Faire voir: Études sur l'enargeia de l'Antiquité à l'époque moderne ed. by Florence Klein and Ruth Webb

Abstract

Reviewed by: Faire voir: Études sur l'enargeia de l'Antiquité à l'époque moderne ed. by Florence Klein and Ruth Webb Flora Iff-Noël Faire voir: Études sur l'enargeia de l'Antiquité à l'époque moderne. Edited by Florence Klein and Ruth Webb. Villeneuve d'Ascq: Presses universitaires du Septentrion. 2021. Pp. 293, ills. This collective volume, which presents the proceedings of a two-day conference at Tourcoing in 2014, analyzes the theory and practice of enargeia and its relationship to visual art through various case studies from archaic Greece to imperial Rome. It contributes to the constantly growing scholarship on text and image studies since the [End Page 375] 1990s, and more precisely on the connections between the Hellenistic concept of enargeia and ancient art and text.1 Indeed, enargeia, defined as the capacity of words to create the impression that absent things are present to the senses, and in particular to the sense of sight (9; see Quint. IO 6.2.29–32), has already been the object of monographs about Hellenistic poetry, imperial rhetoric, and historiography.2 The present volume aims to fill three gaps in the scholarship by considering the following issues (10–11): 1. How can we study enargeia in archaic and classical Greek texts when there are no contemporary theoretical texts on the matter? Can we identify practices specifically associated with particular literary genres? 2. Even after enargeia's theorization and practice in Hellenistic and Roman times, what is the status of word-created images? Are they effective substitutes to the perception of real objects or deceitful illusions? 3. Especially since the 1950s, scholarship interested in descriptions of artworks has isolated such texts and labeled them ekphraseis, changing the meaning of this word, which was originally used in imperial Greek rhetoric to designate texts full of enargeia, i.e., texts that could "place their object as if under the eyes of their reader or audience" (Aelius Theon, Progymnasmata 118). This volume aims to reconsider such texts within the context of enargeia and to explore the role of enargeia within the reception of real artworks and the production of discourse about them. The book focuses especially on Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Zeuxis, Posidippus of Pella, Moschus, Sallust, Pliny, Ovid, Quintilian, and Pseudo-Longinus. Thus, it is of interest to all classicists, as it tackles rhetoric, poetry, historiography, drama, and art history, both in Greece and in Rome. As all quotes are translated, the volume will also be valuable to scholars of modern literature interested in questions of intertextuality, hypotyposis, text and image studies, as well as for historians, art historians, and university students. The Introduction provides a helpful definition of enargeia and a summary of the various chapters. Chapter One by Pierre Judet de La Combe analyzes the description of fountains in the Iliad (22.145–161). How can we explain the presence of a lengthy description of fountains at the precise moment of Hector's defeat, which is the turning point of the war? Judet de La Combe considers it to have a metapoetic meaning, reflecting on the nature of epic. Chapter Two by Deborah Steiner explores the various interactions between objects and texts inscribed on them by comparing the spectator's real vision of the object to the reader's mental vision of the images evoked by the inscribed texts. She focuses on three archaic inscriptions (IG2 I 919 on the oenochoe of Dipylon, Athens, Archeological Museum 192; a funerary epigram on the cenotaph of Ambracia, SEG 41.450; IG I3 833 [End Page 376] bis on an Athenian marble tripod dedicated by a victorious choral poet). Steiner argues that seeing these inscriptions is an anticipation of the images evoked by the inscription's content. For instance, the letters' disposition sometimes seems to represent the shapes of the dance moves evoked in the inscriptions, as when the letters create effects of symmetry that represent the dancers' symmetrical movements, or when the inscription as a whole is placed below representations of dancers and constitutes a wavy line which mimics the dancers' chorus line. The way these inscriptions are written is meaningful for enargeia and...