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N. Bryson - Philostratus and the Imaginary Museum
Citation preview
JOHN ELSNER
w And Christopher Hobins two names when taken lOpethcr with
Trespassers after an uncle and William after Trespassers became
proof They did not simply prove that Piglet had a grandfather
They proved that the language-game of two names Iould work
and that it could provide an identity for all concerned for Piglet
for PigletS grandfather for the sign TRESPASSERS wand for
Christopher Robin Through competition the limits of the
credible of identity itself had changed 34
lH
CHAPTER EIGHT
philostratus and the imaginary museum
NORMAN BRYSON
The Imagines of the Elder philostratus must cuunt as one of the
great ruins of antiquity (Fig ]9) From the Renaissance until the
time of the excavations at Pompeii and ITerculaneum the-Imagines
together with tlie--sur~T~ing-ragments preserved in RO~le
~titUted virtually all that couldJ)k~I~-E~~bpe-l~~~r~~ classical painting Even today when so much more of that painting
has been brought to light the Imagines remains ~ ~~e reso~~ce It is our most extensive account of what a Roman picture gallery
a Roman catalogue of pictures md the Roman viewing of pictures
may have been like philostratus claims to base his account in
actuality In the Proem he assures his reader that his sixty-odd
verbll descriptions are rendered after original paintings (pil1akes) housed in a single collection ill Neapolis (Naples)
I was lodging olltside the walls lof Neapolisj in a suburb facing the sea
where there was a portico built on four I think or possibly five terrlCes open to tile east wind and looking out on the Tyrrhllian sea It ws
resplendent with all the marbles favoured by luxury blll it was
particularly splendid by reason of the panel-paintings set within the walls paintings which I thought had been collected with real for thev exhibited the skill of very many painters I
philostratus has been asked by the son of his host to speak about
the paintings and he agrees The text that follows presents itsd as
the record of his discourses delivered before an IUdience ofynung
men eager to learn in the presence of the pictllr(s
Parr of the fascination of the text for the Renaissance and 2~)
-~~ ---shy
PHI LOS T RAT USA N I) TilE I MAG I N A II Y M Sj
NORMAN BRYSON
eighteenth century seem to have intensified this At1anti~-like )
aspect of the Imagines and in the nineteenth century attempts were 1
undertaken to correlate philostratus text with the ~ ul1earthJ_~ ex~v~ti~~ One consequence of such efforts was that
the ctescriptions were found by some scholars n~~ to correspond I lt-U)l)Ut)l)r1
or not to correspond closely 5nough wit]I the Campaniln
paintings A debate accordingly developed from the second half of (ft l the~Teteenth century and into the twentieth century in which the in--l~
CJuestion of the authenticity of the descriptions became the leading
CJuestion Were they reliable or had philostratus invented the
entire gallery out of nothing as a virtuoso exercise in ecp1Irasis (
~ll~~n became polarised~with figures such as Welcker gt Brunn and Wickhotf on the side of authenticity opposing CayIus)
Friedrichs Matz and Robert 2 Scholarship in English played a
lesser role in the debate with the great exception of Karl
Lehmann 5 article The Imagines of the Elder Philostratus
published in Art Bulletin some fifty years ago in 19411 Coming
almost at the close of the authenticity debate Lehmanns article
advanced what is perhaps the most vigorous and ingenious case
ever mounted in defence of the view that the Imagines were blsed
on an actual picture collection from the late second century or
early third century CEo
Lehmann begins ~h Goethes essay Philostrats ~emalde Jok written in 18184 Goethe had maintained that the present order of
the sixty-odd elements in the Ifllaljines is confused and confusing
Acc( rdingly he rearranged them under nine separate headings ( 1)
Heroic an(1 Tragic Subjects (2) Love and Wooing (3) Birth and
Education (4) Deeds of Herakles () Athletic Contests laquo(i)
Hunters and Hunting (7) Poetry Song and Dance (8)
Landscapes and (9) Still Lite Lehmann takes Goethes thematic
re-ordering which aimed at a clearer editorial se(luence and puts
it to use within the debate on the authenticity of Philostratusmodern reader has been the promise contained in the idea of pictures Working entirely from the existing and apparentlyresurrection from its pages might be constructed an entire gallery confused sequence Lehmann argues that it is possible to account of the lost paintings of antiquity together with the context of their for both the coherence of thematic groupings within the Imarillesreception by a living audience Though the paintin~s at Pompeii and the seeming incoherences of sequence also present in the text and Herculaneum antedate philostratus by two centuries the by mapping the Imagines against an arclitectura~ -
discoveries in Campania anel their publication from the midshylS(i
Fig 29
NOHMAN BRYSON
) X
Some examples will help to clarify Lehmanns processes of
reasoning In the second book of the Imagines occur six
consecutive pictures illustrating the adventures of Herakles
Lehmann points out that it is inconceivable that this grouping
could be accidental [ Apart from a fleeting appearance in the
picture of the Argonauts (2 I 5) Herakles features nowhere else in
the sixty-odd descriptions And yet the sequence of the Ilerakles
pictures is strange The first (220) portrays the contest between
Herakles and Atlas the scene takes place in north-western Africa
The second (221) shows the fight between Heraklcs and Antaios
now the scene is Libya The next depicts Herakles again in north
Africa sleeping and attacked by the Pygmies (222) Obviously
these three (220-222) are concerned with Herakles African
adventures Then ()liows a picture representing the madness of
Herakles and now a temporal series can be inferred after
completing the last of the twelve Labours Herakles voyaged along
the coast of Africa encountering on the way Antaios and later the
Pygmies before his return home and his attack of insanity This
sequence accounts clearly for numbers 220-223 four of the six
Herakles episodes But the two remaining pictures (224 and 225)
do not fit this scheme at all Picture 224 deals with Herakles and
Theiodamas In the myth the episode can be located in two
different regions - Thessaly and Rhodes philostratus reads the
landscape of 224 as Rhodian To Lehmann this sounds odd For
if the painter had intended the landscape as that of Rhodes the
picture should properly have been placed between the African
adventures and Herakles final homecoming Lehmanns resolution
oT the anomaly is to claim that philostratus was wrong to interpret
the landscape as that of Rhodes In fact the mountains in the picture must be those of Thessaly which is where lIcrakles
middot lLabours begm
Picture 224 thus inaugurates the narrative sequence The next
picture in the Imagilles shows one of the Labours - the taming of
the horses of Diomcdcs Though it comes last in the series in
terms of a continuous chronicle it follows 224 and precedes the
later episodes 220 to 223 Vhat has happened is that the
Imagines has run through a continuous story but starting and
~-
PHllOSTRATllS AND TIIF IMA(INARY ~llSE
20
r A~~sl Imiddot Africa I
_ J
WALL II
0 ej ___
)1 ---lUi
I
Ir libY I~
~raJ -I -I ~ ~
il 3 ~
AlllrtM
A1IUes~1 EL
Fi- lO
ending at the wrong points The sequence should be the
commencement of Herakles adventures in Thessaly Heraklcs and
the horses of Diomedes Herakles and Atlas then I Ierakles return
voyage including the episodes with Antaios and with the Pygmies
in North Africa finally Herakles homecoming and madness If Philostratus account were cut and resequenced it would make up
a single story How has this Raw in the presentation come about
It is here that Lehmann advances the hypothesis of the Room
(fig 30 ) If the secluence is laid out as it continuous chronicle its
six component episodes can be thought of as forming a band of
pictures inset into the walls ofa single chamber The hypothesis of
the Room then permits Lehmann to advance the corollary idea of
the Doorway That the Imagines confusingly recounts the
Herakles episodes in the order 345 6 12 can be explained if
PiJilostrHts is imagined entering the room through a
placed between the second and third pictures (22~ The horses of ] II
NOHMIIN BRYSON
(
Diomedes and 220 Atlas ) philostratus passes through the
door turns to one side and begins his text in the middle of the
Herakles legend (fig 30) Observing the correct narrative
sequence is evidently less important to him than describing the
pictures as he Ilnds them in situ set into the walls I f the existence
of room and doorway is accepted the break in sequence can be
read as an architectural caesura not a textual glitch (In Lehmanns
reading all textual discontinuities will be projected as architectural
registers disunity in the text is to be resolved into the unity of the
building the texts openings interruptions and incompleteness
will be transformed through a specific ecphrastic operation into
the wholeness of an image an edifice a museum)
Having tested the hypotheses of the room and the doorway and
finding them secure Lehmann now proceeds to blotk in the walls
of his mlsee imaginaire from dado to cornices For it turns out that
sometimes within an evidently coherent sequence such as that of
Herakles there appear quite unrelated pictures pictures that
interrupt the sequence for no apparent reason Such cases can be
resolved by hypothesising a second tier of pictures placed above
the Ilrst towards the ceiling 7 The opening pictures of book 2
Lehmann maintains form a continuous series of episodes to do
with love To the group as a whole he gives the name Room of
Aphrodite R Loves power features in the opening scene showing
girls in a procession for Aphrodite (21) it continues in the stories
of Hippolytus refusing to love Phaedra (24) in the love of
Critheis and Meles (28) in the suicide of Palltlteia (29) and the
death of Cassandra (210) Yet this catalogue of loves woes is
i~terrupted by pictures quite unconnected with love Chei ron
educating Achilles (22) and female Centaurs (23) Chciron goes
widl female Centaurs but not with the Aphrodite seriet yet the
interruption can be resolved if these pictures are imagined a~a pair
placed above the main scene This upper tier can now establilth
its own band and its own independent life The education of ~ -~Achilles (22) and female Centaurs (23) can absorb a third scene (
frnm the life of Achilles where he mourns the death of Antilochus ~~ (27) The picture of the youthful Antilocltus can then attract as its
cornire partner a picture of Arrhidikos (26 the feature held in
~ ~~
PHILOSTRATliS AND THE IMAGINARY MISEl
WALL
9
t l I
J
bull ~
AI1WM
I (SOlVJO SnJ11z JOll1
UOH
II ~
jmiddotmiddotoP UOP~SOd put ~dOj3d -~_o~e~ ~~ ~~Q~~~P
or 6r
I-i~ 11
common is that both show the corpses of young men) while the
idea of Antilochus as a young Olympian victor can draw to itself
the story of the birth of Pindar the f~lmous bard of such victories
(212) And since Pan is present at Pindars birth Pans presence
with nymphs in an adjacent picture (211) can also be explained
Lehmann docs not stop with the room To enclose the whole of
the text he must build an edillcr a stoa How is it to be lit The
walls require windows and windows turn out to be doubly useful
they provide light for the pictures and they fill up space when
there seem to be not enough pictures to go round Consider for
instance the Hoom of Dionysus (fig 31)9 In Lehmanns analysis
this comprises a lower-level tier devoted to six Dionysian suhjects
and an upper tier with eleven miscellaneous scenes Ohviously
there is a difficulty here How could walls which in their lower I
N()I~MAN BRYSON
2(2
tier show only six scenes leave space for eleven scenes above
Evidently the upper pictures should be imagined as smaller in
scale small enollh to allow on Wall 2 as many as live scenes
(218224) to lit above two below lo Still it makes for a long wall
and one which has only two pictures Oil its lower level But if a low
window is added (between 218 and 219) the emptiness of the
walls lower section is filled Lehmanns museum is now rapidly
acquiring detail The question arises of the layout of room to
room Goethe had proposed nine divisiol1s but Lehmann arrives
at five the number corresponding to Philostratus recollection of
the bull four I think or possibly five terraces Now the final
architectural touches are ready At the end of each of the two
books Lehmann argues stand stilllifes these mark then the exits
of the text the porticoes of the building The room size remains
remarkably unchanging but this would not be surprising if the
building is thought of as a s10a composed of separate terraces In
terrace architecture the principal variable is not room size but the
placement and size of windows which Lehmann further suggests
are adapted to the seasons This makes for four seasonal dining r~ ~)thalls an aesthJum given over to pictures of rivers an alllumllale ~dominated by stories of Dionysus a trielillium Female set aside
for Aphrodite alld a hibernale with scenes of the primitive ~ Saturnine world Finally the whole ensemble resplendent with igt
~ all the marbles favoured by luxury is turned to the West the sun ~scasts its changing selsonal liht on the different clllmiJers of the I
house before setting in the Tvrrhenian sea ~1
bullIjj
~k
I I
It would be possible to object to Lehmanns reconstructibn on
number of counts His case rests on an unargued premise that
Philost~atus ney~ ltLmits_ny pictures from the collection he is
supposed to describe philostratus is denied any powers of
selection over the works he discllsses Moreover there is a further
unaruecl assumption that the text of the I1I1a(inelt~ sll~~i~~lS a
perfect avatar of its fIrst edition Textual corruption is not
something that cOI~I~1 ~~iIy show up in Lehmanns malysis I
PHILOSTRATllS AND TilE IMA(INAIIY MUSmiddot
Whatever changes of sequence that might have beflllen the text in
its transmission from the third century would inevitably take the
f()rm of architectural syntltlX as doors windows cornices dadoes
porticoes terraces It could also be said that at many places the
criterion defining what constitutes the semantic centre of a group
seems strained ll It is hard to conceive of Cassandra with
Agamemnon (210) or the victory of Rhodogune and the Persians
(2S) as types of love
Blit to quarrel with Lehmanns argument in this fashion would
be to miss what is most enduringly interesting about t1is commentary The central claim of his essay is that both the
coherence of thematic groupins in the Imagines and the seeming
disturbances of sequence that also occur can both be explained by
proj(cting the text as architectonic form Lehmanns primary
readi IIg strategies involve heavy use of the tropes of metaphor and
metonymy It is metonymic liaison that provides some of
Lehmanns most convincing se(luences tor instance the reconfigushy
ration of the Herakles pictures in the torm of a continuous band or
Jabula The patterns deriving from metaphor are able to embrace
even more extensive segments of the text A term such as love
being elastic (to say the least) is able to ullite scenes even as
disparate as a singing procession of maidens the deaths of
Cassandra and Agamemnon and the suicide of Pantheia So
Lehmanns groupings resemble those of Goethe or perhaps of any
editor or reader seeking to give order to a gnomic and fragmentary
text What is interesting is the way that with Lehmann till tropes
of mctonymy and metaphor do not remain editorial or textual
operations but are figured in terms that are visual and volumetric
Metonymy projects as the gaze of a beholder who standing at
the centre of the room traces a continuous narrative frieze across
the tiers or as the pathway of the spectators body moving from
room to room up and down staircases and across terraces and
finally out of the building at its exits Xenia I and Xenia 2 (r 36 and 226) Metaphor projects as the repetition of enclosing frames
wherehy the unity suggested by shared semantic features ( love
primitive world) is concretised as the singleness and unshybrokenness of mlJr~1 n~( Inmiddot klt~
ii () 1 [ A N B 1 Y SON
singular risks of uncurtailability Once a common feature such as
love is unleashed it is hard to see what story may not one way
or another be subsumed into the resulting series Similarly once
the idea of chronological series cOllies into play it becomes in
principle possible to order all sixty-odd descriptions into overshy
lapping temporal groups i3ut the potential of both metaphor and
metonymy for unlimited expansion across the whole corpus of the
imagines is held in check by the spatial boundaries of dado and
cornice window and door terrace and swircase Architecture
emerges as the containment and pacification of textual energies
which without that binding inAuence from matter fixed in space
would soon run across the text from end to end
What governs both metaphor and metonymy is another figure
visualisation The text as a whole is envisioned as a luxurious
Neapolitan building This response to the imagines is Lehmanns
distinctive ecphrastic operation H is work wi th rhilostratus text
results in a crossing from text to image Lehmann reacts to each
round of difiiculty within the imagines by creating a new building
feature First the room whose walls soon present dadoes cornices
and doorways they are lit by windows of varying size and
position the rooms are tiered as the terraces of a stoa finally like
any good architect Lehmann considers his building in relation to
the seasons and the orientation of the site He is faced with a text
filled with hiatuses and inconsistencies Under pressure from the
texts internal stress lines he produces step by step an architecture
of containment Vhat emerges within the text as difficulty and
disruption is projected in the visual domain as plenitude and unity
The texts moments of incoherence and disruption produce an
architecture of massive and stable blocks i
It is in this doubling of the broken text as an IInbrokeljimage
rather than in his deductive reasoning that Lehmann enacts a
reading of the imagines which I want to suggest is entirely
sensitive to the contours and topology of rhilostratlls writing At
the same time this sensitivity is consigned by Lehmann to the
unconscious of this text To help locate that other submerged
reading of the imagilles one can begin by noticing that successflll
though Lehmann finds his own analysis to be by his own
lt -Aj-
PlIlLOSTIATlS ANIl TilE IMA([NAHY ~[IS I
admission there remains a grollp of pictures that fall qllitl olltside
the boundary of his analysis Beviewing his work from its end
Lehmann reckons that he has been able to account for all thirty-six
sections of book I and the first twenty-six of book 2 Yet eight
miscellaneous cases remain 12 Accordingly Lehmann expels the
entire group from his definition of the imagines He concilldes
that lacking in the relations he has been proposing the peccant
images are in fact later additions grafted on either before the real
publication or else for a second edition 13 nearing ill mind what
Denmiddotida calls the logic of the sllpplement by pressing on what
Lehmann rejects one may come to see the principles of lxclusiotJ
by which his interpretation is structured That supplement to the
imagines so far from standing beyond its pale may delineate that
which Lehmanns reading must constantly repress in order to
sustain itself and as part of this what may be the features of the
imagines which are the hardest for commentary in general to
reach
One would wish to examine in detail all eight supplementary
items (227-234) Here just the first two in the group will be
considered and especially 228 Looms The selection is in some
sense justified by Lehmann own gesture ofexcusion His system
has been working well it has brollght order to all the previous
pictures in both books however bizarre or dislocated they may
have initially appeared Yet after Xenia 2 (at 226) the system
breaks down entirely In spatial terms Lehmanns (re)construction
of the stoa is now complete With the placing of the second still
life Philostratus writes The End The reader passes out of the
portico - out of Lehmanns text-as-architecture --- into th( outer
disorderly world Interestingly the bce which the world presents
is exactly that of a broken building filled with debris
Now Ih~ doorway belonglt to a house by no means prosperolls you will say it has been abandoned by its master and the court wilhin seems deserted nor do the columns still support its roof for they have set tied and collapsed No it is inhabited by spiders only ltll Ihis crelIure loves to weave its web in quiet ( Looms 21-6)
Lehmanns inspired solution to his texts difiiculties - its dOlIbling
as a perfect building ensemble - confronts at its exit the spectacle
(e 204
IOIMAN BRYSON
of a ruination at once textual and architectural What the ti~ure of
the building had particularly enabled was the transfer of all
problems of the text back into the space supposed to stand behind
it the terraced spaces of the villa The moment when Lehmann
declares the true text of Imagines to have ended is that of an
edifice collapsing
Lehmanns entire reading turns on a suppressioll of the texts
being as written representation his gradual construction of the
stoa with all of its loms mapped and its piuures securely placed
in tiers within chambers depends on a reading of the Imagines in
terms of transparency before a pre-existing referent Concerning
philostratus work within language and of the pictures work with
their represented scenes Lehmanns account says nothing In
pointing this out the aim is not in fact to criticise or fault
Lehmanns interpretation One of the principal desires of the
descriptions in the Imagines is exactly to cease being words on the
page to come alive in the fltgtrIn of an imaJe to pass from the
opacity of words to the luminous scenes behind the words
Frecluently met with in the Imaiines is a textual moment at
the description at last feels its own language to dissolve into the
of the scene it opens upon This is the philostratian Look
Now the painter has been successful in these respects also that he has wrought the spider itself ill so painstaking a fashioll has matched its spots with fidelity to nature and has painted its repulsive fuzzy surface and its savage nature - all this is the mark of a good craftsman and one skilled in depicting the truth For look here is a cord I)rming a squaPe ( Looms 3 I
The painters attention to truth has realised the spider in all its
repulsive detail Having traced that fidelity to nature wittla pen
no less observant than the painters Philostratus earns the riglhfor
his OWl] words also to be recognised as fully backed by truth After
his exclaimed For look the description at last rcaches the
moment of lift-off
Three related labours come together in a single disclosure and
presence the work of rhe spicier building its web strand
strand the work of the painter tracing each of the threads stroke ( stroke the work of the ecphrasist tracing the two previous sets
_--- _14_-
PHILOSTRATliS AND THE IMAGINARY MISF11
line by line 14 At look the words the paint and the spiders web
merge in a moment of visionary presence Out of the diverse tissue
woven by the spider the painter and the writer comes a living
image the weavers travel across [their webs J drawing tight such
of the threads as have become loose In this visionary space there
is no separating the individual strands of image text or web The
ecphrasis itself draws tight any threads that come away pulling
them back into the unitary ima~e that is at the same time a web a
pitture and a text With part of itself the ecphrasis seeks to shed
the opacities it possesses by virtue of being made of words
only an arbitrary connection to things It seeks to fuse the words
into something beyond wurds an image a picture and then to
fuse that picture with what is real in a web tltat is no longer lexical
but pictorial and no longer pictorial but alive
Lehmanns desire for a text of the Imafiines that will dissolve
first into the pictures of a collection and then into the architectural
ensemble that hOllses them is ullcannily true to this aspect of philostratus text Yet it embodies only part of that texts energies
Though in the passage just quoted the separate re~isters of
weaving of picturing and of describing all come together ill
radiant fusion at Philostraws For look elsewhere the Looms
description presents these registers as separable separate and out
of phase
In fact Looms opens with a picture of - representation The
first and seemingly gratui tous pictu re in the description shows
Penelopes loom complete with its shuttle warp threads and lint
What opens the ecphrasis then is an image describing the
fabrication of images the representational means by which
Penelope creates iJer tapestry The image is made (and with
Penelope unmade) within the apparatus of representation The
ecphrasis begins by emphasising representation not as something
which vanishes before its referent but which stays stubbornly
visible and in place as material technique
Similarly Looms foregrounds Its own apparatus of repshy
resentation language Penelope is presented not only as tlte site of
work with images but of work with words She is the creation of Homer and it is with Hnmpr linEC th nhlwltr 111 L_
NIlHMAN EllYSON
1( X
own picture of herbull Penelope
Homer melts the snow with them This is a
reference to Ocyssey 192deg4 bull Her tears flowed and her face melted
as the snow melts on the lofty mountains and as it melts the
streams of the rivers flow full so her fair cheeks melted as they
In the same way philostratus makes a point of telling his
reader that the fine threads on which the spiders drop from the roof
and then climb up again are taken froll] llesiod 15 At these points
in the text the words exactly t~lil to dissolve either into pictures
(Penelope) or into things (spiders) They remain the embedded
lines of Homer and of Hesiod woven into a text which refuses to
assimilate them as its own or to dissolve them before a referent in
pictures or in the world
Just as the text insists on its own opacities its ineradicable
wordiness so it points to ways in which nature itself will not be
absorbed into the supposedly higher realm of human represenshy
tation and culture The place of the spiders is presented as the
annihilation of human work ~here roofs and columns
the spiders thrive Human observers may compare the
Penelupe and apply to their webs the terms of or
geometric measurement (lelraliaslOs) but the webs take over
where human creation comes to its end Interestingly the spiders
in Looms are imagined not only as they appear in the picture
description also includes a scene which exceeds that picture
bull the flat [nests] are good to summer in and the hollow sorl is in winter This is a aside a
to other times and the picture but
within it The that moment
race across their web it does not shd~ them in
other seasons when in summer spiders choose the ~~t webs
and in the winter the hollow ones Looms points to another life
of spiders which the scene in other words implies but does not
state to a world of ruins silences and spider-life that goes on
whether or not there are people around to see it Nature takes over
from culture culture in fact collapses its columns broken but
spiders silently persist away from the human labours of building
weaving painting and describing
------
PHILOSTRATliS AND TilE IMA(JNAHI ~ll1SI1
III
Against Lehmanns maps of the architectural referent one might
posit another topology of things pictures and words not as these
come together in the ensemble of a resurrected museum but as they
fail to connect in a fracture or ruin of representation The
magines work with three dil1erellt substances words things
and images With part Phiostratus- act ()t descriptio-n
middotwrks t~ blur these three in visionary merger (fIg )2)
(~ ~~ ~
(-) lp Fi~ J2
In the heat of this words turn into images or images into real things (4)middot But such excitement and
animation is only one of the Imagines many possibilities There
are others less ecstatic Words come unstuck from things they
hark back not to things in the world but to other words by
Homer or Hesiod (3) Or images pull away from the task of
representation they are shown as products of material technique
threads weft lint looms (J) Or the world pulls away from its
representation in art and language (2) the courtyard appears as
deserted abandoned by its master a place where the visual order
imposed by human cultivation collapses alld the primary
of human space - columlls roof shelter way to the openness of nature
I t is appropriate that Looms opens with
standing both for the capacity of art to provide marvellous
of the world and for the unravelling of art back into mere
and lint The ecphrasis is in tJct in continuous aeros all of the interstices between the world til word and Image
1 to 7 see also fig A t times ( For ) it seems I hal
~ ~)
(~
o H ~l A N B R Y SON
27C
art concealillt art mlkes the dead mailer of leLters and
brushslrokes corne alive BUl this is only one phase ill the
ecphrastic process Equally important are the momellts when the
ecphrasis fails when words revert to being words tapestries
revert to thread and architecture to rubble
One reason that Lehmanns reading banishes Looms from the
Imagines may perhaps be the descriptions eminent f~lilure instead
of giving way to a luminous and ostensible referent
enthusiasm that enables philostratus to say Look The spiders
and Lehmann to say Look The sma - Looms darkens the
picture making it a place of shadows dust and broken
architecture Spatially it figures itself as a ruined courtyard
Textually it traverses not only the place of ecphrastic excitement
where words turn into pictures and pictures turn into things but
all the negative ecphrastic spaces whcre words remain words or
form hybrids with pictures and pictures revert to thei I constituent
elements threads WII hering lint on a loom That philostratus
intends this cffect of netativity and intends it as a figure for his
own ecphrastic enterprise is confirmed by the pairing which
Looms (228) forms with its preceding picture bullThe birth of
Athena (227)
The link of course is Arachne 16 As Ovid tells the tale
Arachne is a human weaver who challenges the skill of the divine
weaver Minerva and is punished ltH Iter hubris when Minerva
turns her into a spider At the contest both welvers set lip their
looms
The web is bound upon the beam the reed separates tlw threads of the warp the woof is threaded through them by the sharp shuttles which their busy fingers ply and when shol through the threads ofdle warp the notched teeth of tilt hammering stay beats it into place l
I~
Minerva pictures the twelve heavenly gods 011 majestic thrones At
the four corners of her tapestry are set miniature scenes of
presumptuous mortals IS Arachne counters this imagery of the
gods punishing humans ()r hubris with scenes of the gods and
especially Jupiter19 violating human females Appalled by
Arachnes work Minerva hits her three times with a shuttle then
robs her of human form
PHI LOS T RAT J SAN D THE I MAG I N A It Y 1lH I
Fig 33
Forthwith her hair touched by the poison fell off and with it both nose and ears and the head shrank up her whole body also was small the slender lingers cling 10 her side as the rest was belly 20
For many interpreters of the Arachne fable the official moral
- a cautionary tale against hubris contains a second level a
of reflection upon the capacities and limitations of an For
Velazquez the competition concerns not only weavers but
painters At the rear of the inner stage in The Fable o( Arachne is
shown Titians painting The Rape of Europa and
presents his own craft in parallel to the art of weaving placed
somewhere perhaps between Arachne and Minerva between the
genre painting of the foreground and Titians history painting in
the middle distance (fig 33) III the reading of Leonard Barkan
this capacity of the Arachne topos to act as arts self-reflexive
shy
2~
OltMAN BRYSON
~~ 2
commentary on art is already present in Ovids text I t requires
no great leap of the imagination to see in Arachnes tapestry all the
elements of Ovids own poetry in the Metamorphoses Just as she
tells the stories of the loves of the gods and the metamorphoses of
their victims so does he 21 Like Velazquez Ovid positions his
own work somewhere between the disorderly profusion
metamorphoses that issue from Arachnes loom and
theologically correct carefully framed tapestries that come
the loom of Minerva
That philostratus intends Looms to unfold in the space of this
a number of details The Birth of
the first subject of Minervas tapestry immediately
precedes the text of Looms in philostratus gallery In Ovid the
contest of Arachne and Minerva is visualised as a spectrum of
iridescent colours
As when after a storm of rain the suns rays strike through and a rainbow with its huge curve stains the wide sky though a thousand different colours shine in it the eye cannot detect the change from each one to the next so appear the adjacent colours22
This is precisely the metaphor philostratus uses to describe the
armour of Athene as the goddess emerges fullv armed from
head of Zeus
As for the material of her panoply no-one could guess iI Ii)r as many as are the colours of the rainbow which changes its light now to one hue gt1d now to another so many are the colours of her armour 2
1
Taking Philostratus two descriptions in sequence one can say
that Looms applies to the competition between Minerva and
Arachne the figure of hathos It is a comic transformation orOvids
contest down-scaled with Penelope in the place of MinerW1
spiders in the place of Arachne
philostratus begins where Ovid left off with Arachnes
metamorphosis the rest was belly is expanded into the spiders
repulsive fuzzy surface and its savage nature and the spiders
grisly meaL Where Ovid uses the Arachne fable as a means to
comment on his own project in the MUal11ornwses niacin his
book somewhere between divine
-~
P II I L () S Tii A T USA N Il TilE J M A ( I N A H Y ~Il S Hmiddot
comically deflated retelling of the fable philostratus places his own
project the Imagines somewhere between the higher artists
(Homer Hesiod Ovid etc) and the beasts Ovid and
use the images of their own
the inverts the rhetoric in a comic
desublimation or parody
Let us touch again on the philostratian exclamation Lookmiddot
k fI
The moment when a picture seems to come alive is encountered
again and again in the 1m agiles In Xenia I philostratlls remark~
that the painted grapes are good to eat and full of winey juice
(r3 I) In Xenia 2 he invites the reader to reach out and take a loaf
from the painted basket (226) In Narcissus he says he cannot
real (123) At the core of the Imagines is the promise tl1at at
ments words
intense experience that
oth pictures and words It is not simply that words arc
tell whether a real bee has been deceived bv the painted Hower or
whetlier we are to be deceived into thinking that a ~
supplemented by pictures and pictures by words To read the
Imagines that way is to model it on the example of the illustrated ~ shybook The logic of the text is in fact closer once again to that of
Derridas supplement What words lack (because they are
words characters on the page marks without light) images can hJluinaJvt with a presence which is based on that lack which grows fro~l it
and turns it into light What images lack (because they are
in time mere pigments on a surf~lce threads on a loom) words Gill
sugply with narration and movement This strange hallueinatoy
power of ecphrasis calls on the capaei~ies of words and I~ to
describe the world but goes beyond their several powers into a
~ _ moment when Look becomes the only appropriate -- ~ ~L
response The exclamation directs the reader not towards the text J t or its Image but past them both into another space where presence )f
~vo to 11 th 0 ooce (gl hdoS tooeh t) fiJtJ - Yet compared with Ovicl (or Vehizquez) philostratlls text is (
clearly self-mocking and self-defeating Its lines move Ollt into all ~ the negative ecpilrastic spaces where the enanIeia of Iookmiddot j
NORMAN BHYlgtON
exactly unfortilcoming Instead of Aracillle the spider instead of the loves of the gods in tapestry an insect meal Oil a web
Accompanying the project of inciting the reader to envision is
Philostratus awareness that with every ecphrasis at some point
the lines and strokes always separate and unravel The text presents
itself as hollowed out by its own rhetorical self-awareness and as
haunted by an inescapably secondary or belated relation to
pictures In the Proem the author dramatises himself as a painter
mangul
Now the story of the men who have mastery in the sciellce of painting and the states and kings that have been passiolltltely devoted to it has been told by others writers Ilotably Aristodemus of Carla whom I
visited for four years In orcler to study paintinf 1n the present discussions however we propose to describe examples of painting in the form of addresses which have been composed for the young 24
Four years of study with Aristodemus have led not to a career in
painting but only in criticism In the scenography of the text
Philostratus is always old and lesser than the young The son of
his host must summon him before he speaks SpJtially he is at the
perimeter beyond the city walls a Greek wandering in Italy
Secondary in relation to painting his pictures are also belated in
time not the work of men who have won mastery in the science
of painting discussed by Pliny but of painters who are never in
fact given names
G- lc o this negative dinlension of the Ima(inegt Lehmann appears
1vt tgt emarkably insensitive Jn his hands the Imagilles are tt come
alive he will infuse them with his own visionary energy~~ resurrecting the fragments of the text into a luminous stoa whose
every corner he can visualise His work with the blta(illes is in a
sense part of the Pompeian tradition which from Winckelmann
to l3ulwer-Lytton to Ilollywood aims to coiJre ivil~ flesh from
the ashes In terms of its own rhetoric Lehmanns is a heroic reading The example of the Irrcltlt Goerhe2f tTllirlp hi274
bull vJ ~_ _
PHILOSTRATLJS AND THE IMAGINARY MI~I
enterprise26
Filling out what remained only tentative in Goethes
essay he perceives an order in the Imagines which not even their
author realised The Imagines have to be wrested from philoshy
stratlls hands Philostratus misreads the mountains of Thes~ly as
mountains of Rhodes Philostratus takes no advantage of these connections and does not mention them27 Although
Philostratus was perfectly able to see immediately many of the
implications of single pictures he did not discuss the cyclic idea
He was not interested in it2R As Lehmanns analysis gains
momentum Philostratus tends to get referred to as thelcctUle~ Like many orators and letter writers and teachers before and after
him he decided to pllblish these lectures as a model of his
tecllllillue and style in handling such a task 29 He paraphrased
rather than described the paintings and pointed out the emotional
values and psychological associations ofeach picture His emphasis
in this collrse ill the appreciation (Ifart was one-sided as flax heen tlwl
elery professor (~f tlzis kind after Ilim (emphases added) ~o
Lehmann himself is not of course a lecturer or professor of this kind
If Philostratus mocks his own secondariness Lehmann expels
secondariness from his text in tbe person of the outmoded
professor who only appreciates and who cannot see what
Lehmann sees the hyper-realistic image of a gallery with all its
rooms envisioned simultaneously and in detail But these abject
personifications the lectlirer and the professor arc not the
bearers of anxiety in his reading or its only scapegoats The
Imapnes need to be reconstructed Lehmann maintains because
without them the third century is the dark century in the history
of ancient painting the era ofa great crisis ofancient art in which
the foundations for the development of later western art were
bid 11 Here are Lehmanns words for the threat his reconstruction is to dispel
In a period lor which a lower-middle-class tomb in Rome like that of the Amelii is used as a cornerstone [or the history of palntin) and Ir which the discovery of the frescoes of a Jewish synagogue in Mesopotamia tends to revolutionize the entire picture of the historv of lnrn
NOH~lAN BRYSON
Is it too much to find in these words a threat to a cherished image
of antiquity an image that must be protected
Art history emerges here in one of its dubious heroising guises
as the custodian of culture working against a background of crisis
and collapse Quite naturally the custodians must live in a great
house resplendent with all the marbles favoured by luxury
but particularly splendid by reason of the panel-paintings set in
the walls The force required to protect the custodians is that of
museum circa 1941 It is a modernist exhibition space
stripped down diagrammatic programmatic yet still (at the end
of the reconstruction) conceived as a house of the great with
dining-chambers for the four seasons Better than most museums
with their difficult diplomatic balance between the needs of
scholars and of patrons it is wholly designed by the art historian
The scholarship that builds this space is to judge by the footnotes
an exclusively German affair And the account endorses the
protocols of a certain strand in the German art history of its time
We shall always regret where fi)nllal problems are concerned the
limitations of a description which aimed not to descrile but to
interpret what the audience saw (emphases added) Painting is to
be approached formally not hermeneutically and interpretation
now a negative term is to be confined to an outpost of
iconography the identification of subjects and programme cycles
Lehmanns own hermeneutic operation presents itself as
opposite of interpretive work It proceeds by excluding lt111 those
images which appear to Lehmann to be editorial additions grafted
01 to the main text supposedly anomalous products of writing and
publication mere word-pictures un backed by actual referents It
prunes away the rhetorical elaborations of the lecn1rer and
bypasses the pictures themselves in order to reach th~ solid
masonry behind them as though representation itself verbal or
pictorial were a barrier to be torn dowH This process is presented
as a series of purifications The text contaminated for publication
is returned to its pristine state The visual field is purged of its
verbal dimension in a double movement from text In architecture
and from arl criticism to archaeology Antiquitys dark age is
banished Its whuralmainstrcam is protected against distortion by
-- - --~-
PHI I 0 S T RAT l SAN Il THE r M A (] N 1 H Y I S I I
inferior and marginlt11 groups Art history triumphs over art
appreciation The end product of these procedurts is the vision of
a purified architectural form whose authority is confirmed by a
tradition of national scholarship and national culture exiled to
America and written up in English yet still in direct contact with
the author of Phiostrats gemalde and with the Graeco-Homan past
Through rhetorical operations such as these Lehmanns
ecplrrasis becomes in a sense a tecitni(lue of the subject It is surely
much more than an archaeological reconstruction Like Auerbad~s Mimesis written in Istanbtll during World War II it mobilises the
energies of cultural resistance to its own dark century It invsts
those energies in an incandescent visualisation that configures the
beleaguered subject as a unified building I t would I think be
wrong to find fault with Lehmanns reading at the level on which
it appears to operate of slellth-like deduction and rationality
Expelled by the texts rational procedures rhetoric returns as
texts unconscious At this buried or subterranean level the
reading actually moves much closer into the Imagines than it is
able to admit Philostratus himself presents the art of painting not
as a copy of the world but ltIS in ternalisation of the world In 19 warns his audience not to be impressed by a works mimetic
realism ill that case he says we should praise an insignificant
feature of the painting and one that has solely to do with imitation
(mimesis) but we shollid nOI be praising its intelligence or
sense of decorum it shows though these I believe are the most
important elements of art l~ lust as painting shows the world as
it has already passed into the subjectivity of the painter so the
beholder should not dwell 011 the external matter of mimesis but
internalise the image drawing it inside the subject On their own
the audience can see pictures and judge mimesis perfectly well
the audience do not yet know are the techniques for
absorbing the pictures into the mind It is precisely
in this assimilation of pictures to subjectivity that the audience has come to hear Philostratus speak
It is in this aspect of internalisation that the Imafiines revcJ rhetoric itself as a techllolov Of elicnlin t1egt If T-_ r
1IIMN BRYSON
of the Ad Herenniuflt names memoria as the fourth part of
rhetoric 34 In order to memorise a lengthy speech the orator
should visualise the successive topics of his discourse as images
arranged in consecutive places within architectural space In the
words of Frances Yates who is that mlfi moving slowly in
lonely building stopping at intervals with an intent face He is a
rhetoric student forming a set of memory loci35 Architectures
role in rhetoric is as the supplier of milieux within which intense
visualisations are to occurUl As Cicero says the images should be
active sharply defined and unusual having the power of speedily
encountering and penetrating the psyche (quae oCCflrrere celerishy
terque percutere animum possim)37 The speech unfolds as
rhetorician walks in his mind past walls each memory-place hung
with a vivid image through rooms doorways stairways
porticoes terraces
The first notion is placed as it were ill the ()recourt the second let us say in the atrium lhe remainder are placed in order round the impluvium and committed not only to bedrooms and parlours but even to statues and the like3R
The stability and dependability of this internal architecture is vital
for the control of the self over its material To forget the existence
of a particular room is to leave out a whole stage of the argument
to lTIisremember the sequence of images is to garble the
presentation of the case
places are chosen and marked om with the utmost possible vlriety as a spacious house divided into a number of rooms Every thinK of note therein is diligently imprinted on the mind in order that thongl n~ay be able to fun through all the parts without let or hindrance The filst task is to secure that there shall be no difficulty in funning through these for that memory must be most firmly fixed which helps another memory all
Here architecture not only stands for the control of the self it is
the actual material means by which the self exercises its control
over its words and its world
If Lehmanns unitary and massively stable architecture stands ~1 _1 _~ bullbull l J ~
~ PHILOSTRATUS AND THE IMA((NARY MlISEU~1
c~) (~~) ( 0 ~ ~
-~ ----~
hI 34
1 reading rejoins Philostratus rhetoric as an operation whose means
is imaginary buildings and whose goal is mastery over self and
over representation Ecphrasis here is a technique for consolidating
the subject in terms of personal and professional control While on
the surface of his text Lehmann disavows hermeneutic art history
and expels the lecturer at other levels of his text Lehmann is
Philostratus shadow-partner or secret sharer Lehmanns entry
into the culture of late antiquity is through a shape-shifting in
which he performs the architectural ars memorativa of a thirdshy
century orator
Yet he does so in terms very different from those supplied in the
Imagines The kind of subject proposed and assllmed by 9
Philostratus text is much less driven by the urge towards unitary
self-possession The Imagines subject exists in a universe where
things images and words may frequently converge but do not
consistently fuse together ill the ardour of imaginary vision The
descriptions show the subject in transit across the interstices where
world pictures and language overlap Especially interesting 10
Philostratus are the hybrid or chiasmic zones where dillerent
registers cross over (fig 34)
Let us return for the last time to Looms Penelopes loom
exists at the place where images and the things of the world cross
over The loom is a thing that makes images yet we do not see the
images it makes only the things - warp threads shuttle it
works with Again when the weavers travel across the web or eat
their squirming prey they are seen as living moving creatures
hill at thl sme time the reader knows they are onlv a static nictllrf -j
--
OIlMAN BRYSON
i(
Elsewhere the text moves to the place where the things of the
world cross over into words The author tells us that the spiders
cables are almost too tine to discern What brings them into view
are in fact Hesiods lines about spiders destending and astending
their threads The word makes the thing exist Or a single word in
Greek -- arachnc is able to generate two utterly different beings
spiders and the weaver who challenged Minerva The characters of
Looms are so to speak engendered by an ecphrastic pun Words
and things change pilCes At other times the text crosses the place
where words and image blend Homers text turns into a picture
then back again into Homers words The line between what is
verbal and visual cannot be drawn4o
The subject of the Imagines is in constant motion and dispersal
across this complex terrain qf wprld jmilg ltlAd texr When the
outward pictures enter the subject and are assimilated to the seWs
interior they scatter across an intricately divided and Auid space
The images of Philostratus exist as r~fractiollS in a multishy
dimensional space in which a variety of voices none of them
