Marks for Words: On Making from Ancient Greek Ekphrasis

This paper takes up the question of painting from ekphrasis, in particular early modern paintings, such as Botticelli’s The Calumny of Apelles, crafted in response to Lucian’s rhetorical text “Slander: On not being too quick to pay attention to it”. Lucian of Samasata worked as a Greek-speaking peripatetic rhetorician under the late Roman empire in the 2^nd century CE, a period commonly known as the Second Sophistic. Traditionally grouped within the broader re-engagement with Greek and Roman antiquity in early modern Europe, these ekphrastic paintings present a queer slant on traditional polemics of word and image. The rhetorical technique of ekphrasis, or to conjure a vivid image in the mind of one’s audience with words, was an important, systematized technique of advanced rhetoricians. An ekphrasis need not describe a work of art, but create a vivid mental image, although conjuring artworks emerged as one tool in the rhetorician’s arsenal. Later material iterations of images preserved or created in and through oratory differ from images inspired by myths or stories as the practice demands adherence to a formal structure laid out by the rhetorician. This paper explores the particular visual exargeia (working out) that this material practice of painting from ekphrasis constitutes. To paraphrase Lucian’s Calumny, I wish to show in words what sort of thing painting from ekphrasis is, how it began, and how it works.