Modes of Viewing in Hellenistic Poetry and Art: And Art

2. Full Presentation of the Image

2 Full Presentation of the Image Hellenistic visual art and poetry created modes of viewing in order to involve viewers and readers visually and spatially. This chapter and the two which follow examine this process. Here recent findings by art historians are particularly worth transferring to our approaches to poetry, for they serve as a model for defining some of the period’s techniques with a clarity that has not been adequately appreciated. By what means do Hellenistic artists and poets put their viewers and readers in the picture? I suggest that for the Hellenistic period we can identify three main methods, all in some way involving the act of supplementation, all common to both art and poetry. The first is obvious enough. The visual artist fills in all the details of both the main subject and its background, with the result that the viewer can place the main subject within a spatial context. An example in architectural relief-sculpture is the Telephus frieze in the Pergamon Altar, where the tortuous story of Telephus is retold visually in great detail, including trees as setting details and scene-dividers in the foreground, and registering the responses of other characters in the background of the scene. The Gigantomachy itself, of course, provides overwhelming visual detail. Particularly fascinating are the moments when, for example, the foot of a virtually free-standing giant (Ill. 5) is placed on one of the stairs—outside the monument’s space and into the viewer’s space. The viewer is confused by the trespass on his reality and is at least momentarily drawn into the image by the blurring of the boundary. In statuary on the small scale it has been shown how the Conservatori Satyr and Maenad group of the first century b.c. 27 (Ill. 6) is designed to tell an actual narrative through its visual detail .1 Depending on the viewer’s position, the satyr first appears to smile in triumph at an impending sexual conquest; then, once the precariousness of his carefully detailed hold on the maenad has been noticed, the viewer realizes that nothing is going to happen and observes the satyr’s grin turning into a grimace of defeat and frustration. In poetry there are abundant examples; I adduced and discussed many of them (from a different perspective from the one which interests us here) in my book on the realism of Alexandrian poetry. The boxing matches described in Theocritus’ twentysecond Idyll and the beginning of the second book of Apollonius’ Argonautica are especially striking in this connection, given the evocation of the physical appearance of King Amycus, the predominantly visual narrative of the fights themselves, and the way in which the two poets dwell upon the natural ambience and the human onlookers. All this happens in precisely the way the Greek rhetors, writing from the first century b.c. onward, commend enargeia and ekphrasis, which “bring the subject before our eyes.” A striking formulation of this quality can be seen in the manner in 28 Full Presentation of the Image 5. Giant on step of Pergamon Altar. Pergamon-Museum, Berlin. DAI, negative number 55.71 which Dionysius of Halicarnassus expresses his admiration for the Classical Athenian orator Lysias, whose recreations of the scene of the crime cause the audience to feel as if they were present: “The style of Lysias is full of enargeia. This is a capacity for bringing subjects within our senses, and is effected when we can apprehend the attendant details. Nobody who pays real attention to the speeches of Lysias could be so gauche, hard to please, or dull-witted as not Full Presentation of the Image 29 6. Conservatori Satyr and Maenad. Palazzo dei Conservatori, Rome (currently housed in the Centrale Montemartini). Faraglia, DAI negative number 33.424 to imagine that he is witnessing (oJra'n) what is being described as if it were actually happening and that he is in the very presence of any characters the orator may introduce” (Lysias 7 Usher).2 Nor should we feel that because Dionysius is talking about a stylistic quality exhibited in a writer from the Classical period we are wrong to regard this kind of evocativeness as peculiarly Hellenistic , for the Greek rhetors quote Homer or Herodotus as illustrating enargeia.3 Dionysius and the rhetors liked to find and cite parallels in early literature to illustrate (and perhaps legitimize) their contemporary Hellenistic tastes, much...