original blend and clash 41 The subject who performs this
internalisation is in perpetual motion The moments when at the
philostratian Look the various registers join in visionary
fusion do not last long Almost at once the visions separate out
into their component strands unravelling as fast as they came
together And they lead on to the next image - more than sixty
times The unravelling of one image clears the space for the
coming together of the next one Or better the unravelling of
each image calls into being summons the next It is in that
perpetual Penelope-like emergence and falling away of images
that the subject is spun by the text Not as a central storehp~se or
gallery more a~ a motion or desire
Lehmanns subject is in a sense the opposite of thiJ In
Lehmanns case internalising philostralUs text means seeking a
means to arrest the motions of the text and to tapture and
immobilise its energies in a final culminating form Into the
stability of the huilding that is to end the text as motion and desire
are poured all the authors ligures for the command of the subject
massive masonry the prestige of the museum purified form
_ --- ----
PHILOSTRATUS AND THE IMAGINAIY M(SEI
Goethe national culture ethnic centrality profcssionlIisll1 posishy
tive knowledge Which should make Lehmann Philostratus most
inappropriate reader were it not for the brilliance and the yearning of his own visualisation
Among other things Lehmanns reading exemplifies some of
the paradoxes inherent in the tradition of positivist scholarship to
which it belongs It is this aspect that raises his reconstruction
above the category of historiGl1 oddity to adumbrate some of the
vicissitudes of positive knowledfe in more general terms First
Lehmanns relation to the literary to textuality and intenextualitx
is remarkably strained and contradictory The architectural ord~r he proposes for the Imagines is itselfbibliograplllc Lehmann needs
texts 10 enable his reconstruction to take place in order to build
his version of Philostratus villa he must resort to the library what
he says for instance concerning the typology of rooms their
orientation and relation to the seasons is directly dependent on
Vitruvius Yet at the same time his analysis mllst bypass textuality
in order to dissolve the texts into architectural form Necessary at
certain moments of the analysis at others textuality becomes an
obstacle to be scornfully removed Inherently untrustworthy
beside the actuality (the positivism) of the archaeological find texts are aligned in his interpretation with ideas of parasitism and
mediocrity figured here by the lecturer or professor The
reading works both to banish textual corruption completely
(which cannot easily show up ill the analysi~ since hiatuses in the
text arc translated at once into architectural syntax) and to build
the necessity for textual wrruption into his case (as when
Lehmann axes the last eight descriptions as later additions )
Textuality features in this mode of analysis primarily under tlte
sign of repression Where it is able to grow transparent before the
three-dimensional architectural and archaeological order it can be
admitted Where textuality fails to become translucent hcfilfe
reference it must be expelled even if the effort to do so becomes
massive involving the whole battery of figures for the command of th~ sui)ject
Secondly this ef1ort to repress textuality runs counter to many
of the most conspicuous features of Philostratllt PIh So
tgtnHMAN BRYSON
2X2
writing especially its interest in exploring the negative ecphrastic
spaces in which the reader so far from experiencing a dissolution
of writing before the luminous referellt (tlte philostratian
Look ) apprehends the text as a sophisticated web of allusions
parodies puns and tonal plays Lehmanns quest for the stable
masonry of the referent seems altogether blind to the many ways
in which philostratus writing plays to the wplzia of the reader as
one who can see bizarre connections who can understand hidden
narrativcs within imagery (A rachne Mincrva) wilD can
exercise the visual eqllivalent of the elaborate verbal dexterity that
characterises Hellenistic poetry When philostratus says that the
web the spiders make is exceedingly fine (k)perleIIOS) he is
doing more dlan asking liS to visualise something hard to see he
is using a key term from Hellenistic poetics eplOs which means
witty fint clever small-scale sophisticated and doing
so as an invitation or a warning to the reader that his own writing
too is all of these things It is a warning that Lehmann perhaps
wisely does not heed for once ecphrasis is thought of as a form
writing that involves much mort than a simple visualisation of
a text it leaves behind the one certainty that ecphrasis seemed to
hold out to the archaeologist - its promise of presence of
resurrection and becomes something else a mode of writing
whose complexity we are perhaps only beginning to discern and
in relation to which tlie idea of visualisation begins to appear as a
simplification at best
Finally the scrupulous rationality of Lehmanns interpretive
method with its emphasis on what can be deduced and
demonstrated as positive knowledge and as archilectural form
renders it strangely unaware of its own aspect of tellIality of the
ways in which it is itself a working wilh words in whityen the words
carry more associations motivations and effect than the writer is
able to hear or control Working within a highly instrumental and
reduced picture-theory of language Lehmanns analysis radically
underestimates the capacity of words to exceed their allotted
functions of argumentation demonstration and proof Opening
on to other investments and other scenes tban that simply of
archaeology and reconstruction Lehmanns text speaks its own
PllILOSTRATS AND THE IMAGINAHY MliS
uncollscious and it is in that energetic and overdetermined
underside of his text that his deepest engagement with Philostratus
may be found What he writes is perhaps the dream-work of
positivism not the forensics of archaeology but its own buried poetics 42
~
l ltJTES TO PAGES 244--61
O On Pausanils see Frazer (1898) Heer (1979) Jacob (1980)
Habich 1 (1985) and Elsner (1992)
I These include discussions of the wild satyrs of the islands 1235-)
the Ethiopians I334- the Ionian Greeks 722-51) the
marvellous animals collected in Rome 9211-2 the islands of
Sardinia and Corsica 10171-13
32 See Elsner (1992) 17--20
33 See Frazer (1898) xiv compare other second-century CE descripshy
tions of ruins such as Dio Chrysostom on Thebes Oratio 7
Plutarch De ~rcctu oracuorum 8 Lucian Diaog 11I0rt 272
34 This chapter began as a paper on Herodotus pyramids delivered to
Paul Cartledges Ancient History Seminar in Cambridge in 1989 I
wish to thank him John Henderson Jamie Masters and the Editors
of this volume for their comments on earlier drafts My deepest debt
is to Joan Pau Rubies y Mirabet with whom I have fi)r several years
discussed the problems of travel travel-writing and identity This
chapter is dedicated to him
CHApTEH EIGHT PHlLOSTRATliS AND Tin IMA(INARY
MUSEUM
1 English translations are taken from the Loeb edition edited by
T E Page E Capps and W H D Rouse (London and New
York193 1)
2 For the history of the debate see the editions of Jacobs and Welcker
(1825) Kayser (1844) Benndorf and Schenkel (1893) and
Steinmann (1914)
3 Lehmann (1941)
4 The essay is conveniently to be f()Und in vo XXVI of Cottas
standard edition (1868) pp 276fT
Lehmann (1941) 21-4
6 Obviously he describes pictures that were topoglllttphically united
but without regard to the ideological and (JrluaJ rda~m which had
dictated their combination Lehmann (1941) 20
7 Indeed the only explanation of the relationships and the lack of
order is that philostratus saw real pictures which were to a certain
extent arranged on the upper and lower parts of walls Lehmann
(1941) 20
8 Lehmann (1941) 31-3
9 Lehmann (1941) 31-3
NOTES TO P(I-S 2()2
10 [n fact the lmalfines do not supply indications concerning the
dimensions of any particular work
II [t should also be noted that Lehmanns groupings occasionally
require him to rewrite the given titles of pictures
11 These last eight pictures of the second book show a remarkable
absence of any stich relation and connection as we have found
everywhere else Lehmann (1941) 37
13 Lehmann (1941) 39-40
14 The image of weaving is frequently used of writing see for
example Catullus ()45ofr in which the marriage of Peleus and
Thetis is covered with a estis variata figuris pestit decorata
jiguris where filfura is also a literary term for Catullus (wn
rhetoric Perhaps the crucial sites of configuring language image
and weaving are words such as ypaqgteurolv grapIein which means
writedraw design (in thread)
I ~ Worfrs an1 Days 777
16 The presence of Arachne in Looms has been argued since the
Renaissance See for example the gloss on Les Etoiles in Blaise
de Vigeneres edition of 1610 514 Lehmann (1941) 39 also
suggests that the two pictures (227 and 218) both refer to the
Arachne story
17 Ovid Met 65~-8
18 Minerva depicts Rhodope and Ilaemus who dared to cal
themselves gods now turned to mountains the Pygmaean queen
who challenged Juno now turned into a crane Antigone turned
by the angered Juno into a stork Cinyras whose daughters are turned to stone
19 Arachnes tapestry shows Europa abducted by the bull Asterie
carried off by the eagle Leda pursued by the swan Jllpiter
disguised as Amphitryon Danae
20 Met 6140--4
21 Barkan (1986) 4
22 Met 663--6
23 227 1~-19
24 lmaxiner Proem
25 Lehmann (1941) 16
26 In the first paragraph of Lehmanns article Goethe is found to be
disappointed by Pompeii and Herculaneum mere Middletowns as
GoetheLehmann put it from whose limited atmosphere they 112
NOTES TO IAUES 27~-83
turn away towards the Imagines Heference to Goethe recur
at several points in the essay Strangely enough no-one with the
exception of Goethe has ever called attention to the problem of the
general order of the paintings in the two books of philostratus
(19) Yet Goethes rearrangement of the Imapnes is also as
Lehmann put it cavalier his own essay lJl1ilds more sysshy
tematically on Goethes
27 Lehmann (1941) 2S
28 Lehmann (1941) 30
29 Lehmann (1941) 41-2
30 Lehmann (1941) 41
31 Lehmann (1941) 17-18
32 Lehmann (1941) 17middot
33 Imagines 19 18-22 1 have modified the Locb translation
here
34 In Ad Herelfiun the five parts of rhetoric are
eloculio memoria pmllUllialio
3) Yates (1966) 8
36 On architectures relation to the art of memory see the discussion
of Elsner (forthcoming) chapter 2 section v
37 Ad HerenniulII 2873)8 cited by Yates (1966) 18
38 Quimilian inH orat 11220 cited by Yates (1966) 22
39 Quintilian Inst oral 11218 cited by Yates (1966) 22
40 The diagram (Iig 34) is not satisfactory for instance its lines
fixity when the whole point is to suggest fluidity and continuum
But 1hope the reader will follow at least the diagrams gist that the
illlaNille constantly shuttles between words il1la~es and thin~s
Area (5) is that of merger between things and images (6) is the
hybrid area ofwordsubjects (7) is the area of blur between word
and image perhaps the principal ecphrastic space~ he space of the
wurd graphein r 41 Barthes (1977) 145-6
42 1am grateful to the members of the Laurcncc Seminar held in the
Department of Classics at Cambridge in May 1991 ltJr their help in
formulating the ideas presented in this essay and particularly to
Simon Goldhill jas Elsner and Stephen Bann for their very
welcome observations and
List of works cited
For abbreviations see pp xi--xiii
Adler J and Ernst U (1988) Text als Figur 11welle Poesie 101 der
Antike gtis rur Moderne Weinheim
Alpers S (1983) The Art ofDescrihlilg Chicago
Amyx D A (1988) Corinthian Vase Painting orrIe Arclaic Period The
Study of Corinthian Vases Berkeley
Arnheim R (1988) The Poet at rile Center A )tudl ofCompo siti 011 in the
Visual Artr Berkeley
Arnott P (1962) Greek Scellic COlventoils ill til Fijth Celllu~) BC
Oxford
(1989) Puhlic and Performance ill the Greek Theater London
Arnott W G (1987) The Stream and the Gold Two notes 011
Theocritus in Filologia e forme letterarie studi (1fimi a F Della
Corte vol I U rhino
Arthur [Katl] M (1975) Hurtides phoenislae and the Plitics
Diss Yale University
(1977) The curse of civilizatioll the choral odes of the PllOemu-ae
HSCP 81 163-8
Ashmole B (1972) Architect and Sculptor in Classical Greece London
Ashmole B and Yalouris N (1967) Olympia The Sculptures of the
Temple of Zeus London
Baladit H (1980) La Pilopollnese de Strahon Paris
-if Bann s (1989) The True Vine on Visual Representanim ald tllet
- lf7estern Tradition Cambridge -J Barber E J w (1990) Prellistone Textiles the Deleopmellt (Clotll ill
the Neolithic and Brone Ages Princctoll
(1992) The peplos of Athelia in Goddess and Polis tILl PaIlGtIz((c
-~~ ---shy
PHI LOS T RAT USA N I) TilE I MAG I N A II Y M Sj
NORMAN BRYSON
eighteenth century seem to have intensified this At1anti~-like )
aspect of the Imagines and in the nineteenth century attempts were 1
undertaken to correlate philostratus text with the ~ ul1earthJ_~ ex~v~ti~~ One consequence of such efforts was that
the ctescriptions were found by some scholars n~~ to correspond I lt-U)l)Ut)l)r1
or not to correspond closely 5nough wit]I the Campaniln
paintings A debate accordingly developed from the second half of (ft l the~Teteenth century and into the twentieth century in which the in--l~
CJuestion of the authenticity of the descriptions became the leading
CJuestion Were they reliable or had philostratus invented the
entire gallery out of nothing as a virtuoso exercise in ecp1Irasis (
~ll~~n became polarised~with figures such as Welcker gt Brunn and Wickhotf on the side of authenticity opposing CayIus)
Friedrichs Matz and Robert 2 Scholarship in English played a
lesser role in the debate with the great exception of Karl
Lehmann 5 article The Imagines of the Elder Philostratus
published in Art Bulletin some fifty years ago in 19411 Coming
almost at the close of the authenticity debate Lehmanns article
advanced what is perhaps the most vigorous and ingenious case
ever mounted in defence of the view that the Imagines were blsed
on an actual picture collection from the late second century or
early third century CEo
Lehmann begins ~h Goethes essay Philostrats ~emalde Jok written in 18184 Goethe had maintained that the present order of
the sixty-odd elements in the Ifllaljines is confused and confusing
Acc( rdingly he rearranged them under nine separate headings ( 1)
Heroic an(1 Tragic Subjects (2) Love and Wooing (3) Birth and
Education (4) Deeds of Herakles () Athletic Contests laquo(i)
Hunters and Hunting (7) Poetry Song and Dance (8)
Landscapes and (9) Still Lite Lehmann takes Goethes thematic
re-ordering which aimed at a clearer editorial se(luence and puts
it to use within the debate on the authenticity of Philostratusmodern reader has been the promise contained in the idea of pictures Working entirely from the existing and apparentlyresurrection from its pages might be constructed an entire gallery confused sequence Lehmann argues that it is possible to account of the lost paintings of antiquity together with the context of their for both the coherence of thematic groupings within the Imarillesreception by a living audience Though the paintin~s at Pompeii and the seeming incoherences of sequence also present in the text and Herculaneum antedate philostratus by two centuries the by mapping the Imagines against an arclitectura~ -
discoveries in Campania anel their publication from the midshylS(i
Fig 29
NOHMAN BRYSON
) X
Some examples will help to clarify Lehmanns processes of
reasoning In the second book of the Imagines occur six
consecutive pictures illustrating the adventures of Herakles
Lehmann points out that it is inconceivable that this grouping
could be accidental [ Apart from a fleeting appearance in the
picture of the Argonauts (2 I 5) Herakles features nowhere else in
the sixty-odd descriptions And yet the sequence of the Ilerakles
pictures is strange The first (220) portrays the contest between
Herakles and Atlas the scene takes place in north-western Africa
The second (221) shows the fight between Heraklcs and Antaios
now the scene is Libya The next depicts Herakles again in north
Africa sleeping and attacked by the Pygmies (222) Obviously
these three (220-222) are concerned with Herakles African
adventures Then ()liows a picture representing the madness of
Herakles and now a temporal series can be inferred after
completing the last of the twelve Labours Herakles voyaged along
the coast of Africa encountering on the way Antaios and later the
Pygmies before his return home and his attack of insanity This
sequence accounts clearly for numbers 220-223 four of the six
Herakles episodes But the two remaining pictures (224 and 225)
do not fit this scheme at all Picture 224 deals with Herakles and
Theiodamas In the myth the episode can be located in two
different regions - Thessaly and Rhodes philostratus reads the
landscape of 224 as Rhodian To Lehmann this sounds odd For
if the painter had intended the landscape as that of Rhodes the
picture should properly have been placed between the African
adventures and Herakles final homecoming Lehmanns resolution
oT the anomaly is to claim that philostratus was wrong to interpret
the landscape as that of Rhodes In fact the mountains in the picture must be those of Thessaly which is where lIcrakles
middot lLabours begm
Picture 224 thus inaugurates the narrative sequence The next
picture in the Imagilles shows one of the Labours - the taming of
the horses of Diomcdcs Though it comes last in the series in
terms of a continuous chronicle it follows 224 and precedes the
later episodes 220 to 223 Vhat has happened is that the
Imagines has run through a continuous story but starting and
~-
PHllOSTRATllS AND TIIF IMA(INARY ~llSE
20
r A~~sl Imiddot Africa I
_ J
WALL II
0 ej ___
)1 ---lUi
I
Ir libY I~
~raJ -I -I ~ ~
il 3 ~
AlllrtM
A1IUes~1 EL
Fi- lO
ending at the wrong points The sequence should be the
commencement of Herakles adventures in Thessaly Heraklcs and
the horses of Diomedes Herakles and Atlas then I Ierakles return
voyage including the episodes with Antaios and with the Pygmies
in North Africa finally Herakles homecoming and madness If Philostratus account were cut and resequenced it would make up
a single story How has this Raw in the presentation come about
It is here that Lehmann advances the hypothesis of the Room
(fig 30 ) If the secluence is laid out as it continuous chronicle its
six component episodes can be thought of as forming a band of
pictures inset into the walls ofa single chamber The hypothesis of
the Room then permits Lehmann to advance the corollary idea of
the Doorway That the Imagines confusingly recounts the
Herakles episodes in the order 345 6 12 can be explained if
PiJilostrHts is imagined entering the room through a
placed between the second and third pictures (22~ The horses of ] II
NOHMIIN BRYSON
(
Diomedes and 220 Atlas ) philostratus passes through the
door turns to one side and begins his text in the middle of the
Herakles legend (fig 30) Observing the correct narrative
sequence is evidently less important to him than describing the
pictures as he Ilnds them in situ set into the walls I f the existence
of room and doorway is accepted the break in sequence can be
read as an architectural caesura not a textual glitch (In Lehmanns
reading all textual discontinuities will be projected as architectural
registers disunity in the text is to be resolved into the unity of the
building the texts openings interruptions and incompleteness
will be transformed through a specific ecphrastic operation into
the wholeness of an image an edifice a museum)
Having tested the hypotheses of the room and the doorway and
finding them secure Lehmann now proceeds to blotk in the walls
of his mlsee imaginaire from dado to cornices For it turns out that
sometimes within an evidently coherent sequence such as that of
Herakles there appear quite unrelated pictures pictures that
interrupt the sequence for no apparent reason Such cases can be
resolved by hypothesising a second tier of pictures placed above
the Ilrst towards the ceiling 7 The opening pictures of book 2
Lehmann maintains form a continuous series of episodes to do
with love To the group as a whole he gives the name Room of
Aphrodite R Loves power features in the opening scene showing
girls in a procession for Aphrodite (21) it continues in the stories
of Hippolytus refusing to love Phaedra (24) in the love of
Critheis and Meles (28) in the suicide of Palltlteia (29) and the
death of Cassandra (210) Yet this catalogue of loves woes is
i~terrupted by pictures quite unconnected with love Chei ron
educating Achilles (22) and female Centaurs (23) Chciron goes
widl female Centaurs but not with the Aphrodite seriet yet the
interruption can be resolved if these pictures are imagined a~a pair
placed above the main scene This upper tier can now establilth
its own band and its own independent life The education of ~ -~Achilles (22) and female Centaurs (23) can absorb a third scene (
frnm the life of Achilles where he mourns the death of Antilochus ~~ (27) The picture of the youthful Antilocltus can then attract as its
cornire partner a picture of Arrhidikos (26 the feature held in
~ ~~
PHILOSTRATliS AND THE IMAGINARY MISEl
WALL
9
t l I
J
bull ~
AI1WM
I (SOlVJO SnJ11z JOll1
UOH
II ~
jmiddotmiddotoP UOP~SOd put ~dOj3d -~_o~e~ ~~ ~~Q~~~P
or 6r
I-i~ 11
common is that both show the corpses of young men) while the
idea of Antilochus as a young Olympian victor can draw to itself
the story of the birth of Pindar the f~lmous bard of such victories
(212) And since Pan is present at Pindars birth Pans presence
with nymphs in an adjacent picture (211) can also be explained
Lehmann docs not stop with the room To enclose the whole of
the text he must build an edillcr a stoa How is it to be lit The
walls require windows and windows turn out to be doubly useful
they provide light for the pictures and they fill up space when
there seem to be not enough pictures to go round Consider for
instance the Hoom of Dionysus (fig 31)9 In Lehmanns analysis
this comprises a lower-level tier devoted to six Dionysian suhjects
and an upper tier with eleven miscellaneous scenes Ohviously
there is a difficulty here How could walls which in their lower I
N()I~MAN BRYSON
2(2
tier show only six scenes leave space for eleven scenes above
Evidently the upper pictures should be imagined as smaller in
scale small enollh to allow on Wall 2 as many as live scenes
(218224) to lit above two below lo Still it makes for a long wall
and one which has only two pictures Oil its lower level But if a low
window is added (between 218 and 219) the emptiness of the
walls lower section is filled Lehmanns museum is now rapidly
acquiring detail The question arises of the layout of room to
room Goethe had proposed nine divisiol1s but Lehmann arrives
at five the number corresponding to Philostratus recollection of
the bull four I think or possibly five terraces Now the final
architectural touches are ready At the end of each of the two
books Lehmann argues stand stilllifes these mark then the exits
of the text the porticoes of the building The room size remains
remarkably unchanging but this would not be surprising if the
building is thought of as a s10a composed of separate terraces In
terrace architecture the principal variable is not room size but the
placement and size of windows which Lehmann further suggests
are adapted to the seasons This makes for four seasonal dining r~ ~)thalls an aesthJum given over to pictures of rivers an alllumllale ~dominated by stories of Dionysus a trielillium Female set aside
for Aphrodite alld a hibernale with scenes of the primitive ~ Saturnine world Finally the whole ensemble resplendent with igt
~ all the marbles favoured by luxury is turned to the West the sun ~scasts its changing selsonal liht on the different clllmiJers of the I
house before setting in the Tvrrhenian sea ~1
bullIjj
~k
I I
It would be possible to object to Lehmanns reconstructibn on
number of counts His case rests on an unargued premise that
Philost~atus ney~ ltLmits_ny pictures from the collection he is
supposed to describe philostratus is denied any powers of
selection over the works he discllsses Moreover there is a further
unaruecl assumption that the text of the I1I1a(inelt~ sll~~i~~lS a
perfect avatar of its fIrst edition Textual corruption is not
something that cOI~I~1 ~~iIy show up in Lehmanns malysis I
PHILOSTRATllS AND TilE IMA(INAIIY MUSmiddot
Whatever changes of sequence that might have beflllen the text in
its transmission from the third century would inevitably take the
f()rm of architectural syntltlX as doors windows cornices dadoes
porticoes terraces It could also be said that at many places the
criterion defining what constitutes the semantic centre of a group
seems strained ll It is hard to conceive of Cassandra with
Agamemnon (210) or the victory of Rhodogune and the Persians
(2S) as types of love
Blit to quarrel with Lehmanns argument in this fashion would
be to miss what is most enduringly interesting about t1is commentary The central claim of his essay is that both the
coherence of thematic groupins in the Imagines and the seeming
disturbances of sequence that also occur can both be explained by
proj(cting the text as architectonic form Lehmanns primary
readi IIg strategies involve heavy use of the tropes of metaphor and
metonymy It is metonymic liaison that provides some of
Lehmanns most convincing se(luences tor instance the reconfigushy
ration of the Herakles pictures in the torm of a continuous band or
Jabula The patterns deriving from metaphor are able to embrace
even more extensive segments of the text A term such as love
being elastic (to say the least) is able to ullite scenes even as
disparate as a singing procession of maidens the deaths of
Cassandra and Agamemnon and the suicide of Pantheia So
Lehmanns groupings resemble those of Goethe or perhaps of any
editor or reader seeking to give order to a gnomic and fragmentary
text What is interesting is the way that with Lehmann till tropes
of mctonymy and metaphor do not remain editorial or textual
operations but are figured in terms that are visual and volumetric
Metonymy projects as the gaze of a beholder who standing at
the centre of the room traces a continuous narrative frieze across
the tiers or as the pathway of the spectators body moving from
room to room up and down staircases and across terraces and
finally out of the building at its exits Xenia I and Xenia 2 (r 36 and 226) Metaphor projects as the repetition of enclosing frames
wherehy the unity suggested by shared semantic features ( love
primitive world) is concretised as the singleness and unshybrokenness of mlJr~1 n~( Inmiddot klt~
ii () 1 [ A N B 1 Y SON
singular risks of uncurtailability Once a common feature such as
love is unleashed it is hard to see what story may not one way
or another be subsumed into the resulting series Similarly once
the idea of chronological series cOllies into play it becomes in
principle possible to order all sixty-odd descriptions into overshy
lapping temporal groups i3ut the potential of both metaphor and
metonymy for unlimited expansion across the whole corpus of the
imagines is held in check by the spatial boundaries of dado and
cornice window and door terrace and swircase Architecture
emerges as the containment and pacification of textual energies
which without that binding inAuence from matter fixed in space
would soon run across the text from end to end
What governs both metaphor and metonymy is another figure
visualisation The text as a whole is envisioned as a luxurious
Neapolitan building This response to the imagines is Lehmanns
distinctive ecphrastic operation H is work wi th rhilostratus text
results in a crossing from text to image Lehmann reacts to each
round of difiiculty within the imagines by creating a new building
feature First the room whose walls soon present dadoes cornices
and doorways they are lit by windows of varying size and
position the rooms are tiered as the terraces of a stoa finally like
any good architect Lehmann considers his building in relation to
the seasons and the orientation of the site He is faced with a text
filled with hiatuses and inconsistencies Under pressure from the
texts internal stress lines he produces step by step an architecture
of containment Vhat emerges within the text as difficulty and
disruption is projected in the visual domain as plenitude and unity
The texts moments of incoherence and disruption produce an
architecture of massive and stable blocks i
It is in this doubling of the broken text as an IInbrokeljimage
rather than in his deductive reasoning that Lehmann enacts a
reading of the imagines which I want to suggest is entirely
sensitive to the contours and topology of rhilostratlls writing At
the same time this sensitivity is consigned by Lehmann to the
unconscious of this text To help locate that other submerged
reading of the imagilles one can begin by noticing that successflll
though Lehmann finds his own analysis to be by his own
lt -Aj-
PlIlLOSTIATlS ANIl TilE IMA([NAHY ~[IS I
admission there remains a grollp of pictures that fall qllitl olltside
the boundary of his analysis Beviewing his work from its end
Lehmann reckons that he has been able to account for all thirty-six
sections of book I and the first twenty-six of book 2 Yet eight
miscellaneous cases remain 12 Accordingly Lehmann expels the
entire group from his definition of the imagines He concilldes
that lacking in the relations he has been proposing the peccant
images are in fact later additions grafted on either before the real
publication or else for a second edition 13 nearing ill mind what
Denmiddotida calls the logic of the sllpplement by pressing on what
Lehmann rejects one may come to see the principles of lxclusiotJ
by which his interpretation is structured That supplement to the
imagines so far from standing beyond its pale may delineate that
which Lehmanns reading must constantly repress in order to
sustain itself and as part of this what may be the features of the
imagines which are the hardest for commentary in general to
reach
One would wish to examine in detail all eight supplementary
items (227-234) Here just the first two in the group will be
considered and especially 228 Looms The selection is in some
sense justified by Lehmann own gesture ofexcusion His system
has been working well it has brollght order to all the previous
pictures in both books however bizarre or dislocated they may
have initially appeared Yet after Xenia 2 (at 226) the system
breaks down entirely In spatial terms Lehmanns (re)construction
of the stoa is now complete With the placing of the second still
life Philostratus writes The End The reader passes out of the
portico - out of Lehmanns text-as-architecture --- into th( outer
disorderly world Interestingly the bce which the world presents
is exactly that of a broken building filled with debris
Now Ih~ doorway belonglt to a house by no means prosperolls you will say it has been abandoned by its master and the court wilhin seems deserted nor do the columns still support its roof for they have set tied and collapsed No it is inhabited by spiders only ltll Ihis crelIure loves to weave its web in quiet ( Looms 21-6)
Lehmanns inspired solution to his texts difiiculties - its dOlIbling
as a perfect building ensemble - confronts at its exit the spectacle
(e 204
IOIMAN BRYSON
of a ruination at once textual and architectural What the ti~ure of
the building had particularly enabled was the transfer of all
problems of the text back into the space supposed to stand behind
it the terraced spaces of the villa The moment when Lehmann
declares the true text of Imagines to have ended is that of an
edifice collapsing
Lehmanns entire reading turns on a suppressioll of the texts
being as written representation his gradual construction of the
stoa with all of its loms mapped and its piuures securely placed
in tiers within chambers depends on a reading of the Imagines in
terms of transparency before a pre-existing referent Concerning
philostratus work within language and of the pictures work with
their represented scenes Lehmanns account says nothing In
pointing this out the aim is not in fact to criticise or fault
Lehmanns interpretation One of the principal desires of the
descriptions in the Imagines is exactly to cease being words on the
page to come alive in the fltgtrIn of an imaJe to pass from the
opacity of words to the luminous scenes behind the words
Frecluently met with in the Imaiines is a textual moment at
the description at last feels its own language to dissolve into the
of the scene it opens upon This is the philostratian Look
Now the painter has been successful in these respects also that he has wrought the spider itself ill so painstaking a fashioll has matched its spots with fidelity to nature and has painted its repulsive fuzzy surface and its savage nature - all this is the mark of a good craftsman and one skilled in depicting the truth For look here is a cord I)rming a squaPe ( Looms 3 I
The painters attention to truth has realised the spider in all its
repulsive detail Having traced that fidelity to nature wittla pen
no less observant than the painters Philostratus earns the riglhfor
his OWl] words also to be recognised as fully backed by truth After
his exclaimed For look the description at last rcaches the
moment of lift-off
Three related labours come together in a single disclosure and
presence the work of rhe spicier building its web strand
strand the work of the painter tracing each of the threads stroke ( stroke the work of the ecphrasist tracing the two previous sets
_--- _14_-
PHILOSTRATliS AND THE IMAGINARY MISF11
line by line 14 At look the words the paint and the spiders web
merge in a moment of visionary presence Out of the diverse tissue
woven by the spider the painter and the writer comes a living
image the weavers travel across [their webs J drawing tight such
of the threads as have become loose In this visionary space there
is no separating the individual strands of image text or web The
ecphrasis itself draws tight any threads that come away pulling
them back into the unitary ima~e that is at the same time a web a
pitture and a text With part of itself the ecphrasis seeks to shed
the opacities it possesses by virtue of being made of words
only an arbitrary connection to things It seeks to fuse the words
into something beyond wurds an image a picture and then to
fuse that picture with what is real in a web tltat is no longer lexical
but pictorial and no longer pictorial but alive
Lehmanns desire for a text of the Imafiines that will dissolve
first into the pictures of a collection and then into the architectural
ensemble that hOllses them is ullcannily true to this aspect of philostratus text Yet it embodies only part of that texts energies
Though in the passage just quoted the separate re~isters of
weaving of picturing and of describing all come together ill
radiant fusion at Philostraws For look elsewhere the Looms
description presents these registers as separable separate and out
of phase
In fact Looms opens with a picture of - representation The
first and seemingly gratui tous pictu re in the description shows
Penelopes loom complete with its shuttle warp threads and lint
What opens the ecphrasis then is an image describing the
fabrication of images the representational means by which
Penelope creates iJer tapestry The image is made (and with
Penelope unmade) within the apparatus of representation The
ecphrasis begins by emphasising representation not as something
which vanishes before its referent but which stays stubbornly
visible and in place as material technique
Similarly Looms foregrounds Its own apparatus of repshy
resentation language Penelope is presented not only as tlte site of
work with images but of work with words She is the creation of Homer and it is with Hnmpr linEC th nhlwltr 111 L_
NIlHMAN EllYSON
1( X
own picture of herbull Penelope
Homer melts the snow with them This is a
reference to Ocyssey 192deg4 bull Her tears flowed and her face melted
as the snow melts on the lofty mountains and as it melts the
streams of the rivers flow full so her fair cheeks melted as they
In the same way philostratus makes a point of telling his
reader that the fine threads on which the spiders drop from the roof
and then climb up again are taken froll] llesiod 15 At these points
in the text the words exactly t~lil to dissolve either into pictures
(Penelope) or into things (spiders) They remain the embedded
lines of Homer and of Hesiod woven into a text which refuses to
assimilate them as its own or to dissolve them before a referent in
pictures or in the world
Just as the text insists on its own opacities its ineradicable
wordiness so it points to ways in which nature itself will not be
absorbed into the supposedly higher realm of human represenshy
tation and culture The place of the spiders is presented as the
annihilation of human work ~here roofs and columns
the spiders thrive Human observers may compare the
Penelupe and apply to their webs the terms of or
geometric measurement (lelraliaslOs) but the webs take over
where human creation comes to its end Interestingly the spiders
in Looms are imagined not only as they appear in the picture
description also includes a scene which exceeds that picture
bull the flat [nests] are good to summer in and the hollow sorl is in winter This is a aside a
to other times and the picture but
within it The that moment
race across their web it does not shd~ them in
other seasons when in summer spiders choose the ~~t webs
and in the winter the hollow ones Looms points to another life
of spiders which the scene in other words implies but does not
state to a world of ruins silences and spider-life that goes on
whether or not there are people around to see it Nature takes over
from culture culture in fact collapses its columns broken but
spiders silently persist away from the human labours of building
weaving painting and describing
------
PHILOSTRATliS AND TilE IMA(JNAHI ~ll1SI1
III
Against Lehmanns maps of the architectural referent one might
posit another topology of things pictures and words not as these
come together in the ensemble of a resurrected museum but as they
fail to connect in a fracture or ruin of representation The
magines work with three dil1erellt substances words things
and images With part Phiostratus- act ()t descriptio-n
middotwrks t~ blur these three in visionary merger (fIg )2)
(~ ~~ ~
(-) lp Fi~ J2
In the heat of this words turn into images or images into real things (4)middot But such excitement and
animation is only one of the Imagines many possibilities There
are others less ecstatic Words come unstuck from things they
hark back not to things in the world but to other words by
Homer or Hesiod (3) Or images pull away from the task of
representation they are shown as products of material technique
threads weft lint looms (J) Or the world pulls away from its
representation in art and language (2) the courtyard appears as
deserted abandoned by its master a place where the visual order
imposed by human cultivation collapses alld the primary
of human space - columlls roof shelter way to the openness of nature
I t is appropriate that Looms opens with
standing both for the capacity of art to provide marvellous
of the world and for the unravelling of art back into mere
and lint The ecphrasis is in tJct in continuous aeros all of the interstices between the world til word and Image
1 to 7 see also fig A t times ( For ) it seems I hal
~ ~)
(~
o H ~l A N B R Y SON
27C
art concealillt art mlkes the dead mailer of leLters and
brushslrokes corne alive BUl this is only one phase ill the
ecphrastic process Equally important are the momellts when the
ecphrasis fails when words revert to being words tapestries
revert to thread and architecture to rubble
One reason that Lehmanns reading banishes Looms from the
Imagines may perhaps be the descriptions eminent f~lilure instead
of giving way to a luminous and ostensible referent
enthusiasm that enables philostratus to say Look The spiders
and Lehmann to say Look The sma - Looms darkens the
picture making it a place of shadows dust and broken
architecture Spatially it figures itself as a ruined courtyard
Textually it traverses not only the place of ecphrastic excitement
where words turn into pictures and pictures turn into things but
all the negative ecphrastic spaces whcre words remain words or
form hybrids with pictures and pictures revert to thei I constituent
elements threads WII hering lint on a loom That philostratus
intends this cffect of netativity and intends it as a figure for his
own ecphrastic enterprise is confirmed by the pairing which
Looms (228) forms with its preceding picture bullThe birth of
Athena (227)
The link of course is Arachne 16 As Ovid tells the tale
Arachne is a human weaver who challenges the skill of the divine
weaver Minerva and is punished ltH Iter hubris when Minerva
turns her into a spider At the contest both welvers set lip their
looms
The web is bound upon the beam the reed separates tlw threads of the warp the woof is threaded through them by the sharp shuttles which their busy fingers ply and when shol through the threads ofdle warp the notched teeth of tilt hammering stay beats it into place l
I~
Minerva pictures the twelve heavenly gods 011 majestic thrones At
the four corners of her tapestry are set miniature scenes of
presumptuous mortals IS Arachne counters this imagery of the
gods punishing humans ()r hubris with scenes of the gods and
especially Jupiter19 violating human females Appalled by
Arachnes work Minerva hits her three times with a shuttle then
robs her of human form
PHI LOS T RAT J SAN D THE I MAG I N A It Y 1lH I
Fig 33
Forthwith her hair touched by the poison fell off and with it both nose and ears and the head shrank up her whole body also was small the slender lingers cling 10 her side as the rest was belly 20
For many interpreters of the Arachne fable the official moral
- a cautionary tale against hubris contains a second level a
of reflection upon the capacities and limitations of an For
Velazquez the competition concerns not only weavers but
painters At the rear of the inner stage in The Fable o( Arachne is
shown Titians painting The Rape of Europa and
presents his own craft in parallel to the art of weaving placed
somewhere perhaps between Arachne and Minerva between the
genre painting of the foreground and Titians history painting in
the middle distance (fig 33) III the reading of Leonard Barkan
this capacity of the Arachne topos to act as arts self-reflexive
shy
2~
OltMAN BRYSON
~~ 2
commentary on art is already present in Ovids text I t requires
no great leap of the imagination to see in Arachnes tapestry all the
elements of Ovids own poetry in the Metamorphoses Just as she
tells the stories of the loves of the gods and the metamorphoses of
their victims so does he 21 Like Velazquez Ovid positions his
own work somewhere between the disorderly profusion
metamorphoses that issue from Arachnes loom and
theologically correct carefully framed tapestries that come
the loom of Minerva
That philostratus intends Looms to unfold in the space of this
a number of details The Birth of
the first subject of Minervas tapestry immediately
precedes the text of Looms in philostratus gallery In Ovid the
contest of Arachne and Minerva is visualised as a spectrum of
iridescent colours
As when after a storm of rain the suns rays strike through and a rainbow with its huge curve stains the wide sky though a thousand different colours shine in it the eye cannot detect the change from each one to the next so appear the adjacent colours22
This is precisely the metaphor philostratus uses to describe the
armour of Athene as the goddess emerges fullv armed from
head of Zeus
As for the material of her panoply no-one could guess iI Ii)r as many as are the colours of the rainbow which changes its light now to one hue gt1d now to another so many are the colours of her armour 2
1
Taking Philostratus two descriptions in sequence one can say
that Looms applies to the competition between Minerva and
Arachne the figure of hathos It is a comic transformation orOvids
contest down-scaled with Penelope in the place of MinerW1
spiders in the place of Arachne
philostratus begins where Ovid left off with Arachnes
metamorphosis the rest was belly is expanded into the spiders
repulsive fuzzy surface and its savage nature and the spiders
grisly meaL Where Ovid uses the Arachne fable as a means to
comment on his own project in the MUal11ornwses niacin his
book somewhere between divine
-~
P II I L () S Tii A T USA N Il TilE J M A ( I N A H Y ~Il S Hmiddot
comically deflated retelling of the fable philostratus places his own
project the Imagines somewhere between the higher artists
(Homer Hesiod Ovid etc) and the beasts Ovid and
use the images of their own
the inverts the rhetoric in a comic
desublimation or parody
Let us touch again on the philostratian exclamation Lookmiddot
k fI
The moment when a picture seems to come alive is encountered
again and again in the 1m agiles In Xenia I philostratlls remark~
that the painted grapes are good to eat and full of winey juice
(r3 I) In Xenia 2 he invites the reader to reach out and take a loaf
from the painted basket (226) In Narcissus he says he cannot
real (123) At the core of the Imagines is the promise tl1at at
ments words
intense experience that
oth pictures and words It is not simply that words arc
tell whether a real bee has been deceived bv the painted Hower or
whetlier we are to be deceived into thinking that a ~
supplemented by pictures and pictures by words To read the
Imagines that way is to model it on the example of the illustrated ~ shybook The logic of the text is in fact closer once again to that of
Derridas supplement What words lack (because they are
words characters on the page marks without light) images can hJluinaJvt with a presence which is based on that lack which grows fro~l it
and turns it into light What images lack (because they are
in time mere pigments on a surf~lce threads on a loom) words Gill
sugply with narration and movement This strange hallueinatoy
power of ecphrasis calls on the capaei~ies of words and I~ to
describe the world but goes beyond their several powers into a
~ _ moment when Look becomes the only appropriate -- ~ ~L
response The exclamation directs the reader not towards the text J t or its Image but past them both into another space where presence )f
~vo to 11 th 0 ooce (gl hdoS tooeh t) fiJtJ - Yet compared with Ovicl (or Vehizquez) philostratlls text is (
clearly self-mocking and self-defeating Its lines move Ollt into all ~ the negative ecpilrastic spaces where the enanIeia of Iookmiddot j
NORMAN BHYlgtON
exactly unfortilcoming Instead of Aracillle the spider instead of the loves of the gods in tapestry an insect meal Oil a web
Accompanying the project of inciting the reader to envision is
Philostratus awareness that with every ecphrasis at some point
the lines and strokes always separate and unravel The text presents
itself as hollowed out by its own rhetorical self-awareness and as
haunted by an inescapably secondary or belated relation to
pictures In the Proem the author dramatises himself as a painter
mangul
Now the story of the men who have mastery in the sciellce of painting and the states and kings that have been passiolltltely devoted to it has been told by others writers Ilotably Aristodemus of Carla whom I
visited for four years In orcler to study paintinf 1n the present discussions however we propose to describe examples of painting in the form of addresses which have been composed for the young 24
Four years of study with Aristodemus have led not to a career in
painting but only in criticism In the scenography of the text
Philostratus is always old and lesser than the young The son of
his host must summon him before he speaks SpJtially he is at the
perimeter beyond the city walls a Greek wandering in Italy
Secondary in relation to painting his pictures are also belated in
time not the work of men who have won mastery in the science
of painting discussed by Pliny but of painters who are never in
fact given names
G- lc o this negative dinlension of the Ima(inegt Lehmann appears
1vt tgt emarkably insensitive Jn his hands the Imagilles are tt come
alive he will infuse them with his own visionary energy~~ resurrecting the fragments of the text into a luminous stoa whose
every corner he can visualise His work with the blta(illes is in a
sense part of the Pompeian tradition which from Winckelmann
to l3ulwer-Lytton to Ilollywood aims to coiJre ivil~ flesh from
the ashes In terms of its own rhetoric Lehmanns is a heroic reading The example of the Irrcltlt Goerhe2f tTllirlp hi274
bull vJ ~_ _
PHILOSTRATLJS AND THE IMAGINARY MI~I
enterprise26
Filling out what remained only tentative in Goethes
essay he perceives an order in the Imagines which not even their
author realised The Imagines have to be wrested from philoshy
stratlls hands Philostratus misreads the mountains of Thes~ly as
mountains of Rhodes Philostratus takes no advantage of these connections and does not mention them27 Although
Philostratus was perfectly able to see immediately many of the
implications of single pictures he did not discuss the cyclic idea
He was not interested in it2R As Lehmanns analysis gains
momentum Philostratus tends to get referred to as thelcctUle~ Like many orators and letter writers and teachers before and after
him he decided to pllblish these lectures as a model of his
tecllllillue and style in handling such a task 29 He paraphrased
rather than described the paintings and pointed out the emotional
values and psychological associations ofeach picture His emphasis
in this collrse ill the appreciation (Ifart was one-sided as flax heen tlwl
elery professor (~f tlzis kind after Ilim (emphases added) ~o
Lehmann himself is not of course a lecturer or professor of this kind
If Philostratus mocks his own secondariness Lehmann expels
secondariness from his text in tbe person of the outmoded
