Abstract
The practice and theory of modern literary ekphrasis remain dominated by the original and foundational pairing of poetry and painting in Horace's Ars Poetica, from which the ut pictura poesis genre is derived. From Shelley's ‘On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci in the Florentine Gallery’ to W. H. Auden's ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’, from Browning's ‘My Last Duchess’ to Yeats's ‘The Municipal Gallery Revisited’, we can listen to most of the greatest poets of the modem age reflecting, some with envy, others with defiance, on the seeming superiority of the image over the word. The novel, however, seems to have made no comparable contribution or addition to this genre. How many novelists have turned their narrative skills towards the contemplation of the other arts? If, as James Heffernan has argued, ‘the art of speaking for pictures is above all a rhetorical performance’, is not the novel better equipped for such an extended performance?1 Most modern novelists show a passing or referential interest in the world of art, quoting from it repeatedly, but rarely constructing entire fictions around the idea of a parallel art which speaks in a silent language.2
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