Visual Ekphrasis and the articulation of the past

Arnold, Dana (2022) Visual Ekphrasis and the articulation of the past. Modern Philology, 120 (1). pp. 65-88. ISSN 0026-8232

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Abstract

This essay focuses on examples of graphic representations of architecture as they appear in architectural treatises and published studies of particular buildings or sites. I argue that these images are a form of writing, as they have syntactical and linguistic qualities. In this way, images are a kind of visual ekphrasis of the architecture they describe. My interest here is about how visual ekphrases of architecture make the past a place that is distinct from that which text-based antiquarian studies articulate. This opens up questions of how we perceive space and time and the ways in which they can be visually described. I concentrate on a moment in the mid-eighteenth century when the past also extended geographically, as travel in Greece became possible and revealed a new past with different scholarly legacies from the more familiar ancient Roman examples. The resulting Graeco-Roman controversy that dominated architectural discourse shows us how visual descriptions were used as evidence in different aesthetic debates and how they pulled architecture into the present, enabling it to be used part of architectural practice. My discussion focuses on two publications which both appeared in 1762: James Stuart and Nicholas Revett’s The Antiquities of Athens: Measured and Delineated, and Giambattista Piranesi’s Ichnographiam Campi Martii antiquae urbis (Ichnographia of the Campus Martius of the Ancient City). This line of enquiry allows us new understandings of how images operated as an inspiration to architects’ imagination, and of the ways in which they influence how histories can be formulated.