professor who only appreciates and who cannot see what
Lehmann sees the hyper-realistic image of a gallery with all its
rooms envisioned simultaneously and in detail But these abject
personifications the lectlirer and the professor arc not the
bearers of anxiety in his reading or its only scapegoats The
Imapnes need to be reconstructed Lehmann maintains because
without them the third century is the dark century in the history
of ancient painting the era ofa great crisis ofancient art in which
the foundations for the development of later western art were
bid 11 Here are Lehmanns words for the threat his reconstruction is to dispel
In a period lor which a lower-middle-class tomb in Rome like that of the Amelii is used as a cornerstone [or the history of palntin) and Ir which the discovery of the frescoes of a Jewish synagogue in Mesopotamia tends to revolutionize the entire picture of the historv of lnrn
NOH~lAN BRYSON
Is it too much to find in these words a threat to a cherished image
of antiquity an image that must be protected
Art history emerges here in one of its dubious heroising guises
as the custodian of culture working against a background of crisis
and collapse Quite naturally the custodians must live in a great
house resplendent with all the marbles favoured by luxury
but particularly splendid by reason of the panel-paintings set in
the walls The force required to protect the custodians is that of
museum circa 1941 It is a modernist exhibition space
stripped down diagrammatic programmatic yet still (at the end
of the reconstruction) conceived as a house of the great with
dining-chambers for the four seasons Better than most museums
with their difficult diplomatic balance between the needs of
scholars and of patrons it is wholly designed by the art historian
The scholarship that builds this space is to judge by the footnotes
an exclusively German affair And the account endorses the
protocols of a certain strand in the German art history of its time
We shall always regret where fi)nllal problems are concerned the
limitations of a description which aimed not to descrile but to
interpret what the audience saw (emphases added) Painting is to
be approached formally not hermeneutically and interpretation
now a negative term is to be confined to an outpost of
iconography the identification of subjects and programme cycles
Lehmanns own hermeneutic operation presents itself as
opposite of interpretive work It proceeds by excluding lt111 those
images which appear to Lehmann to be editorial additions grafted
01 to the main text supposedly anomalous products of writing and
publication mere word-pictures un backed by actual referents It
prunes away the rhetorical elaborations of the lecn1rer and
bypasses the pictures themselves in order to reach th~ solid
masonry behind them as though representation itself verbal or
pictorial were a barrier to be torn dowH This process is presented
as a series of purifications The text contaminated for publication
is returned to its pristine state The visual field is purged of its
verbal dimension in a double movement from text In architecture
and from arl criticism to archaeology Antiquitys dark age is
banished Its whuralmainstrcam is protected against distortion by
-- - --~-
PHI I 0 S T RAT l SAN Il THE r M A (] N 1 H Y I S I I
inferior and marginlt11 groups Art history triumphs over art
appreciation The end product of these procedurts is the vision of
a purified architectural form whose authority is confirmed by a
tradition of national scholarship and national culture exiled to
America and written up in English yet still in direct contact with
the author of Phiostrats gemalde and with the Graeco-Homan past
Through rhetorical operations such as these Lehmanns
ecplrrasis becomes in a sense a tecitni(lue of the subject It is surely
much more than an archaeological reconstruction Like Auerbad~s Mimesis written in Istanbtll during World War II it mobilises the
energies of cultural resistance to its own dark century It invsts
those energies in an incandescent visualisation that configures the
beleaguered subject as a unified building I t would I think be
wrong to find fault with Lehmanns reading at the level on which
it appears to operate of slellth-like deduction and rationality
Expelled by the texts rational procedures rhetoric returns as
texts unconscious At this buried or subterranean level the
reading actually moves much closer into the Imagines than it is
able to admit Philostratus himself presents the art of painting not
as a copy of the world but ltIS in ternalisation of the world In 19 warns his audience not to be impressed by a works mimetic
realism ill that case he says we should praise an insignificant
feature of the painting and one that has solely to do with imitation
(mimesis) but we shollid nOI be praising its intelligence or
sense of decorum it shows though these I believe are the most
important elements of art l~ lust as painting shows the world as
it has already passed into the subjectivity of the painter so the
beholder should not dwell 011 the external matter of mimesis but
internalise the image drawing it inside the subject On their own
the audience can see pictures and judge mimesis perfectly well
the audience do not yet know are the techniques for
absorbing the pictures into the mind It is precisely
in this assimilation of pictures to subjectivity that the audience has come to hear Philostratus speak
It is in this aspect of internalisation that the Imafiines revcJ rhetoric itself as a techllolov Of elicnlin t1egt If T-_ r
1IIMN BRYSON
of the Ad Herenniuflt names memoria as the fourth part of
rhetoric 34 In order to memorise a lengthy speech the orator
should visualise the successive topics of his discourse as images
arranged in consecutive places within architectural space In the
words of Frances Yates who is that mlfi moving slowly in
lonely building stopping at intervals with an intent face He is a
rhetoric student forming a set of memory loci35 Architectures
role in rhetoric is as the supplier of milieux within which intense
visualisations are to occurUl As Cicero says the images should be
active sharply defined and unusual having the power of speedily
encountering and penetrating the psyche (quae oCCflrrere celerishy
terque percutere animum possim)37 The speech unfolds as
rhetorician walks in his mind past walls each memory-place hung
with a vivid image through rooms doorways stairways
porticoes terraces
The first notion is placed as it were ill the ()recourt the second let us say in the atrium lhe remainder are placed in order round the impluvium and committed not only to bedrooms and parlours but even to statues and the like3R
The stability and dependability of this internal architecture is vital
for the control of the self over its material To forget the existence
of a particular room is to leave out a whole stage of the argument
to lTIisremember the sequence of images is to garble the
presentation of the case
places are chosen and marked om with the utmost possible vlriety as a spacious house divided into a number of rooms Every thinK of note therein is diligently imprinted on the mind in order that thongl n~ay be able to fun through all the parts without let or hindrance The filst task is to secure that there shall be no difficulty in funning through these for that memory must be most firmly fixed which helps another memory all
Here architecture not only stands for the control of the self it is
the actual material means by which the self exercises its control
over its words and its world
If Lehmanns unitary and massively stable architecture stands ~1 _1 _~ bullbull l J ~
~ PHILOSTRATUS AND THE IMA((NARY MlISEU~1
c~) (~~) ( 0 ~ ~
-~ ----~
hI 34
1 reading rejoins Philostratus rhetoric as an operation whose means
is imaginary buildings and whose goal is mastery over self and
over representation Ecphrasis here is a technique for consolidating
the subject in terms of personal and professional control While on
the surface of his text Lehmann disavows hermeneutic art history
and expels the lecturer at other levels of his text Lehmann is
Philostratus shadow-partner or secret sharer Lehmanns entry
into the culture of late antiquity is through a shape-shifting in
which he performs the architectural ars memorativa of a thirdshy
century orator
Yet he does so in terms very different from those supplied in the
Imagines The kind of subject proposed and assllmed by 9
Philostratus text is much less driven by the urge towards unitary
self-possession The Imagines subject exists in a universe where
things images and words may frequently converge but do not
consistently fuse together ill the ardour of imaginary vision The
descriptions show the subject in transit across the interstices where
world pictures and language overlap Especially interesting 10
Philostratus are the hybrid or chiasmic zones where dillerent
registers cross over (fig 34)
Let us return for the last time to Looms Penelopes loom
exists at the place where images and the things of the world cross
over The loom is a thing that makes images yet we do not see the
images it makes only the things - warp threads shuttle it
works with Again when the weavers travel across the web or eat
their squirming prey they are seen as living moving creatures
hill at thl sme time the reader knows they are onlv a static nictllrf -j
--
OIlMAN BRYSON
i(
Elsewhere the text moves to the place where the things of the
world cross over into words The author tells us that the spiders
cables are almost too tine to discern What brings them into view
are in fact Hesiods lines about spiders destending and astending
their threads The word makes the thing exist Or a single word in
Greek -- arachnc is able to generate two utterly different beings
spiders and the weaver who challenged Minerva The characters of
Looms are so to speak engendered by an ecphrastic pun Words
and things change pilCes At other times the text crosses the place
where words and image blend Homers text turns into a picture
then back again into Homers words The line between what is
verbal and visual cannot be drawn4o
The subject of the Imagines is in constant motion and dispersal
across this complex terrain qf wprld jmilg ltlAd texr When the
outward pictures enter the subject and are assimilated to the seWs
interior they scatter across an intricately divided and Auid space
The images of Philostratus exist as r~fractiollS in a multishy
dimensional space in which a variety of voices none of them
original blend and clash 41 The subject who performs this
internalisation is in perpetual motion The moments when at the
philostratian Look the various registers join in visionary
fusion do not last long Almost at once the visions separate out
into their component strands unravelling as fast as they came
together And they lead on to the next image - more than sixty
times The unravelling of one image clears the space for the
coming together of the next one Or better the unravelling of
each image calls into being summons the next It is in that
perpetual Penelope-like emergence and falling away of images
that the subject is spun by the text Not as a central storehp~se or
gallery more a~ a motion or desire
Lehmanns subject is in a sense the opposite of thiJ In
Lehmanns case internalising philostralUs text means seeking a
means to arrest the motions of the text and to tapture and
immobilise its energies in a final culminating form Into the
stability of the huilding that is to end the text as motion and desire
are poured all the authors ligures for the command of the subject
massive masonry the prestige of the museum purified form
_ --- ----
PHILOSTRATUS AND THE IMAGINAIY M(SEI
Goethe national culture ethnic centrality profcssionlIisll1 posishy
tive knowledge Which should make Lehmann Philostratus most
inappropriate reader were it not for the brilliance and the yearning of his own visualisation
Among other things Lehmanns reading exemplifies some of
the paradoxes inherent in the tradition of positivist scholarship to
which it belongs It is this aspect that raises his reconstruction
above the category of historiGl1 oddity to adumbrate some of the
vicissitudes of positive knowledfe in more general terms First
Lehmanns relation to the literary to textuality and intenextualitx
is remarkably strained and contradictory The architectural ord~r he proposes for the Imagines is itselfbibliograplllc Lehmann needs
texts 10 enable his reconstruction to take place in order to build
his version of Philostratus villa he must resort to the library what
he says for instance concerning the typology of rooms their
orientation and relation to the seasons is directly dependent on
Vitruvius Yet at the same time his analysis mllst bypass textuality
in order to dissolve the texts into architectural form Necessary at
certain moments of the analysis at others textuality becomes an
obstacle to be scornfully removed Inherently untrustworthy
beside the actuality (the positivism) of the archaeological find texts are aligned in his interpretation with ideas of parasitism and
mediocrity figured here by the lecturer or professor The
reading works both to banish textual corruption completely
(which cannot easily show up ill the analysi~ since hiatuses in the
text arc translated at once into architectural syntax) and to build
the necessity for textual wrruption into his case (as when
Lehmann axes the last eight descriptions as later additions )
Textuality features in this mode of analysis primarily under tlte
sign of repression Where it is able to grow transparent before the
three-dimensional architectural and archaeological order it can be
admitted Where textuality fails to become translucent hcfilfe
reference it must be expelled even if the effort to do so becomes
massive involving the whole battery of figures for the command of th~ sui)ject
Secondly this ef1ort to repress textuality runs counter to many
of the most conspicuous features of Philostratllt PIh So
tgtnHMAN BRYSON
2X2
writing especially its interest in exploring the negative ecphrastic
spaces in which the reader so far from experiencing a dissolution
of writing before the luminous referellt (tlte philostratian
Look ) apprehends the text as a sophisticated web of allusions
parodies puns and tonal plays Lehmanns quest for the stable
masonry of the referent seems altogether blind to the many ways
in which philostratus writing plays to the wplzia of the reader as
one who can see bizarre connections who can understand hidden
narrativcs within imagery (A rachne Mincrva) wilD can
exercise the visual eqllivalent of the elaborate verbal dexterity that
characterises Hellenistic poetry When philostratus says that the
web the spiders make is exceedingly fine (k)perleIIOS) he is
doing more dlan asking liS to visualise something hard to see he
is using a key term from Hellenistic poetics eplOs which means
witty fint clever small-scale sophisticated and doing
so as an invitation or a warning to the reader that his own writing
too is all of these things It is a warning that Lehmann perhaps
wisely does not heed for once ecphrasis is thought of as a form
writing that involves much mort than a simple visualisation of
a text it leaves behind the one certainty that ecphrasis seemed to
hold out to the archaeologist - its promise of presence of
resurrection and becomes something else a mode of writing
whose complexity we are perhaps only beginning to discern and
in relation to which tlie idea of visualisation begins to appear as a
simplification at best
Finally the scrupulous rationality of Lehmanns interpretive
method with its emphasis on what can be deduced and
demonstrated as positive knowledge and as archilectural form
renders it strangely unaware of its own aspect of tellIality of the
ways in which it is itself a working wilh words in whityen the words
carry more associations motivations and effect than the writer is
able to hear or control Working within a highly instrumental and
reduced picture-theory of language Lehmanns analysis radically
underestimates the capacity of words to exceed their allotted
functions of argumentation demonstration and proof Opening
on to other investments and other scenes tban that simply of
archaeology and reconstruction Lehmanns text speaks its own
PllILOSTRATS AND THE IMAGINAHY MliS
uncollscious and it is in that energetic and overdetermined
underside of his text that his deepest engagement with Philostratus
may be found What he writes is perhaps the dream-work of
positivism not the forensics of archaeology but its own buried poetics 42
~
l ltJTES TO PAGES 244--61
O On Pausanils see Frazer (1898) Heer (1979) Jacob (1980)
Habich 1 (1985) and Elsner (1992)
I These include discussions of the wild satyrs of the islands 1235-)
the Ethiopians I334- the Ionian Greeks 722-51) the
marvellous animals collected in Rome 9211-2 the islands of
Sardinia and Corsica 10171-13
32 See Elsner (1992) 17--20
33 See Frazer (1898) xiv compare other second-century CE descripshy
tions of ruins such as Dio Chrysostom on Thebes Oratio 7
Plutarch De ~rcctu oracuorum 8 Lucian Diaog 11I0rt 272
34 This chapter began as a paper on Herodotus pyramids delivered to
Paul Cartledges Ancient History Seminar in Cambridge in 1989 I
wish to thank him John Henderson Jamie Masters and the Editors
of this volume for their comments on earlier drafts My deepest debt
is to Joan Pau Rubies y Mirabet with whom I have fi)r several years
discussed the problems of travel travel-writing and identity This
chapter is dedicated to him
CHApTEH EIGHT PHlLOSTRATliS AND Tin IMA(INARY
MUSEUM
1 English translations are taken from the Loeb edition edited by
T E Page E Capps and W H D Rouse (London and New
York193 1)
2 For the history of the debate see the editions of Jacobs and Welcker
(1825) Kayser (1844) Benndorf and Schenkel (1893) and
Steinmann (1914)
3 Lehmann (1941)
4 The essay is conveniently to be f()Und in vo XXVI of Cottas
standard edition (1868) pp 276fT
Lehmann (1941) 21-4
6 Obviously he describes pictures that were topoglllttphically united
but without regard to the ideological and (JrluaJ rda~m which had
dictated their combination Lehmann (1941) 20
7 Indeed the only explanation of the relationships and the lack of
order is that philostratus saw real pictures which were to a certain
extent arranged on the upper and lower parts of walls Lehmann
(1941) 20
8 Lehmann (1941) 31-3
9 Lehmann (1941) 31-3
NOTES TO P(I-S 2()2
10 [n fact the lmalfines do not supply indications concerning the
dimensions of any particular work
II [t should also be noted that Lehmanns groupings occasionally
require him to rewrite the given titles of pictures
11 These last eight pictures of the second book show a remarkable
absence of any stich relation and connection as we have found
everywhere else Lehmann (1941) 37
13 Lehmann (1941) 39-40
14 The image of weaving is frequently used of writing see for
example Catullus ()45ofr in which the marriage of Peleus and
Thetis is covered with a estis variata figuris pestit decorata
jiguris where filfura is also a literary term for Catullus (wn
rhetoric Perhaps the crucial sites of configuring language image
and weaving are words such as ypaqgteurolv grapIein which means
writedraw design (in thread)
I ~ Worfrs an1 Days 777
16 The presence of Arachne in Looms has been argued since the
Renaissance See for example the gloss on Les Etoiles in Blaise
de Vigeneres edition of 1610 514 Lehmann (1941) 39 also
suggests that the two pictures (227 and 218) both refer to the
Arachne story
17 Ovid Met 65~-8
18 Minerva depicts Rhodope and Ilaemus who dared to cal
themselves gods now turned to mountains the Pygmaean queen
who challenged Juno now turned into a crane Antigone turned
by the angered Juno into a stork Cinyras whose daughters are turned to stone
19 Arachnes tapestry shows Europa abducted by the bull Asterie
carried off by the eagle Leda pursued by the swan Jllpiter
disguised as Amphitryon Danae
20 Met 6140--4
21 Barkan (1986) 4
22 Met 663--6
23 227 1~-19
24 lmaxiner Proem
25 Lehmann (1941) 16
26 In the first paragraph of Lehmanns article Goethe is found to be
disappointed by Pompeii and Herculaneum mere Middletowns as
GoetheLehmann put it from whose limited atmosphere they 112
NOTES TO IAUES 27~-83
turn away towards the Imagines Heference to Goethe recur
at several points in the essay Strangely enough no-one with the
exception of Goethe has ever called attention to the problem of the
general order of the paintings in the two books of philostratus
(19) Yet Goethes rearrangement of the Imapnes is also as
Lehmann put it cavalier his own essay lJl1ilds more sysshy
tematically on Goethes
27 Lehmann (1941) 2S
28 Lehmann (1941) 30
29 Lehmann (1941) 41-2
30 Lehmann (1941) 41
31 Lehmann (1941) 17-18
32 Lehmann (1941) 17middot
33 Imagines 19 18-22 1 have modified the Locb translation
here
34 In Ad Herelfiun the five parts of rhetoric are
eloculio memoria pmllUllialio
3) Yates (1966) 8
36 On architectures relation to the art of memory see the discussion
of Elsner (forthcoming) chapter 2 section v
37 Ad HerenniulII 2873)8 cited by Yates (1966) 18
38 Quimilian inH orat 11220 cited by Yates (1966) 22
39 Quintilian Inst oral 11218 cited by Yates (1966) 22
40 The diagram (Iig 34) is not satisfactory for instance its lines
fixity when the whole point is to suggest fluidity and continuum
But 1hope the reader will follow at least the diagrams gist that the
illlaNille constantly shuttles between words il1la~es and thin~s
Area (5) is that of merger between things and images (6) is the
hybrid area ofwordsubjects (7) is the area of blur between word
and image perhaps the principal ecphrastic space~ he space of the
wurd graphein r 41 Barthes (1977) 145-6
42 1am grateful to the members of the Laurcncc Seminar held in the
Department of Classics at Cambridge in May 1991 ltJr their help in
formulating the ideas presented in this essay and particularly to
Simon Goldhill jas Elsner and Stephen Bann for their very
welcome observations and
List of works cited
For abbreviations see pp xi--xiii
Adler J and Ernst U (1988) Text als Figur 11welle Poesie 101 der
Antike gtis rur Moderne Weinheim
Alpers S (1983) The Art ofDescrihlilg Chicago
Amyx D A (1988) Corinthian Vase Painting orrIe Arclaic Period The
Study of Corinthian Vases Berkeley
Arnheim R (1988) The Poet at rile Center A )tudl ofCompo siti 011 in the
Visual Artr Berkeley
Arnott P (1962) Greek Scellic COlventoils ill til Fijth Celllu~) BC
Oxford
(1989) Puhlic and Performance ill the Greek Theater London
Arnott W G (1987) The Stream and the Gold Two notes 011
Theocritus in Filologia e forme letterarie studi (1fimi a F Della
Corte vol I U rhino
Arthur [Katl] M (1975) Hurtides phoenislae and the Plitics
Diss Yale University
(1977) The curse of civilizatioll the choral odes of the PllOemu-ae
HSCP 81 163-8
Ashmole B (1972) Architect and Sculptor in Classical Greece London
Ashmole B and Yalouris N (1967) Olympia The Sculptures of the
Temple of Zeus London
Baladit H (1980) La Pilopollnese de Strahon Paris
-if Bann s (1989) The True Vine on Visual Representanim ald tllet
- lf7estern Tradition Cambridge -J Barber E J w (1990) Prellistone Textiles the Deleopmellt (Clotll ill
the Neolithic and Brone Ages Princctoll
(1992) The peplos of Athelia in Goddess and Polis tILl PaIlGtIz((c
NOHMAN BRYSON
) X
Some examples will help to clarify Lehmanns processes of
reasoning In the second book of the Imagines occur six
consecutive pictures illustrating the adventures of Herakles
Lehmann points out that it is inconceivable that this grouping
could be accidental [ Apart from a fleeting appearance in the
picture of the Argonauts (2 I 5) Herakles features nowhere else in
the sixty-odd descriptions And yet the sequence of the Ilerakles
pictures is strange The first (220) portrays the contest between
Herakles and Atlas the scene takes place in north-western Africa
The second (221) shows the fight between Heraklcs and Antaios
now the scene is Libya The next depicts Herakles again in north
Africa sleeping and attacked by the Pygmies (222) Obviously
these three (220-222) are concerned with Herakles African
adventures Then ()liows a picture representing the madness of
Herakles and now a temporal series can be inferred after
completing the last of the twelve Labours Herakles voyaged along
the coast of Africa encountering on the way Antaios and later the
Pygmies before his return home and his attack of insanity This
sequence accounts clearly for numbers 220-223 four of the six
Herakles episodes But the two remaining pictures (224 and 225)
do not fit this scheme at all Picture 224 deals with Herakles and
Theiodamas In the myth the episode can be located in two
different regions - Thessaly and Rhodes philostratus reads the
landscape of 224 as Rhodian To Lehmann this sounds odd For
if the painter had intended the landscape as that of Rhodes the
picture should properly have been placed between the African
adventures and Herakles final homecoming Lehmanns resolution
oT the anomaly is to claim that philostratus was wrong to interpret
the landscape as that of Rhodes In fact the mountains in the picture must be those of Thessaly which is where lIcrakles
middot lLabours begm
Picture 224 thus inaugurates the narrative sequence The next
picture in the Imagilles shows one of the Labours - the taming of
the horses of Diomcdcs Though it comes last in the series in
terms of a continuous chronicle it follows 224 and precedes the
later episodes 220 to 223 Vhat has happened is that the
Imagines has run through a continuous story but starting and
~-
PHllOSTRATllS AND TIIF IMA(INARY ~llSE
20
r A~~sl Imiddot Africa I
_ J
WALL II
0 ej ___
)1 ---lUi
I
Ir libY I~
~raJ -I -I ~ ~
il 3 ~
AlllrtM
A1IUes~1 EL
Fi- lO
ending at the wrong points The sequence should be the
commencement of Herakles adventures in Thessaly Heraklcs and
the horses of Diomedes Herakles and Atlas then I Ierakles return
voyage including the episodes with Antaios and with the Pygmies
in North Africa finally Herakles homecoming and madness If Philostratus account were cut and resequenced it would make up
a single story How has this Raw in the presentation come about
It is here that Lehmann advances the hypothesis of the Room
(fig 30 ) If the secluence is laid out as it continuous chronicle its
six component episodes can be thought of as forming a band of
pictures inset into the walls ofa single chamber The hypothesis of
the Room then permits Lehmann to advance the corollary idea of
the Doorway That the Imagines confusingly recounts the
Herakles episodes in the order 345 6 12 can be explained if
PiJilostrHts is imagined entering the room through a
placed between the second and third pictures (22~ The horses of ] II
NOHMIIN BRYSON
(
Diomedes and 220 Atlas ) philostratus passes through the
door turns to one side and begins his text in the middle of the
Herakles legend (fig 30) Observing the correct narrative
sequence is evidently less important to him than describing the
pictures as he Ilnds them in situ set into the walls I f the existence
of room and doorway is accepted the break in sequence can be
read as an architectural caesura not a textual glitch (In Lehmanns
reading all textual discontinuities will be projected as architectural
registers disunity in the text is to be resolved into the unity of the
building the texts openings interruptions and incompleteness
will be transformed through a specific ecphrastic operation into
the wholeness of an image an edifice a museum)
Having tested the hypotheses of the room and the doorway and
finding them secure Lehmann now proceeds to blotk in the walls
of his mlsee imaginaire from dado to cornices For it turns out that
sometimes within an evidently coherent sequence such as that of
Herakles there appear quite unrelated pictures pictures that
interrupt the sequence for no apparent reason Such cases can be
resolved by hypothesising a second tier of pictures placed above
the Ilrst towards the ceiling 7 The opening pictures of book 2
Lehmann maintains form a continuous series of episodes to do
with love To the group as a whole he gives the name Room of
Aphrodite R Loves power features in the opening scene showing
girls in a procession for Aphrodite (21) it continues in the stories
of Hippolytus refusing to love Phaedra (24) in the love of
Critheis and Meles (28) in the suicide of Palltlteia (29) and the
death of Cassandra (210) Yet this catalogue of loves woes is
i~terrupted by pictures quite unconnected with love Chei ron
educating Achilles (22) and female Centaurs (23) Chciron goes
widl female Centaurs but not with the Aphrodite seriet yet the
interruption can be resolved if these pictures are imagined a~a pair
placed above the main scene This upper tier can now establilth
its own band and its own independent life The education of ~ -~Achilles (22) and female Centaurs (23) can absorb a third scene (
frnm the life of Achilles where he mourns the death of Antilochus ~~ (27) The picture of the youthful Antilocltus can then attract as its
cornire partner a picture of Arrhidikos (26 the feature held in
~ ~~
PHILOSTRATliS AND THE IMAGINARY MISEl
WALL
9
t l I
J
bull ~
AI1WM
I (SOlVJO SnJ11z JOll1
UOH
II ~
jmiddotmiddotoP UOP~SOd put ~dOj3d -~_o~e~ ~~ ~~Q~~~P
or 6r
I-i~ 11
common is that both show the corpses of young men) while the
idea of Antilochus as a young Olympian victor can draw to itself
the story of the birth of Pindar the f~lmous bard of such victories
(212) And since Pan is present at Pindars birth Pans presence
with nymphs in an adjacent picture (211) can also be explained
Lehmann docs not stop with the room To enclose the whole of
the text he must build an edillcr a stoa How is it to be lit The
walls require windows and windows turn out to be doubly useful
they provide light for the pictures and they fill up space when
there seem to be not enough pictures to go round Consider for
instance the Hoom of Dionysus (fig 31)9 In Lehmanns analysis
this comprises a lower-level tier devoted to six Dionysian suhjects
and an upper tier with eleven miscellaneous scenes Ohviously
there is a difficulty here How could walls which in their lower I
N()I~MAN BRYSON
2(2
tier show only six scenes leave space for eleven scenes above
Evidently the upper pictures should be imagined as smaller in
scale small enollh to allow on Wall 2 as many as live scenes
(218224) to lit above two below lo Still it makes for a long wall
and one which has only two pictures Oil its lower level But if a low
window is added (between 218 and 219) the emptiness of the
walls lower section is filled Lehmanns museum is now rapidly
acquiring detail The question arises of the layout of room to
room Goethe had proposed nine divisiol1s but Lehmann arrives
at five the number corresponding to Philostratus recollection of
the bull four I think or possibly five terraces Now the final
architectural touches are ready At the end of each of the two
books Lehmann argues stand stilllifes these mark then the exits
of the text the porticoes of the building The room size remains
remarkably unchanging but this would not be surprising if the
building is thought of as a s10a composed of separate terraces In
terrace architecture the principal variable is not room size but the
placement and size of windows which Lehmann further suggests
are adapted to the seasons This makes for four seasonal dining r~ ~)thalls an aesthJum given over to pictures of rivers an alllumllale ~dominated by stories of Dionysus a trielillium Female set aside
for Aphrodite alld a hibernale with scenes of the primitive ~ Saturnine world Finally the whole ensemble resplendent with igt
~ all the marbles favoured by luxury is turned to the West the sun ~scasts its changing selsonal liht on the different clllmiJers of the I
house before setting in the Tvrrhenian sea ~1
bullIjj
~k
I I
It would be possible to object to Lehmanns reconstructibn on
number of counts His case rests on an unargued premise that
Philost~atus ney~ ltLmits_ny pictures from the collection he is
supposed to describe philostratus is denied any powers of
selection over the works he discllsses Moreover there is a further
unaruecl assumption that the text of the I1I1a(inelt~ sll~~i~~lS a
perfect avatar of its fIrst edition Textual corruption is not
something that cOI~I~1 ~~iIy show up in Lehmanns malysis I
PHILOSTRATllS AND TilE IMA(INAIIY MUSmiddot
Whatever changes of sequence that might have beflllen the text in
its transmission from the third century would inevitably take the
f()rm of architectural syntltlX as doors windows cornices dadoes
porticoes terraces It could also be said that at many places the
criterion defining what constitutes the semantic centre of a group
seems strained ll It is hard to conceive of Cassandra with
Agamemnon (210) or the victory of Rhodogune and the Persians
(2S) as types of love
Blit to quarrel with Lehmanns argument in this fashion would
be to miss what is most enduringly interesting about t1is commentary The central claim of his essay is that both the
coherence of thematic groupins in the Imagines and the seeming
disturbances of sequence that also occur can both be explained by
proj(cting the text as architectonic form Lehmanns primary
readi IIg strategies involve heavy use of the tropes of metaphor and
metonymy It is metonymic liaison that provides some of
Lehmanns most convincing se(luences tor instance the reconfigushy
ration of the Herakles pictures in the torm of a continuous band or
Jabula The patterns deriving from metaphor are able to embrace
even more extensive segments of the text A term such as love
being elastic (to say the least) is able to ullite scenes even as
disparate as a singing procession of maidens the deaths of
Cassandra and Agamemnon and the suicide of Pantheia So
Lehmanns groupings resemble those of Goethe or perhaps of any
editor or reader seeking to give order to a gnomic and fragmentary
text What is interesting is the way that with Lehmann till tropes
of mctonymy and metaphor do not remain editorial or textual
operations but are figured in terms that are visual and volumetric
Metonymy projects as the gaze of a beholder who standing at
the centre of the room traces a continuous narrative frieze across
the tiers or as the pathway of the spectators body moving from
room to room up and down staircases and across terraces and
finally out of the building at its exits Xenia I and Xenia 2 (r 36 and 226) Metaphor projects as the repetition of enclosing frames
wherehy the unity suggested by shared semantic features ( love
primitive world) is concretised as the singleness and unshybrokenness of mlJr~1 n~( Inmiddot klt~
ii () 1 [ A N B 1 Y SON
singular risks of uncurtailability Once a common feature such as
love is unleashed it is hard to see what story may not one way
or another be subsumed into the resulting series Similarly once
the idea of chronological series cOllies into play it becomes in
principle possible to order all sixty-odd descriptions into overshy
lapping temporal groups i3ut the potential of both metaphor and
metonymy for unlimited expansion across the whole corpus of the
imagines is held in check by the spatial boundaries of dado and
cornice window and door terrace and swircase Architecture
emerges as the containment and pacification of textual energies
which without that binding inAuence from matter fixed in space
would soon run across the text from end to end
What governs both metaphor and metonymy is another figure
visualisation The text as a whole is envisioned as a luxurious
Neapolitan building This response to the imagines is Lehmanns
distinctive ecphrastic operation H is work wi th rhilostratus text
results in a crossing from text to image Lehmann reacts to each
round of difiiculty within the imagines by creating a new building
feature First the room whose walls soon present dadoes cornices
and doorways they are lit by windows of varying size and
position the rooms are tiered as the terraces of a stoa finally like
any good architect Lehmann considers his building in relation to
the seasons and the orientation of the site He is faced with a text
filled with hiatuses and inconsistencies Under pressure from the
texts internal stress lines he produces step by step an architecture
of containment Vhat emerges within the text as difficulty and
disruption is projected in the visual domain as plenitude and unity
The texts moments of incoherence and disruption produce an
architecture of massive and stable blocks i
It is in this doubling of the broken text as an IInbrokeljimage
rather than in his deductive reasoning that Lehmann enacts a
reading of the imagines which I want to suggest is entirely
sensitive to the contours and topology of rhilostratlls writing At
the same time this sensitivity is consigned by Lehmann to the
unconscious of this text To help locate that other submerged
reading of the imagilles one can begin by noticing that successflll
though Lehmann finds his own analysis to be by his own
lt -Aj-
PlIlLOSTIATlS ANIl TilE IMA([NAHY ~[IS I
admission there remains a grollp of pictures that fall qllitl olltside
the boundary of his analysis Beviewing his work from its end
Lehmann reckons that he has been able to account for all thirty-six
sections of book I and the first twenty-six of book 2 Yet eight
miscellaneous cases remain 12 Accordingly Lehmann expels the
entire group from his definition of the imagines He concilldes
that lacking in the relations he has been proposing the peccant
images are in fact later additions grafted on either before the real
publication or else for a second edition 13 nearing ill mind what
Denmiddotida calls the logic of the sllpplement by pressing on what
Lehmann rejects one may come to see the principles of lxclusiotJ
by which his interpretation is structured That supplement to the
imagines so far from standing beyond its pale may delineate that
which Lehmanns reading must constantly repress in order to
sustain itself and as part of this what may be the features of the
imagines which are the hardest for commentary in general to
reach
One would wish to examine in detail all eight supplementary
items (227-234) Here just the first two in the group will be
considered and especially 228 Looms The selection is in some
sense justified by Lehmann own gesture ofexcusion His system
has been working well it has brollght order to all the previous
pictures in both books however bizarre or dislocated they may
have initially appeared Yet after Xenia 2 (at 226) the system
breaks down entirely In spatial terms Lehmanns (re)construction
of the stoa is now complete With the placing of the second still
life Philostratus writes The End The reader passes out of the
portico - out of Lehmanns text-as-architecture --- into th( outer
disorderly world Interestingly the bce which the world presents
is exactly that of a broken building filled with debris
Now Ih~ doorway belonglt to a house by no means prosperolls you will say it has been abandoned by its master and the court wilhin seems deserted nor do the columns still support its roof for they have set tied and collapsed No it is inhabited by spiders only ltll Ihis crelIure loves to weave its web in quiet ( Looms 21-6)
Lehmanns inspired solution to his texts difiiculties - its dOlIbling
as a perfect building ensemble - confronts at its exit the spectacle
(e 204
IOIMAN BRYSON
of a ruination at once textual and architectural What the ti~ure of
the building had particularly enabled was the transfer of all
problems of the text back into the space supposed to stand behind
it the terraced spaces of the villa The moment when Lehmann
declares the true text of Imagines to have ended is that of an
edifice collapsing
Lehmanns entire reading turns on a suppressioll of the texts
being as written representation his gradual construction of the
stoa with all of its loms mapped and its piuures securely placed
in tiers within chambers depends on a reading of the Imagines in
terms of transparency before a pre-existing referent Concerning
philostratus work within language and of the pictures work with
their represented scenes Lehmanns account says nothing In
pointing this out the aim is not in fact to criticise or fault
Lehmanns interpretation One of the principal desires of the
descriptions in the Imagines is exactly to cease being words on the
page to come alive in the fltgtrIn of an imaJe to pass from the
opacity of words to the luminous scenes behind the words
Frecluently met with in the Imaiines is a textual moment at
the description at last feels its own language to dissolve into the
of the scene it opens upon This is the philostratian Look
Now the painter has been successful in these respects also that he has wrought the spider itself ill so painstaking a fashioll has matched its spots with fidelity to nature and has painted its repulsive fuzzy surface and its savage nature - all this is the mark of a good craftsman and one skilled in depicting the truth For look here is a cord I)rming a squaPe ( Looms 3 I
The painters attention to truth has realised the spider in all its
repulsive detail Having traced that fidelity to nature wittla pen
no less observant than the painters Philostratus earns the riglhfor
his OWl] words also to be recognised as fully backed by truth After
his exclaimed For look the description at last rcaches the
moment of lift-off
Three related labours come together in a single disclosure and
presence the work of rhe spicier building its web strand
strand the work of the painter tracing each of the threads stroke ( stroke the work of the ecphrasist tracing the two previous sets
_--- _14_-
PHILOSTRATliS AND THE IMAGINARY MISF11
line by line 14 At look the words the paint and the spiders web
merge in a moment of visionary presence Out of the diverse tissue
woven by the spider the painter and the writer comes a living
image the weavers travel across [their webs J drawing tight such
of the threads as have become loose In this visionary space there
is no separating the individual strands of image text or web The
ecphrasis itself draws tight any threads that come away pulling
them back into the unitary ima~e that is at the same time a web a
pitture and a text With part of itself the ecphrasis seeks to shed
the opacities it possesses by virtue of being made of words
only an arbitrary connection to things It seeks to fuse the words
into something beyond wurds an image a picture and then to
fuse that picture with what is real in a web tltat is no longer lexical
but pictorial and no longer pictorial but alive
Lehmanns desire for a text of the Imafiines that will dissolve
first into the pictures of a collection and then into the architectural
ensemble that hOllses them is ullcannily true to this aspect of philostratus text Yet it embodies only part of that texts energies
Though in the passage just quoted the separate re~isters of
weaving of picturing and of describing all come together ill
radiant fusion at Philostraws For look elsewhere the Looms
description presents these registers as separable separate and out
of phase
In fact Looms opens with a picture of - representation The
first and seemingly gratui tous pictu re in the description shows
Penelopes loom complete with its shuttle warp threads and lint
What opens the ecphrasis then is an image describing the
fabrication of images the representational means by which
Penelope creates iJer tapestry The image is made (and with
Penelope unmade) within the apparatus of representation The
ecphrasis begins by emphasising representation not as something
which vanishes before its referent but which stays stubbornly
visible and in place as material technique
Similarly Looms foregrounds Its own apparatus of repshy
resentation language Penelope is presented not only as tlte site of
work with images but of work with words She is the creation of Homer and it is with Hnmpr linEC th nhlwltr 111 L_
NIlHMAN EllYSON
1( X
own picture of herbull Penelope
Homer melts the snow with them This is a
reference to Ocyssey 192deg4 bull Her tears flowed and her face melted
as the snow melts on the lofty mountains and as it melts the
streams of the rivers flow full so her fair cheeks melted as they
In the same way philostratus makes a point of telling his
reader that the fine threads on which the spiders drop from the roof
and then climb up again are taken froll] llesiod 15 At these points
in the text the words exactly t~lil to dissolve either into pictures
(Penelope) or into things (spiders) They remain the embedded
lines of Homer and of Hesiod woven into a text which refuses to
assimilate them as its own or to dissolve them before a referent in
pictures or in the world
Just as the text insists on its own opacities its ineradicable
wordiness so it points to ways in which nature itself will not be
absorbed into the supposedly higher realm of human represenshy
tation and culture The place of the spiders is presented as the
annihilation of human work ~here roofs and columns
the spiders thrive Human observers may compare the
Penelupe and apply to their webs the terms of or
geometric measurement (lelraliaslOs) but the webs take over
where human creation comes to its end Interestingly the spiders
in Looms are imagined not only as they appear in the picture
description also includes a scene which exceeds that picture
bull the flat [nests] are good to summer in and the hollow sorl is in winter This is a aside a
to other times and the picture but
within it The that moment
race across their web it does not shd~ them in
other seasons when in summer spiders choose the ~~t webs
and in the winter the hollow ones Looms points to another life
of spiders which the scene in other words implies but does not
state to a world of ruins silences and spider-life that goes on
whether or not there are people around to see it Nature takes over
from culture culture in fact collapses its columns broken but
spiders silently persist away from the human labours of building
weaving painting and describing
------
PHILOSTRATliS AND TilE IMA(JNAHI ~ll1SI1
III
Against Lehmanns maps of the architectural referent one might
posit another topology of things pictures and words not as these
come together in the ensemble of a resurrected museum but as they
fail to connect in a fracture or ruin of representation The
magines work with three dil1erellt substances words things
and images With part Phiostratus- act ()t descriptio-n
middotwrks t~ blur these three in visionary merger (fIg )2)
(~ ~~ ~
(-) lp Fi~ J2
In the heat of this words turn into images or images into real things (4)middot But such excitement and
animation is only one of the Imagines many possibilities There
are others less ecstatic Words come unstuck from things they
hark back not to things in the world but to other words by
Homer or Hesiod (3) Or images pull away from the task of
representation they are shown as products of material technique
threads weft lint looms (J) Or the world pulls away from its
representation in art and language (2) the courtyard appears as
deserted abandoned by its master a place where the visual order
imposed by human cultivation collapses alld the primary
of human space - columlls roof shelter way to the openness of nature
I t is appropriate that Looms opens with
standing both for the capacity of art to provide marvellous
of the world and for the unravelling of art back into mere
and lint The ecphrasis is in tJct in continuous aeros all of the interstices between the world til word and Image
1 to 7 see also fig A t times ( For ) it seems I hal
~ ~)
(~
o H ~l A N B R Y SON
27C
art concealillt art mlkes the dead mailer of leLters and
brushslrokes corne alive BUl this is only one phase ill the
ecphrastic process Equally important are the momellts when the
ecphrasis fails when words revert to being words tapestries
revert to thread and architecture to rubble
One reason that Lehmanns reading banishes Looms from the
Imagines may perhaps be the descriptions eminent f~lilure instead
of giving way to a luminous and ostensible referent
enthusiasm that enables philostratus to say Look The spiders
and Lehmann to say Look The sma - Looms darkens the
picture making it a place of shadows dust and broken
architecture Spatially it figures itself as a ruined courtyard
Textually it traverses not only the place of ecphrastic excitement
where words turn into pictures and pictures turn into things but
all the negative ecphrastic spaces whcre words remain words or
form hybrids with pictures and pictures revert to thei I constituent
elements threads WII hering lint on a loom That philostratus
intends this cffect of netativity and intends it as a figure for his
own ecphrastic enterprise is confirmed by the pairing which
Looms (228) forms with its preceding picture bullThe birth of
Athena (227)
The link of course is Arachne 16 As Ovid tells the tale
Arachne is a human weaver who challenges the skill of the divine
weaver Minerva and is punished ltH Iter hubris when Minerva
turns her into a spider At the contest both welvers set lip their
looms
The web is bound upon the beam the reed separates tlw threads of the warp the woof is threaded through them by the sharp shuttles which their busy fingers ply and when shol through the threads ofdle warp the notched teeth of tilt hammering stay beats it into place l
I~
Minerva pictures the twelve heavenly gods 011 majestic thrones At
the four corners of her tapestry are set miniature scenes of
presumptuous mortals IS Arachne counters this imagery of the
gods punishing humans ()r hubris with scenes of the gods and
especially Jupiter19 violating human females Appalled by
Arachnes work Minerva hits her three times with a shuttle then
robs her of human form
PHI LOS T RAT J SAN D THE I MAG I N A It Y 1lH I
Fig 33
Forthwith her hair touched by the poison fell off and with it both nose and ears and the head shrank up her whole body also was small the slender lingers cling 10 her side as the rest was belly 20
For many interpreters of the Arachne fable the official moral
- a cautionary tale against hubris contains a second level a
of reflection upon the capacities and limitations of an For
Velazquez the competition concerns not only weavers but
painters At the rear of the inner stage in The Fable o( Arachne is
shown Titians painting The Rape of Europa and
