Ekphrastic Poetry on the Venus de Milo

Abstract

Within literary studies, the interaction of ekphrastic poetry and painting constitutes a frequently examined topic, but the intermedial relationships between poetry and sculpture have been more rarely explored. Contributing to the scholarship on literary ekphrasis and on the interrelations between poetry and sculpture, the paper focuses on strategies of description and narrativization, paying homage and developing a rivalry, and the account of the viewer’s activity and their aesthetic evaluation. The essay examines these issues via the case study of the ekphrastic lyrical tradition of the Venus de Milo. Firstly, it lays out a sketch of nineteenth-century art historical and lyrical approaches to the Venus de Milo. Secondly and predominantly, it analyses some examples of twentieth-century ekphrasis (such as the Hungarian Gyula Juhász’s “Milói Vénus,” the Romanian Alfred Moşoiu’s “Venus din Milo,” the British Alfred Noyes’s “The Venus of Milo,” and the Hungarian György Rónay’s “A milói Vénusz”), which all respond to the statue of Venus de Milo, and either continue or break the art historical and lyrical traditions developed during the 1800s. Therefore, on the one hand, the study demonstrates how ekphrastic literary traditions, while participating in the canonization of visual works of art, show the traces of the changing approaches and appreciations of their artistic object (in this case study, the Venus de Milo) over a long period of time, and, on the other hand, it sheds light on how the ekphrastic literary tradition itself is shaped.