Visual Rhetorics of Carmina Figurata in the Poetry of the Early Middle Ages

Abstract

Examines the way the verbal image represents itself graphically in the shape of pattern poems and traces the forming of visual rhetorics back to the early medieval poetry. Pattern poems ( carmina figurata ) are considered to be the earliest genre of the visual poetry, where from new synthetic form springs. Visual images of pattern poems by Simmias of Rhode, Dosiades of Crete, Theocritus reveal the obvious interconnection between poetry and painting. The description visualises common or mythological object, while its reception is based on the reflection of the sign­symbolic level of the poetic structure in figurative iconicity. In addition, Latin poets contributed greatly to shaping verbal text as a new visual language. Particularly well­known is the visual experiment by Publilius Optatianus Porphyrius, namely The Panegyric to the Emperor Constantine the Great (326), in which the universality of verbal and visual levels represents the semantic whole and the way the rhetoric message is structured. A new approach to visual signification gave a new expressive form not just with the means of language as such but as a specific mode of musical expression of a poetic text. One may recall exceptional drawings based on the depiction of musical signs by the poet and musician Baude Cordier (c. 1380 - c. 1440), namely Belle, Bonne, Sage rondo for three voices presented in a heart­shaped score. The semantics of the Latin cross was reconsidered by the Latin poet Rabanus Maurus Magnentius (c. 780-856) in his treatise De laudibus sanctae crucis , where the semantic structure of the text distinctly reveals its visual potentials and the lexical level correlates with the sign system, so that verbal and visual elements constitute each other.