presents his own craft in parallel to the art of weaving placed
somewhere perhaps between Arachne and Minerva between the
genre painting of the foreground and Titians history painting in
the middle distance (fig 33) III the reading of Leonard Barkan
this capacity of the Arachne topos to act as arts self-reflexive
shy
2~
OltMAN BRYSON
~~ 2
commentary on art is already present in Ovids text I t requires
no great leap of the imagination to see in Arachnes tapestry all the
elements of Ovids own poetry in the Metamorphoses Just as she
tells the stories of the loves of the gods and the metamorphoses of
their victims so does he 21 Like Velazquez Ovid positions his
own work somewhere between the disorderly profusion
metamorphoses that issue from Arachnes loom and
theologically correct carefully framed tapestries that come
the loom of Minerva
That philostratus intends Looms to unfold in the space of this
a number of details The Birth of
the first subject of Minervas tapestry immediately
precedes the text of Looms in philostratus gallery In Ovid the
contest of Arachne and Minerva is visualised as a spectrum of
iridescent colours
As when after a storm of rain the suns rays strike through and a rainbow with its huge curve stains the wide sky though a thousand different colours shine in it the eye cannot detect the change from each one to the next so appear the adjacent colours22
This is precisely the metaphor philostratus uses to describe the
armour of Athene as the goddess emerges fullv armed from
head of Zeus
As for the material of her panoply no-one could guess iI Ii)r as many as are the colours of the rainbow which changes its light now to one hue gt1d now to another so many are the colours of her armour 2
1
Taking Philostratus two descriptions in sequence one can say
that Looms applies to the competition between Minerva and
Arachne the figure of hathos It is a comic transformation orOvids
contest down-scaled with Penelope in the place of MinerW1
spiders in the place of Arachne
philostratus begins where Ovid left off with Arachnes
metamorphosis the rest was belly is expanded into the spiders
repulsive fuzzy surface and its savage nature and the spiders
grisly meaL Where Ovid uses the Arachne fable as a means to
comment on his own project in the MUal11ornwses niacin his
book somewhere between divine
-~
P II I L () S Tii A T USA N Il TilE J M A ( I N A H Y ~Il S Hmiddot
comically deflated retelling of the fable philostratus places his own
project the Imagines somewhere between the higher artists
(Homer Hesiod Ovid etc) and the beasts Ovid and
use the images of their own
the inverts the rhetoric in a comic
desublimation or parody
Let us touch again on the philostratian exclamation Lookmiddot
k fI
The moment when a picture seems to come alive is encountered
again and again in the 1m agiles In Xenia I philostratlls remark~
that the painted grapes are good to eat and full of winey juice
(r3 I) In Xenia 2 he invites the reader to reach out and take a loaf
from the painted basket (226) In Narcissus he says he cannot
real (123) At the core of the Imagines is the promise tl1at at
ments words
intense experience that
oth pictures and words It is not simply that words arc
tell whether a real bee has been deceived bv the painted Hower or
whetlier we are to be deceived into thinking that a ~
supplemented by pictures and pictures by words To read the
Imagines that way is to model it on the example of the illustrated ~ shybook The logic of the text is in fact closer once again to that of
Derridas supplement What words lack (because they are
words characters on the page marks without light) images can hJluinaJvt with a presence which is based on that lack which grows fro~l it
and turns it into light What images lack (because they are
in time mere pigments on a surf~lce threads on a loom) words Gill
sugply with narration and movement This strange hallueinatoy
power of ecphrasis calls on the capaei~ies of words and I~ to
describe the world but goes beyond their several powers into a
~ _ moment when Look becomes the only appropriate -- ~ ~L
response The exclamation directs the reader not towards the text J t or its Image but past them both into another space where presence )f
~vo to 11 th 0 ooce (gl hdoS tooeh t) fiJtJ - Yet compared with Ovicl (or Vehizquez) philostratlls text is (
clearly self-mocking and self-defeating Its lines move Ollt into all ~ the negative ecpilrastic spaces where the enanIeia of Iookmiddot j
NORMAN BHYlgtON
exactly unfortilcoming Instead of Aracillle the spider instead of the loves of the gods in tapestry an insect meal Oil a web
Accompanying the project of inciting the reader to envision is
Philostratus awareness that with every ecphrasis at some point
the lines and strokes always separate and unravel The text presents
itself as hollowed out by its own rhetorical self-awareness and as
haunted by an inescapably secondary or belated relation to
pictures In the Proem the author dramatises himself as a painter
mangul
Now the story of the men who have mastery in the sciellce of painting and the states and kings that have been passiolltltely devoted to it has been told by others writers Ilotably Aristodemus of Carla whom I
visited for four years In orcler to study paintinf 1n the present discussions however we propose to describe examples of painting in the form of addresses which have been composed for the young 24
Four years of study with Aristodemus have led not to a career in
painting but only in criticism In the scenography of the text
Philostratus is always old and lesser than the young The son of
his host must summon him before he speaks SpJtially he is at the
perimeter beyond the city walls a Greek wandering in Italy
Secondary in relation to painting his pictures are also belated in
time not the work of men who have won mastery in the science
of painting discussed by Pliny but of painters who are never in
fact given names
G- lc o this negative dinlension of the Ima(inegt Lehmann appears
1vt tgt emarkably insensitive Jn his hands the Imagilles are tt come
alive he will infuse them with his own visionary energy~~ resurrecting the fragments of the text into a luminous stoa whose
every corner he can visualise His work with the blta(illes is in a
sense part of the Pompeian tradition which from Winckelmann
to l3ulwer-Lytton to Ilollywood aims to coiJre ivil~ flesh from
the ashes In terms of its own rhetoric Lehmanns is a heroic reading The example of the Irrcltlt Goerhe2f tTllirlp hi274
bull vJ ~_ _
PHILOSTRATLJS AND THE IMAGINARY MI~I
enterprise26
Filling out what remained only tentative in Goethes
essay he perceives an order in the Imagines which not even their
author realised The Imagines have to be wrested from philoshy
stratlls hands Philostratus misreads the mountains of Thes~ly as
mountains of Rhodes Philostratus takes no advantage of these connections and does not mention them27 Although
Philostratus was perfectly able to see immediately many of the
implications of single pictures he did not discuss the cyclic idea
He was not interested in it2R As Lehmanns analysis gains
momentum Philostratus tends to get referred to as thelcctUle~ Like many orators and letter writers and teachers before and after
him he decided to pllblish these lectures as a model of his
tecllllillue and style in handling such a task 29 He paraphrased
rather than described the paintings and pointed out the emotional
values and psychological associations ofeach picture His emphasis
in this collrse ill the appreciation (Ifart was one-sided as flax heen tlwl
elery professor (~f tlzis kind after Ilim (emphases added) ~o
Lehmann himself is not of course a lecturer or professor of this kind
If Philostratus mocks his own secondariness Lehmann expels
secondariness from his text in tbe person of the outmoded
professor who only appreciates and who cannot see what
Lehmann sees the hyper-realistic image of a gallery with all its
rooms envisioned simultaneously and in detail But these abject
personifications the lectlirer and the professor arc not the
bearers of anxiety in his reading or its only scapegoats The
Imapnes need to be reconstructed Lehmann maintains because
without them the third century is the dark century in the history
of ancient painting the era ofa great crisis ofancient art in which
the foundations for the development of later western art were
bid 11 Here are Lehmanns words for the threat his reconstruction is to dispel
In a period lor which a lower-middle-class tomb in Rome like that of the Amelii is used as a cornerstone [or the history of palntin) and Ir which the discovery of the frescoes of a Jewish synagogue in Mesopotamia tends to revolutionize the entire picture of the historv of lnrn
NOH~lAN BRYSON
Is it too much to find in these words a threat to a cherished image
of antiquity an image that must be protected
Art history emerges here in one of its dubious heroising guises
as the custodian of culture working against a background of crisis
and collapse Quite naturally the custodians must live in a great
house resplendent with all the marbles favoured by luxury
but particularly splendid by reason of the panel-paintings set in
the walls The force required to protect the custodians is that of
museum circa 1941 It is a modernist exhibition space
stripped down diagrammatic programmatic yet still (at the end
of the reconstruction) conceived as a house of the great with
dining-chambers for the four seasons Better than most museums
with their difficult diplomatic balance between the needs of
scholars and of patrons it is wholly designed by the art historian
The scholarship that builds this space is to judge by the footnotes
an exclusively German affair And the account endorses the
protocols of a certain strand in the German art history of its time
We shall always regret where fi)nllal problems are concerned the
limitations of a description which aimed not to descrile but to
interpret what the audience saw (emphases added) Painting is to
be approached formally not hermeneutically and interpretation
now a negative term is to be confined to an outpost of
iconography the identification of subjects and programme cycles
Lehmanns own hermeneutic operation presents itself as
opposite of interpretive work It proceeds by excluding lt111 those
images which appear to Lehmann to be editorial additions grafted
01 to the main text supposedly anomalous products of writing and
publication mere word-pictures un backed by actual referents It
prunes away the rhetorical elaborations of the lecn1rer and
bypasses the pictures themselves in order to reach th~ solid
masonry behind them as though representation itself verbal or
pictorial were a barrier to be torn dowH This process is presented
as a series of purifications The text contaminated for publication
is returned to its pristine state The visual field is purged of its
verbal dimension in a double movement from text In architecture
and from arl criticism to archaeology Antiquitys dark age is
banished Its whuralmainstrcam is protected against distortion by
-- - --~-
PHI I 0 S T RAT l SAN Il THE r M A (] N 1 H Y I S I I
inferior and marginlt11 groups Art history triumphs over art
appreciation The end product of these procedurts is the vision of
a purified architectural form whose authority is confirmed by a
tradition of national scholarship and national culture exiled to
America and written up in English yet still in direct contact with
the author of Phiostrats gemalde and with the Graeco-Homan past
Through rhetorical operations such as these Lehmanns
ecplrrasis becomes in a sense a tecitni(lue of the subject It is surely
much more than an archaeological reconstruction Like Auerbad~s Mimesis written in Istanbtll during World War II it mobilises the
energies of cultural resistance to its own dark century It invsts
those energies in an incandescent visualisation that configures the
beleaguered subject as a unified building I t would I think be
wrong to find fault with Lehmanns reading at the level on which
it appears to operate of slellth-like deduction and rationality
Expelled by the texts rational procedures rhetoric returns as
texts unconscious At this buried or subterranean level the
reading actually moves much closer into the Imagines than it is
able to admit Philostratus himself presents the art of painting not
as a copy of the world but ltIS in ternalisation of the world In 19 warns his audience not to be impressed by a works mimetic
realism ill that case he says we should praise an insignificant
feature of the painting and one that has solely to do with imitation
(mimesis) but we shollid nOI be praising its intelligence or
sense of decorum it shows though these I believe are the most
important elements of art l~ lust as painting shows the world as
it has already passed into the subjectivity of the painter so the
beholder should not dwell 011 the external matter of mimesis but
internalise the image drawing it inside the subject On their own
the audience can see pictures and judge mimesis perfectly well
the audience do not yet know are the techniques for
absorbing the pictures into the mind It is precisely
in this assimilation of pictures to subjectivity that the audience has come to hear Philostratus speak
It is in this aspect of internalisation that the Imafiines revcJ rhetoric itself as a techllolov Of elicnlin t1egt If T-_ r
1IIMN BRYSON
of the Ad Herenniuflt names memoria as the fourth part of
rhetoric 34 In order to memorise a lengthy speech the orator
should visualise the successive topics of his discourse as images
arranged in consecutive places within architectural space In the
words of Frances Yates who is that mlfi moving slowly in
lonely building stopping at intervals with an intent face He is a
rhetoric student forming a set of memory loci35 Architectures
role in rhetoric is as the supplier of milieux within which intense
visualisations are to occurUl As Cicero says the images should be
active sharply defined and unusual having the power of speedily
encountering and penetrating the psyche (quae oCCflrrere celerishy
terque percutere animum possim)37 The speech unfolds as
rhetorician walks in his mind past walls each memory-place hung
with a vivid image through rooms doorways stairways
porticoes terraces
The first notion is placed as it were ill the ()recourt the second let us say in the atrium lhe remainder are placed in order round the impluvium and committed not only to bedrooms and parlours but even to statues and the like3R
The stability and dependability of this internal architecture is vital
for the control of the self over its material To forget the existence
of a particular room is to leave out a whole stage of the argument
to lTIisremember the sequence of images is to garble the
presentation of the case
places are chosen and marked om with the utmost possible vlriety as a spacious house divided into a number of rooms Every thinK of note therein is diligently imprinted on the mind in order that thongl n~ay be able to fun through all the parts without let or hindrance The filst task is to secure that there shall be no difficulty in funning through these for that memory must be most firmly fixed which helps another memory all
Here architecture not only stands for the control of the self it is
the actual material means by which the self exercises its control
over its words and its world
If Lehmanns unitary and massively stable architecture stands ~1 _1 _~ bullbull l J ~
~ PHILOSTRATUS AND THE IMA((NARY MlISEU~1
c~) (~~) ( 0 ~ ~
-~ ----~
hI 34
1 reading rejoins Philostratus rhetoric as an operation whose means
is imaginary buildings and whose goal is mastery over self and
over representation Ecphrasis here is a technique for consolidating
the subject in terms of personal and professional control While on
the surface of his text Lehmann disavows hermeneutic art history
and expels the lecturer at other levels of his text Lehmann is
Philostratus shadow-partner or secret sharer Lehmanns entry
into the culture of late antiquity is through a shape-shifting in
which he performs the architectural ars memorativa of a thirdshy
century orator
Yet he does so in terms very different from those supplied in the
Imagines The kind of subject proposed and assllmed by 9
Philostratus text is much less driven by the urge towards unitary
self-possession The Imagines subject exists in a universe where
things images and words may frequently converge but do not
consistently fuse together ill the ardour of imaginary vision The
descriptions show the subject in transit across the interstices where
world pictures and language overlap Especially interesting 10
Philostratus are the hybrid or chiasmic zones where dillerent
registers cross over (fig 34)
Let us return for the last time to Looms Penelopes loom
exists at the place where images and the things of the world cross
over The loom is a thing that makes images yet we do not see the
images it makes only the things - warp threads shuttle it
works with Again when the weavers travel across the web or eat
their squirming prey they are seen as living moving creatures
hill at thl sme time the reader knows they are onlv a static nictllrf -j
--
OIlMAN BRYSON
i(
Elsewhere the text moves to the place where the things of the
world cross over into words The author tells us that the spiders
cables are almost too tine to discern What brings them into view
are in fact Hesiods lines about spiders destending and astending
their threads The word makes the thing exist Or a single word in
Greek -- arachnc is able to generate two utterly different beings
spiders and the weaver who challenged Minerva The characters of
Looms are so to speak engendered by an ecphrastic pun Words
and things change pilCes At other times the text crosses the place
where words and image blend Homers text turns into a picture
then back again into Homers words The line between what is
verbal and visual cannot be drawn4o
The subject of the Imagines is in constant motion and dispersal
across this complex terrain qf wprld jmilg ltlAd texr When the
outward pictures enter the subject and are assimilated to the seWs
interior they scatter across an intricately divided and Auid space
The images of Philostratus exist as r~fractiollS in a multishy
dimensional space in which a variety of voices none of them
original blend and clash 41 The subject who performs this
internalisation is in perpetual motion The moments when at the
philostratian Look the various registers join in visionary
fusion do not last long Almost at once the visions separate out
into their component strands unravelling as fast as they came
together And they lead on to the next image - more than sixty
times The unravelling of one image clears the space for the
coming together of the next one Or better the unravelling of
each image calls into being summons the next It is in that
perpetual Penelope-like emergence and falling away of images
that the subject is spun by the text Not as a central storehp~se or
gallery more a~ a motion or desire
Lehmanns subject is in a sense the opposite of thiJ In
Lehmanns case internalising philostralUs text means seeking a
means to arrest the motions of the text and to tapture and
immobilise its energies in a final culminating form Into the
stability of the huilding that is to end the text as motion and desire
are poured all the authors ligures for the command of the subject
massive masonry the prestige of the museum purified form
_ --- ----
PHILOSTRATUS AND THE IMAGINAIY M(SEI
Goethe national culture ethnic centrality profcssionlIisll1 posishy
tive knowledge Which should make Lehmann Philostratus most
inappropriate reader were it not for the brilliance and the yearning of his own visualisation
Among other things Lehmanns reading exemplifies some of
the paradoxes inherent in the tradition of positivist scholarship to
which it belongs It is this aspect that raises his reconstruction
above the category of historiGl1 oddity to adumbrate some of the
vicissitudes of positive knowledfe in more general terms First
Lehmanns relation to the literary to textuality and intenextualitx
is remarkably strained and contradictory The architectural ord~r he proposes for the Imagines is itselfbibliograplllc Lehmann needs
texts 10 enable his reconstruction to take place in order to build
his version of Philostratus villa he must resort to the library what
he says for instance concerning the typology of rooms their
orientation and relation to the seasons is directly dependent on
Vitruvius Yet at the same time his analysis mllst bypass textuality
in order to dissolve the texts into architectural form Necessary at
certain moments of the analysis at others textuality becomes an
obstacle to be scornfully removed Inherently untrustworthy
beside the actuality (the positivism) of the archaeological find texts are aligned in his interpretation with ideas of parasitism and
mediocrity figured here by the lecturer or professor The
reading works both to banish textual corruption completely
(which cannot easily show up ill the analysi~ since hiatuses in the
text arc translated at once into architectural syntax) and to build
the necessity for textual wrruption into his case (as when
Lehmann axes the last eight descriptions as later additions )
Textuality features in this mode of analysis primarily under tlte
sign of repression Where it is able to grow transparent before the
three-dimensional architectural and archaeological order it can be
admitted Where textuality fails to become translucent hcfilfe
reference it must be expelled even if the effort to do so becomes
massive involving the whole battery of figures for the command of th~ sui)ject
Secondly this ef1ort to repress textuality runs counter to many
of the most conspicuous features of Philostratllt PIh So
tgtnHMAN BRYSON
2X2
writing especially its interest in exploring the negative ecphrastic
spaces in which the reader so far from experiencing a dissolution
of writing before the luminous referellt (tlte philostratian
Look ) apprehends the text as a sophisticated web of allusions
parodies puns and tonal plays Lehmanns quest for the stable
masonry of the referent seems altogether blind to the many ways
in which philostratus writing plays to the wplzia of the reader as
one who can see bizarre connections who can understand hidden
narrativcs within imagery (A rachne Mincrva) wilD can
exercise the visual eqllivalent of the elaborate verbal dexterity that
characterises Hellenistic poetry When philostratus says that the
web the spiders make is exceedingly fine (k)perleIIOS) he is
doing more dlan asking liS to visualise something hard to see he
is using a key term from Hellenistic poetics eplOs which means
witty fint clever small-scale sophisticated and doing
so as an invitation or a warning to the reader that his own writing
too is all of these things It is a warning that Lehmann perhaps
wisely does not heed for once ecphrasis is thought of as a form
writing that involves much mort than a simple visualisation of
a text it leaves behind the one certainty that ecphrasis seemed to
hold out to the archaeologist - its promise of presence of
resurrection and becomes something else a mode of writing
whose complexity we are perhaps only beginning to discern and
in relation to which tlie idea of visualisation begins to appear as a
simplification at best
Finally the scrupulous rationality of Lehmanns interpretive
method with its emphasis on what can be deduced and
demonstrated as positive knowledge and as archilectural form
renders it strangely unaware of its own aspect of tellIality of the
ways in which it is itself a working wilh words in whityen the words
carry more associations motivations and effect than the writer is
able to hear or control Working within a highly instrumental and
reduced picture-theory of language Lehmanns analysis radically
underestimates the capacity of words to exceed their allotted
functions of argumentation demonstration and proof Opening
on to other investments and other scenes tban that simply of
archaeology and reconstruction Lehmanns text speaks its own
PllILOSTRATS AND THE IMAGINAHY MliS
uncollscious and it is in that energetic and overdetermined
underside of his text that his deepest engagement with Philostratus
may be found What he writes is perhaps the dream-work of
positivism not the forensics of archaeology but its own buried poetics 42
~
l ltJTES TO PAGES 244--61
O On Pausanils see Frazer (1898) Heer (1979) Jacob (1980)
Habich 1 (1985) and Elsner (1992)
I These include discussions of the wild satyrs of the islands 1235-)
the Ethiopians I334- the Ionian Greeks 722-51) the
marvellous animals collected in Rome 9211-2 the islands of
Sardinia and Corsica 10171-13
32 See Elsner (1992) 17--20
33 See Frazer (1898) xiv compare other second-century CE descripshy
tions of ruins such as Dio Chrysostom on Thebes Oratio 7
Plutarch De ~rcctu oracuorum 8 Lucian Diaog 11I0rt 272
34 This chapter began as a paper on Herodotus pyramids delivered to
Paul Cartledges Ancient History Seminar in Cambridge in 1989 I
wish to thank him John Henderson Jamie Masters and the Editors
of this volume for their comments on earlier drafts My deepest debt
is to Joan Pau Rubies y Mirabet with whom I have fi)r several years
discussed the problems of travel travel-writing and identity This
chapter is dedicated to him
CHApTEH EIGHT PHlLOSTRATliS AND Tin IMA(INARY
MUSEUM
1 English translations are taken from the Loeb edition edited by
T E Page E Capps and W H D Rouse (London and New
York193 1)
2 For the history of the debate see the editions of Jacobs and Welcker
(1825) Kayser (1844) Benndorf and Schenkel (1893) and
Steinmann (1914)
3 Lehmann (1941)
4 The essay is conveniently to be f()Und in vo XXVI of Cottas
standard edition (1868) pp 276fT
Lehmann (1941) 21-4
6 Obviously he describes pictures that were topoglllttphically united
but without regard to the ideological and (JrluaJ rda~m which had
dictated their combination Lehmann (1941) 20
7 Indeed the only explanation of the relationships and the lack of
order is that philostratus saw real pictures which were to a certain
extent arranged on the upper and lower parts of walls Lehmann
(1941) 20
8 Lehmann (1941) 31-3
9 Lehmann (1941) 31-3
NOTES TO P(I-S 2()2
10 [n fact the lmalfines do not supply indications concerning the
dimensions of any particular work
II [t should also be noted that Lehmanns groupings occasionally
require him to rewrite the given titles of pictures
11 These last eight pictures of the second book show a remarkable
absence of any stich relation and connection as we have found
everywhere else Lehmann (1941) 37
13 Lehmann (1941) 39-40
14 The image of weaving is frequently used of writing see for
example Catullus ()45ofr in which the marriage of Peleus and
Thetis is covered with a estis variata figuris pestit decorata
jiguris where filfura is also a literary term for Catullus (wn
rhetoric Perhaps the crucial sites of configuring language image
and weaving are words such as ypaqgteurolv grapIein which means
writedraw design (in thread)
I ~ Worfrs an1 Days 777
16 The presence of Arachne in Looms has been argued since the
Renaissance See for example the gloss on Les Etoiles in Blaise
de Vigeneres edition of 1610 514 Lehmann (1941) 39 also
suggests that the two pictures (227 and 218) both refer to the
Arachne story
17 Ovid Met 65~-8
18 Minerva depicts Rhodope and Ilaemus who dared to cal
themselves gods now turned to mountains the Pygmaean queen
who challenged Juno now turned into a crane Antigone turned
by the angered Juno into a stork Cinyras whose daughters are turned to stone
19 Arachnes tapestry shows Europa abducted by the bull Asterie
carried off by the eagle Leda pursued by the swan Jllpiter
disguised as Amphitryon Danae
20 Met 6140--4
21 Barkan (1986) 4
22 Met 663--6
23 227 1~-19
24 lmaxiner Proem
25 Lehmann (1941) 16
26 In the first paragraph of Lehmanns article Goethe is found to be
disappointed by Pompeii and Herculaneum mere Middletowns as
GoetheLehmann put it from whose limited atmosphere they 112
NOTES TO IAUES 27~-83
turn away towards the Imagines Heference to Goethe recur
at several points in the essay Strangely enough no-one with the
exception of Goethe has ever called attention to the problem of the
general order of the paintings in the two books of philostratus
(19) Yet Goethes rearrangement of the Imapnes is also as
Lehmann put it cavalier his own essay lJl1ilds more sysshy
tematically on Goethes
27 Lehmann (1941) 2S
28 Lehmann (1941) 30
29 Lehmann (1941) 41-2
30 Lehmann (1941) 41
31 Lehmann (1941) 17-18
32 Lehmann (1941) 17middot
33 Imagines 19 18-22 1 have modified the Locb translation
here
34 In Ad Herelfiun the five parts of rhetoric are
eloculio memoria pmllUllialio
3) Yates (1966) 8
36 On architectures relation to the art of memory see the discussion
of Elsner (forthcoming) chapter 2 section v
37 Ad HerenniulII 2873)8 cited by Yates (1966) 18
38 Quimilian inH orat 11220 cited by Yates (1966) 22
39 Quintilian Inst oral 11218 cited by Yates (1966) 22
40 The diagram (Iig 34) is not satisfactory for instance its lines
fixity when the whole point is to suggest fluidity and continuum
But 1hope the reader will follow at least the diagrams gist that the
illlaNille constantly shuttles between words il1la~es and thin~s
Area (5) is that of merger between things and images (6) is the
hybrid area ofwordsubjects (7) is the area of blur between word
and image perhaps the principal ecphrastic space~ he space of the
wurd graphein r 41 Barthes (1977) 145-6
42 1am grateful to the members of the Laurcncc Seminar held in the
Department of Classics at Cambridge in May 1991 ltJr their help in
formulating the ideas presented in this essay and particularly to
Simon Goldhill jas Elsner and Stephen Bann for their very
welcome observations and
List of works cited
For abbreviations see pp xi--xiii
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Antike gtis rur Moderne Weinheim
Alpers S (1983) The Art ofDescrihlilg Chicago
Amyx D A (1988) Corinthian Vase Painting orrIe Arclaic Period The
Study of Corinthian Vases Berkeley
Arnheim R (1988) The Poet at rile Center A )tudl ofCompo siti 011 in the
Visual Artr Berkeley
Arnott P (1962) Greek Scellic COlventoils ill til Fijth Celllu~) BC
Oxford
(1989) Puhlic and Performance ill the Greek Theater London
Arnott W G (1987) The Stream and the Gold Two notes 011
Theocritus in Filologia e forme letterarie studi (1fimi a F Della
Corte vol I U rhino
Arthur [Katl] M (1975) Hurtides phoenislae and the Plitics
Diss Yale University
(1977) The curse of civilizatioll the choral odes of the PllOemu-ae
HSCP 81 163-8
Ashmole B (1972) Architect and Sculptor in Classical Greece London
Ashmole B and Yalouris N (1967) Olympia The Sculptures of the
Temple of Zeus London
Baladit H (1980) La Pilopollnese de Strahon Paris
-if Bann s (1989) The True Vine on Visual Representanim ald tllet
- lf7estern Tradition Cambridge -J Barber E J w (1990) Prellistone Textiles the Deleopmellt (Clotll ill
the Neolithic and Brone Ages Princctoll
(1992) The peplos of Athelia in Goddess and Polis tILl PaIlGtIz((c
NOHMIIN BRYSON
(
Diomedes and 220 Atlas ) philostratus passes through the
door turns to one side and begins his text in the middle of the
Herakles legend (fig 30) Observing the correct narrative
sequence is evidently less important to him than describing the
pictures as he Ilnds them in situ set into the walls I f the existence
of room and doorway is accepted the break in sequence can be
read as an architectural caesura not a textual glitch (In Lehmanns
reading all textual discontinuities will be projected as architectural
registers disunity in the text is to be resolved into the unity of the
building the texts openings interruptions and incompleteness
will be transformed through a specific ecphrastic operation into
the wholeness of an image an edifice a museum)
Having tested the hypotheses of the room and the doorway and
finding them secure Lehmann now proceeds to blotk in the walls
of his mlsee imaginaire from dado to cornices For it turns out that
sometimes within an evidently coherent sequence such as that of
Herakles there appear quite unrelated pictures pictures that
interrupt the sequence for no apparent reason Such cases can be
resolved by hypothesising a second tier of pictures placed above
the Ilrst towards the ceiling 7 The opening pictures of book 2
Lehmann maintains form a continuous series of episodes to do
with love To the group as a whole he gives the name Room of
Aphrodite R Loves power features in the opening scene showing
girls in a procession for Aphrodite (21) it continues in the stories
of Hippolytus refusing to love Phaedra (24) in the love of
Critheis and Meles (28) in the suicide of Palltlteia (29) and the
death of Cassandra (210) Yet this catalogue of loves woes is
i~terrupted by pictures quite unconnected with love Chei ron
educating Achilles (22) and female Centaurs (23) Chciron goes
widl female Centaurs but not with the Aphrodite seriet yet the
interruption can be resolved if these pictures are imagined a~a pair
placed above the main scene This upper tier can now establilth
its own band and its own independent life The education of ~ -~Achilles (22) and female Centaurs (23) can absorb a third scene (
frnm the life of Achilles where he mourns the death of Antilochus ~~ (27) The picture of the youthful Antilocltus can then attract as its
cornire partner a picture of Arrhidikos (26 the feature held in
~ ~~
PHILOSTRATliS AND THE IMAGINARY MISEl
WALL
9
t l I
J
bull ~
AI1WM
I (SOlVJO SnJ11z JOll1
UOH
II ~
jmiddotmiddotoP UOP~SOd put ~dOj3d -~_o~e~ ~~ ~~Q~~~P
or 6r
I-i~ 11
common is that both show the corpses of young men) while the
idea of Antilochus as a young Olympian victor can draw to itself
the story of the birth of Pindar the f~lmous bard of such victories
(212) And since Pan is present at Pindars birth Pans presence
with nymphs in an adjacent picture (211) can also be explained
Lehmann docs not stop with the room To enclose the whole of
the text he must build an edillcr a stoa How is it to be lit The
walls require windows and windows turn out to be doubly useful
they provide light for the pictures and they fill up space when
there seem to be not enough pictures to go round Consider for
instance the Hoom of Dionysus (fig 31)9 In Lehmanns analysis
this comprises a lower-level tier devoted to six Dionysian suhjects
and an upper tier with eleven miscellaneous scenes Ohviously
there is a difficulty here How could walls which in their lower I
N()I~MAN BRYSON
2(2
tier show only six scenes leave space for eleven scenes above
Evidently the upper pictures should be imagined as smaller in
scale small enollh to allow on Wall 2 as many as live scenes
(218224) to lit above two below lo Still it makes for a long wall
and one which has only two pictures Oil its lower level But if a low
window is added (between 218 and 219) the emptiness of the
walls lower section is filled Lehmanns museum is now rapidly
acquiring detail The question arises of the layout of room to
room Goethe had proposed nine divisiol1s but Lehmann arrives
at five the number corresponding to Philostratus recollection of
the bull four I think or possibly five terraces Now the final
architectural touches are ready At the end of each of the two
books Lehmann argues stand stilllifes these mark then the exits
of the text the porticoes of the building The room size remains
remarkably unchanging but this would not be surprising if the
building is thought of as a s10a composed of separate terraces In
terrace architecture the principal variable is not room size but the
placement and size of windows which Lehmann further suggests
are adapted to the seasons This makes for four seasonal dining r~ ~)thalls an aesthJum given over to pictures of rivers an alllumllale ~dominated by stories of Dionysus a trielillium Female set aside
for Aphrodite alld a hibernale with scenes of the primitive ~ Saturnine world Finally the whole ensemble resplendent with igt
~ all the marbles favoured by luxury is turned to the West the sun ~scasts its changing selsonal liht on the different clllmiJers of the I
house before setting in the Tvrrhenian sea ~1
bullIjj
~k
I I
It would be possible to object to Lehmanns reconstructibn on
number of counts His case rests on an unargued premise that
Philost~atus ney~ ltLmits_ny pictures from the collection he is
supposed to describe philostratus is denied any powers of
selection over the works he discllsses Moreover there is a further
unaruecl assumption that the text of the I1I1a(inelt~ sll~~i~~lS a
perfect avatar of its fIrst edition Textual corruption is not
something that cOI~I~1 ~~iIy show up in Lehmanns malysis I
PHILOSTRATllS AND TilE IMA(INAIIY MUSmiddot
Whatever changes of sequence that might have beflllen the text in
its transmission from the third century would inevitably take the
f()rm of architectural syntltlX as doors windows cornices dadoes
porticoes terraces It could also be said that at many places the
criterion defining what constitutes the semantic centre of a group
seems strained ll It is hard to conceive of Cassandra with
Agamemnon (210) or the victory of Rhodogune and the Persians
(2S) as types of love
Blit to quarrel with Lehmanns argument in this fashion would
be to miss what is most enduringly interesting about t1is commentary The central claim of his essay is that both the
coherence of thematic groupins in the Imagines and the seeming
disturbances of sequence that also occur can both be explained by
proj(cting the text as architectonic form Lehmanns primary
readi IIg strategies involve heavy use of the tropes of metaphor and
metonymy It is metonymic liaison that provides some of
Lehmanns most convincing se(luences tor instance the reconfigushy
ration of the Herakles pictures in the torm of a continuous band or
Jabula The patterns deriving from metaphor are able to embrace
even more extensive segments of the text A term such as love
being elastic (to say the least) is able to ullite scenes even as
disparate as a singing procession of maidens the deaths of
Cassandra and Agamemnon and the suicide of Pantheia So
Lehmanns groupings resemble those of Goethe or perhaps of any
editor or reader seeking to give order to a gnomic and fragmentary
text What is interesting is the way that with Lehmann till tropes
of mctonymy and metaphor do not remain editorial or textual
operations but are figured in terms that are visual and volumetric
Metonymy projects as the gaze of a beholder who standing at
the centre of the room traces a continuous narrative frieze across
the tiers or as the pathway of the spectators body moving from
room to room up and down staircases and across terraces and
finally out of the building at its exits Xenia I and Xenia 2 (r 36 and 226) Metaphor projects as the repetition of enclosing frames
wherehy the unity suggested by shared semantic features ( love
primitive world) is concretised as the singleness and unshybrokenness of mlJr~1 n~( Inmiddot klt~
ii () 1 [ A N B 1 Y SON
singular risks of uncurtailability Once a common feature such as
love is unleashed it is hard to see what story may not one way
or another be subsumed into the resulting series Similarly once
the idea of chronological series cOllies into play it becomes in
principle possible to order all sixty-odd descriptions into overshy
lapping temporal groups i3ut the potential of both metaphor and
metonymy for unlimited expansion across the whole corpus of the
imagines is held in check by the spatial boundaries of dado and
cornice window and door terrace and swircase Architecture
emerges as the containment and pacification of textual energies
which without that binding inAuence from matter fixed in space
would soon run across the text from end to end
What governs both metaphor and metonymy is another figure
visualisation The text as a whole is envisioned as a luxurious
Neapolitan building This response to the imagines is Lehmanns
distinctive ecphrastic operation H is work wi th rhilostratus text
results in a crossing from text to image Lehmann reacts to each
round of difiiculty within the imagines by creating a new building
feature First the room whose walls soon present dadoes cornices
and doorways they are lit by windows of varying size and
position the rooms are tiered as the terraces of a stoa finally like
any good architect Lehmann considers his building in relation to
the seasons and the orientation of the site He is faced with a text
filled with hiatuses and inconsistencies Under pressure from the
texts internal stress lines he produces step by step an architecture
of containment Vhat emerges within the text as difficulty and
disruption is projected in the visual domain as plenitude and unity
The texts moments of incoherence and disruption produce an
architecture of massive and stable blocks i
It is in this doubling of the broken text as an IInbrokeljimage
rather than in his deductive reasoning that Lehmann enacts a
reading of the imagines which I want to suggest is entirely
sensitive to the contours and topology of rhilostratlls writing At
the same time this sensitivity is consigned by Lehmann to the
unconscious of this text To help locate that other submerged
reading of the imagilles one can begin by noticing that successflll
though Lehmann finds his own analysis to be by his own
lt -Aj-
PlIlLOSTIATlS ANIl TilE IMA([NAHY ~[IS I
admission there remains a grollp of pictures that fall qllitl olltside
the boundary of his analysis Beviewing his work from its end
Lehmann reckons that he has been able to account for all thirty-six
sections of book I and the first twenty-six of book 2 Yet eight
miscellaneous cases remain 12 Accordingly Lehmann expels the
entire group from his definition of the imagines He concilldes
that lacking in the relations he has been proposing the peccant
images are in fact later additions grafted on either before the real
publication or else for a second edition 13 nearing ill mind what
Denmiddotida calls the logic of the sllpplement by pressing on what
Lehmann rejects one may come to see the principles of lxclusiotJ
by which his interpretation is structured That supplement to the
imagines so far from standing beyond its pale may delineate that
which Lehmanns reading must constantly repress in order to
sustain itself and as part of this what may be the features of the
imagines which are the hardest for commentary in general to
reach
One would wish to examine in detail all eight supplementary
items (227-234) Here just the first two in the group will be
considered and especially 228 Looms The selection is in some
sense justified by Lehmann own gesture ofexcusion His system
has been working well it has brollght order to all the previous
pictures in both books however bizarre or dislocated they may
have initially appeared Yet after Xenia 2 (at 226) the system
breaks down entirely In spatial terms Lehmanns (re)construction
of the stoa is now complete With the placing of the second still
life Philostratus writes The End The reader passes out of the
portico - out of Lehmanns text-as-architecture --- into th( outer
disorderly world Interestingly the bce which the world presents
is exactly that of a broken building filled with debris
Now Ih~ doorway belonglt to a house by no means prosperolls you will say it has been abandoned by its master and the court wilhin seems deserted nor do the columns still support its roof for they have set tied and collapsed No it is inhabited by spiders only ltll Ihis crelIure loves to weave its web in quiet ( Looms 21-6)
Lehmanns inspired solution to his texts difiiculties - its dOlIbling
as a perfect building ensemble - confronts at its exit the spectacle
(e 204
IOIMAN BRYSON
of a ruination at once textual and architectural What the ti~ure of
the building had particularly enabled was the transfer of all
problems of the text back into the space supposed to stand behind
it the terraced spaces of the villa The moment when Lehmann
declares the true text of Imagines to have ended is that of an
edifice collapsing
Lehmanns entire reading turns on a suppressioll of the texts
being as written representation his gradual construction of the
stoa with all of its loms mapped and its piuures securely placed
in tiers within chambers depends on a reading of the Imagines in
terms of transparency before a pre-existing referent Concerning
philostratus work within language and of the pictures work with
their represented scenes Lehmanns account says nothing In
pointing this out the aim is not in fact to criticise or fault
Lehmanns interpretation One of the principal desires of the
descriptions in the Imagines is exactly to cease being words on the
page to come alive in the fltgtrIn of an imaJe to pass from the
opacity of words to the luminous scenes behind the words
Frecluently met with in the Imaiines is a textual moment at
the description at last feels its own language to dissolve into the
of the scene it opens upon This is the philostratian Look
Now the painter has been successful in these respects also that he has wrought the spider itself ill so painstaking a fashioll has matched its spots with fidelity to nature and has painted its repulsive fuzzy surface and its savage nature - all this is the mark of a good craftsman and one skilled in depicting the truth For look here is a cord I)rming a squaPe ( Looms 3 I
The painters attention to truth has realised the spider in all its
repulsive detail Having traced that fidelity to nature wittla pen
no less observant than the painters Philostratus earns the riglhfor
his OWl] words also to be recognised as fully backed by truth After
his exclaimed For look the description at last rcaches the
moment of lift-off
Three related labours come together in a single disclosure and
presence the work of rhe spicier building its web strand
strand the work of the painter tracing each of the threads stroke ( stroke the work of the ecphrasist tracing the two previous sets
_--- _14_-
PHILOSTRATliS AND THE IMAGINARY MISF11
line by line 14 At look the words the paint and the spiders web
merge in a moment of visionary presence Out of the diverse tissue
woven by the spider the painter and the writer comes a living
image the weavers travel across [their webs J drawing tight such
of the threads as have become loose In this visionary space there
is no separating the individual strands of image text or web The
ecphrasis itself draws tight any threads that come away pulling
them back into the unitary ima~e that is at the same time a web a
pitture and a text With part of itself the ecphrasis seeks to shed
the opacities it possesses by virtue of being made of words
only an arbitrary connection to things It seeks to fuse the words
into something beyond wurds an image a picture and then to
fuse that picture with what is real in a web tltat is no longer lexical
but pictorial and no longer pictorial but alive
Lehmanns desire for a text of the Imafiines that will dissolve
first into the pictures of a collection and then into the architectural
ensemble that hOllses them is ullcannily true to this aspect of philostratus text Yet it embodies only part of that texts energies
Though in the passage just quoted the separate re~isters of
weaving of picturing and of describing all come together ill
radiant fusion at Philostraws For look elsewhere the Looms
description presents these registers as separable separate and out
of phase
In fact Looms opens with a picture of - representation The
first and seemingly gratui tous pictu re in the description shows
Penelopes loom complete with its shuttle warp threads and lint
What opens the ecphrasis then is an image describing the
fabrication of images the representational means by which
Penelope creates iJer tapestry The image is made (and with
Penelope unmade) within the apparatus of representation The
ecphrasis begins by emphasising representation not as something
which vanishes before its referent but which stays stubbornly
visible and in place as material technique
Similarly Looms foregrounds Its own apparatus of repshy
resentation language Penelope is presented not only as tlte site of
work with images but of work with words She is the creation of Homer and it is with Hnmpr linEC th nhlwltr 111 L_
NIlHMAN EllYSON
1( X
own picture of herbull Penelope
Homer melts the snow with them This is a
reference to Ocyssey 192deg4 bull Her tears flowed and her face melted
as the snow melts on the lofty mountains and as it melts the
streams of the rivers flow full so her fair cheeks melted as they
In the same way philostratus makes a point of telling his
reader that the fine threads on which the spiders drop from the roof
and then climb up again are taken froll] llesiod 15 At these points
in the text the words exactly t~lil to dissolve either into pictures
(Penelope) or into things (spiders) They remain the embedded
lines of Homer and of Hesiod woven into a text which refuses to
assimilate them as its own or to dissolve them before a referent in
pictures or in the world
Just as the text insists on its own opacities its ineradicable
wordiness so it points to ways in which nature itself will not be
absorbed into the supposedly higher realm of human represenshy
tation and culture The place of the spiders is presented as the
annihilation of human work ~here roofs and columns
the spiders thrive Human observers may compare the
Penelupe and apply to their webs the terms of or
geometric measurement (lelraliaslOs) but the webs take over
where human creation comes to its end Interestingly the spiders
in Looms are imagined not only as they appear in the picture
description also includes a scene which exceeds that picture
bull the flat [nests] are good to summer in and the hollow sorl is in winter This is a aside a
to other times and the picture but
within it The that moment
race across their web it does not shd~ them in
other seasons when in summer spiders choose the ~~t webs
and in the winter the hollow ones Looms points to another life
of spiders which the scene in other words implies but does not
state to a world of ruins silences and spider-life that goes on
whether or not there are people around to see it Nature takes over
from culture culture in fact collapses its columns broken but
spiders silently persist away from the human labours of building
