Secret Designs/Public Shapes: The Space of Memory in the Ekphrasis of Hildegard’s Scivias

Abstract

Space, like body, is one of those too-large terms that defies precise categorization: it is nothing and everything at once. And yet, space, like body has concrete and strategic meanings. Through ekphrasis, it extends farther, reveals itself conceptually larger and more elastic than the confines of an aesthetic conception limited to the material arts allow. The space of the mystical-vision text, for instance, unfurls territories that in our current ideological milieu cannot be mapped cleanly, for reasons pertaining to authenticity claims discussed in the previous chapter. But the spatiality of the mystical vision text ensures expansion into compositions not certain, not defined, a composition that hazily shifts, and unsolid itself, represents unsolid bodies. The space the mystical vision occupies is then confusing to the theorist of ekphrasis because a large part of the long theoretical conversation about ekphrasis has dedicated itself firmly to the respective ideological relationships of the visual and verbal arts to dimensions of space and time. Renaissance and Enlightenment thought about the arts attributed the dimension of space to the qualities with which visual art is concerned, whereas the relationship of the verbal arts to their represented action was thought to be governed by time. Again, this formulation begins with da Vinci’s paragone and becomes even more cemented in Western aesthetic critical tradition with Lessing’s Laocoon, in which he aligns the visual arts with the extension of bodies in space and the verbal arts with actions in time, stating that one or the other art can only enter into “suitable relation” with its respective dimension.1