphrasis is a special sort of “descriptive speech” ( logos periēgēmatikos), and one that transforms the subject described from something figuratively “shown” ( to dēloumenon) into a sort of literal apparition “before the eyes” ( hyp’ opsin). Theon’s explanation of ekphrasis as a “descriptive speech which brings the subject shown before the eyes with visual vividness” 6 seems to have been echoed almost verbatim among other Progymnasmata authors. 5 Despite their differences in emphasis and explanatory gloss, the Progymasmata provide strikingly similar definitions. 4 The most detailed ancient critical analyses, however, come in the context of the Imperial Greek Progymnasmata by Theon, Hermogenes, Aphthonius, and Nikolaus. The word recurs in the context of the scholiasts’ commentaries-above all in relation to the Homeric poems. Where modern critics have tended to describe ekphrasis as a “verbal representation of a literary representation,” 1 or else as a “sought-for equivalent in words of any visual image,” 2 some classical scholars have argued that “the ancient and modern categories of ekphrasis are … formed on entirely different grounds, and are entirely incommensurate, belonging as they do to radically different systems.” 3Īs a critical term, “ekphrasis” ( ἔκφρασις) is attested from around the 1st century ce onwards. At the same time, there has been much debate about the precise relationship between modern uses of the term-as developed above all in the study of comparative literature-and its precise semantic meanings in antiquity. The concept has been fundamental to late 20th- and early 21st-century scholarship on the interface between visual and verbal media.
Ekphrasis refers to the literary and rhetorical trope of summoning up-through words-an impression of a visual stimulus, object, or scene.
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