weaving painting and describing
------
PHILOSTRATliS AND TilE IMA(JNAHI ~ll1SI1
III
Against Lehmanns maps of the architectural referent one might
posit another topology of things pictures and words not as these
come together in the ensemble of a resurrected museum but as they
fail to connect in a fracture or ruin of representation The
magines work with three dil1erellt substances words things
and images With part Phiostratus- act ()t descriptio-n
middotwrks t~ blur these three in visionary merger (fIg )2)
(~ ~~ ~
(-) lp Fi~ J2
In the heat of this words turn into images or images into real things (4)middot But such excitement and
animation is only one of the Imagines many possibilities There
are others less ecstatic Words come unstuck from things they
hark back not to things in the world but to other words by
Homer or Hesiod (3) Or images pull away from the task of
representation they are shown as products of material technique
threads weft lint looms (J) Or the world pulls away from its
representation in art and language (2) the courtyard appears as
deserted abandoned by its master a place where the visual order
imposed by human cultivation collapses alld the primary
of human space - columlls roof shelter way to the openness of nature
I t is appropriate that Looms opens with
standing both for the capacity of art to provide marvellous
of the world and for the unravelling of art back into mere
and lint The ecphrasis is in tJct in continuous aeros all of the interstices between the world til word and Image
1 to 7 see also fig A t times ( For ) it seems I hal
~ ~)
(~
o H ~l A N B R Y SON
27C
art concealillt art mlkes the dead mailer of leLters and
brushslrokes corne alive BUl this is only one phase ill the
ecphrastic process Equally important are the momellts when the
ecphrasis fails when words revert to being words tapestries
revert to thread and architecture to rubble
One reason that Lehmanns reading banishes Looms from the
Imagines may perhaps be the descriptions eminent f~lilure instead
of giving way to a luminous and ostensible referent
enthusiasm that enables philostratus to say Look The spiders
and Lehmann to say Look The sma - Looms darkens the
picture making it a place of shadows dust and broken
architecture Spatially it figures itself as a ruined courtyard
Textually it traverses not only the place of ecphrastic excitement
where words turn into pictures and pictures turn into things but
all the negative ecphrastic spaces whcre words remain words or
form hybrids with pictures and pictures revert to thei I constituent
elements threads WII hering lint on a loom That philostratus
intends this cffect of netativity and intends it as a figure for his
own ecphrastic enterprise is confirmed by the pairing which
Looms (228) forms with its preceding picture bullThe birth of
Athena (227)
The link of course is Arachne 16 As Ovid tells the tale
Arachne is a human weaver who challenges the skill of the divine
weaver Minerva and is punished ltH Iter hubris when Minerva
turns her into a spider At the contest both welvers set lip their
looms
The web is bound upon the beam the reed separates tlw threads of the warp the woof is threaded through them by the sharp shuttles which their busy fingers ply and when shol through the threads ofdle warp the notched teeth of tilt hammering stay beats it into place l
I~
Minerva pictures the twelve heavenly gods 011 majestic thrones At
the four corners of her tapestry are set miniature scenes of
presumptuous mortals IS Arachne counters this imagery of the
gods punishing humans ()r hubris with scenes of the gods and
especially Jupiter19 violating human females Appalled by
Arachnes work Minerva hits her three times with a shuttle then
robs her of human form
PHI LOS T RAT J SAN D THE I MAG I N A It Y 1lH I
Fig 33
Forthwith her hair touched by the poison fell off and with it both nose and ears and the head shrank up her whole body also was small the slender lingers cling 10 her side as the rest was belly 20
For many interpreters of the Arachne fable the official moral
- a cautionary tale against hubris contains a second level a
of reflection upon the capacities and limitations of an For
Velazquez the competition concerns not only weavers but
painters At the rear of the inner stage in The Fable o( Arachne is
shown Titians painting The Rape of Europa and
presents his own craft in parallel to the art of weaving placed
somewhere perhaps between Arachne and Minerva between the
genre painting of the foreground and Titians history painting in
the middle distance (fig 33) III the reading of Leonard Barkan
this capacity of the Arachne topos to act as arts self-reflexive
shy
2~
OltMAN BRYSON
~~ 2
commentary on art is already present in Ovids text I t requires
no great leap of the imagination to see in Arachnes tapestry all the
elements of Ovids own poetry in the Metamorphoses Just as she
tells the stories of the loves of the gods and the metamorphoses of
their victims so does he 21 Like Velazquez Ovid positions his
own work somewhere between the disorderly profusion
metamorphoses that issue from Arachnes loom and
theologically correct carefully framed tapestries that come
the loom of Minerva
That philostratus intends Looms to unfold in the space of this
a number of details The Birth of
the first subject of Minervas tapestry immediately
precedes the text of Looms in philostratus gallery In Ovid the
contest of Arachne and Minerva is visualised as a spectrum of
iridescent colours
As when after a storm of rain the suns rays strike through and a rainbow with its huge curve stains the wide sky though a thousand different colours shine in it the eye cannot detect the change from each one to the next so appear the adjacent colours22
This is precisely the metaphor philostratus uses to describe the
armour of Athene as the goddess emerges fullv armed from
head of Zeus
As for the material of her panoply no-one could guess iI Ii)r as many as are the colours of the rainbow which changes its light now to one hue gt1d now to another so many are the colours of her armour 2
1
Taking Philostratus two descriptions in sequence one can say
that Looms applies to the competition between Minerva and
Arachne the figure of hathos It is a comic transformation orOvids
contest down-scaled with Penelope in the place of MinerW1
spiders in the place of Arachne
philostratus begins where Ovid left off with Arachnes
metamorphosis the rest was belly is expanded into the spiders
repulsive fuzzy surface and its savage nature and the spiders
grisly meaL Where Ovid uses the Arachne fable as a means to
comment on his own project in the MUal11ornwses niacin his
book somewhere between divine
-~
P II I L () S Tii A T USA N Il TilE J M A ( I N A H Y ~Il S Hmiddot
comically deflated retelling of the fable philostratus places his own
project the Imagines somewhere between the higher artists
(Homer Hesiod Ovid etc) and the beasts Ovid and
use the images of their own
the inverts the rhetoric in a comic
desublimation or parody
Let us touch again on the philostratian exclamation Lookmiddot
k fI
The moment when a picture seems to come alive is encountered
again and again in the 1m agiles In Xenia I philostratlls remark~
that the painted grapes are good to eat and full of winey juice
(r3 I) In Xenia 2 he invites the reader to reach out and take a loaf
from the painted basket (226) In Narcissus he says he cannot
real (123) At the core of the Imagines is the promise tl1at at
ments words
intense experience that
oth pictures and words It is not simply that words arc
tell whether a real bee has been deceived bv the painted Hower or
whetlier we are to be deceived into thinking that a ~
supplemented by pictures and pictures by words To read the
Imagines that way is to model it on the example of the illustrated ~ shybook The logic of the text is in fact closer once again to that of
Derridas supplement What words lack (because they are
words characters on the page marks without light) images can hJluinaJvt with a presence which is based on that lack which grows fro~l it
and turns it into light What images lack (because they are
in time mere pigments on a surf~lce threads on a loom) words Gill
sugply with narration and movement This strange hallueinatoy
power of ecphrasis calls on the capaei~ies of words and I~ to
describe the world but goes beyond their several powers into a
~ _ moment when Look becomes the only appropriate -- ~ ~L
response The exclamation directs the reader not towards the text J t or its Image but past them both into another space where presence )f
~vo to 11 th 0 ooce (gl hdoS tooeh t) fiJtJ - Yet compared with Ovicl (or Vehizquez) philostratlls text is (
clearly self-mocking and self-defeating Its lines move Ollt into all ~ the negative ecpilrastic spaces where the enanIeia of Iookmiddot j
NORMAN BHYlgtON
exactly unfortilcoming Instead of Aracillle the spider instead of the loves of the gods in tapestry an insect meal Oil a web
Accompanying the project of inciting the reader to envision is
Philostratus awareness that with every ecphrasis at some point
the lines and strokes always separate and unravel The text presents
itself as hollowed out by its own rhetorical self-awareness and as
haunted by an inescapably secondary or belated relation to
pictures In the Proem the author dramatises himself as a painter
mangul
Now the story of the men who have mastery in the sciellce of painting and the states and kings that have been passiolltltely devoted to it has been told by others writers Ilotably Aristodemus of Carla whom I
visited for four years In orcler to study paintinf 1n the present discussions however we propose to describe examples of painting in the form of addresses which have been composed for the young 24
Four years of study with Aristodemus have led not to a career in
painting but only in criticism In the scenography of the text
Philostratus is always old and lesser than the young The son of
his host must summon him before he speaks SpJtially he is at the
perimeter beyond the city walls a Greek wandering in Italy
Secondary in relation to painting his pictures are also belated in
time not the work of men who have won mastery in the science
of painting discussed by Pliny but of painters who are never in
fact given names
G- lc o this negative dinlension of the Ima(inegt Lehmann appears
1vt tgt emarkably insensitive Jn his hands the Imagilles are tt come
alive he will infuse them with his own visionary energy~~ resurrecting the fragments of the text into a luminous stoa whose
every corner he can visualise His work with the blta(illes is in a
sense part of the Pompeian tradition which from Winckelmann
to l3ulwer-Lytton to Ilollywood aims to coiJre ivil~ flesh from
the ashes In terms of its own rhetoric Lehmanns is a heroic reading The example of the Irrcltlt Goerhe2f tTllirlp hi274
bull vJ ~_ _
PHILOSTRATLJS AND THE IMAGINARY MI~I
enterprise26
Filling out what remained only tentative in Goethes
essay he perceives an order in the Imagines which not even their
author realised The Imagines have to be wrested from philoshy
stratlls hands Philostratus misreads the mountains of Thes~ly as
mountains of Rhodes Philostratus takes no advantage of these connections and does not mention them27 Although
Philostratus was perfectly able to see immediately many of the
implications of single pictures he did not discuss the cyclic idea
He was not interested in it2R As Lehmanns analysis gains
momentum Philostratus tends to get referred to as thelcctUle~ Like many orators and letter writers and teachers before and after
him he decided to pllblish these lectures as a model of his
tecllllillue and style in handling such a task 29 He paraphrased
rather than described the paintings and pointed out the emotional
values and psychological associations ofeach picture His emphasis
in this collrse ill the appreciation (Ifart was one-sided as flax heen tlwl
elery professor (~f tlzis kind after Ilim (emphases added) ~o
Lehmann himself is not of course a lecturer or professor of this kind
If Philostratus mocks his own secondariness Lehmann expels
secondariness from his text in tbe person of the outmoded
professor who only appreciates and who cannot see what
Lehmann sees the hyper-realistic image of a gallery with all its
rooms envisioned simultaneously and in detail But these abject
personifications the lectlirer and the professor arc not the
bearers of anxiety in his reading or its only scapegoats The
Imapnes need to be reconstructed Lehmann maintains because
without them the third century is the dark century in the history
of ancient painting the era ofa great crisis ofancient art in which
the foundations for the development of later western art were
bid 11 Here are Lehmanns words for the threat his reconstruction is to dispel
In a period lor which a lower-middle-class tomb in Rome like that of the Amelii is used as a cornerstone [or the history of palntin) and Ir which the discovery of the frescoes of a Jewish synagogue in Mesopotamia tends to revolutionize the entire picture of the historv of lnrn
NOH~lAN BRYSON
Is it too much to find in these words a threat to a cherished image
of antiquity an image that must be protected
Art history emerges here in one of its dubious heroising guises
as the custodian of culture working against a background of crisis
and collapse Quite naturally the custodians must live in a great
house resplendent with all the marbles favoured by luxury
but particularly splendid by reason of the panel-paintings set in
the walls The force required to protect the custodians is that of
museum circa 1941 It is a modernist exhibition space
stripped down diagrammatic programmatic yet still (at the end
of the reconstruction) conceived as a house of the great with
dining-chambers for the four seasons Better than most museums
with their difficult diplomatic balance between the needs of
scholars and of patrons it is wholly designed by the art historian
The scholarship that builds this space is to judge by the footnotes
an exclusively German affair And the account endorses the
protocols of a certain strand in the German art history of its time
We shall always regret where fi)nllal problems are concerned the
limitations of a description which aimed not to descrile but to
interpret what the audience saw (emphases added) Painting is to
be approached formally not hermeneutically and interpretation
now a negative term is to be confined to an outpost of
iconography the identification of subjects and programme cycles
Lehmanns own hermeneutic operation presents itself as
opposite of interpretive work It proceeds by excluding lt111 those
images which appear to Lehmann to be editorial additions grafted
01 to the main text supposedly anomalous products of writing and
publication mere word-pictures un backed by actual referents It
prunes away the rhetorical elaborations of the lecn1rer and
bypasses the pictures themselves in order to reach th~ solid
masonry behind them as though representation itself verbal or
pictorial were a barrier to be torn dowH This process is presented
as a series of purifications The text contaminated for publication
is returned to its pristine state The visual field is purged of its
verbal dimension in a double movement from text In architecture
and from arl criticism to archaeology Antiquitys dark age is
banished Its whuralmainstrcam is protected against distortion by
-- - --~-
PHI I 0 S T RAT l SAN Il THE r M A (] N 1 H Y I S I I
inferior and marginlt11 groups Art history triumphs over art
appreciation The end product of these procedurts is the vision of
a purified architectural form whose authority is confirmed by a
tradition of national scholarship and national culture exiled to
America and written up in English yet still in direct contact with
the author of Phiostrats gemalde and with the Graeco-Homan past
Through rhetorical operations such as these Lehmanns
ecplrrasis becomes in a sense a tecitni(lue of the subject It is surely
much more than an archaeological reconstruction Like Auerbad~s Mimesis written in Istanbtll during World War II it mobilises the
energies of cultural resistance to its own dark century It invsts
those energies in an incandescent visualisation that configures the
beleaguered subject as a unified building I t would I think be
wrong to find fault with Lehmanns reading at the level on which
it appears to operate of slellth-like deduction and rationality
Expelled by the texts rational procedures rhetoric returns as
texts unconscious At this buried or subterranean level the
reading actually moves much closer into the Imagines than it is
able to admit Philostratus himself presents the art of painting not
as a copy of the world but ltIS in ternalisation of the world In 19 warns his audience not to be impressed by a works mimetic
realism ill that case he says we should praise an insignificant
feature of the painting and one that has solely to do with imitation
(mimesis) but we shollid nOI be praising its intelligence or
sense of decorum it shows though these I believe are the most
important elements of art l~ lust as painting shows the world as
it has already passed into the subjectivity of the painter so the
beholder should not dwell 011 the external matter of mimesis but
internalise the image drawing it inside the subject On their own
the audience can see pictures and judge mimesis perfectly well
the audience do not yet know are the techniques for
absorbing the pictures into the mind It is precisely
in this assimilation of pictures to subjectivity that the audience has come to hear Philostratus speak
It is in this aspect of internalisation that the Imafiines revcJ rhetoric itself as a techllolov Of elicnlin t1egt If T-_ r
1IIMN BRYSON
of the Ad Herenniuflt names memoria as the fourth part of
rhetoric 34 In order to memorise a lengthy speech the orator
should visualise the successive topics of his discourse as images
arranged in consecutive places within architectural space In the
words of Frances Yates who is that mlfi moving slowly in
lonely building stopping at intervals with an intent face He is a
rhetoric student forming a set of memory loci35 Architectures
role in rhetoric is as the supplier of milieux within which intense
visualisations are to occurUl As Cicero says the images should be
active sharply defined and unusual having the power of speedily
encountering and penetrating the psyche (quae oCCflrrere celerishy
terque percutere animum possim)37 The speech unfolds as
rhetorician walks in his mind past walls each memory-place hung
with a vivid image through rooms doorways stairways
porticoes terraces
The first notion is placed as it were ill the ()recourt the second let us say in the atrium lhe remainder are placed in order round the impluvium and committed not only to bedrooms and parlours but even to statues and the like3R
The stability and dependability of this internal architecture is vital
for the control of the self over its material To forget the existence
of a particular room is to leave out a whole stage of the argument
to lTIisremember the sequence of images is to garble the
presentation of the case
places are chosen and marked om with the utmost possible vlriety as a spacious house divided into a number of rooms Every thinK of note therein is diligently imprinted on the mind in order that thongl n~ay be able to fun through all the parts without let or hindrance The filst task is to secure that there shall be no difficulty in funning through these for that memory must be most firmly fixed which helps another memory all
Here architecture not only stands for the control of the self it is
the actual material means by which the self exercises its control
over its words and its world
If Lehmanns unitary and massively stable architecture stands ~1 _1 _~ bullbull l J ~
~ PHILOSTRATUS AND THE IMA((NARY MlISEU~1
c~) (~~) ( 0 ~ ~
-~ ----~
hI 34
1 reading rejoins Philostratus rhetoric as an operation whose means
is imaginary buildings and whose goal is mastery over self and
over representation Ecphrasis here is a technique for consolidating
the subject in terms of personal and professional control While on
the surface of his text Lehmann disavows hermeneutic art history
and expels the lecturer at other levels of his text Lehmann is
Philostratus shadow-partner or secret sharer Lehmanns entry
into the culture of late antiquity is through a shape-shifting in
which he performs the architectural ars memorativa of a thirdshy
century orator
Yet he does so in terms very different from those supplied in the
Imagines The kind of subject proposed and assllmed by 9
Philostratus text is much less driven by the urge towards unitary
self-possession The Imagines subject exists in a universe where
things images and words may frequently converge but do not
consistently fuse together ill the ardour of imaginary vision The
descriptions show the subject in transit across the interstices where
world pictures and language overlap Especially interesting 10
Philostratus are the hybrid or chiasmic zones where dillerent
registers cross over (fig 34)
Let us return for the last time to Looms Penelopes loom
exists at the place where images and the things of the world cross
over The loom is a thing that makes images yet we do not see the
images it makes only the things - warp threads shuttle it
works with Again when the weavers travel across the web or eat
their squirming prey they are seen as living moving creatures
hill at thl sme time the reader knows they are onlv a static nictllrf -j
--
OIlMAN BRYSON
i(
Elsewhere the text moves to the place where the things of the
world cross over into words The author tells us that the spiders
cables are almost too tine to discern What brings them into view
are in fact Hesiods lines about spiders destending and astending
their threads The word makes the thing exist Or a single word in
Greek -- arachnc is able to generate two utterly different beings
spiders and the weaver who challenged Minerva The characters of
Looms are so to speak engendered by an ecphrastic pun Words
and things change pilCes At other times the text crosses the place
where words and image blend Homers text turns into a picture
then back again into Homers words The line between what is
verbal and visual cannot be drawn4o
The subject of the Imagines is in constant motion and dispersal
across this complex terrain qf wprld jmilg ltlAd texr When the
outward pictures enter the subject and are assimilated to the seWs
interior they scatter across an intricately divided and Auid space
The images of Philostratus exist as r~fractiollS in a multishy
dimensional space in which a variety of voices none of them
original blend and clash 41 The subject who performs this
internalisation is in perpetual motion The moments when at the
philostratian Look the various registers join in visionary
fusion do not last long Almost at once the visions separate out
into their component strands unravelling as fast as they came
together And they lead on to the next image - more than sixty
times The unravelling of one image clears the space for the
coming together of the next one Or better the unravelling of
each image calls into being summons the next It is in that
perpetual Penelope-like emergence and falling away of images
that the subject is spun by the text Not as a central storehp~se or
gallery more a~ a motion or desire
Lehmanns subject is in a sense the opposite of thiJ In
Lehmanns case internalising philostralUs text means seeking a
means to arrest the motions of the text and to tapture and
immobilise its energies in a final culminating form Into the
stability of the huilding that is to end the text as motion and desire
are poured all the authors ligures for the command of the subject
massive masonry the prestige of the museum purified form
_ --- ----
PHILOSTRATUS AND THE IMAGINAIY M(SEI
Goethe national culture ethnic centrality profcssionlIisll1 posishy
tive knowledge Which should make Lehmann Philostratus most
inappropriate reader were it not for the brilliance and the yearning of his own visualisation
Among other things Lehmanns reading exemplifies some of
the paradoxes inherent in the tradition of positivist scholarship to
which it belongs It is this aspect that raises his reconstruction
above the category of historiGl1 oddity to adumbrate some of the
vicissitudes of positive knowledfe in more general terms First
Lehmanns relation to the literary to textuality and intenextualitx
is remarkably strained and contradictory The architectural ord~r he proposes for the Imagines is itselfbibliograplllc Lehmann needs
texts 10 enable his reconstruction to take place in order to build
his version of Philostratus villa he must resort to the library what
he says for instance concerning the typology of rooms their
orientation and relation to the seasons is directly dependent on
Vitruvius Yet at the same time his analysis mllst bypass textuality
in order to dissolve the texts into architectural form Necessary at
certain moments of the analysis at others textuality becomes an
obstacle to be scornfully removed Inherently untrustworthy
beside the actuality (the positivism) of the archaeological find texts are aligned in his interpretation with ideas of parasitism and
mediocrity figured here by the lecturer or professor The
reading works both to banish textual corruption completely
(which cannot easily show up ill the analysi~ since hiatuses in the
text arc translated at once into architectural syntax) and to build
the necessity for textual wrruption into his case (as when
Lehmann axes the last eight descriptions as later additions )
Textuality features in this mode of analysis primarily under tlte
sign of repression Where it is able to grow transparent before the
three-dimensional architectural and archaeological order it can be
admitted Where textuality fails to become translucent hcfilfe
reference it must be expelled even if the effort to do so becomes
massive involving the whole battery of figures for the command of th~ sui)ject
Secondly this ef1ort to repress textuality runs counter to many
of the most conspicuous features of Philostratllt PIh So
tgtnHMAN BRYSON
2X2
writing especially its interest in exploring the negative ecphrastic
spaces in which the reader so far from experiencing a dissolution
of writing before the luminous referellt (tlte philostratian
Look ) apprehends the text as a sophisticated web of allusions
parodies puns and tonal plays Lehmanns quest for the stable
masonry of the referent seems altogether blind to the many ways
in which philostratus writing plays to the wplzia of the reader as
one who can see bizarre connections who can understand hidden
narrativcs within imagery (A rachne Mincrva) wilD can
exercise the visual eqllivalent of the elaborate verbal dexterity that
characterises Hellenistic poetry When philostratus says that the
web the spiders make is exceedingly fine (k)perleIIOS) he is
doing more dlan asking liS to visualise something hard to see he
is using a key term from Hellenistic poetics eplOs which means
witty fint clever small-scale sophisticated and doing
so as an invitation or a warning to the reader that his own writing
too is all of these things It is a warning that Lehmann perhaps
wisely does not heed for once ecphrasis is thought of as a form
writing that involves much mort than a simple visualisation of
a text it leaves behind the one certainty that ecphrasis seemed to
hold out to the archaeologist - its promise of presence of
resurrection and becomes something else a mode of writing
whose complexity we are perhaps only beginning to discern and
in relation to which tlie idea of visualisation begins to appear as a
simplification at best
Finally the scrupulous rationality of Lehmanns interpretive
method with its emphasis on what can be deduced and
demonstrated as positive knowledge and as archilectural form
renders it strangely unaware of its own aspect of tellIality of the
ways in which it is itself a working wilh words in whityen the words
carry more associations motivations and effect than the writer is
able to hear or control Working within a highly instrumental and
reduced picture-theory of language Lehmanns analysis radically
underestimates the capacity of words to exceed their allotted
functions of argumentation demonstration and proof Opening
on to other investments and other scenes tban that simply of
archaeology and reconstruction Lehmanns text speaks its own
PllILOSTRATS AND THE IMAGINAHY MliS
uncollscious and it is in that energetic and overdetermined
underside of his text that his deepest engagement with Philostratus
may be found What he writes is perhaps the dream-work of
positivism not the forensics of archaeology but its own buried poetics 42
~
l ltJTES TO PAGES 244--61
O On Pausanils see Frazer (1898) Heer (1979) Jacob (1980)
Habich 1 (1985) and Elsner (1992)
I These include discussions of the wild satyrs of the islands 1235-)
the Ethiopians I334- the Ionian Greeks 722-51) the
marvellous animals collected in Rome 9211-2 the islands of
Sardinia and Corsica 10171-13
32 See Elsner (1992) 17--20
33 See Frazer (1898) xiv compare other second-century CE descripshy
tions of ruins such as Dio Chrysostom on Thebes Oratio 7
Plutarch De ~rcctu oracuorum 8 Lucian Diaog 11I0rt 272
34 This chapter began as a paper on Herodotus pyramids delivered to
Paul Cartledges Ancient History Seminar in Cambridge in 1989 I
wish to thank him John Henderson Jamie Masters and the Editors
of this volume for their comments on earlier drafts My deepest debt
is to Joan Pau Rubies y Mirabet with whom I have fi)r several years
discussed the problems of travel travel-writing and identity This
chapter is dedicated to him
CHApTEH EIGHT PHlLOSTRATliS AND Tin IMA(INARY
MUSEUM
1 English translations are taken from the Loeb edition edited by
T E Page E Capps and W H D Rouse (London and New
York193 1)
2 For the history of the debate see the editions of Jacobs and Welcker
(1825) Kayser (1844) Benndorf and Schenkel (1893) and
Steinmann (1914)
3 Lehmann (1941)
4 The essay is conveniently to be f()Und in vo XXVI of Cottas
standard edition (1868) pp 276fT
Lehmann (1941) 21-4
6 Obviously he describes pictures that were topoglllttphically united
but without regard to the ideological and (JrluaJ rda~m which had
dictated their combination Lehmann (1941) 20
7 Indeed the only explanation of the relationships and the lack of
order is that philostratus saw real pictures which were to a certain
extent arranged on the upper and lower parts of walls Lehmann
(1941) 20
8 Lehmann (1941) 31-3
9 Lehmann (1941) 31-3
NOTES TO P(I-S 2()2
10 [n fact the lmalfines do not supply indications concerning the
dimensions of any particular work
II [t should also be noted that Lehmanns groupings occasionally
require him to rewrite the given titles of pictures
11 These last eight pictures of the second book show a remarkable
absence of any stich relation and connection as we have found
everywhere else Lehmann (1941) 37
13 Lehmann (1941) 39-40
14 The image of weaving is frequently used of writing see for
example Catullus ()45ofr in which the marriage of Peleus and
Thetis is covered with a estis variata figuris pestit decorata
jiguris where filfura is also a literary term for Catullus (wn
rhetoric Perhaps the crucial sites of configuring language image
and weaving are words such as ypaqgteurolv grapIein which means
writedraw design (in thread)
I ~ Worfrs an1 Days 777
16 The presence of Arachne in Looms has been argued since the
Renaissance See for example the gloss on Les Etoiles in Blaise
de Vigeneres edition of 1610 514 Lehmann (1941) 39 also
suggests that the two pictures (227 and 218) both refer to the
Arachne story
17 Ovid Met 65~-8
18 Minerva depicts Rhodope and Ilaemus who dared to cal
themselves gods now turned to mountains the Pygmaean queen
who challenged Juno now turned into a crane Antigone turned
by the angered Juno into a stork Cinyras whose daughters are turned to stone
19 Arachnes tapestry shows Europa abducted by the bull Asterie
carried off by the eagle Leda pursued by the swan Jllpiter
disguised as Amphitryon Danae
20 Met 6140--4
21 Barkan (1986) 4
22 Met 663--6
23 227 1~-19
24 lmaxiner Proem
25 Lehmann (1941) 16
26 In the first paragraph of Lehmanns article Goethe is found to be
disappointed by Pompeii and Herculaneum mere Middletowns as
GoetheLehmann put it from whose limited atmosphere they 112
NOTES TO IAUES 27~-83
turn away towards the Imagines Heference to Goethe recur
at several points in the essay Strangely enough no-one with the
exception of Goethe has ever called attention to the problem of the
general order of the paintings in the two books of philostratus
(19) Yet Goethes rearrangement of the Imapnes is also as
Lehmann put it cavalier his own essay lJl1ilds more sysshy
tematically on Goethes
27 Lehmann (1941) 2S
28 Lehmann (1941) 30
29 Lehmann (1941) 41-2
30 Lehmann (1941) 41
31 Lehmann (1941) 17-18
32 Lehmann (1941) 17middot
33 Imagines 19 18-22 1 have modified the Locb translation
here
34 In Ad Herelfiun the five parts of rhetoric are
eloculio memoria pmllUllialio
3) Yates (1966) 8
36 On architectures relation to the art of memory see the discussion
of Elsner (forthcoming) chapter 2 section v
37 Ad HerenniulII 2873)8 cited by Yates (1966) 18
38 Quimilian inH orat 11220 cited by Yates (1966) 22
39 Quintilian Inst oral 11218 cited by Yates (1966) 22
40 The diagram (Iig 34) is not satisfactory for instance its lines
fixity when the whole point is to suggest fluidity and continuum
But 1hope the reader will follow at least the diagrams gist that the
illlaNille constantly shuttles between words il1la~es and thin~s
Area (5) is that of merger between things and images (6) is the
hybrid area ofwordsubjects (7) is the area of blur between word
and image perhaps the principal ecphrastic space~ he space of the
wurd graphein r 41 Barthes (1977) 145-6
42 1am grateful to the members of the Laurcncc Seminar held in the
Department of Classics at Cambridge in May 1991 ltJr their help in
formulating the ideas presented in this essay and particularly to
Simon Goldhill jas Elsner and Stephen Bann for their very
welcome observations and
List of works cited
For abbreviations see pp xi--xiii
Adler J and Ernst U (1988) Text als Figur 11welle Poesie 101 der
Antike gtis rur Moderne Weinheim
Alpers S (1983) The Art ofDescrihlilg Chicago
Amyx D A (1988) Corinthian Vase Painting orrIe Arclaic Period The
Study of Corinthian Vases Berkeley
Arnheim R (1988) The Poet at rile Center A )tudl ofCompo siti 011 in the
Visual Artr Berkeley
Arnott P (1962) Greek Scellic COlventoils ill til Fijth Celllu~) BC
Oxford
(1989) Puhlic and Performance ill the Greek Theater London
Arnott W G (1987) The Stream and the Gold Two notes 011
Theocritus in Filologia e forme letterarie studi (1fimi a F Della
Corte vol I U rhino
Arthur [Katl] M (1975) Hurtides phoenislae and the Plitics
Diss Yale University
(1977) The curse of civilizatioll the choral odes of the PllOemu-ae
HSCP 81 163-8
Ashmole B (1972) Architect and Sculptor in Classical Greece London
Ashmole B and Yalouris N (1967) Olympia The Sculptures of the
Temple of Zeus London
Baladit H (1980) La Pilopollnese de Strahon Paris
-if Bann s (1989) The True Vine on Visual Representanim ald tllet
- lf7estern Tradition Cambridge -J Barber E J w (1990) Prellistone Textiles the Deleopmellt (Clotll ill
the Neolithic and Brone Ages Princctoll
(1992) The peplos of Athelia in Goddess and Polis tILl PaIlGtIz((c
N()I~MAN BRYSON
2(2
tier show only six scenes leave space for eleven scenes above
Evidently the upper pictures should be imagined as smaller in
scale small enollh to allow on Wall 2 as many as live scenes
(218224) to lit above two below lo Still it makes for a long wall
and one which has only two pictures Oil its lower level But if a low
window is added (between 218 and 219) the emptiness of the
walls lower section is filled Lehmanns museum is now rapidly
acquiring detail The question arises of the layout of room to
room Goethe had proposed nine divisiol1s but Lehmann arrives
at five the number corresponding to Philostratus recollection of
the bull four I think or possibly five terraces Now the final
architectural touches are ready At the end of each of the two
books Lehmann argues stand stilllifes these mark then the exits
of the text the porticoes of the building The room size remains
remarkably unchanging but this would not be surprising if the
building is thought of as a s10a composed of separate terraces In
terrace architecture the principal variable is not room size but the
placement and size of windows which Lehmann further suggests
are adapted to the seasons This makes for four seasonal dining r~ ~)thalls an aesthJum given over to pictures of rivers an alllumllale ~dominated by stories of Dionysus a trielillium Female set aside
for Aphrodite alld a hibernale with scenes of the primitive ~ Saturnine world Finally the whole ensemble resplendent with igt
~ all the marbles favoured by luxury is turned to the West the sun ~scasts its changing selsonal liht on the different clllmiJers of the I
house before setting in the Tvrrhenian sea ~1
bullIjj
~k
I I
It would be possible to object to Lehmanns reconstructibn on
number of counts His case rests on an unargued premise that
Philost~atus ney~ ltLmits_ny pictures from the collection he is
supposed to describe philostratus is denied any powers of
selection over the works he discllsses Moreover there is a further
unaruecl assumption that the text of the I1I1a(inelt~ sll~~i~~lS a
perfect avatar of its fIrst edition Textual corruption is not
something that cOI~I~1 ~~iIy show up in Lehmanns malysis I
PHILOSTRATllS AND TilE IMA(INAIIY MUSmiddot
Whatever changes of sequence that might have beflllen the text in
its transmission from the third century would inevitably take the
f()rm of architectural syntltlX as doors windows cornices dadoes
porticoes terraces It could also be said that at many places the
criterion defining what constitutes the semantic centre of a group
seems strained ll It is hard to conceive of Cassandra with
Agamemnon (210) or the victory of Rhodogune and the Persians
(2S) as types of love
Blit to quarrel with Lehmanns argument in this fashion would
be to miss what is most enduringly interesting about t1is commentary The central claim of his essay is that both the
coherence of thematic groupins in the Imagines and the seeming
disturbances of sequence that also occur can both be explained by
proj(cting the text as architectonic form Lehmanns primary
readi IIg strategies involve heavy use of the tropes of metaphor and
metonymy It is metonymic liaison that provides some of
Lehmanns most convincing se(luences tor instance the reconfigushy
ration of the Herakles pictures in the torm of a continuous band or
Jabula The patterns deriving from metaphor are able to embrace
even more extensive segments of the text A term such as love
being elastic (to say the least) is able to ullite scenes even as
disparate as a singing procession of maidens the deaths of
Cassandra and Agamemnon and the suicide of Pantheia So
Lehmanns groupings resemble those of Goethe or perhaps of any
editor or reader seeking to give order to a gnomic and fragmentary
text What is interesting is the way that with Lehmann till tropes
of mctonymy and metaphor do not remain editorial or textual
operations but are figured in terms that are visual and volumetric
Metonymy projects as the gaze of a beholder who standing at
the centre of the room traces a continuous narrative frieze across
the tiers or as the pathway of the spectators body moving from
room to room up and down staircases and across terraces and
finally out of the building at its exits Xenia I and Xenia 2 (r 36 and 226) Metaphor projects as the repetition of enclosing frames
wherehy the unity suggested by shared semantic features ( love
primitive world) is concretised as the singleness and unshybrokenness of mlJr~1 n~( Inmiddot klt~
ii () 1 [ A N B 1 Y SON
singular risks of uncurtailability Once a common feature such as
love is unleashed it is hard to see what story may not one way
or another be subsumed into the resulting series Similarly once
the idea of chronological series cOllies into play it becomes in
principle possible to order all sixty-odd descriptions into overshy
lapping temporal groups i3ut the potential of both metaphor and
metonymy for unlimited expansion across the whole corpus of the
imagines is held in check by the spatial boundaries of dado and
cornice window and door terrace and swircase Architecture
emerges as the containment and pacification of textual energies
which without that binding inAuence from matter fixed in space
would soon run across the text from end to end
What governs both metaphor and metonymy is another figure
visualisation The text as a whole is envisioned as a luxurious
Neapolitan building This response to the imagines is Lehmanns
distinctive ecphrastic operation H is work wi th rhilostratus text
results in a crossing from text to image Lehmann reacts to each
round of difiiculty within the imagines by creating a new building
feature First the room whose walls soon present dadoes cornices
and doorways they are lit by windows of varying size and
position the rooms are tiered as the terraces of a stoa finally like
any good architect Lehmann considers his building in relation to
the seasons and the orientation of the site He is faced with a text
filled with hiatuses and inconsistencies Under pressure from the
texts internal stress lines he produces step by step an architecture
of containment Vhat emerges within the text as difficulty and
disruption is projected in the visual domain as plenitude and unity
The texts moments of incoherence and disruption produce an
architecture of massive and stable blocks i
It is in this doubling of the broken text as an IInbrokeljimage
rather than in his deductive reasoning that Lehmann enacts a
reading of the imagines which I want to suggest is entirely
sensitive to the contours and topology of rhilostratlls writing At
the same time this sensitivity is consigned by Lehmann to the
unconscious of this text To help locate that other submerged
reading of the imagilles one can begin by noticing that successflll
though Lehmann finds his own analysis to be by his own
lt -Aj-
PlIlLOSTIATlS ANIl TilE IMA([NAHY ~[IS I
admission there remains a grollp of pictures that fall qllitl olltside
the boundary of his analysis Beviewing his work from its end
Lehmann reckons that he has been able to account for all thirty-six
sections of book I and the first twenty-six of book 2 Yet eight
miscellaneous cases remain 12 Accordingly Lehmann expels the
entire group from his definition of the imagines He concilldes
that lacking in the relations he has been proposing the peccant
images are in fact later additions grafted on either before the real
publication or else for a second edition 13 nearing ill mind what
Denmiddotida calls the logic of the sllpplement by pressing on what
Lehmann rejects one may come to see the principles of lxclusiotJ
by which his interpretation is structured That supplement to the
imagines so far from standing beyond its pale may delineate that
which Lehmanns reading must constantly repress in order to
sustain itself and as part of this what may be the features of the
imagines which are the hardest for commentary in general to
reach
One would wish to examine in detail all eight supplementary
items (227-234) Here just the first two in the group will be
considered and especially 228 Looms The selection is in some
sense justified by Lehmann own gesture ofexcusion His system
has been working well it has brollght order to all the previous
pictures in both books however bizarre or dislocated they may
have initially appeared Yet after Xenia 2 (at 226) the system
breaks down entirely In spatial terms Lehmanns (re)construction
of the stoa is now complete With the placing of the second still
life Philostratus writes The End The reader passes out of the
portico - out of Lehmanns text-as-architecture --- into th( outer
disorderly world Interestingly the bce which the world presents
is exactly that of a broken building filled with debris
Now Ih~ doorway belonglt to a house by no means prosperolls you will say it has been abandoned by its master and the court wilhin seems deserted nor do the columns still support its roof for they have set tied and collapsed No it is inhabited by spiders only ltll Ihis crelIure loves to weave its web in quiet ( Looms 21-6)
Lehmanns inspired solution to his texts difiiculties - its dOlIbling
as a perfect building ensemble - confronts at its exit the spectacle
(e 204
IOIMAN BRYSON
of a ruination at once textual and architectural What the ti~ure of
the building had particularly enabled was the transfer of all
problems of the text back into the space supposed to stand behind
it the terraced spaces of the villa The moment when Lehmann
declares the true text of Imagines to have ended is that of an
edifice collapsing
Lehmanns entire reading turns on a suppressioll of the texts
being as written representation his gradual construction of the
stoa with all of its loms mapped and its piuures securely placed
in tiers within chambers depends on a reading of the Imagines in
terms of transparency before a pre-existing referent Concerning
philostratus work within language and of the pictures work with
their represented scenes Lehmanns account says nothing In
pointing this out the aim is not in fact to criticise or fault
Lehmanns interpretation One of the principal desires of the
descriptions in the Imagines is exactly to cease being words on the
page to come alive in the fltgtrIn of an imaJe to pass from the
opacity of words to the luminous scenes behind the words
Frecluently met with in the Imaiines is a textual moment at
the description at last feels its own language to dissolve into the
of the scene it opens upon This is the philostratian Look
Now the painter has been successful in these respects also that he has wrought the spider itself ill so painstaking a fashioll has matched its spots with fidelity to nature and has painted its repulsive fuzzy surface and its savage nature - all this is the mark of a good craftsman and one skilled in depicting the truth For look here is a cord I)rming a squaPe ( Looms 3 I
The painters attention to truth has realised the spider in all its
repulsive detail Having traced that fidelity to nature wittla pen
no less observant than the painters Philostratus earns the riglhfor
his OWl] words also to be recognised as fully backed by truth After
his exclaimed For look the description at last rcaches the
moment of lift-off
Three related labours come together in a single disclosure and
presence the work of rhe spicier building its web strand
strand the work of the painter tracing each of the threads stroke ( stroke the work of the ecphrasist tracing the two previous sets
_--- _14_-
PHILOSTRATliS AND THE IMAGINARY MISF11
line by line 14 At look the words the paint and the spiders web
merge in a moment of visionary presence Out of the diverse tissue
woven by the spider the painter and the writer comes a living
image the weavers travel across [their webs J drawing tight such
of the threads as have become loose In this visionary space there
is no separating the individual strands of image text or web The
ecphrasis itself draws tight any threads that come away pulling
them back into the unitary ima~e that is at the same time a web a
pitture and a text With part of itself the ecphrasis seeks to shed
the opacities it possesses by virtue of being made of words
only an arbitrary connection to things It seeks to fuse the words
into something beyond wurds an image a picture and then to
fuse that picture with what is real in a web tltat is no longer lexical
but pictorial and no longer pictorial but alive
Lehmanns desire for a text of the Imafiines that will dissolve
first into the pictures of a collection and then into the architectural
ensemble that hOllses them is ullcannily true to this aspect of philostratus text Yet it embodies only part of that texts energies
Though in the passage just quoted the separate re~isters of
weaving of picturing and of describing all come together ill
radiant fusion at Philostraws For look elsewhere the Looms
description presents these registers as separable separate and out
of phase
In fact Looms opens with a picture of - representation The
first and seemingly gratui tous pictu re in the description shows
Penelopes loom complete with its shuttle warp threads and lint
What opens the ecphrasis then is an image describing the
fabrication of images the representational means by which
Penelope creates iJer tapestry The image is made (and with
Penelope unmade) within the apparatus of representation The
ecphrasis begins by emphasising representation not as something
which vanishes before its referent but which stays stubbornly
visible and in place as material technique
Similarly Looms foregrounds Its own apparatus of repshy
resentation language Penelope is presented not only as tlte site of
work with images but of work with words She is the creation of Homer and it is with Hnmpr linEC th nhlwltr 111 L_
NIlHMAN EllYSON
1( X
own picture of herbull Penelope
Homer melts the snow with them This is a
reference to Ocyssey 192deg4 bull Her tears flowed and her face melted
as the snow melts on the lofty mountains and as it melts the
streams of the rivers flow full so her fair cheeks melted as they
In the same way philostratus makes a point of telling his
reader that the fine threads on which the spiders drop from the roof
and then climb up again are taken froll] llesiod 15 At these points
in the text the words exactly t~lil to dissolve either into pictures
(Penelope) or into things (spiders) They remain the embedded
lines of Homer and of Hesiod woven into a text which refuses to
assimilate them as its own or to dissolve them before a referent in
pictures or in the world
Just as the text insists on its own opacities its ineradicable
wordiness so it points to ways in which nature itself will not be
absorbed into the supposedly higher realm of human represenshy
tation and culture The place of the spiders is presented as the
annihilation of human work ~here roofs and columns
the spiders thrive Human observers may compare the
