Modes of Viewing in Hellenistic Poetry and Art: And Art

1. Aims, Approaches, and Samples

1 Aims, Approaches, and Samples What processes were at work when hearers or readers of poetry in the Hellenistic period envisaged the scenes presented by the poets of their day? How did people in that period view contemporary works of art? And to what extent are we entitled to talk in terms of analogies between the two types of viewing—the one based on words which create a picture in the mind’s eye, the other centering on images which one can view directly and move around spatially? This book aims to examine certain aspects of these questions. If it transpires that there is indeed a common process of constructing mental images or relating to actual objets d’art which can be differentiated from the habits current in the fifth or fourth centuries b.c., we shall have learned some important lessons about the function of poetry and art in the Hellenistic age and about the period’s poetic and artistic strategies. Quite apart from that, there is the considerable intrinsic interest involved in discovering more about how an age and a culture as sophisticated as the Hellenistic advanced the experience of viewing in Western poetry and art. In pursuing this aim, I will often use the sister arts of the Hellenistic period, by which I mean its poetry and visual art, to see what light they may shed on one another in the matter of viewing . Often, too, the results of modern research in one field will be applied to the other. New analyses by the art historians of the period will enable us to see the images of its poets from unexpected new angles, and, conversely, some of the poetic techniques characteristic of the age will be tested for their applicability to the reconstruction of the Hellenistic way of viewing painting and 3 sculpture. In essence, the poetry of the period and some of its strategies will help us to place the tone of certain works of art, while art and some of its strategies will literally open our eyes to the poets’ unprecedented techniques of visual description and narrative. Framed in these terms, the aim of this book is not as narrow as that of the chapter in T. B. L. Webster’s Hellenistic Poetry and Art which was concerned with the influences of the one art on the other in that period.1 Admittedly, this question will have to be addressed on occasion, but of greater general significance is a much broader issue: the common modes of viewing that I think can be detected in the sister arts in the period. Nor do I intend such a wide overview of the Hellenistic aesthetic as attempted more recently by B. H. Fowler,2 who in practice offers not so much a definition of the Hellenistic aesthetic as a description of the shared subject matter, genres, styles, and modes of Hellenistic art and literature . The object of my undertaking is more specialized, with the emphasis placed firmly on modes of viewing in Hellenistic poetry and art. To a coverage of Hellenistic taste in general as offered by John Onians’ Art and Thought in the Hellenistic World3 I have likewise no pretension, stimulating though I have found it many times. I have, by contrast, found a highly sympathetic approach in an essay by Andrew Stewart4 which forcefully and illuminatingly pursues the analogy ofAsianism in Hellenistic rhetorical theory and the “Hellenistic Baroque.” Stewart’s literary criteria and terminology are strikingly helpful in our understanding of this much misunderstood and unquestionably vital facet of Hellenistic art. In the present study, the rhetorical treatises on (or, more often, fulminations against) Asianism have their counterparts in the abundant pictorially descriptive poetic texts of the early third century, from which we can infer what was valued in viewing, although comparatively little in the way of direct formulation has survived. The underlying contention here is that if a Hellenistic poetic description of a person, an animal, the weather, a scene, or an objet d’art adopts a particular way of viewing, we have independent evidence for the habits of viewing that Hellenistic people would have brought to their contemplation of representational art. The Hellenistic poets have set down in words the ways in which their contemporaries observed works of art—or rather, perhaps, their 4 Aims, Approaches, and Samples “putative” contemporaries, since we are forced to deal with generalities when talking...