Penelupe and apply to their webs the terms of or
geometric measurement (lelraliaslOs) but the webs take over
where human creation comes to its end Interestingly the spiders
in Looms are imagined not only as they appear in the picture
description also includes a scene which exceeds that picture
bull the flat [nests] are good to summer in and the hollow sorl is in winter This is a aside a
to other times and the picture but
within it The that moment
race across their web it does not shd~ them in
other seasons when in summer spiders choose the ~~t webs
and in the winter the hollow ones Looms points to another life
of spiders which the scene in other words implies but does not
state to a world of ruins silences and spider-life that goes on
whether or not there are people around to see it Nature takes over
from culture culture in fact collapses its columns broken but
spiders silently persist away from the human labours of building
weaving painting and describing
------
PHILOSTRATliS AND TilE IMA(JNAHI ~ll1SI1
III
Against Lehmanns maps of the architectural referent one might
posit another topology of things pictures and words not as these
come together in the ensemble of a resurrected museum but as they
fail to connect in a fracture or ruin of representation The
magines work with three dil1erellt substances words things
and images With part Phiostratus- act ()t descriptio-n
middotwrks t~ blur these three in visionary merger (fIg )2)
(~ ~~ ~
(-) lp Fi~ J2
In the heat of this words turn into images or images into real things (4)middot But such excitement and
animation is only one of the Imagines many possibilities There
are others less ecstatic Words come unstuck from things they
hark back not to things in the world but to other words by
Homer or Hesiod (3) Or images pull away from the task of
representation they are shown as products of material technique
threads weft lint looms (J) Or the world pulls away from its
representation in art and language (2) the courtyard appears as
deserted abandoned by its master a place where the visual order
imposed by human cultivation collapses alld the primary
of human space - columlls roof shelter way to the openness of nature
I t is appropriate that Looms opens with
standing both for the capacity of art to provide marvellous
of the world and for the unravelling of art back into mere
and lint The ecphrasis is in tJct in continuous aeros all of the interstices between the world til word and Image
1 to 7 see also fig A t times ( For ) it seems I hal
~ ~)
(~
o H ~l A N B R Y SON
27C
art concealillt art mlkes the dead mailer of leLters and
brushslrokes corne alive BUl this is only one phase ill the
ecphrastic process Equally important are the momellts when the
ecphrasis fails when words revert to being words tapestries
revert to thread and architecture to rubble
One reason that Lehmanns reading banishes Looms from the
Imagines may perhaps be the descriptions eminent f~lilure instead
of giving way to a luminous and ostensible referent
enthusiasm that enables philostratus to say Look The spiders
and Lehmann to say Look The sma - Looms darkens the
picture making it a place of shadows dust and broken
architecture Spatially it figures itself as a ruined courtyard
Textually it traverses not only the place of ecphrastic excitement
where words turn into pictures and pictures turn into things but
all the negative ecphrastic spaces whcre words remain words or
form hybrids with pictures and pictures revert to thei I constituent
elements threads WII hering lint on a loom That philostratus
intends this cffect of netativity and intends it as a figure for his
own ecphrastic enterprise is confirmed by the pairing which
Looms (228) forms with its preceding picture bullThe birth of
Athena (227)
The link of course is Arachne 16 As Ovid tells the tale
Arachne is a human weaver who challenges the skill of the divine
weaver Minerva and is punished ltH Iter hubris when Minerva
turns her into a spider At the contest both welvers set lip their
looms
The web is bound upon the beam the reed separates tlw threads of the warp the woof is threaded through them by the sharp shuttles which their busy fingers ply and when shol through the threads ofdle warp the notched teeth of tilt hammering stay beats it into place l
I~
Minerva pictures the twelve heavenly gods 011 majestic thrones At
the four corners of her tapestry are set miniature scenes of
presumptuous mortals IS Arachne counters this imagery of the
gods punishing humans ()r hubris with scenes of the gods and
especially Jupiter19 violating human females Appalled by
Arachnes work Minerva hits her three times with a shuttle then
robs her of human form
PHI LOS T RAT J SAN D THE I MAG I N A It Y 1lH I
Fig 33
Forthwith her hair touched by the poison fell off and with it both nose and ears and the head shrank up her whole body also was small the slender lingers cling 10 her side as the rest was belly 20
For many interpreters of the Arachne fable the official moral
- a cautionary tale against hubris contains a second level a
of reflection upon the capacities and limitations of an For
Velazquez the competition concerns not only weavers but
painters At the rear of the inner stage in The Fable o( Arachne is
shown Titians painting The Rape of Europa and
presents his own craft in parallel to the art of weaving placed
somewhere perhaps between Arachne and Minerva between the
genre painting of the foreground and Titians history painting in
the middle distance (fig 33) III the reading of Leonard Barkan
this capacity of the Arachne topos to act as arts self-reflexive
shy
2~
OltMAN BRYSON
~~ 2
commentary on art is already present in Ovids text I t requires
no great leap of the imagination to see in Arachnes tapestry all the
elements of Ovids own poetry in the Metamorphoses Just as she
tells the stories of the loves of the gods and the metamorphoses of
their victims so does he 21 Like Velazquez Ovid positions his
own work somewhere between the disorderly profusion
metamorphoses that issue from Arachnes loom and
theologically correct carefully framed tapestries that come
the loom of Minerva
That philostratus intends Looms to unfold in the space of this
a number of details The Birth of
the first subject of Minervas tapestry immediately
precedes the text of Looms in philostratus gallery In Ovid the
contest of Arachne and Minerva is visualised as a spectrum of
iridescent colours
As when after a storm of rain the suns rays strike through and a rainbow with its huge curve stains the wide sky though a thousand different colours shine in it the eye cannot detect the change from each one to the next so appear the adjacent colours22
This is precisely the metaphor philostratus uses to describe the
armour of Athene as the goddess emerges fullv armed from
head of Zeus
As for the material of her panoply no-one could guess iI Ii)r as many as are the colours of the rainbow which changes its light now to one hue gt1d now to another so many are the colours of her armour 2
1
Taking Philostratus two descriptions in sequence one can say
that Looms applies to the competition between Minerva and
Arachne the figure of hathos It is a comic transformation orOvids
contest down-scaled with Penelope in the place of MinerW1
spiders in the place of Arachne
philostratus begins where Ovid left off with Arachnes
metamorphosis the rest was belly is expanded into the spiders
repulsive fuzzy surface and its savage nature and the spiders
grisly meaL Where Ovid uses the Arachne fable as a means to
comment on his own project in the MUal11ornwses niacin his
book somewhere between divine
-~
P II I L () S Tii A T USA N Il TilE J M A ( I N A H Y ~Il S Hmiddot
comically deflated retelling of the fable philostratus places his own
project the Imagines somewhere between the higher artists
(Homer Hesiod Ovid etc) and the beasts Ovid and
use the images of their own
the inverts the rhetoric in a comic
desublimation or parody
Let us touch again on the philostratian exclamation Lookmiddot
k fI
The moment when a picture seems to come alive is encountered
again and again in the 1m agiles In Xenia I philostratlls remark~
that the painted grapes are good to eat and full of winey juice
(r3 I) In Xenia 2 he invites the reader to reach out and take a loaf
from the painted basket (226) In Narcissus he says he cannot
real (123) At the core of the Imagines is the promise tl1at at
ments words
intense experience that
oth pictures and words It is not simply that words arc
tell whether a real bee has been deceived bv the painted Hower or
whetlier we are to be deceived into thinking that a ~
supplemented by pictures and pictures by words To read the
Imagines that way is to model it on the example of the illustrated ~ shybook The logic of the text is in fact closer once again to that of
Derridas supplement What words lack (because they are
words characters on the page marks without light) images can hJluinaJvt with a presence which is based on that lack which grows fro~l it
and turns it into light What images lack (because they are
in time mere pigments on a surf~lce threads on a loom) words Gill
sugply with narration and movement This strange hallueinatoy
power of ecphrasis calls on the capaei~ies of words and I~ to
describe the world but goes beyond their several powers into a
~ _ moment when Look becomes the only appropriate -- ~ ~L
response The exclamation directs the reader not towards the text J t or its Image but past them both into another space where presence )f
~vo to 11 th 0 ooce (gl hdoS tooeh t) fiJtJ - Yet compared with Ovicl (or Vehizquez) philostratlls text is (
clearly self-mocking and self-defeating Its lines move Ollt into all ~ the negative ecpilrastic spaces where the enanIeia of Iookmiddot j
NORMAN BHYlgtON
exactly unfortilcoming Instead of Aracillle the spider instead of the loves of the gods in tapestry an insect meal Oil a web
Accompanying the project of inciting the reader to envision is
Philostratus awareness that with every ecphrasis at some point
the lines and strokes always separate and unravel The text presents
itself as hollowed out by its own rhetorical self-awareness and as
haunted by an inescapably secondary or belated relation to
pictures In the Proem the author dramatises himself as a painter
mangul
Now the story of the men who have mastery in the sciellce of painting and the states and kings that have been passiolltltely devoted to it has been told by others writers Ilotably Aristodemus of Carla whom I
visited for four years In orcler to study paintinf 1n the present discussions however we propose to describe examples of painting in the form of addresses which have been composed for the young 24
Four years of study with Aristodemus have led not to a career in
painting but only in criticism In the scenography of the text
Philostratus is always old and lesser than the young The son of
his host must summon him before he speaks SpJtially he is at the
perimeter beyond the city walls a Greek wandering in Italy
Secondary in relation to painting his pictures are also belated in
time not the work of men who have won mastery in the science
of painting discussed by Pliny but of painters who are never in
fact given names
G- lc o this negative dinlension of the Ima(inegt Lehmann appears
1vt tgt emarkably insensitive Jn his hands the Imagilles are tt come
alive he will infuse them with his own visionary energy~~ resurrecting the fragments of the text into a luminous stoa whose
every corner he can visualise His work with the blta(illes is in a
sense part of the Pompeian tradition which from Winckelmann
to l3ulwer-Lytton to Ilollywood aims to coiJre ivil~ flesh from
the ashes In terms of its own rhetoric Lehmanns is a heroic reading The example of the Irrcltlt Goerhe2f tTllirlp hi274
bull vJ ~_ _
PHILOSTRATLJS AND THE IMAGINARY MI~I
enterprise26
Filling out what remained only tentative in Goethes
essay he perceives an order in the Imagines which not even their
author realised The Imagines have to be wrested from philoshy
stratlls hands Philostratus misreads the mountains of Thes~ly as
mountains of Rhodes Philostratus takes no advantage of these connections and does not mention them27 Although
Philostratus was perfectly able to see immediately many of the
implications of single pictures he did not discuss the cyclic idea
He was not interested in it2R As Lehmanns analysis gains
momentum Philostratus tends to get referred to as thelcctUle~ Like many orators and letter writers and teachers before and after
him he decided to pllblish these lectures as a model of his
tecllllillue and style in handling such a task 29 He paraphrased
rather than described the paintings and pointed out the emotional
values and psychological associations ofeach picture His emphasis
in this collrse ill the appreciation (Ifart was one-sided as flax heen tlwl
elery professor (~f tlzis kind after Ilim (emphases added) ~o
Lehmann himself is not of course a lecturer or professor of this kind
If Philostratus mocks his own secondariness Lehmann expels
secondariness from his text in tbe person of the outmoded
professor who only appreciates and who cannot see what
Lehmann sees the hyper-realistic image of a gallery with all its
rooms envisioned simultaneously and in detail But these abject
personifications the lectlirer and the professor arc not the
bearers of anxiety in his reading or its only scapegoats The
Imapnes need to be reconstructed Lehmann maintains because
without them the third century is the dark century in the history
of ancient painting the era ofa great crisis ofancient art in which
the foundations for the development of later western art were
bid 11 Here are Lehmanns words for the threat his reconstruction is to dispel
In a period lor which a lower-middle-class tomb in Rome like that of the Amelii is used as a cornerstone [or the history of palntin) and Ir which the discovery of the frescoes of a Jewish synagogue in Mesopotamia tends to revolutionize the entire picture of the historv of lnrn
NOH~lAN BRYSON
Is it too much to find in these words a threat to a cherished image
of antiquity an image that must be protected
Art history emerges here in one of its dubious heroising guises
as the custodian of culture working against a background of crisis
and collapse Quite naturally the custodians must live in a great
house resplendent with all the marbles favoured by luxury
but particularly splendid by reason of the panel-paintings set in
the walls The force required to protect the custodians is that of
museum circa 1941 It is a modernist exhibition space
stripped down diagrammatic programmatic yet still (at the end
of the reconstruction) conceived as a house of the great with
dining-chambers for the four seasons Better than most museums
with their difficult diplomatic balance between the needs of
scholars and of patrons it is wholly designed by the art historian
The scholarship that builds this space is to judge by the footnotes
an exclusively German affair And the account endorses the
protocols of a certain strand in the German art history of its time
We shall always regret where fi)nllal problems are concerned the
limitations of a description which aimed not to descrile but to
interpret what the audience saw (emphases added) Painting is to
be approached formally not hermeneutically and interpretation
now a negative term is to be confined to an outpost of
iconography the identification of subjects and programme cycles
Lehmanns own hermeneutic operation presents itself as
opposite of interpretive work It proceeds by excluding lt111 those
images which appear to Lehmann to be editorial additions grafted
01 to the main text supposedly anomalous products of writing and
publication mere word-pictures un backed by actual referents It
prunes away the rhetorical elaborations of the lecn1rer and
bypasses the pictures themselves in order to reach th~ solid
masonry behind them as though representation itself verbal or
pictorial were a barrier to be torn dowH This process is presented
as a series of purifications The text contaminated for publication
is returned to its pristine state The visual field is purged of its
verbal dimension in a double movement from text In architecture
and from arl criticism to archaeology Antiquitys dark age is
banished Its whuralmainstrcam is protected against distortion by
-- - --~-
PHI I 0 S T RAT l SAN Il THE r M A (] N 1 H Y I S I I
inferior and marginlt11 groups Art history triumphs over art
appreciation The end product of these procedurts is the vision of
a purified architectural form whose authority is confirmed by a
tradition of national scholarship and national culture exiled to
America and written up in English yet still in direct contact with
the author of Phiostrats gemalde and with the Graeco-Homan past
Through rhetorical operations such as these Lehmanns
ecplrrasis becomes in a sense a tecitni(lue of the subject It is surely
much more than an archaeological reconstruction Like Auerbad~s Mimesis written in Istanbtll during World War II it mobilises the
energies of cultural resistance to its own dark century It invsts
those energies in an incandescent visualisation that configures the
beleaguered subject as a unified building I t would I think be
wrong to find fault with Lehmanns reading at the level on which
it appears to operate of slellth-like deduction and rationality
Expelled by the texts rational procedures rhetoric returns as
texts unconscious At this buried or subterranean level the
reading actually moves much closer into the Imagines than it is
able to admit Philostratus himself presents the art of painting not
as a copy of the world but ltIS in ternalisation of the world In 19 warns his audience not to be impressed by a works mimetic
realism ill that case he says we should praise an insignificant
feature of the painting and one that has solely to do with imitation
(mimesis) but we shollid nOI be praising its intelligence or
sense of decorum it shows though these I believe are the most
important elements of art l~ lust as painting shows the world as
it has already passed into the subjectivity of the painter so the
beholder should not dwell 011 the external matter of mimesis but
internalise the image drawing it inside the subject On their own
the audience can see pictures and judge mimesis perfectly well
the audience do not yet know are the techniques for
absorbing the pictures into the mind It is precisely
in this assimilation of pictures to subjectivity that the audience has come to hear Philostratus speak
It is in this aspect of internalisation that the Imafiines revcJ rhetoric itself as a techllolov Of elicnlin t1egt If T-_ r
1IIMN BRYSON
of the Ad Herenniuflt names memoria as the fourth part of
rhetoric 34 In order to memorise a lengthy speech the orator
should visualise the successive topics of his discourse as images
arranged in consecutive places within architectural space In the
words of Frances Yates who is that mlfi moving slowly in
lonely building stopping at intervals with an intent face He is a
rhetoric student forming a set of memory loci35 Architectures
role in rhetoric is as the supplier of milieux within which intense
visualisations are to occurUl As Cicero says the images should be
active sharply defined and unusual having the power of speedily
encountering and penetrating the psyche (quae oCCflrrere celerishy
terque percutere animum possim)37 The speech unfolds as
rhetorician walks in his mind past walls each memory-place hung
with a vivid image through rooms doorways stairways
porticoes terraces
The first notion is placed as it were ill the ()recourt the second let us say in the atrium lhe remainder are placed in order round the impluvium and committed not only to bedrooms and parlours but even to statues and the like3R
The stability and dependability of this internal architecture is vital
for the control of the self over its material To forget the existence
of a particular room is to leave out a whole stage of the argument
to lTIisremember the sequence of images is to garble the
presentation of the case
places are chosen and marked om with the utmost possible vlriety as a spacious house divided into a number of rooms Every thinK of note therein is diligently imprinted on the mind in order that thongl n~ay be able to fun through all the parts without let or hindrance The filst task is to secure that there shall be no difficulty in funning through these for that memory must be most firmly fixed which helps another memory all
Here architecture not only stands for the control of the self it is
the actual material means by which the self exercises its control
over its words and its world
If Lehmanns unitary and massively stable architecture stands ~1 _1 _~ bullbull l J ~
~ PHILOSTRATUS AND THE IMA((NARY MlISEU~1
c~) (~~) ( 0 ~ ~
-~ ----~
hI 34
1 reading rejoins Philostratus rhetoric as an operation whose means
is imaginary buildings and whose goal is mastery over self and
over representation Ecphrasis here is a technique for consolidating
the subject in terms of personal and professional control While on
the surface of his text Lehmann disavows hermeneutic art history
and expels the lecturer at other levels of his text Lehmann is
Philostratus shadow-partner or secret sharer Lehmanns entry
into the culture of late antiquity is through a shape-shifting in
which he performs the architectural ars memorativa of a thirdshy
century orator
Yet he does so in terms very different from those supplied in the
Imagines The kind of subject proposed and assllmed by 9
Philostratus text is much less driven by the urge towards unitary
self-possession The Imagines subject exists in a universe where
things images and words may frequently converge but do not
consistently fuse together ill the ardour of imaginary vision The
descriptions show the subject in transit across the interstices where
world pictures and language overlap Especially interesting 10
Philostratus are the hybrid or chiasmic zones where dillerent
registers cross over (fig 34)
Let us return for the last time to Looms Penelopes loom
exists at the place where images and the things of the world cross
over The loom is a thing that makes images yet we do not see the
images it makes only the things - warp threads shuttle it
works with Again when the weavers travel across the web or eat
their squirming prey they are seen as living moving creatures
hill at thl sme time the reader knows they are onlv a static nictllrf -j
--
OIlMAN BRYSON
i(
Elsewhere the text moves to the place where the things of the
world cross over into words The author tells us that the spiders
cables are almost too tine to discern What brings them into view
are in fact Hesiods lines about spiders destending and astending
their threads The word makes the thing exist Or a single word in
Greek -- arachnc is able to generate two utterly different beings
spiders and the weaver who challenged Minerva The characters of
Looms are so to speak engendered by an ecphrastic pun Words
and things change pilCes At other times the text crosses the place
where words and image blend Homers text turns into a picture
then back again into Homers words The line between what is
verbal and visual cannot be drawn4o
The subject of the Imagines is in constant motion and dispersal
across this complex terrain qf wprld jmilg ltlAd texr When the
outward pictures enter the subject and are assimilated to the seWs
interior they scatter across an intricately divided and Auid space
The images of Philostratus exist as r~fractiollS in a multishy
dimensional space in which a variety of voices none of them
original blend and clash 41 The subject who performs this
internalisation is in perpetual motion The moments when at the
philostratian Look the various registers join in visionary
fusion do not last long Almost at once the visions separate out
into their component strands unravelling as fast as they came
together And they lead on to the next image - more than sixty
times The unravelling of one image clears the space for the
coming together of the next one Or better the unravelling of
each image calls into being summons the next It is in that
perpetual Penelope-like emergence and falling away of images
that the subject is spun by the text Not as a central storehp~se or
gallery more a~ a motion or desire
Lehmanns subject is in a sense the opposite of thiJ In
Lehmanns case internalising philostralUs text means seeking a
means to arrest the motions of the text and to tapture and
immobilise its energies in a final culminating form Into the
stability of the huilding that is to end the text as motion and desire
are poured all the authors ligures for the command of the subject
massive masonry the prestige of the museum purified form
_ --- ----
PHILOSTRATUS AND THE IMAGINAIY M(SEI
Goethe national culture ethnic centrality profcssionlIisll1 posishy
tive knowledge Which should make Lehmann Philostratus most
inappropriate reader were it not for the brilliance and the yearning of his own visualisation
Among other things Lehmanns reading exemplifies some of
the paradoxes inherent in the tradition of positivist scholarship to
which it belongs It is this aspect that raises his reconstruction
above the category of historiGl1 oddity to adumbrate some of the
vicissitudes of positive knowledfe in more general terms First
Lehmanns relation to the literary to textuality and intenextualitx
is remarkably strained and contradictory The architectural ord~r he proposes for the Imagines is itselfbibliograplllc Lehmann needs
texts 10 enable his reconstruction to take place in order to build
his version of Philostratus villa he must resort to the library what
he says for instance concerning the typology of rooms their
orientation and relation to the seasons is directly dependent on
Vitruvius Yet at the same time his analysis mllst bypass textuality
in order to dissolve the texts into architectural form Necessary at
certain moments of the analysis at others textuality becomes an
obstacle to be scornfully removed Inherently untrustworthy
beside the actuality (the positivism) of the archaeological find texts are aligned in his interpretation with ideas of parasitism and
mediocrity figured here by the lecturer or professor The
reading works both to banish textual corruption completely
(which cannot easily show up ill the analysi~ since hiatuses in the
text arc translated at once into architectural syntax) and to build
the necessity for textual wrruption into his case (as when
Lehmann axes the last eight descriptions as later additions )
Textuality features in this mode of analysis primarily under tlte
sign of repression Where it is able to grow transparent before the
three-dimensional architectural and archaeological order it can be
admitted Where textuality fails to become translucent hcfilfe
reference it must be expelled even if the effort to do so becomes
massive involving the whole battery of figures for the command of th~ sui)ject
Secondly this ef1ort to repress textuality runs counter to many
of the most conspicuous features of Philostratllt PIh So
tgtnHMAN BRYSON
2X2
writing especially its interest in exploring the negative ecphrastic
spaces in which the reader so far from experiencing a dissolution
of writing before the luminous referellt (tlte philostratian
Look ) apprehends the text as a sophisticated web of allusions
parodies puns and tonal plays Lehmanns quest for the stable
masonry of the referent seems altogether blind to the many ways
in which philostratus writing plays to the wplzia of the reader as
one who can see bizarre connections who can understand hidden
narrativcs within imagery (A rachne Mincrva) wilD can
exercise the visual eqllivalent of the elaborate verbal dexterity that
characterises Hellenistic poetry When philostratus says that the
web the spiders make is exceedingly fine (k)perleIIOS) he is
doing more dlan asking liS to visualise something hard to see he
is using a key term from Hellenistic poetics eplOs which means
witty fint clever small-scale sophisticated and doing
so as an invitation or a warning to the reader that his own writing
too is all of these things It is a warning that Lehmann perhaps
wisely does not heed for once ecphrasis is thought of as a form
writing that involves much mort than a simple visualisation of
a text it leaves behind the one certainty that ecphrasis seemed to
hold out to the archaeologist - its promise of presence of
resurrection and becomes something else a mode of writing
whose complexity we are perhaps only beginning to discern and
in relation to which tlie idea of visualisation begins to appear as a
simplification at best
Finally the scrupulous rationality of Lehmanns interpretive
method with its emphasis on what can be deduced and
demonstrated as positive knowledge and as archilectural form
renders it strangely unaware of its own aspect of tellIality of the
ways in which it is itself a working wilh words in whityen the words
carry more associations motivations and effect than the writer is
able to hear or control Working within a highly instrumental and
reduced picture-theory of language Lehmanns analysis radically
underestimates the capacity of words to exceed their allotted
functions of argumentation demonstration and proof Opening
on to other investments and other scenes tban that simply of
archaeology and reconstruction Lehmanns text speaks its own
PllILOSTRATS AND THE IMAGINAHY MliS
uncollscious and it is in that energetic and overdetermined
underside of his text that his deepest engagement with Philostratus
may be found What he writes is perhaps the dream-work of
positivism not the forensics of archaeology but its own buried poetics 42
~
l ltJTES TO PAGES 244--61
O On Pausanils see Frazer (1898) Heer (1979) Jacob (1980)
Habich 1 (1985) and Elsner (1992)
I These include discussions of the wild satyrs of the islands 1235-)
the Ethiopians I334- the Ionian Greeks 722-51) the
marvellous animals collected in Rome 9211-2 the islands of
Sardinia and Corsica 10171-13
32 See Elsner (1992) 17--20
33 See Frazer (1898) xiv compare other second-century CE descripshy
tions of ruins such as Dio Chrysostom on Thebes Oratio 7
Plutarch De ~rcctu oracuorum 8 Lucian Diaog 11I0rt 272
34 This chapter began as a paper on Herodotus pyramids delivered to
Paul Cartledges Ancient History Seminar in Cambridge in 1989 I
wish to thank him John Henderson Jamie Masters and the Editors
of this volume for their comments on earlier drafts My deepest debt
is to Joan Pau Rubies y Mirabet with whom I have fi)r several years
discussed the problems of travel travel-writing and identity This
chapter is dedicated to him
CHApTEH EIGHT PHlLOSTRATliS AND Tin IMA(INARY
MUSEUM
1 English translations are taken from the Loeb edition edited by
T E Page E Capps and W H D Rouse (London and New
York193 1)
2 For the history of the debate see the editions of Jacobs and Welcker
(1825) Kayser (1844) Benndorf and Schenkel (1893) and
Steinmann (1914)
3 Lehmann (1941)
4 The essay is conveniently to be f()Und in vo XXVI of Cottas
standard edition (1868) pp 276fT
Lehmann (1941) 21-4
6 Obviously he describes pictures that were topoglllttphically united
but without regard to the ideological and (JrluaJ rda~m which had
dictated their combination Lehmann (1941) 20
7 Indeed the only explanation of the relationships and the lack of
order is that philostratus saw real pictures which were to a certain
extent arranged on the upper and lower parts of walls Lehmann
(1941) 20
8 Lehmann (1941) 31-3
9 Lehmann (1941) 31-3
NOTES TO P(I-S 2()2
10 [n fact the lmalfines do not supply indications concerning the
dimensions of any particular work
II [t should also be noted that Lehmanns groupings occasionally
require him to rewrite the given titles of pictures
11 These last eight pictures of the second book show a remarkable
absence of any stich relation and connection as we have found
everywhere else Lehmann (1941) 37
13 Lehmann (1941) 39-40
14 The image of weaving is frequently used of writing see for
example Catullus ()45ofr in which the marriage of Peleus and
Thetis is covered with a estis variata figuris pestit decorata
jiguris where filfura is also a literary term for Catullus (wn
rhetoric Perhaps the crucial sites of configuring language image
and weaving are words such as ypaqgteurolv grapIein which means
writedraw design (in thread)
I ~ Worfrs an1 Days 777
16 The presence of Arachne in Looms has been argued since the
Renaissance See for example the gloss on Les Etoiles in Blaise
de Vigeneres edition of 1610 514 Lehmann (1941) 39 also
suggests that the two pictures (227 and 218) both refer to the
Arachne story
17 Ovid Met 65~-8
18 Minerva depicts Rhodope and Ilaemus who dared to cal
themselves gods now turned to mountains the Pygmaean queen
who challenged Juno now turned into a crane Antigone turned
by the angered Juno into a stork Cinyras whose daughters are turned to stone
19 Arachnes tapestry shows Europa abducted by the bull Asterie
carried off by the eagle Leda pursued by the swan Jllpiter
disguised as Amphitryon Danae
20 Met 6140--4
21 Barkan (1986) 4
22 Met 663--6
23 227 1~-19
24 lmaxiner Proem
25 Lehmann (1941) 16
26 In the first paragraph of Lehmanns article Goethe is found to be
disappointed by Pompeii and Herculaneum mere Middletowns as
GoetheLehmann put it from whose limited atmosphere they 112
NOTES TO IAUES 27~-83
turn away towards the Imagines Heference to Goethe recur
at several points in the essay Strangely enough no-one with the
exception of Goethe has ever called attention to the problem of the
general order of the paintings in the two books of philostratus
(19) Yet Goethes rearrangement of the Imapnes is also as
Lehmann put it cavalier his own essay lJl1ilds more sysshy
tematically on Goethes
27 Lehmann (1941) 2S
28 Lehmann (1941) 30
29 Lehmann (1941) 41-2
30 Lehmann (1941) 41
31 Lehmann (1941) 17-18
32 Lehmann (1941) 17middot
33 Imagines 19 18-22 1 have modified the Locb translation
here
34 In Ad Herelfiun the five parts of rhetoric are
eloculio memoria pmllUllialio
3) Yates (1966) 8
36 On architectures relation to the art of memory see the discussion
of Elsner (forthcoming) chapter 2 section v
37 Ad HerenniulII 2873)8 cited by Yates (1966) 18
38 Quimilian inH orat 11220 cited by Yates (1966) 22
39 Quintilian Inst oral 11218 cited by Yates (1966) 22
40 The diagram (Iig 34) is not satisfactory for instance its lines
fixity when the whole point is to suggest fluidity and continuum
But 1hope the reader will follow at least the diagrams gist that the
illlaNille constantly shuttles between words il1la~es and thin~s
Area (5) is that of merger between things and images (6) is the
hybrid area ofwordsubjects (7) is the area of blur between word
and image perhaps the principal ecphrastic space~ he space of the
wurd graphein r 41 Barthes (1977) 145-6
42 1am grateful to the members of the Laurcncc Seminar held in the
Department of Classics at Cambridge in May 1991 ltJr their help in
formulating the ideas presented in this essay and particularly to
Simon Goldhill jas Elsner and Stephen Bann for their very
welcome observations and
List of works cited
For abbreviations see pp xi--xiii
Adler J and Ernst U (1988) Text als Figur 11welle Poesie 101 der
Antike gtis rur Moderne Weinheim
Alpers S (1983) The Art ofDescrihlilg Chicago
Amyx D A (1988) Corinthian Vase Painting orrIe Arclaic Period The
Study of Corinthian Vases Berkeley
Arnheim R (1988) The Poet at rile Center A )tudl ofCompo siti 011 in the
Visual Artr Berkeley
Arnott P (1962) Greek Scellic COlventoils ill til Fijth Celllu~) BC
Oxford
(1989) Puhlic and Performance ill the Greek Theater London
Arnott W G (1987) The Stream and the Gold Two notes 011
Theocritus in Filologia e forme letterarie studi (1fimi a F Della
Corte vol I U rhino
Arthur [Katl] M (1975) Hurtides phoenislae and the Plitics
Diss Yale University
(1977) The curse of civilizatioll the choral odes of the PllOemu-ae
HSCP 81 163-8
Ashmole B (1972) Architect and Sculptor in Classical Greece London
Ashmole B and Yalouris N (1967) Olympia The Sculptures of the
Temple of Zeus London
Baladit H (1980) La Pilopollnese de Strahon Paris
-if Bann s (1989) The True Vine on Visual Representanim ald tllet
- lf7estern Tradition Cambridge -J Barber E J w (1990) Prellistone Textiles the Deleopmellt (Clotll ill
the Neolithic and Brone Ages Princctoll
(1992) The peplos of Athelia in Goddess and Polis tILl PaIlGtIz((c
ii () 1 [ A N B 1 Y SON
singular risks of uncurtailability Once a common feature such as
love is unleashed it is hard to see what story may not one way
or another be subsumed into the resulting series Similarly once
the idea of chronological series cOllies into play it becomes in
principle possible to order all sixty-odd descriptions into overshy
lapping temporal groups i3ut the potential of both metaphor and
metonymy for unlimited expansion across the whole corpus of the
imagines is held in check by the spatial boundaries of dado and
cornice window and door terrace and swircase Architecture
emerges as the containment and pacification of textual energies
which without that binding inAuence from matter fixed in space
would soon run across the text from end to end
What governs both metaphor and metonymy is another figure
visualisation The text as a whole is envisioned as a luxurious
Neapolitan building This response to the imagines is Lehmanns
distinctive ecphrastic operation H is work wi th rhilostratus text
results in a crossing from text to image Lehmann reacts to each
round of difiiculty within the imagines by creating a new building
feature First the room whose walls soon present dadoes cornices
and doorways they are lit by windows of varying size and
position the rooms are tiered as the terraces of a stoa finally like
any good architect Lehmann considers his building in relation to
the seasons and the orientation of the site He is faced with a text
filled with hiatuses and inconsistencies Under pressure from the
texts internal stress lines he produces step by step an architecture
of containment Vhat emerges within the text as difficulty and
disruption is projected in the visual domain as plenitude and unity
The texts moments of incoherence and disruption produce an
architecture of massive and stable blocks i
It is in this doubling of the broken text as an IInbrokeljimage
rather than in his deductive reasoning that Lehmann enacts a
reading of the imagines which I want to suggest is entirely
sensitive to the contours and topology of rhilostratlls writing At
the same time this sensitivity is consigned by Lehmann to the
unconscious of this text To help locate that other submerged
reading of the imagilles one can begin by noticing that successflll
though Lehmann finds his own analysis to be by his own
lt -Aj-
PlIlLOSTIATlS ANIl TilE IMA([NAHY ~[IS I
admission there remains a grollp of pictures that fall qllitl olltside
the boundary of his analysis Beviewing his work from its end
Lehmann reckons that he has been able to account for all thirty-six
sections of book I and the first twenty-six of book 2 Yet eight
miscellaneous cases remain 12 Accordingly Lehmann expels the
entire group from his definition of the imagines He concilldes
that lacking in the relations he has been proposing the peccant
images are in fact later additions grafted on either before the real
publication or else for a second edition 13 nearing ill mind what
Denmiddotida calls the logic of the sllpplement by pressing on what
Lehmann rejects one may come to see the principles of lxclusiotJ
by which his interpretation is structured That supplement to the
imagines so far from standing beyond its pale may delineate that
which Lehmanns reading must constantly repress in order to
sustain itself and as part of this what may be the features of the
imagines which are the hardest for commentary in general to
reach
One would wish to examine in detail all eight supplementary
items (227-234) Here just the first two in the group will be
considered and especially 228 Looms The selection is in some
sense justified by Lehmann own gesture ofexcusion His system
has been working well it has brollght order to all the previous
pictures in both books however bizarre or dislocated they may
have initially appeared Yet after Xenia 2 (at 226) the system
breaks down entirely In spatial terms Lehmanns (re)construction
of the stoa is now complete With the placing of the second still
life Philostratus writes The End The reader passes out of the
portico - out of Lehmanns text-as-architecture --- into th( outer
disorderly world Interestingly the bce which the world presents
is exactly that of a broken building filled with debris
Now Ih~ doorway belonglt to a house by no means prosperolls you will say it has been abandoned by its master and the court wilhin seems deserted nor do the columns still support its roof for they have set tied and collapsed No it is inhabited by spiders only ltll Ihis crelIure loves to weave its web in quiet ( Looms 21-6)
Lehmanns inspired solution to his texts difiiculties - its dOlIbling
as a perfect building ensemble - confronts at its exit the spectacle
(e 204
IOIMAN BRYSON
of a ruination at once textual and architectural What the ti~ure of
the building had particularly enabled was the transfer of all
problems of the text back into the space supposed to stand behind
it the terraced spaces of the villa The moment when Lehmann
declares the true text of Imagines to have ended is that of an
edifice collapsing
Lehmanns entire reading turns on a suppressioll of the texts
being as written representation his gradual construction of the
stoa with all of its loms mapped and its piuures securely placed
in tiers within chambers depends on a reading of the Imagines in
terms of transparency before a pre-existing referent Concerning
philostratus work within language and of the pictures work with
their represented scenes Lehmanns account says nothing In
pointing this out the aim is not in fact to criticise or fault
Lehmanns interpretation One of the principal desires of the
descriptions in the Imagines is exactly to cease being words on the
page to come alive in the fltgtrIn of an imaJe to pass from the
opacity of words to the luminous scenes behind the words
Frecluently met with in the Imaiines is a textual moment at
the description at last feels its own language to dissolve into the
of the scene it opens upon This is the philostratian Look
Now the painter has been successful in these respects also that he has wrought the spider itself ill so painstaking a fashioll has matched its spots with fidelity to nature and has painted its repulsive fuzzy surface and its savage nature - all this is the mark of a good craftsman and one skilled in depicting the truth For look here is a cord I)rming a squaPe ( Looms 3 I
The painters attention to truth has realised the spider in all its
repulsive detail Having traced that fidelity to nature wittla pen
no less observant than the painters Philostratus earns the riglhfor
his OWl] words also to be recognised as fully backed by truth After
his exclaimed For look the description at last rcaches the
moment of lift-off
Three related labours come together in a single disclosure and
presence the work of rhe spicier building its web strand
strand the work of the painter tracing each of the threads stroke ( stroke the work of the ecphrasist tracing the two previous sets
_--- _14_-
PHILOSTRATliS AND THE IMAGINARY MISF11
line by line 14 At look the words the paint and the spiders web
merge in a moment of visionary presence Out of the diverse tissue
woven by the spider the painter and the writer comes a living
image the weavers travel across [their webs J drawing tight such
of the threads as have become loose In this visionary space there
is no separating the individual strands of image text or web The
ecphrasis itself draws tight any threads that come away pulling
them back into the unitary ima~e that is at the same time a web a
pitture and a text With part of itself the ecphrasis seeks to shed
the opacities it possesses by virtue of being made of words
only an arbitrary connection to things It seeks to fuse the words
into something beyond wurds an image a picture and then to
fuse that picture with what is real in a web tltat is no longer lexical
but pictorial and no longer pictorial but alive
Lehmanns desire for a text of the Imafiines that will dissolve
first into the pictures of a collection and then into the architectural
ensemble that hOllses them is ullcannily true to this aspect of philostratus text Yet it embodies only part of that texts energies
Though in the passage just quoted the separate re~isters of
weaving of picturing and of describing all come together ill
radiant fusion at Philostraws For look elsewhere the Looms
description presents these registers as separable separate and out
of phase
In fact Looms opens with a picture of - representation The
first and seemingly gratui tous pictu re in the description shows
Penelopes loom complete with its shuttle warp threads and lint
What opens the ecphrasis then is an image describing the
fabrication of images the representational means by which
Penelope creates iJer tapestry The image is made (and with
Penelope unmade) within the apparatus of representation The
ecphrasis begins by emphasising representation not as something
which vanishes before its referent but which stays stubbornly
visible and in place as material technique
Similarly Looms foregrounds Its own apparatus of repshy
resentation language Penelope is presented not only as tlte site of
work with images but of work with words She is the creation of Homer and it is with Hnmpr linEC th nhlwltr 111 L_
NIlHMAN EllYSON
1( X
own picture of herbull Penelope
Homer melts the snow with them This is a
reference to Ocyssey 192deg4 bull Her tears flowed and her face melted
as the snow melts on the lofty mountains and as it melts the
streams of the rivers flow full so her fair cheeks melted as they
In the same way philostratus makes a point of telling his
reader that the fine threads on which the spiders drop from the roof
and then climb up again are taken froll] llesiod 15 At these points
in the text the words exactly t~lil to dissolve either into pictures
(Penelope) or into things (spiders) They remain the embedded
lines of Homer and of Hesiod woven into a text which refuses to
assimilate them as its own or to dissolve them before a referent in
pictures or in the world
Just as the text insists on its own opacities its ineradicable
wordiness so it points to ways in which nature itself will not be
absorbed into the supposedly higher realm of human represenshy
tation and culture The place of the spiders is presented as the
annihilation of human work ~here roofs and columns
the spiders thrive Human observers may compare the
Penelupe and apply to their webs the terms of or
geometric measurement (lelraliaslOs) but the webs take over
where human creation comes to its end Interestingly the spiders
in Looms are imagined not only as they appear in the picture
description also includes a scene which exceeds that picture
bull the flat [nests] are good to summer in and the hollow sorl is in winter This is a aside a
to other times and the picture but
within it The that moment
race across their web it does not shd~ them in
other seasons when in summer spiders choose the ~~t webs
and in the winter the hollow ones Looms points to another life
of spiders which the scene in other words implies but does not
state to a world of ruins silences and spider-life that goes on
whether or not there are people around to see it Nature takes over
from culture culture in fact collapses its columns broken but
spiders silently persist away from the human labours of building
weaving painting and describing
------
PHILOSTRATliS AND TilE IMA(JNAHI ~ll1SI1
III
Against Lehmanns maps of the architectural referent one might
posit another topology of things pictures and words not as these
come together in the ensemble of a resurrected museum but as they
fail to connect in a fracture or ruin of representation The
magines work with three dil1erellt substances words things
and images With part Phiostratus- act ()t descriptio-n
middotwrks t~ blur these three in visionary merger (fIg )2)
(~ ~~ ~
(-) lp Fi~ J2
In the heat of this words turn into images or images into real things (4)middot But such excitement and
animation is only one of the Imagines many possibilities There
are others less ecstatic Words come unstuck from things they
hark back not to things in the world but to other words by
Homer or Hesiod (3) Or images pull away from the task of
representation they are shown as products of material technique
threads weft lint looms (J) Or the world pulls away from its
representation in art and language (2) the courtyard appears as
deserted abandoned by its master a place where the visual order
imposed by human cultivation collapses alld the primary
of human space - columlls roof shelter way to the openness of nature
I t is appropriate that Looms opens with
standing both for the capacity of art to provide marvellous
of the world and for the unravelling of art back into mere
and lint The ecphrasis is in tJct in continuous aeros all of the interstices between the world til word and Image
1 to 7 see also fig A t times ( For ) it seems I hal
~ ~)
(~
o H ~l A N B R Y SON
27C
art concealillt art mlkes the dead mailer of leLters and
brushslrokes corne alive BUl this is only one phase ill the
ecphrastic process Equally important are the momellts when the
ecphrasis fails when words revert to being words tapestries
revert to thread and architecture to rubble
One reason that Lehmanns reading banishes Looms from the
Imagines may perhaps be the descriptions eminent f~lilure instead
of giving way to a luminous and ostensible referent
enthusiasm that enables philostratus to say Look The spiders
and Lehmann to say Look The sma - Looms darkens the
picture making it a place of shadows dust and broken
architecture Spatially it figures itself as a ruined courtyard
Textually it traverses not only the place of ecphrastic excitement
where words turn into pictures and pictures turn into things but
all the negative ecphrastic spaces whcre words remain words or
form hybrids with pictures and pictures revert to thei I constituent
elements threads WII hering lint on a loom That philostratus
intends this cffect of netativity and intends it as a figure for his
own ecphrastic enterprise is confirmed by the pairing which
Looms (228) forms with its preceding picture bullThe birth of
Athena (227)
The link of course is Arachne 16 As Ovid tells the tale
Arachne is a human weaver who challenges the skill of the divine
weaver Minerva and is punished ltH Iter hubris when Minerva
turns her into a spider At the contest both welvers set lip their
looms
The web is bound upon the beam the reed separates tlw threads of the warp the woof is threaded through them by the sharp shuttles which their busy fingers ply and when shol through the threads ofdle warp the notched teeth of tilt hammering stay beats it into place l
I~
Minerva pictures the twelve heavenly gods 011 majestic thrones At
the four corners of her tapestry are set miniature scenes of
presumptuous mortals IS Arachne counters this imagery of the
gods punishing humans ()r hubris with scenes of the gods and
especially Jupiter19 violating human females Appalled by
Arachnes work Minerva hits her three times with a shuttle then
robs her of human form
PHI LOS T RAT J SAN D THE I MAG I N A It Y 1lH I
Fig 33
Forthwith her hair touched by the poison fell off and with it both nose and ears and the head shrank up her whole body also was small the slender lingers cling 10 her side as the rest was belly 20
For many interpreters of the Arachne fable the official moral
- a cautionary tale against hubris contains a second level a
of reflection upon the capacities and limitations of an For
Velazquez the competition concerns not only weavers but
painters At the rear of the inner stage in The Fable o( Arachne is
shown Titians painting The Rape of Europa and
presents his own craft in parallel to the art of weaving placed
somewhere perhaps between Arachne and Minerva between the
genre painting of the foreground and Titians history painting in
the middle distance (fig 33) III the reading of Leonard Barkan
this capacity of the Arachne topos to act as arts self-reflexive
shy
2~
OltMAN BRYSON
~~ 2
commentary on art is already present in Ovids text I t requires
no great leap of the imagination to see in Arachnes tapestry all the
elements of Ovids own poetry in the Metamorphoses Just as she
tells the stories of the loves of the gods and the metamorphoses of
their victims so does he 21 Like Velazquez Ovid positions his
own work somewhere between the disorderly profusion
metamorphoses that issue from Arachnes loom and
theologically correct carefully framed tapestries that come
the loom of Minerva
That philostratus intends Looms to unfold in the space of this
a number of details The Birth of
the first subject of Minervas tapestry immediately
precedes the text of Looms in philostratus gallery In Ovid the
contest of Arachne and Minerva is visualised as a spectrum of
iridescent colours
As when after a storm of rain the suns rays strike through and a rainbow with its huge curve stains the wide sky though a thousand different colours shine in it the eye cannot detect the change from each one to the next so appear the adjacent colours22
This is precisely the metaphor philostratus uses to describe the
armour of Athene as the goddess emerges fullv armed from
head of Zeus
As for the material of her panoply no-one could guess iI Ii)r as many as are the colours of the rainbow which changes its light now to one hue gt1d now to another so many are the colours of her armour 2
1
Taking Philostratus two descriptions in sequence one can say
that Looms applies to the competition between Minerva and
Arachne the figure of hathos It is a comic transformation orOvids
contest down-scaled with Penelope in the place of MinerW1
spiders in the place of Arachne
philostratus begins where Ovid left off with Arachnes
metamorphosis the rest was belly is expanded into the spiders
repulsive fuzzy surface and its savage nature and the spiders
grisly meaL Where Ovid uses the Arachne fable as a means to
comment on his own project in the MUal11ornwses niacin his
book somewhere between divine
-~
P II I L () S Tii A T USA N Il TilE J M A ( I N A H Y ~Il S Hmiddot
comically deflated retelling of the fable philostratus places his own
project the Imagines somewhere between the higher artists
(Homer Hesiod Ovid etc) and the beasts Ovid and
use the images of their own
the inverts the rhetoric in a comic
desublimation or parody
Let us touch again on the philostratian exclamation Lookmiddot
k fI
The moment when a picture seems to come alive is encountered
again and again in the 1m agiles In Xenia I philostratlls remark~
that the painted grapes are good to eat and full of winey juice
(r3 I) In Xenia 2 he invites the reader to reach out and take a loaf
from the painted basket (226) In Narcissus he says he cannot
real (123) At the core of the Imagines is the promise tl1at at
ments words
intense experience that
oth pictures and words It is not simply that words arc
tell whether a real bee has been deceived bv the painted Hower or
whetlier we are to be deceived into thinking that a ~
supplemented by pictures and pictures by words To read the
Imagines that way is to model it on the example of the illustrated ~ shybook The logic of the text is in fact closer once again to that of
Derridas supplement What words lack (because they are
words characters on the page marks without light) images can hJluinaJvt with a presence which is based on that lack which grows fro~l it
and turns it into light What images lack (because they are
in time mere pigments on a surf~lce threads on a loom) words Gill
sugply with narration and movement This strange hallueinatoy
power of ecphrasis calls on the capaei~ies of words and I~ to
describe the world but goes beyond their several powers into a
~ _ moment when Look becomes the only appropriate -- ~ ~L
response The exclamation directs the reader not towards the text J t or its Image but past them both into another space where presence )f
~vo to 11 th 0 ooce (gl hdoS tooeh t) fiJtJ - Yet compared with Ovicl (or Vehizquez) philostratlls text is (
clearly self-mocking and self-defeating Its lines move Ollt into all ~ the negative ecpilrastic spaces where the enanIeia of Iookmiddot j
NORMAN BHYlgtON
exactly unfortilcoming Instead of Aracillle the spider instead of the loves of the gods in tapestry an insect meal Oil a web
Accompanying the project of inciting the reader to envision is
Philostratus awareness that with every ecphrasis at some point
the lines and strokes always separate and unravel The text presents
itself as hollowed out by its own rhetorical self-awareness and as
haunted by an inescapably secondary or belated relation to
pictures In the Proem the author dramatises himself as a painter
mangul
Now the story of the men who have mastery in the sciellce of painting and the states and kings that have been passiolltltely devoted to it has been told by others writers Ilotably Aristodemus of Carla whom I
visited for four years In orcler to study paintinf 1n the present discussions however we propose to describe examples of painting in the form of addresses which have been composed for the young 24
Four years of study with Aristodemus have led not to a career in
painting but only in criticism In the scenography of the text
Philostratus is always old and lesser than the young The son of
his host must summon him before he speaks SpJtially he is at the
perimeter beyond the city walls a Greek wandering in Italy
Secondary in relation to painting his pictures are also belated in
time not the work of men who have won mastery in the science
of painting discussed by Pliny but of painters who are never in
fact given names
G- lc o this negative dinlension of the Ima(inegt Lehmann appears
1vt tgt emarkably insensitive Jn his hands the Imagilles are tt come
alive he will infuse them with his own visionary energy~~ resurrecting the fragments of the text into a luminous stoa whose
every corner he can visualise His work with the blta(illes is in a
sense part of the Pompeian tradition which from Winckelmann
to l3ulwer-Lytton to Ilollywood aims to coiJre ivil~ flesh from
the ashes In terms of its own rhetoric Lehmanns is a heroic reading The example of the Irrcltlt Goerhe2f tTllirlp hi274
bull vJ ~_ _
PHILOSTRATLJS AND THE IMAGINARY MI~I
enterprise26
Filling out what remained only tentative in Goethes
essay he perceives an order in the Imagines which not even their
author realised The Imagines have to be wrested from philoshy
stratlls hands Philostratus misreads the mountains of Thes~ly as
mountains of Rhodes Philostratus takes no advantage of these connections and does not mention them27 Although
Philostratus was perfectly able to see immediately many of the
implications of single pictures he did not discuss the cyclic idea
He was not interested in it2R As Lehmanns analysis gains
momentum Philostratus tends to get referred to as thelcctUle~ Like many orators and letter writers and teachers before and after
him he decided to pllblish these lectures as a model of his
tecllllillue and style in handling such a task 29 He paraphrased
rather than described the paintings and pointed out the emotional
values and psychological associations ofeach picture His emphasis
in this collrse ill the appreciation (Ifart was one-sided as flax heen tlwl
elery professor (~f tlzis kind after Ilim (emphases added) ~o
Lehmann himself is not of course a lecturer or professor of this kind
If Philostratus mocks his own secondariness Lehmann expels
secondariness from his text in tbe person of the outmoded
professor who only appreciates and who cannot see what
Lehmann sees the hyper-realistic image of a gallery with all its
rooms envisioned simultaneously and in detail But these abject
personifications the lectlirer and the professor arc not the
bearers of anxiety in his reading or its only scapegoats The
Imapnes need to be reconstructed Lehmann maintains because
without them the third century is the dark century in the history
of ancient painting the era ofa great crisis ofancient art in which
the foundations for the development of later western art were
bid 11 Here are Lehmanns words for the threat his reconstruction is to dispel
In a period lor which a lower-middle-class tomb in Rome like that of the Amelii is used as a cornerstone [or the history of palntin) and Ir which the discovery of the frescoes of a Jewish synagogue in Mesopotamia tends to revolutionize the entire picture of the historv of lnrn
NOH~lAN BRYSON
Is it too much to find in these words a threat to a cherished image
of antiquity an image that must be protected
Art history emerges here in one of its dubious heroising guises
as the custodian of culture working against a background of crisis
and collapse Quite naturally the custodians must live in a great
house resplendent with all the marbles favoured by luxury
but particularly splendid by reason of the panel-paintings set in
the walls The force required to protect the custodians is that of
museum circa 1941 It is a modernist exhibition space
stripped down diagrammatic programmatic yet still (at the end
of the reconstruction) conceived as a house of the great with
dining-chambers for the four seasons Better than most museums
with their difficult diplomatic balance between the needs of
scholars and of patrons it is wholly designed by the art historian
The scholarship that builds this space is to judge by the footnotes
an exclusively German affair And the account endorses the
protocols of a certain strand in the German art history of its time
We shall always regret where fi)nllal problems are concerned the
limitations of a description which aimed not to descrile but to
interpret what the audience saw (emphases added) Painting is to
be approached formally not hermeneutically and interpretation
now a negative term is to be confined to an outpost of
iconography the identification of subjects and programme cycles
Lehmanns own hermeneutic operation presents itself as
opposite of interpretive work It proceeds by excluding lt111 those
images which appear to Lehmann to be editorial additions grafted
01 to the main text supposedly anomalous products of writing and
publication mere word-pictures un backed by actual referents It
prunes away the rhetorical elaborations of the lecn1rer and
bypasses the pictures themselves in order to reach th~ solid
masonry behind them as though representation itself verbal or
pictorial were a barrier to be torn dowH This process is presented
as a series of purifications The text contaminated for publication
is returned to its pristine state The visual field is purged of its
verbal dimension in a double movement from text In architecture
and from arl criticism to archaeology Antiquitys dark age is
banished Its whuralmainstrcam is protected against distortion by
-- - --~-
PHI I 0 S T RAT l SAN Il THE r M A (] N 1 H Y I S I I
inferior and marginlt11 groups Art history triumphs over art
appreciation The end product of these procedurts is the vision of
a purified architectural form whose authority is confirmed by a
tradition of national scholarship and national culture exiled to
America and written up in English yet still in direct contact with
the author of Phiostrats gemalde and with the Graeco-Homan past
Through rhetorical operations such as these Lehmanns
ecplrrasis becomes in a sense a tecitni(lue of the subject It is surely
much more than an archaeological reconstruction Like Auerbad~s Mimesis written in Istanbtll during World War II it mobilises the
energies of cultural resistance to its own dark century It invsts
those energies in an incandescent visualisation that configures the
beleaguered subject as a unified building I t would I think be
wrong to find fault with Lehmanns reading at the level on which
it appears to operate of slellth-like deduction and rationality
Expelled by the texts rational procedures rhetoric returns as
texts unconscious At this buried or subterranean level the
reading actually moves much closer into the Imagines than it is
able to admit Philostratus himself presents the art of painting not
as a copy of the world but ltIS in ternalisation of the world In 19 warns his audience not to be impressed by a works mimetic
realism ill that case he says we should praise an insignificant
feature of the painting and one that has solely to do with imitation
(mimesis) but we shollid nOI be praising its intelligence or
sense of decorum it shows though these I believe are the most
important elements of art l~ lust as painting shows the world as
it has already passed into the subjectivity of the painter so the
beholder should not dwell 011 the external matter of mimesis but
internalise the image drawing it inside the subject On their own
the audience can see pictures and judge mimesis perfectly well
the audience do not yet know are the techniques for
absorbing the pictures into the mind It is precisely
in this assimilation of pictures to subjectivity that the audience has come to hear Philostratus speak
It is in this aspect of internalisation that the Imafiines revcJ rhetoric itself as a techllolov Of elicnlin t1egt If T-_ r
1IIMN BRYSON
of the Ad Herenniuflt names memoria as the fourth part of
rhetoric 34 In order to memorise a lengthy speech the orator
should visualise the successive topics of his discourse as images
arranged in consecutive places within architectural space In the
words of Frances Yates who is that mlfi moving slowly in
lonely building stopping at intervals with an intent face He is a
rhetoric student forming a set of memory loci35 Architectures
role in rhetoric is as the supplier of milieux within which intense
visualisations are to occurUl As Cicero says the images should be
active sharply defined and unusual having the power of speedily
encountering and penetrating the psyche (quae oCCflrrere celerishy
terque percutere animum possim)37 The speech unfolds as
rhetorician walks in his mind past walls each memory-place hung
with a vivid image through rooms doorways stairways
porticoes terraces
The first notion is placed as it were ill the ()recourt the second let us say in the atrium lhe remainder are placed in order round the impluvium and committed not only to bedrooms and parlours but even to statues and the like3R
The stability and dependability of this internal architecture is vital
for the control of the self over its material To forget the existence
of a particular room is to leave out a whole stage of the argument
to lTIisremember the sequence of images is to garble the
presentation of the case
places are chosen and marked om with the utmost possible vlriety as a spacious house divided into a number of rooms Every thinK of note therein is diligently imprinted on the mind in order that thongl n~ay be able to fun through all the parts without let or hindrance The filst task is to secure that there shall be no difficulty in funning through these for that memory must be most firmly fixed which helps another memory all
Here architecture not only stands for the control of the self it is
the actual material means by which the self exercises its control
over its words and its world
If Lehmanns unitary and massively stable architecture stands ~1 _1 _~ bullbull l J ~
~ PHILOSTRATUS AND THE IMA((NARY MlISEU~1
c~) (~~) ( 0 ~ ~
-~ ----~
hI 34
1 reading rejoins Philostratus rhetoric as an operation whose means
is imaginary buildings and whose goal is mastery over self and
over representation Ecphrasis here is a technique for consolidating
the subject in terms of personal and professional control While on
the surface of his text Lehmann disavows hermeneutic art history
and expels the lecturer at other levels of his text Lehmann is
Philostratus shadow-partner or secret sharer Lehmanns entry
into the culture of late antiquity is through a shape-shifting in
which he performs the architectural ars memorativa of a thirdshy
century orator
Yet he does so in terms very different from those supplied in the
Imagines The kind of subject proposed and assllmed by 9
Philostratus text is much less driven by the urge towards unitary
self-possession The Imagines subject exists in a universe where
things images and words may frequently converge but do not
consistently fuse together ill the ardour of imaginary vision The
descriptions show the subject in transit across the interstices where
world pictures and language overlap Especially interesting 10
Philostratus are the hybrid or chiasmic zones where dillerent
registers cross over (fig 34)
Let us return for the last time to Looms Penelopes loom
exists at the place where images and the things of the world cross
over The loom is a thing that makes images yet we do not see the
images it makes only the things - warp threads shuttle it
works with Again when the weavers travel across the web or eat
their squirming prey they are seen as living moving creatures
hill at thl sme time the reader knows they are onlv a static nictllrf -j
--
OIlMAN BRYSON
i(
Elsewhere the text moves to the place where the things of the
world cross over into words The author tells us that the spiders
cables are almost too tine to discern What brings them into view
are in fact Hesiods lines about spiders destending and astending
their threads The word makes the thing exist Or a single word in
Greek -- arachnc is able to generate two utterly different beings
spiders and the weaver who challenged Minerva The characters of
Looms are so to speak engendered by an ecphrastic pun Words
and things change pilCes At other times the text crosses the place
where words and image blend Homers text turns into a picture
then back again into Homers words The line between what is
verbal and visual cannot be drawn4o
The subject of the Imagines is in constant motion and dispersal
across this complex terrain qf wprld jmilg ltlAd texr When the
outward pictures enter the subject and are assimilated to the seWs
interior they scatter across an intricately divided and Auid space
The images of Philostratus exist as r~fractiollS in a multishy
dimensional space in which a variety of voices none of them
original blend and clash 41 The subject who performs this
internalisation is in perpetual motion The moments when at the
philostratian Look the various registers join in visionary
fusion do not last long Almost at once the visions separate out
into their component strands unravelling as fast as they came
together And they lead on to the next image - more than sixty
times The unravelling of one image clears the space for the
coming together of the next one Or better the unravelling of
each image calls into being summons the next It is in that
perpetual Penelope-like emergence and falling away of images
that the subject is spun by the text Not as a central storehp~se or
gallery more a~ a motion or desire
Lehmanns subject is in a sense the opposite of thiJ In
Lehmanns case internalising philostralUs text means seeking a
means to arrest the motions of the text and to tapture and
immobilise its energies in a final culminating form Into the
stability of the huilding that is to end the text as motion and desire
are poured all the authors ligures for the command of the subject
massive masonry the prestige of the museum purified form
_ --- ----
PHILOSTRATUS AND THE IMAGINAIY M(SEI
Goethe national culture ethnic centrality profcssionlIisll1 posishy
tive knowledge Which should make Lehmann Philostratus most
inappropriate reader were it not for the brilliance and the yearning of his own visualisation
Among other things Lehmanns reading exemplifies some of
the paradoxes inherent in the tradition of positivist scholarship to
which it belongs It is this aspect that raises his reconstruction
above the category of historiGl1 oddity to adumbrate some of the
vicissitudes of positive knowledfe in more general terms First
Lehmanns relation to the literary to textuality and intenextualitx
is remarkably strained and contradictory The architectural ord~r he proposes for the Imagines is itselfbibliograplllc Lehmann needs
texts 10 enable his reconstruction to take place in order to build
his version of Philostratus villa he must resort to the library what
he says for instance concerning the typology of rooms their
orientation and relation to the seasons is directly dependent on
Vitruvius Yet at the same time his analysis mllst bypass textuality
in order to dissolve the texts into architectural form Necessary at
certain moments of the analysis at others textuality becomes an
obstacle to be scornfully removed Inherently untrustworthy
beside the actuality (the positivism) of the archaeological find texts are aligned in his interpretation with ideas of parasitism and
mediocrity figured here by the lecturer or professor The
reading works both to banish textual corruption completely
(which cannot easily show up ill the analysi~ since hiatuses in the
text arc translated at once into architectural syntax) and to build
the necessity for textual wrruption into his case (as when
Lehmann axes the last eight descriptions as later additions )
Textuality features in this mode of analysis primarily under tlte
sign of repression Where it is able to grow transparent before the
three-dimensional architectural and archaeological order it can be
admitted Where textuality fails to become translucent hcfilfe
reference it must be expelled even if the effort to do so becomes
massive involving the whole battery of figures for the command of th~ sui)ject
Secondly this ef1ort to repress textuality runs counter to many
of the most conspicuous features of Philostratllt PIh So
tgtnHMAN BRYSON
2X2
writing especially its interest in exploring the negative ecphrastic
spaces in which the reader so far from experiencing a dissolution
of writing before the luminous referellt (tlte philostratian
Look ) apprehends the text as a sophisticated web of allusions
parodies puns and tonal plays Lehmanns quest for the stable
masonry of the referent seems altogether blind to the many ways
in which philostratus writing plays to the wplzia of the reader as
one who can see bizarre connections who can understand hidden
narrativcs within imagery (A rachne Mincrva) wilD can
exercise the visual eqllivalent of the elaborate verbal dexterity that
characterises Hellenistic poetry When philostratus says that the
web the spiders make is exceedingly fine (k)perleIIOS) he is
doing more dlan asking liS to visualise something hard to see he
is using a key term from Hellenistic poetics eplOs which means
witty fint clever small-scale sophisticated and doing
so as an invitation or a warning to the reader that his own writing
too is all of these things It is a warning that Lehmann perhaps
wisely does not heed for once ecphrasis is thought of as a form
writing that involves much mort than a simple visualisation of
a text it leaves behind the one certainty that ecphrasis seemed to
hold out to the archaeologist - its promise of presence of
resurrection and becomes something else a mode of writing
whose complexity we are perhaps only beginning to discern and
in relation to which tlie idea of visualisation begins to appear as a
simplification at best
Finally the scrupulous rationality of Lehmanns interpretive
method with its emphasis on what can be deduced and
demonstrated as positive knowledge and as archilectural form
renders it strangely unaware of its own aspect of tellIality of the
ways in which it is itself a working wilh words in whityen the words
carry more associations motivations and effect than the writer is
able to hear or control Working within a highly instrumental and
reduced picture-theory of language Lehmanns analysis radically
underestimates the capacity of words to exceed their allotted
functions of argumentation demonstration and proof Opening
on to other investments and other scenes tban that simply of
archaeology and reconstruction Lehmanns text speaks its own
PllILOSTRATS AND THE IMAGINAHY MliS
uncollscious and it is in that energetic and overdetermined
underside of his text that his deepest engagement with Philostratus
may be found What he writes is perhaps the dream-work of
positivism not the forensics of archaeology but its own buried poetics 42
~
l ltJTES TO PAGES 244--61
O On Pausanils see Frazer (1898) Heer (1979) Jacob (1980)
Habich 1 (1985) and Elsner (1992)
I These include discussions of the wild satyrs of the islands 1235-)
the Ethiopians I334- the Ionian Greeks 722-51) the
marvellous animals collected in Rome 9211-2 the islands of
Sardinia and Corsica 10171-13
32 See Elsner (1992) 17--20
33 See Frazer (1898) xiv compare other second-century CE descripshy
tions of ruins such as Dio Chrysostom on Thebes Oratio 7
Plutarch De ~rcctu oracuorum 8 Lucian Diaog 11I0rt 272
34 This chapter began as a paper on Herodotus pyramids delivered to
Paul Cartledges Ancient History Seminar in Cambridge in 1989 I
wish to thank him John Henderson Jamie Masters and the Editors
of this volume for their comments on earlier drafts My deepest debt
is to Joan Pau Rubies y Mirabet with whom I have fi)r several years
discussed the problems of travel travel-writing and identity This
chapter is dedicated to him
CHApTEH EIGHT PHlLOSTRATliS AND Tin IMA(INARY
MUSEUM
1 English translations are taken from the Loeb edition edited by
T E Page E Capps and W H D Rouse (London and New
York193 1)
2 For the history of the debate see the editions of Jacobs and Welcker
(1825) Kayser (1844) Benndorf and Schenkel (1893) and
Steinmann (1914)
3 Lehmann (1941)
4 The essay is conveniently to be f()Und in vo XXVI of Cottas
standard edition (1868) pp 276fT
Lehmann (1941) 21-4
6 Obviously he describes pictures that were topoglllttphically united
but without regard to the ideological and (JrluaJ rda~m which had
dictated their combination Lehmann (1941) 20
7 Indeed the only explanation of the relationships and the lack of
order is that philostratus saw real pictures which were to a certain
extent arranged on the upper and lower parts of walls Lehmann
(1941) 20
8 Lehmann (1941) 31-3
9 Lehmann (1941) 31-3
NOTES TO P(I-S 2()2
10 [n fact the lmalfines do not supply indications concerning the
dimensions of any particular work
II [t should also be noted that Lehmanns groupings occasionally
require him to rewrite the given titles of pictures
11 These last eight pictures of the second book show a remarkable
absence of any stich relation and connection as we have found
everywhere else Lehmann (1941) 37
13 Lehmann (1941) 39-40
14 The image of weaving is frequently used of writing see for
example Catullus ()45ofr in which the marriage of Peleus and
Thetis is covered with a estis variata figuris pestit decorata
jiguris where filfura is also a literary term for Catullus (wn
rhetoric Perhaps the crucial sites of configuring language image
and weaving are words such as ypaqgteurolv grapIein which means
writedraw design (in thread)
I ~ Worfrs an1 Days 777
16 The presence of Arachne in Looms has been argued since the
Renaissance See for example the gloss on Les Etoiles in Blaise
de Vigeneres edition of 1610 514 Lehmann (1941) 39 also
suggests that the two pictures (227 and 218) both refer to the
Arachne story
17 Ovid Met 65~-8
18 Minerva depicts Rhodope and Ilaemus who dared to cal
themselves gods now turned to mountains the Pygmaean queen
who challenged Juno now turned into a crane Antigone turned
by the angered Juno into a stork Cinyras whose daughters are turned to stone
19 Arachnes tapestry shows Europa abducted by the bull Asterie
carried off by the eagle Leda pursued by the swan Jllpiter
disguised as Amphitryon Danae
20 Met 6140--4
21 Barkan (1986) 4
22 Met 663--6
23 227 1~-19
24 lmaxiner Proem
25 Lehmann (1941) 16
26 In the first paragraph of Lehmanns article Goethe is found to be
disappointed by Pompeii and Herculaneum mere Middletowns as
GoetheLehmann put it from whose limited atmosphere they 112
NOTES TO IAUES 27~-83
turn away towards the Imagines Heference to Goethe recur
at several points in the essay Strangely enough no-one with the
exception of Goethe has ever called attention to the problem of the
general order of the paintings in the two books of philostratus
(19) Yet Goethes rearrangement of the Imapnes is also as
Lehmann put it cavalier his own essay lJl1ilds more sysshy
tematically on Goethes
27 Lehmann (1941) 2S
28 Lehmann (1941) 30
29 Lehmann (1941) 41-2
30 Lehmann (1941) 41
31 Lehmann (1941) 17-18
32 Lehmann (1941) 17middot
33 Imagines 19 18-22 1 have modified the Locb translation
here
34 In Ad Herelfiun the five parts of rhetoric are
eloculio memoria pmllUllialio
3) Yates (1966) 8
36 On architectures relation to the art of memory see the discussion
of Elsner (forthcoming) chapter 2 section v
37 Ad HerenniulII 2873)8 cited by Yates (1966) 18
38 Quimilian inH orat 11220 cited by Yates (1966) 22
39 Quintilian Inst oral 11218 cited by Yates (1966) 22
40 The diagram (Iig 34) is not satisfactory for instance its lines
fixity when the whole point is to suggest fluidity and continuum
But 1hope the reader will follow at least the diagrams gist that the
illlaNille constantly shuttles between words il1la~es and thin~s
Area (5) is that of merger between things and images (6) is the
hybrid area ofwordsubjects (7) is the area of blur between word
and image perhaps the principal ecphrastic space~ he space of the
wurd graphein r 41 Barthes (1977) 145-6
42 1am grateful to the members of the Laurcncc Seminar held in the
Department of Classics at Cambridge in May 1991 ltJr their help in
formulating the ideas presented in this essay and particularly to
Simon Goldhill jas Elsner and Stephen Bann for their very
welcome observations and
List of works cited
For abbreviations see pp xi--xiii
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Antike gtis rur Moderne Weinheim
Alpers S (1983) The Art ofDescrihlilg Chicago
Amyx D A (1988) Corinthian Vase Painting orrIe Arclaic Period The
Study of Corinthian Vases Berkeley
Arnheim R (1988) The Poet at rile Center A )tudl ofCompo siti 011 in the
Visual Artr Berkeley
Arnott P (1962) Greek Scellic COlventoils ill til Fijth Celllu~) BC
Oxford
(1989) Puhlic and Performance ill the Greek Theater London
Arnott W G (1987) The Stream and the Gold Two notes 011
Theocritus in Filologia e forme letterarie studi (1fimi a F Della
Corte vol I U rhino
Arthur [Katl] M (1975) Hurtides phoenislae and the Plitics
Diss Yale University
(1977) The curse of civilizatioll the choral odes of the PllOemu-ae
HSCP 81 163-8
Ashmole B (1972) Architect and Sculptor in Classical Greece London
Ashmole B and Yalouris N (1967) Olympia The Sculptures of the
Temple of Zeus London
Baladit H (1980) La Pilopollnese de Strahon Paris
-if Bann s (1989) The True Vine on Visual Representanim ald tllet
- lf7estern Tradition Cambridge -J Barber E J w (1990) Prellistone Textiles the Deleopmellt (Clotll ill
the Neolithic and Brone Ages Princctoll
(1992) The peplos of Athelia in Goddess and Polis tILl PaIlGtIz((c
IOIMAN BRYSON
of a ruination at once textual and architectural What the ti~ure of
the building had particularly enabled was the transfer of all
problems of the text back into the space supposed to stand behind
it the terraced spaces of the villa The moment when Lehmann
declares the true text of Imagines to have ended is that of an
edifice collapsing
Lehmanns entire reading turns on a suppressioll of the texts
being as written representation his gradual construction of the
stoa with all of its loms mapped and its piuures securely placed
in tiers within chambers depends on a reading of the Imagines in
terms of transparency before a pre-existing referent Concerning
philostratus work within language and of the pictures work with
their represented scenes Lehmanns account says nothing In
pointing this out the aim is not in fact to criticise or fault
Lehmanns interpretation One of the principal desires of the
descriptions in the Imagines is exactly to cease being words on the
page to come alive in the fltgtrIn of an imaJe to pass from the
opacity of words to the luminous scenes behind the words
Frecluently met with in the Imaiines is a textual moment at
the description at last feels its own language to dissolve into the
of the scene it opens upon This is the philostratian Look
Now the painter has been successful in these respects also that he has wrought the spider itself ill so painstaking a fashioll has matched its spots with fidelity to nature and has painted its repulsive fuzzy surface and its savage nature - all this is the mark of a good craftsman and one skilled in depicting the truth For look here is a cord I)rming a squaPe ( Looms 3 I
The painters attention to truth has realised the spider in all its
repulsive detail Having traced that fidelity to nature wittla pen
no less observant than the painters Philostratus earns the riglhfor
his OWl] words also to be recognised as fully backed by truth After
his exclaimed For look the description at last rcaches the
moment of lift-off
Three related labours come together in a single disclosure and
presence the work of rhe spicier building its web strand
strand the work of the painter tracing each of the threads stroke ( stroke the work of the ecphrasist tracing the two previous sets
_--- _14_-
PHILOSTRATliS AND THE IMAGINARY MISF11
line by line 14 At look the words the paint and the spiders web
merge in a moment of visionary presence Out of the diverse tissue
woven by the spider the painter and the writer comes a living
image the weavers travel across [their webs J drawing tight such
of the threads as have become loose In this visionary space there
is no separating the individual strands of image text or web The
ecphrasis itself draws tight any threads that come away pulling
them back into the unitary ima~e that is at the same time a web a
pitture and a text With part of itself the ecphrasis seeks to shed
the opacities it possesses by virtue of being made of words
only an arbitrary connection to things It seeks to fuse the words
into something beyond wurds an image a picture and then to
fuse that picture with what is real in a web tltat is no longer lexical
but pictorial and no longer pictorial but alive
Lehmanns desire for a text of the Imafiines that will dissolve
first into the pictures of a collection and then into the architectural
ensemble that hOllses them is ullcannily true to this aspect of philostratus text Yet it embodies only part of that texts energies
Though in the passage just quoted the separate re~isters of
weaving of picturing and of describing all come together ill
radiant fusion at Philostraws For look elsewhere the Looms
description presents these registers as separable separate and out
of phase
In fact Looms opens with a picture of - representation The
first and seemingly gratui tous pictu re in the description shows
Penelopes loom complete with its shuttle warp threads and lint
What opens the ecphrasis then is an image describing the
fabrication of images the representational means by which
Penelope creates iJer tapestry The image is made (and with
Penelope unmade) within the apparatus of representation The
ecphrasis begins by emphasising representation not as something
which vanishes before its referent but which stays stubbornly
visible and in place as material technique
Similarly Looms foregrounds Its own apparatus of repshy
resentation language Penelope is presented not only as tlte site of
work with images but of work with words She is the creation of Homer and it is with Hnmpr linEC th nhlwltr 111 L_
NIlHMAN EllYSON
1( X
own picture of herbull Penelope
Homer melts the snow with them This is a
reference to Ocyssey 192deg4 bull Her tears flowed and her face melted
as the snow melts on the lofty mountains and as it melts the
streams of the rivers flow full so her fair cheeks melted as they
In the same way philostratus makes a point of telling his
reader that the fine threads on which the spiders drop from the roof
and then climb up again are taken froll] llesiod 15 At these points
in the text the words exactly t~lil to dissolve either into pictures
(Penelope) or into things (spiders) They remain the embedded
lines of Homer and of Hesiod woven into a text which refuses to
assimilate them as its own or to dissolve them before a referent in
pictures or in the world
Just as the text insists on its own opacities its ineradicable
wordiness so it points to ways in which nature itself will not be
absorbed into the supposedly higher realm of human represenshy
tation and culture The place of the spiders is presented as the
annihilation of human work ~here roofs and columns
the spiders thrive Human observers may compare the
Penelupe and apply to their webs the terms of or
geometric measurement (lelraliaslOs) but the webs take over
where human creation comes to its end Interestingly the spiders
in Looms are imagined not only as they appear in the picture
description also includes a scene which exceeds that picture
bull the flat [nests] are good to summer in and the hollow sorl is in winter This is a aside a
to other times and the picture but
within it The that moment
race across their web it does not shd~ them in
other seasons when in summer spiders choose the ~~t webs
and in the winter the hollow ones Looms points to another life
of spiders which the scene in other words implies but does not
state to a world of ruins silences and spider-life that goes on
whether or not there are people around to see it Nature takes over
from culture culture in fact collapses its columns broken but
spiders silently persist away from the human labours of building
weaving painting and describing
------
PHILOSTRATliS AND TilE IMA(JNAHI ~ll1SI1
III
Against Lehmanns maps of the architectural referent one might
posit another topology of things pictures and words not as these
come together in the ensemble of a resurrected museum but as they
fail to connect in a fracture or ruin of representation The
magines work with three dil1erellt substances words things
and images With part Phiostratus- act ()t descriptio-n
middotwrks t~ blur these three in visionary merger (fIg )2)
(~ ~~ ~
(-) lp Fi~ J2
In the heat of this words turn into images or images into real things (4)middot But such excitement and
animation is only one of the Imagines many possibilities There
are others less ecstatic Words come unstuck from things they
hark back not to things in the world but to other words by
Homer or Hesiod (3) Or images pull away from the task of
representation they are shown as products of material technique
threads weft lint looms (J) Or the world pulls away from its
representation in art and language (2) the courtyard appears as
deserted abandoned by its master a place where the visual order
imposed by human cultivation collapses alld the primary
of human space - columlls roof shelter way to the openness of nature
I t is appropriate that Looms opens with
standing both for the capacity of art to provide marvellous
of the world and for the unravelling of art back into mere
and lint The ecphrasis is in tJct in continuous aeros all of the interstices between the world til word and Image
1 to 7 see also fig A t times ( For ) it seems I hal
~ ~)
(~
o H ~l A N B R Y SON
27C
art concealillt art mlkes the dead mailer of leLters and
brushslrokes corne alive BUl this is only one phase ill the
ecphrastic process Equally important are the momellts when the
ecphrasis fails when words revert to being words tapestries
revert to thread and architecture to rubble
One reason that Lehmanns reading banishes Looms from the
Imagines may perhaps be the descriptions eminent f~lilure instead
of giving way to a luminous and ostensible referent
enthusiasm that enables philostratus to say Look The spiders
and Lehmann to say Look The sma - Looms darkens the
picture making it a place of shadows dust and broken
architecture Spatially it figures itself as a ruined courtyard
Textually it traverses not only the place of ecphrastic excitement
where words turn into pictures and pictures turn into things but
all the negative ecphrastic spaces whcre words remain words or
form hybrids with pictures and pictures revert to thei I constituent
elements threads WII hering lint on a loom That philostratus
intends this cffect of netativity and intends it as a figure for his
own ecphrastic enterprise is confirmed by the pairing which
Looms (228) forms with its preceding picture bullThe birth of
Athena (227)
The link of course is Arachne 16 As Ovid tells the tale
Arachne is a human weaver who challenges the skill of the divine
weaver Minerva and is punished ltH Iter hubris when Minerva
turns her into a spider At the contest both welvers set lip their
looms
The web is bound upon the beam the reed separates tlw threads of the warp the woof is threaded through them by the sharp shuttles which their busy fingers ply and when shol through the threads ofdle warp the notched teeth of tilt hammering stay beats it into place l
I~
Minerva pictures the twelve heavenly gods 011 majestic thrones At
the four corners of her tapestry are set miniature scenes of
presumptuous mortals IS Arachne counters this imagery of the
gods punishing humans ()r hubris with scenes of the gods and
especially Jupiter19 violating human females Appalled by
Arachnes work Minerva hits her three times with a shuttle then
robs her of human form
PHI LOS T RAT J SAN D THE I MAG I N A It Y 1lH I
Fig 33
Forthwith her hair touched by the poison fell off and with it both nose and ears and the head shrank up her whole body also was small the slender lingers cling 10 her side as the rest was belly 20
For many interpreters of the Arachne fable the official moral
- a cautionary tale against hubris contains a second level a
of reflection upon the capacities and limitations of an For
Velazquez the competition concerns not only weavers but
painters At the rear of the inner stage in The Fable o( Arachne is
shown Titians painting The Rape of Europa and
presents his own craft in parallel to the art of weaving placed
somewhere perhaps between Arachne and Minerva between the
genre painting of the foreground and Titians history painting in
the middle distance (fig 33) III the reading of Leonard Barkan
this capacity of the Arachne topos to act as arts self-reflexive
shy
2~
OltMAN BRYSON
~~ 2
commentary on art is already present in Ovids text I t requires
no great leap of the imagination to see in Arachnes tapestry all the
elements of Ovids own poetry in the Metamorphoses Just as she
tells the stories of the loves of the gods and the metamorphoses of
their victims so does he 21 Like Velazquez Ovid positions his
own work somewhere between the disorderly profusion
metamorphoses that issue from Arachnes loom and
theologically correct carefully framed tapestries that come
the loom of Minerva
That philostratus intends Looms to unfold in the space of this
a number of details The Birth of
the first subject of Minervas tapestry immediately
precedes the text of Looms in philostratus gallery In Ovid the
contest of Arachne and Minerva is visualised as a spectrum of
iridescent colours
As when after a storm of rain the suns rays strike through and a rainbow with its huge curve stains the wide sky though a thousand different colours shine in it the eye cannot detect the change from each one to the next so appear the adjacent colours22
This is precisely the metaphor philostratus uses to describe the
armour of Athene as the goddess emerges fullv armed from
head of Zeus
As for the material of her panoply no-one could guess iI Ii)r as many as are the colours of the rainbow which changes its light now to one hue gt1d now to another so many are the colours of her armour 2
1
Taking Philostratus two descriptions in sequence one can say
that Looms applies to the competition between Minerva and
Arachne the figure of hathos It is a comic transformation orOvids
contest down-scaled with Penelope in the place of MinerW1
spiders in the place of Arachne
philostratus begins where Ovid left off with Arachnes
metamorphosis the rest was belly is expanded into the spiders
repulsive fuzzy surface and its savage nature and the spiders
grisly meaL Where Ovid uses the Arachne fable as a means to
comment on his own project in the MUal11ornwses niacin his
book somewhere between divine
-~
P II I L () S Tii A T USA N Il TilE J M A ( I N A H Y ~Il S Hmiddot
comically deflated retelling of the fable philostratus places his own
project the Imagines somewhere between the higher artists
(Homer Hesiod Ovid etc) and the beasts Ovid and
use the images of their own
the inverts the rhetoric in a comic
desublimation or parody
Let us touch again on the philostratian exclamation Lookmiddot
k fI
The moment when a picture seems to come alive is encountered
again and again in the 1m agiles In Xenia I philostratlls remark~
that the painted grapes are good to eat and full of winey juice
(r3 I) In Xenia 2 he invites the reader to reach out and take a loaf
from the painted basket (226) In Narcissus he says he cannot
real (123) At the core of the Imagines is the promise tl1at at
ments words
intense experience that
oth pictures and words It is not simply that words arc
tell whether a real bee has been deceived bv the painted Hower or
whetlier we are to be deceived into thinking that a ~
supplemented by pictures and pictures by words To read the
Imagines that way is to model it on the example of the illustrated ~ shybook The logic of the text is in fact closer once again to that of
Derridas supplement What words lack (because they are
words characters on the page marks without light) images can hJluinaJvt with a presence which is based on that lack which grows fro~l it
and turns it into light What images lack (because they are
in time mere pigments on a surf~lce threads on a loom) words Gill
sugply with narration and movement This strange hallueinatoy
power of ecphrasis calls on the capaei~ies of words and I~ to
describe the world but goes beyond their several powers into a
~ _ moment when Look becomes the only appropriate -- ~ ~L
response The exclamation directs the reader not towards the text J t or its Image but past them both into another space where presence )f
~vo to 11 th 0 ooce (gl hdoS tooeh t) fiJtJ - Yet compared with Ovicl (or Vehizquez) philostratlls text is (
clearly self-mocking and self-defeating Its lines move Ollt into all ~ the negative ecpilrastic spaces where the enanIeia of Iookmiddot j
NORMAN BHYlgtON
exactly unfortilcoming Instead of Aracillle the spider instead of the loves of the gods in tapestry an insect meal Oil a web
Accompanying the project of inciting the reader to envision is
Philostratus awareness that with every ecphrasis at some point
the lines and strokes always separate and unravel The text presents
itself as hollowed out by its own rhetorical self-awareness and as
haunted by an inescapably secondary or belated relation to
pictures In the Proem the author dramatises himself as a painter
mangul
Now the story of the men who have mastery in the sciellce of painting and the states and kings that have been passiolltltely devoted to it has been told by others writers Ilotably Aristodemus of Carla whom I
visited for four years In orcler to study paintinf 1n the present discussions however we propose to describe examples of painting in the form of addresses which have been composed for the young 24
Four years of study with Aristodemus have led not to a career in
painting but only in criticism In the scenography of the text
Philostratus is always old and lesser than the young The son of
his host must summon him before he speaks SpJtially he is at the
perimeter beyond the city walls a Greek wandering in Italy
Secondary in relation to painting his pictures are also belated in
time not the work of men who have won mastery in the science
of painting discussed by Pliny but of painters who are never in
fact given names
G- lc o this negative dinlension of the Ima(inegt Lehmann appears
1vt tgt emarkably insensitive Jn his hands the Imagilles are tt come
alive he will infuse them with his own visionary energy~~ resurrecting the fragments of the text into a luminous stoa whose
every corner he can visualise His work with the blta(illes is in a
sense part of the Pompeian tradition which from Winckelmann
to l3ulwer-Lytton to Ilollywood aims to coiJre ivil~ flesh from
the ashes In terms of its own rhetoric Lehmanns is a heroic reading The example of the Irrcltlt Goerhe2f tTllirlp hi274
bull vJ ~_ _
PHILOSTRATLJS AND THE IMAGINARY MI~I
enterprise26
Filling out what remained only tentative in Goethes
essay he perceives an order in the Imagines which not even their
author realised The Imagines have to be wrested from philoshy
stratlls hands Philostratus misreads the mountains of Thes~ly as
mountains of Rhodes Philostratus takes no advantage of these connections and does not mention them27 Although
Philostratus was perfectly able to see immediately many of the
implications of single pictures he did not discuss the cyclic idea
He was not interested in it2R As Lehmanns analysis gains
momentum Philostratus tends to get referred to as thelcctUle~ Like many orators and letter writers and teachers before and after
him he decided to pllblish these lectures as a model of his
tecllllillue and style in handling such a task 29 He paraphrased
rather than described the paintings and pointed out the emotional
values and psychological associations ofeach picture His emphasis
in this collrse ill the appreciation (Ifart was one-sided as flax heen tlwl
elery professor (~f tlzis kind after Ilim (emphases added) ~o
Lehmann himself is not of course a lecturer or professor of this kind
If Philostratus mocks his own secondariness Lehmann expels
secondariness from his text in tbe person of the outmoded
professor who only appreciates and who cannot see what
Lehmann sees the hyper-realistic image of a gallery with all its
rooms envisioned simultaneously and in detail But these abject
personifications the lectlirer and the professor arc not the
bearers of anxiety in his reading or its only scapegoats The
Imapnes need to be reconstructed Lehmann maintains because
without them the third century is the dark century in the history
of ancient painting the era ofa great crisis ofancient art in which
the foundations for the development of later western art were
bid 11 Here are Lehmanns words for the threat his reconstruction is to dispel
In a period lor which a lower-middle-class tomb in Rome like that of the Amelii is used as a cornerstone [or the history of palntin) and Ir which the discovery of the frescoes of a Jewish synagogue in Mesopotamia tends to revolutionize the entire picture of the historv of lnrn
NOH~lAN BRYSON
Is it too much to find in these words a threat to a cherished image
of antiquity an image that must be protected
Art history emerges here in one of its dubious heroising guises
as the custodian of culture working against a background of crisis
and collapse Quite naturally the custodians must live in a great
house resplendent with all the marbles favoured by luxury
but particularly splendid by reason of the panel-paintings set in
the walls The force required to protect the custodians is that of
museum circa 1941 It is a modernist exhibition space
stripped down diagrammatic programmatic yet still (at the end
of the reconstruction) conceived as a house of the great with
dining-chambers for the four seasons Better than most museums
with their difficult diplomatic balance between the needs of
scholars and of patrons it is wholly designed by the art historian
The scholarship that builds this space is to judge by the footnotes
an exclusively German affair And the account endorses the
protocols of a certain strand in the German art history of its time
We shall always regret where fi)nllal problems are concerned the
limitations of a description which aimed not to descrile but to
interpret what the audience saw (emphases added) Painting is to
be approached formally not hermeneutically and interpretation
now a negative term is to be confined to an outpost of
iconography the identification of subjects and programme cycles
Lehmanns own hermeneutic operation presents itself as
opposite of interpretive work It proceeds by excluding lt111 those
images which appear to Lehmann to be editorial additions grafted
01 to the main text supposedly anomalous products of writing and
publication mere word-pictures un backed by actual referents It
prunes away the rhetorical elaborations of the lecn1rer and
bypasses the pictures themselves in order to reach th~ solid
masonry behind them as though representation itself verbal or
pictorial were a barrier to be torn dowH This process is presented
as a series of purifications The text contaminated for publication
is returned to its pristine state The visual field is purged of its
verbal dimension in a double movement from text In architecture
and from arl criticism to archaeology Antiquitys dark age is
banished Its whuralmainstrcam is protected against distortion by
-- - --~-
PHI I 0 S T RAT l SAN Il THE r M A (] N 1 H Y I S I I
inferior and marginlt11 groups Art history triumphs over art
appreciation The end product of these procedurts is the vision of
a purified architectural form whose authority is confirmed by a
tradition of national scholarship and national culture exiled to
America and written up in English yet still in direct contact with
the author of Phiostrats gemalde and with the Graeco-Homan past
Through rhetorical operations such as these Lehmanns
ecplrrasis becomes in a sense a tecitni(lue of the subject It is surely
much more than an archaeological reconstruction Like Auerbad~s Mimesis written in Istanbtll during World War II it mobilises the
energies of cultural resistance to its own dark century It invsts
those energies in an incandescent visualisation that configures the
beleaguered subject as a unified building I t would I think be
wrong to find fault with Lehmanns reading at the level on which
it appears to operate of slellth-like deduction and rationality
Expelled by the texts rational procedures rhetoric returns as
texts unconscious At this buried or subterranean level the
reading actually moves much closer into the Imagines than it is
able to admit Philostratus himself presents the art of painting not
as a copy of the world but ltIS in ternalisation of the world In 19 warns his audience not to be impressed by a works mimetic
realism ill that case he says we should praise an insignificant
feature of the painting and one that has solely to do with imitation
(mimesis) but we shollid nOI be praising its intelligence or
sense of decorum it shows though these I believe are the most
important elements of art l~ lust as painting shows the world as
it has already passed into the subjectivity of the painter so the
beholder should not dwell 011 the external matter of mimesis but
internalise the image drawing it inside the subject On their own
the audience can see pictures and judge mimesis perfectly well
the audience do not yet know are the techniques for
absorbing the pictures into the mind It is precisely
in this assimilation of pictures to subjectivity that the audience has come to hear Philostratus speak
It is in this aspect of internalisation that the Imafiines revcJ rhetoric itself as a techllolov Of elicnlin t1egt If T-_ r
1IIMN BRYSON
of the Ad Herenniuflt names memoria as the fourth part of
rhetoric 34 In order to memorise a lengthy speech the orator
should visualise the successive topics of his discourse as images
arranged in consecutive places within architectural space In the
words of Frances Yates who is that mlfi moving slowly in
lonely building stopping at intervals with an intent face He is a
rhetoric student forming a set of memory loci35 Architectures
role in rhetoric is as the supplier of milieux within which intense
visualisations are to occurUl As Cicero says the images should be
active sharply defined and unusual having the power of speedily
encountering and penetrating the psyche (quae oCCflrrere celerishy
terque percutere animum possim)37 The speech unfolds as
rhetorician walks in his mind past walls each memory-place hung
with a vivid image through rooms doorways stairways
porticoes terraces
The first notion is placed as it were ill the ()recourt the second let us say in the atrium lhe remainder are placed in order round the impluvium and committed not only to bedrooms and parlours but even to statues and the like3R
The stability and dependability of this internal architecture is vital
for the control of the self over its material To forget the existence
of a particular room is to leave out a whole stage of the argument
to lTIisremember the sequence of images is to garble the
presentation of the case
places are chosen and marked om with the utmost possible vlriety as a spacious house divided into a number of rooms Every thinK of note therein is diligently imprinted on the mind in order that thongl n~ay be able to fun through all the parts without let or hindrance The filst task is to secure that there shall be no difficulty in funning through these for that memory must be most firmly fixed which helps another memory all
Here architecture not only stands for the control of the self it is
the actual material means by which the self exercises its control
over its words and its world
If Lehmanns unitary and massively stable architecture stands ~1 _1 _~ bullbull l J ~
~ PHILOSTRATUS AND THE IMA((NARY MlISEU~1
c~) (~~) ( 0 ~ ~
-~ ----~
hI 34
1 reading rejoins Philostratus rhetoric as an operation whose means
is imaginary buildings and whose goal is mastery over self and
over representation Ecphrasis here is a technique for consolidating
the subject in terms of personal and professional control While on
the surface of his text Lehmann disavows hermeneutic art history
and expels the lecturer at other levels of his text Lehmann is
Philostratus shadow-partner or secret sharer Lehmanns entry
into the culture of late antiquity is through a shape-shifting in
which he performs the architectural ars memorativa of a thirdshy
century orator
Yet he does so in terms very different from those supplied in the
Imagines The kind of subject proposed and assllmed by 9
Philostratus text is much less driven by the urge towards unitary
self-possession The Imagines subject exists in a universe where
things images and words may frequently converge but do not
consistently fuse together ill the ardour of imaginary vision The
descriptions show the subject in transit across the interstices where
world pictures and language overlap Especially interesting 10
Philostratus are the hybrid or chiasmic zones where dillerent
registers cross over (fig 34)
Let us return for the last time to Looms Penelopes loom
exists at the place where images and the things of the world cross
over The loom is a thing that makes images yet we do not see the
images it makes only the things - warp threads shuttle it
works with Again when the weavers travel across the web or eat
their squirming prey they are seen as living moving creatures
hill at thl sme time the reader knows they are onlv a static nictllrf -j
--
OIlMAN BRYSON
i(
Elsewhere the text moves to the place where the things of the
world cross over into words The author tells us that the spiders
cables are almost too tine to discern What brings them into view
are in fact Hesiods lines about spiders destending and astending
their threads The word makes the thing exist Or a single word in
Greek -- arachnc is able to generate two utterly different beings
spiders and the weaver who challenged Minerva The characters of
Looms are so to speak engendered by an ecphrastic pun Words
and things change pilCes At other times the text crosses the place
where words and image blend Homers text turns into a picture
then back again into Homers words The line between what is
verbal and visual cannot be drawn4o
The subject of the Imagines is in constant motion and dispersal
across this complex terrain qf wprld jmilg ltlAd texr When the
outward pictures enter the subject and are assimilated to the seWs
interior they scatter across an intricately divided and Auid space
The images of Philostratus exist as r~fractiollS in a multishy
dimensional space in which a variety of voices none of them
original blend and clash 41 The subject who performs this
internalisation is in perpetual motion The moments when at the
philostratian Look the various registers join in visionary
fusion do not last long Almost at once the visions separate out
into their component strands unravelling as fast as they came
together And they lead on to the next image - more than sixty
times The unravelling of one image clears the space for the
coming together of the next one Or better the unravelling of
each image calls into being summons the next It is in that
perpetual Penelope-like emergence and falling away of images
that the subject is spun by the text Not as a central storehp~se or
gallery more a~ a motion or desire
Lehmanns subject is in a sense the opposite of thiJ In
Lehmanns case internalising philostralUs text means seeking a
means to arrest the motions of the text and to tapture and
immobilise its energies in a final culminating form Into the
stability of the huilding that is to end the text as motion and desire
are poured all the authors ligures for the command of the subject
massive masonry the prestige of the museum purified form
_ --- ----
PHILOSTRATUS AND THE IMAGINAIY M(SEI
Goethe national culture ethnic centrality profcssionlIisll1 posishy
tive knowledge Which should make Lehmann Philostratus most
inappropriate reader were it not for the brilliance and the yearning of his own visualisation
Among other things Lehmanns reading exemplifies some of
the paradoxes inherent in the tradition of positivist scholarship to
which it belongs It is this aspect that raises his reconstruction
above the category of historiGl1 oddity to adumbrate some of the
vicissitudes of positive knowledfe in more general terms First
Lehmanns relation to the literary to textuality and intenextualitx
is remarkably strained and contradictory The architectural ord~r he proposes for the Imagines is itselfbibliograplllc Lehmann needs
texts 10 enable his reconstruction to take place in order to build
his version of Philostratus villa he must resort to the library what
he says for instance concerning the typology of rooms their
orientation and relation to the seasons is directly dependent on
Vitruvius Yet at the same time his analysis mllst bypass textuality
in order to dissolve the texts into architectural form Necessary at
certain moments of the analysis at others textuality becomes an
obstacle to be scornfully removed Inherently untrustworthy
beside the actuality (the positivism) of the archaeological find texts are aligned in his interpretation with ideas of parasitism and
mediocrity figured here by the lecturer or professor The
reading works both to banish textual corruption completely
(which cannot easily show up ill the analysi~ since hiatuses in the
text arc translated at once into architectural syntax) and to build
the necessity for textual wrruption into his case (as when
Lehmann axes the last eight descriptions as later additions )
Textuality features in this mode of analysis primarily under tlte
sign of repression Where it is able to grow transparent before the
three-dimensional architectural and archaeological order it can be
admitted Where textuality fails to become translucent hcfilfe
reference it must be expelled even if the effort to do so becomes
massive involving the whole battery of figures for the command of th~ sui)ject
Secondly this ef1ort to repress textuality runs counter to many
of the most conspicuous features of Philostratllt PIh So
tgtnHMAN BRYSON
2X2
writing especially its interest in exploring the negative ecphrastic
spaces in which the reader so far from experiencing a dissolution
of writing before the luminous referellt (tlte philostratian
Look ) apprehends the text as a sophisticated web of allusions
parodies puns and tonal plays Lehmanns quest for the stable
masonry of the referent seems altogether blind to the many ways
in which philostratus writing plays to the wplzia of the reader as
one who can see bizarre connections who can understand hidden
narrativcs within imagery (A rachne Mincrva) wilD can
exercise the visual eqllivalent of the elaborate verbal dexterity that
characterises Hellenistic poetry When philostratus says that the
web the spiders make is exceedingly fine (k)perleIIOS) he is
doing more dlan asking liS to visualise something hard to see he
is using a key term from Hellenistic poetics eplOs which means
witty fint clever small-scale sophisticated and doing
so as an invitation or a warning to the reader that his own writing
too is all of these things It is a warning that Lehmann perhaps
wisely does not heed for once ecphrasis is thought of as a form
writing that involves much mort than a simple visualisation of
a text it leaves behind the one certainty that ecphrasis seemed to
hold out to the archaeologist - its promise of presence of
resurrection and becomes something else a mode of writing
whose complexity we are perhaps only beginning to discern and
in relation to which tlie idea of visualisation begins to appear as a
simplification at best
Finally the scrupulous rationality of Lehmanns interpretive
method with its emphasis on what can be deduced and
demonstrated as positive knowledge and as archilectural form
renders it strangely unaware of its own aspect of tellIality of the
ways in which it is itself a working wilh words in whityen the words
carry more associations motivations and effect than the writer is
able to hear or control Working within a highly instrumental and
reduced picture-theory of language Lehmanns analysis radically
underestimates the capacity of words to exceed their allotted
functions of argumentation demonstration and proof Opening
on to other investments and other scenes tban that simply of
archaeology and reconstruction Lehmanns text speaks its own
PllILOSTRATS AND THE IMAGINAHY MliS
uncollscious and it is in that energetic and overdetermined
underside of his text that his deepest engagement with Philostratus
may be found What he writes is perhaps the dream-work of
positivism not the forensics of archaeology but its own buried poetics 42
~
l ltJTES TO PAGES 244--61
O On Pausanils see Frazer (1898) Heer (1979) Jacob (1980)
Habich 1 (1985) and Elsner (1992)
I These include discussions of the wild satyrs of the islands 1235-)
the Ethiopians I334- the Ionian Greeks 722-51) the
marvellous animals collected in Rome 9211-2 the islands of
Sardinia and Corsica 10171-13
32 See Elsner (1992) 17--20
33 See Frazer (1898) xiv compare other second-century CE descripshy
tions of ruins such as Dio Chrysostom on Thebes Oratio 7
Plutarch De ~rcctu oracuorum 8 Lucian Diaog 11I0rt 272
34 This chapter began as a paper on Herodotus pyramids delivered to
Paul Cartledges Ancient History Seminar in Cambridge in 1989 I
wish to thank him John Henderson Jamie Masters and the Editors
of this volume for their comments on earlier drafts My deepest debt
is to Joan Pau Rubies y Mirabet with whom I have fi)r several years
discussed the problems of travel travel-writing and identity This
chapter is dedicated to him
CHApTEH EIGHT PHlLOSTRATliS AND Tin IMA(INARY
MUSEUM
1 English translations are taken from the Loeb edition edited by
T E Page E Capps and W H D Rouse (London and New
York193 1)
2 For the history of the debate see the editions of Jacobs and Welcker
(1825) Kayser (1844) Benndorf and Schenkel (1893) and
Steinmann (1914)
3 Lehmann (1941)
4 The essay is conveniently to be f()Und in vo XXVI of Cottas
standard edition (1868) pp 276fT
Lehmann (1941) 21-4
6 Obviously he describes pictures that were topoglllttphically united
but without regard to the ideological and (JrluaJ rda~m which had
dictated their combination Lehmann (1941) 20
7 Indeed the only explanation of the relationships and the lack of
order is that philostratus saw real pictures which were to a certain
extent arranged on the upper and lower parts of walls Lehmann
(1941) 20
8 Lehmann (1941) 31-3
9 Lehmann (1941) 31-3
NOTES TO P(I-S 2()2
10 [n fact the lmalfines do not supply indications concerning the
dimensions of any particular work
II [t should also be noted that Lehmanns groupings occasionally
require him to rewrite the given titles of pictures
11 These last eight pictures of the second book show a remarkable
absence of any stich relation and connection as we have found
everywhere else Lehmann (1941) 37
13 Lehmann (1941) 39-40
14 The image of weaving is frequently used of writing see for
example Catullus ()45ofr in which the marriage of Peleus and
Thetis is covered with a estis variata figuris pestit decorata
jiguris where filfura is also a literary term for Catullus (wn
rhetoric Perhaps the crucial sites of configuring language image
and weaving are words such as ypaqgteurolv grapIein which means
writedraw design (in thread)
I ~ Worfrs an1 Days 777
16 The presence of Arachne in Looms has been argued since the
Renaissance See for example the gloss on Les Etoiles in Blaise
de Vigeneres edition of 1610 514 Lehmann (1941) 39 also
suggests that the two pictures (227 and 218) both refer to the
Arachne story
17 Ovid Met 65~-8
18 Minerva depicts Rhodope and Ilaemus who dared to cal
themselves gods now turned to mountains the Pygmaean queen
who challenged Juno now turned into a crane Antigone turned
by the angered Juno into a stork Cinyras whose daughters are turned to stone
19 Arachnes tapestry shows Europa abducted by the bull Asterie
carried off by the eagle Leda pursued by the swan Jllpiter
disguised as Amphitryon Danae
20 Met 6140--4
21 Barkan (1986) 4
22 Met 663--6
23 227 1~-19
24 lmaxiner Proem
25 Lehmann (1941) 16
26 In the first paragraph of Lehmanns article Goethe is found to be
disappointed by Pompeii and Herculaneum mere Middletowns as
GoetheLehmann put it from whose limited atmosphere they 112
NOTES TO IAUES 27~-83
turn away towards the Imagines Heference to Goethe recur
at several points in the essay Strangely enough no-one with the
exception of Goethe has ever called attention to the problem of the
general order of the paintings in the two books of philostratus
(19) Yet Goethes rearrangement of the Imapnes is also as
Lehmann put it cavalier his own essay lJl1ilds more sysshy
tematically on Goethes
27 Lehmann (1941) 2S
28 Lehmann (1941) 30
29 Lehmann (1941) 41-2
30 Lehmann (1941) 41
31 Lehmann (1941) 17-18
32 Lehmann (1941) 17middot
33 Imagines 19 18-22 1 have modified the Locb translation
here
34 In Ad Herelfiun the five parts of rhetoric are
eloculio memoria pmllUllialio
3) Yates (1966) 8
36 On architectures relation to the art of memory see the discussion
of Elsner (forthcoming) chapter 2 section v
37 Ad HerenniulII 2873)8 cited by Yates (1966) 18
38 Quimilian inH orat 11220 cited by Yates (1966) 22
39 Quintilian Inst oral 11218 cited by Yates (1966) 22
40 The diagram (Iig 34) is not satisfactory for instance its lines
fixity when the whole point is to suggest fluidity and continuum
But 1hope the reader will follow at least the diagrams gist that the
illlaNille constantly shuttles between words il1la~es and thin~s
Area (5) is that of merger between things and images (6) is the
hybrid area ofwordsubjects (7) is the area of blur between word
and image perhaps the principal ecphrastic space~ he space of the
wurd graphein r 41 Barthes (1977) 145-6
42 1am grateful to the members of the Laurcncc Seminar held in the
Department of Classics at Cambridge in May 1991 ltJr their help in
formulating the ideas presented in this essay and particularly to
Simon Goldhill jas Elsner and Stephen Bann for their very
welcome observations and
List of works cited
For abbreviations see pp xi--xiii
Adler J and Ernst U (1988) Text als Figur 11welle Poesie 101 der
Antike gtis rur Moderne Weinheim
Alpers S (1983) The Art ofDescrihlilg Chicago
Amyx D A (1988) Corinthian Vase Painting orrIe Arclaic Period The
Study of Corinthian Vases Berkeley
Arnheim R (1988) The Poet at rile Center A )tudl ofCompo siti 011 in the
Visual Artr Berkeley
Arnott P (1962) Greek Scellic COlventoils ill til Fijth Celllu~) BC
Oxford
(1989) Puhlic and Performance ill the Greek Theater London
Arnott W G (1987) The Stream and the Gold Two notes 011
Theocritus in Filologia e forme letterarie studi (1fimi a F Della
Corte vol I U rhino
Arthur [Katl] M (1975) Hurtides phoenislae and the Plitics
Diss Yale University
(1977) The curse of civilizatioll the choral odes of the PllOemu-ae
HSCP 81 163-8
Ashmole B (1972) Architect and Sculptor in Classical Greece London
Ashmole B and Yalouris N (1967) Olympia The Sculptures of the
Temple of Zeus London
Baladit H (1980) La Pilopollnese de Strahon Paris
-if Bann s (1989) The True Vine on Visual Representanim ald tllet
- lf7estern Tradition Cambridge -J Barber E J w (1990) Prellistone Textiles the Deleopmellt (Clotll ill
the Neolithic and Brone Ages Princctoll
(1992) The peplos of Athelia in Goddess and Polis tILl PaIlGtIz((c
NIlHMAN EllYSON
1( X
own picture of herbull Penelope
Homer melts the snow with them This is a
reference to Ocyssey 192deg4 bull Her tears flowed and her face melted
as the snow melts on the lofty mountains and as it melts the
streams of the rivers flow full so her fair cheeks melted as they
In the same way philostratus makes a point of telling his
reader that the fine threads on which the spiders drop from the roof
and then climb up again are taken froll] llesiod 15 At these points
in the text the words exactly t~lil to dissolve either into pictures
(Penelope) or into things (spiders) They remain the embedded
lines of Homer and of Hesiod woven into a text which refuses to
assimilate them as its own or to dissolve them before a referent in
pictures or in the world
Just as the text insists on its own opacities its ineradicable
wordiness so it points to ways in which nature itself will not be
absorbed into the supposedly higher realm of human represenshy
tation and culture The place of the spiders is presented as the
annihilation of human work ~here roofs and columns
the spiders thrive Human observers may compare the
Penelupe and apply to their webs the terms of or
geometric measurement (lelraliaslOs) but the webs take over
where human creation comes to its end Interestingly the spiders
in Looms are imagined not only as they appear in the picture
description also includes a scene which exceeds that picture
bull the flat [nests] are good to summer in and the hollow sorl is in winter This is a aside a
to other times and the picture but
within it The that moment
race across their web it does not shd~ them in
other seasons when in summer spiders choose the ~~t webs
and in the winter the hollow ones Looms points to another life
of spiders which the scene in other words implies but does not
state to a world of ruins silences and spider-life that goes on
whether or not there are people around to see it Nature takes over
from culture culture in fact collapses its columns broken but
spiders silently persist away from the human labours of building
weaving painting and describing
------
PHILOSTRATliS AND TilE IMA(JNAHI ~ll1SI1
III
Against Lehmanns maps of the architectural referent one might
posit another topology of things pictures and words not as these
come together in the ensemble of a resurrected museum but as they
fail to connect in a fracture or ruin of representation The
magines work with three dil1erellt substances words things
and images With part Phiostratus- act ()t descriptio-n
middotwrks t~ blur these three in visionary merger (fIg )2)
(~ ~~ ~
(-) lp Fi~ J2
In the heat of this words turn into images or images into real things (4)middot But such excitement and
animation is only one of the Imagines many possibilities There
are others less ecstatic Words come unstuck from things they
hark back not to things in the world but to other words by
Homer or Hesiod (3) Or images pull away from the task of
representation they are shown as products of material technique
threads weft lint looms (J) Or the world pulls away from its
representation in art and language (2) the courtyard appears as
deserted abandoned by its master a place where the visual order
imposed by human cultivation collapses alld the primary
of human space - columlls roof shelter way to the openness of nature
I t is appropriate that Looms opens with
standing both for the capacity of art to provide marvellous
of the world and for the unravelling of art back into mere
and lint The ecphrasis is in tJct in continuous aeros all of the interstices between the world til word and Image
1 to 7 see also fig A t times ( For ) it seems I hal
~ ~)
(~
o H ~l A N B R Y SON
27C
art concealillt art mlkes the dead mailer of leLters and
brushslrokes corne alive BUl this is only one phase ill the
ecphrastic process Equally important are the momellts when the
ecphrasis fails when words revert to being words tapestries
revert to thread and architecture to rubble
One reason that Lehmanns reading banishes Looms from the
Imagines may perhaps be the descriptions eminent f~lilure instead
of giving way to a luminous and ostensible referent
enthusiasm that enables philostratus to say Look The spiders
and Lehmann to say Look The sma - Looms darkens the
picture making it a place of shadows dust and broken
architecture Spatially it figures itself as a ruined courtyard
Textually it traverses not only the place of ecphrastic excitement
where words turn into pictures and pictures turn into things but
all the negative ecphrastic spaces whcre words remain words or
form hybrids with pictures and pictures revert to thei I constituent
elements threads WII hering lint on a loom That philostratus
intends this cffect of netativity and intends it as a figure for his
own ecphrastic enterprise is confirmed by the pairing which
Looms (228) forms with its preceding picture bullThe birth of
Athena (227)
The link of course is Arachne 16 As Ovid tells the tale
Arachne is a human weaver who challenges the skill of the divine
weaver Minerva and is punished ltH Iter hubris when Minerva
turns her into a spider At the contest both welvers set lip their
looms
The web is bound upon the beam the reed separates tlw threads of the warp the woof is threaded through them by the sharp shuttles which their busy fingers ply and when shol through the threads ofdle warp the notched teeth of tilt hammering stay beats it into place l
I~
Minerva pictures the twelve heavenly gods 011 majestic thrones At
the four corners of her tapestry are set miniature scenes of
presumptuous mortals IS Arachne counters this imagery of the
gods punishing humans ()r hubris with scenes of the gods and
especially Jupiter19 violating human females Appalled by
Arachnes work Minerva hits her three times with a shuttle then
robs her of human form
PHI LOS T RAT J SAN D THE I MAG I N A It Y 1lH I
Fig 33
Forthwith her hair touched by the poison fell off and with it both nose and ears and the head shrank up her whole body also was small the slender lingers cling 10 her side as the rest was belly 20
For many interpreters of the Arachne fable the official moral
- a cautionary tale against hubris contains a second level a
of reflection upon the capacities and limitations of an For
Velazquez the competition concerns not only weavers but
painters At the rear of the inner stage in The Fable o( Arachne is
shown Titians painting The Rape of Europa and
presents his own craft in parallel to the art of weaving placed
somewhere perhaps between Arachne and Minerva between the
genre painting of the foreground and Titians history painting in
the middle distance (fig 33) III the reading of Leonard Barkan
this capacity of the Arachne topos to act as arts self-reflexive
shy
2~
OltMAN BRYSON
~~ 2
commentary on art is already present in Ovids text I t requires
no great leap of the imagination to see in Arachnes tapestry all the
elements of Ovids own poetry in the Metamorphoses Just as she
tells the stories of the loves of the gods and the metamorphoses of
their victims so does he 21 Like Velazquez Ovid positions his
own work somewhere between the disorderly profusion
metamorphoses that issue from Arachnes loom and
theologically correct carefully framed tapestries that come
the loom of Minerva
That philostratus intends Looms to unfold in the space of this
a number of details The Birth of
the first subject of Minervas tapestry immediately
precedes the text of Looms in philostratus gallery In Ovid the
contest of Arachne and Minerva is visualised as a spectrum of
iridescent colours
As when after a storm of rain the suns rays strike through and a rainbow with its huge curve stains the wide sky though a thousand different colours shine in it the eye cannot detect the change from each one to the next so appear the adjacent colours22
This is precisely the metaphor philostratus uses to describe the
armour of Athene as the goddess emerges fullv armed from
head of Zeus
As for the material of her panoply no-one could guess iI Ii)r as many as are the colours of the rainbow which changes its light now to one hue gt1d now to another so many are the colours of her armour 2
1
Taking Philostratus two descriptions in sequence one can say
that Looms applies to the competition between Minerva and
Arachne the figure of hathos It is a comic transformation orOvids
contest down-scaled with Penelope in the place of MinerW1
spiders in the place of Arachne
philostratus begins where Ovid left off with Arachnes
metamorphosis the rest was belly is expanded into the spiders
repulsive fuzzy surface and its savage nature and the spiders
grisly meaL Where Ovid uses the Arachne fable as a means to
comment on his own project in the MUal11ornwses niacin his
book somewhere between divine
-~
P II I L () S Tii A T USA N Il TilE J M A ( I N A H Y ~Il S Hmiddot
comically deflated retelling of the fable philostratus places his own
project the Imagines somewhere between the higher artists
(Homer Hesiod Ovid etc) and the beasts Ovid and
use the images of their own
the inverts the rhetoric in a comic
desublimation or parody
Let us touch again on the philostratian exclamation Lookmiddot
k fI
The moment when a picture seems to come alive is encountered
again and again in the 1m agiles In Xenia I philostratlls remark~
that the painted grapes are good to eat and full of winey juice
(r3 I) In Xenia 2 he invites the reader to reach out and take a loaf
from the painted basket (226) In Narcissus he says he cannot
real (123) At the core of the Imagines is the promise tl1at at
ments words
intense experience that
oth pictures and words It is not simply that words arc
tell whether a real bee has been deceived bv the painted Hower or
whetlier we are to be deceived into thinking that a ~
supplemented by pictures and pictures by words To read the
Imagines that way is to model it on the example of the illustrated ~ shybook The logic of the text is in fact closer once again to that of
Derridas supplement What words lack (because they are
words characters on the page marks without light) images can hJluinaJvt with a presence which is based on that lack which grows fro~l it
and turns it into light What images lack (because they are
in time mere pigments on a surf~lce threads on a loom) words Gill
sugply with narration and movement This strange hallueinatoy
power of ecphrasis calls on the capaei~ies of words and I~ to
describe the world but goes beyond their several powers into a
~ _ moment when Look becomes the only appropriate -- ~ ~L
response The exclamation directs the reader not towards the text J t or its Image but past them both into another space where presence )f
~vo to 11 th 0 ooce (gl hdoS tooeh t) fiJtJ - Yet compared with Ovicl (or Vehizquez) philostratlls text is (
clearly self-mocking and self-defeating Its lines move Ollt into all ~ the negative ecpilrastic spaces where the enanIeia of Iookmiddot j
NORMAN BHYlgtON
exactly unfortilcoming Instead of Aracillle the spider instead of the loves of the gods in tapestry an insect meal Oil a web
Accompanying the project of inciting the reader to envision is
Philostratus awareness that with every ecphrasis at some point
the lines and strokes always separate and unravel The text presents
itself as hollowed out by its own rhetorical self-awareness and as
haunted by an inescapably secondary or belated relation to
pictures In the Proem the author dramatises himself as a painter
mangul
Now the story of the men who have mastery in the sciellce of painting and the states and kings that have been passiolltltely devoted to it has been told by others writers Ilotably Aristodemus of Carla whom I
visited for four years In orcler to study paintinf 1n the present discussions however we propose to describe examples of painting in the form of addresses which have been composed for the young 24
Four years of study with Aristodemus have led not to a career in
painting but only in criticism In the scenography of the text
Philostratus is always old and lesser than the young The son of
his host must summon him before he speaks SpJtially he is at the
perimeter beyond the city walls a Greek wandering in Italy
Secondary in relation to painting his pictures are also belated in
time not the work of men who have won mastery in the science
of painting discussed by Pliny but of painters who are never in
fact given names
G- lc o this negative dinlension of the Ima(inegt Lehmann appears
1vt tgt emarkably insensitive Jn his hands the Imagilles are tt come
alive he will infuse them with his own visionary energy~~ resurrecting the fragments of the text into a luminous stoa whose
every corner he can visualise His work with the blta(illes is in a
sense part of the Pompeian tradition which from Winckelmann
to l3ulwer-Lytton to Ilollywood aims to coiJre ivil~ flesh from
the ashes In terms of its own rhetoric Lehmanns is a heroic reading The example of the Irrcltlt Goerhe2f tTllirlp hi274
bull vJ ~_ _
PHILOSTRATLJS AND THE IMAGINARY MI~I
enterprise26
Filling out what remained only tentative in Goethes
essay he perceives an order in the Imagines which not even their
author realised The Imagines have to be wrested from philoshy
stratlls hands Philostratus misreads the mountains of Thes~ly as
mountains of Rhodes Philostratus takes no advantage of these connections and does not mention them27 Although
Philostratus was perfectly able to see immediately many of the
implications of single pictures he did not discuss the cyclic idea
He was not interested in it2R As Lehmanns analysis gains
momentum Philostratus tends to get referred to as thelcctUle~ Like many orators and letter writers and teachers before and after
him he decided to pllblish these lectures as a model of his
tecllllillue and style in handling such a task 29 He paraphrased
rather than described the paintings and pointed out the emotional
values and psychological associations ofeach picture His emphasis
in this collrse ill the appreciation (Ifart was one-sided as flax heen tlwl
elery professor (~f tlzis kind after Ilim (emphases added) ~o
Lehmann himself is not of course a lecturer or professor of this kind
If Philostratus mocks his own secondariness Lehmann expels
secondariness from his text in tbe person of the outmoded
professor who only appreciates and who cannot see what
Lehmann sees the hyper-realistic image of a gallery with all its
rooms envisioned simultaneously and in detail But these abject
personifications the lectlirer and the professor arc not the
bearers of anxiety in his reading or its only scapegoats The
Imapnes need to be reconstructed Lehmann maintains because
without them the third century is the dark century in the history
of ancient painting the era ofa great crisis ofancient art in which
the foundations for the development of later western art were
bid 11 Here are Lehmanns words for the threat his reconstruction is to dispel
In a period lor which a lower-middle-class tomb in Rome like that of the Amelii is used as a cornerstone [or the history of palntin) and Ir which the discovery of the frescoes of a Jewish synagogue in Mesopotamia tends to revolutionize the entire picture of the historv of lnrn
NOH~lAN BRYSON
Is it too much to find in these words a threat to a cherished image
of antiquity an image that must be protected
Art history emerges here in one of its dubious heroising guises
as the custodian of culture working against a background of crisis
and collapse Quite naturally the custodians must live in a great
house resplendent with all the marbles favoured by luxury
but particularly splendid by reason of the panel-paintings set in
the walls The force required to protect the custodians is that of
museum circa 1941 It is a modernist exhibition space
stripped down diagrammatic programmatic yet still (at the end
of the reconstruction) conceived as a house of the great with
dining-chambers for the four seasons Better than most museums
with their difficult diplomatic balance between the needs of
scholars and of patrons it is wholly designed by the art historian
The scholarship that builds this space is to judge by the footnotes
an exclusively German affair And the account endorses the
protocols of a certain strand in the German art history of its time
We shall always regret where fi)nllal problems are concerned the
limitations of a description which aimed not to descrile but to
interpret what the audience saw (emphases added) Painting is to
be approached formally not hermeneutically and interpretation
now a negative term is to be confined to an outpost of
iconography the identification of subjects and programme cycles
Lehmanns own hermeneutic operation presents itself as
opposite of interpretive work It proceeds by excluding lt111 those
images which appear to Lehmann to be editorial additions grafted
01 to the main text supposedly anomalous products of writing and
publication mere word-pictures un backed by actual referents It
prunes away the rhetorical elaborations of the lecn1rer and
bypasses the pictures themselves in order to reach th~ solid
masonry behind them as though representation itself verbal or
pictorial were a barrier to be torn dowH This process is presented
as a series of purifications The text contaminated for publication
is returned to its pristine state The visual field is purged of its
verbal dimension in a double movement from text In architecture
and from arl criticism to archaeology Antiquitys dark age is
banished Its whuralmainstrcam is protected against distortion by
-- - --~-
PHI I 0 S T RAT l SAN Il THE r M A (] N 1 H Y I S I I
inferior and marginlt11 groups Art history triumphs over art
appreciation The end product of these procedurts is the vision of
a purified architectural form whose authority is confirmed by a
tradition of national scholarship and national culture exiled to
America and written up in English yet still in direct contact with
the author of Phiostrats gemalde and with the Graeco-Homan past
Through rhetorical operations such as these Lehmanns
ecplrrasis becomes in a sense a tecitni(lue of the subject It is surely
much more than an archaeological reconstruction Like Auerbad~s Mimesis written in Istanbtll during World War II it mobilises the
energies of cultural resistance to its own dark century It invsts
those energies in an incandescent visualisation that configures the
beleaguered subject as a unified building I t would I think be
wrong to find fault with Lehmanns reading at the level on which
it appears to operate of slellth-like deduction and rationality
Expelled by the texts rational procedures rhetoric returns as
texts unconscious At this buried or subterranean level the
reading actually moves much closer into the Imagines than it is
able to admit Philostratus himself presents the art of painting not
as a copy of the world but ltIS in ternalisation of the world In 19 warns his audience not to be impressed by a works mimetic
realism ill that case he says we should praise an insignificant
feature of the painting and one that has solely to do with imitation
(mimesis) but we shollid nOI be praising its intelligence or
sense of decorum it shows though these I believe are the most
important elements of art l~ lust as painting shows the world as
it has already passed into the subjectivity of the painter so the
beholder should not dwell 011 the external matter of mimesis but
internalise the image drawing it inside the subject On their own
the audience can see pictures and judge mimesis perfectly well
the audience do not yet know are the techniques for
absorbing the pictures into the mind It is precisely
in this assimilation of pictures to subjectivity that the audience has come to hear Philostratus speak
It is in this aspect of internalisation that the Imafiines revcJ rhetoric itself as a techllolov Of elicnlin t1egt If T-_ r
1IIMN BRYSON
of the Ad Herenniuflt names memoria as the fourth part of
rhetoric 34 In order to memorise a lengthy speech the orator
should visualise the successive topics of his discourse as images
arranged in consecutive places within architectural space In the
words of Frances Yates who is that mlfi moving slowly in
lonely building stopping at intervals with an intent face He is a
rhetoric student forming a set of memory loci35 Architectures
role in rhetoric is as the supplier of milieux within which intense
visualisations are to occurUl As Cicero says the images should be
active sharply defined and unusual having the power of speedily
encountering and penetrating the psyche (quae oCCflrrere celerishy
terque percutere animum possim)37 The speech unfolds as
rhetorician walks in his mind past walls each memory-place hung
with a vivid image through rooms doorways stairways
porticoes terraces
The first notion is placed as it were ill the ()recourt the second let us say in the atrium lhe remainder are placed in order round the impluvium and committed not only to bedrooms and parlours but even to statues and the like3R
The stability and dependability of this internal architecture is vital
for the control of the self over its material To forget the existence
of a particular room is to leave out a whole stage of the argument
to lTIisremember the sequence of images is to garble the
presentation of the case
places are chosen and marked om with the utmost possible vlriety as a spacious house divided into a number of rooms Every thinK of note therein is diligently imprinted on the mind in order that thongl n~ay be able to fun through all the parts without let or hindrance The filst task is to secure that there shall be no difficulty in funning through these for that memory must be most firmly fixed which helps another memory all
Here architecture not only stands for the control of the self it is
the actual material means by which the self exercises its control
over its words and its world
If Lehmanns unitary and massively stable architecture stands ~1 _1 _~ bullbull l J ~
~ PHILOSTRATUS AND THE IMA((NARY MlISEU~1
c~) (~~) ( 0 ~ ~
-~ ----~
hI 34
1 reading rejoins Philostratus rhetoric as an operation whose means
is imaginary buildings and whose goal is mastery over self and
over representation Ecphrasis here is a technique for consolidating
the subject in terms of personal and professional control While on
the surface of his text Lehmann disavows hermeneutic art history
and expels the lecturer at other levels of his text Lehmann is
Philostratus shadow-partner or secret sharer Lehmanns entry
into the culture of late antiquity is through a shape-shifting in
which he performs the architectural ars memorativa of a thirdshy
century orator
Yet he does so in terms very different from those supplied in the
Imagines The kind of subject proposed and assllmed by 9
Philostratus text is much less driven by the urge towards unitary
self-possession The Imagines subject exists in a universe where
things images and words may frequently converge but do not
consistently fuse together ill the ardour of imaginary vision The
descriptions show the subject in transit across the interstices where
world pictures and language overlap Especially interesting 10
Philostratus are the hybrid or chiasmic zones where dillerent
registers cross over (fig 34)
Let us return for the last time to Looms Penelopes loom
exists at the place where images and the things of the world cross
over The loom is a thing that makes images yet we do not see the
images it makes only the things - warp threads shuttle it
works with Again when the weavers travel across the web or eat
their squirming prey they are seen as living moving creatures
hill at thl sme time the reader knows they are onlv a static nictllrf -j
--
OIlMAN BRYSON
i(
Elsewhere the text moves to the place where the things of the
world cross over into words The author tells us that the spiders
cables are almost too tine to discern What brings them into view
are in fact Hesiods lines about spiders destending and astending
their threads The word makes the thing exist Or a single word in
Greek -- arachnc is able to generate two utterly different beings
spiders and the weaver who challenged Minerva The characters of
Looms are so to speak engendered by an ecphrastic pun Words
and things change pilCes At other times the text crosses the place
where words and image blend Homers text turns into a picture
then back again into Homers words The line between what is
verbal and visual cannot be drawn4o
The subject of the Imagines is in constant motion and dispersal
across this complex terrain qf wprld jmilg ltlAd texr When the
outward pictures enter the subject and are assimilated to the seWs
interior they scatter across an intricately divided and Auid space
The images of Philostratus exist as r~fractiollS in a multishy
dimensional space in which a variety of voices none of them
original blend and clash 41 The subject who performs this
internalisation is in perpetual motion The moments when at the
philostratian Look the various registers join in visionary
fusion do not last long Almost at once the visions separate out
into their component strands unravelling as fast as they came
together And they lead on to the next image - more than sixty
times The unravelling of one image clears the space for the
coming together of the next one Or better the unravelling of
each image calls into being summons the next It is in that
perpetual Penelope-like emergence and falling away of images
that the subject is spun by the text Not as a central storehp~se or
gallery more a~ a motion or desire
Lehmanns subject is in a sense the opposite of thiJ In
Lehmanns case internalising philostralUs text means seeking a
means to arrest the motions of the text and to tapture and
immobilise its energies in a final culminating form Into the
stability of the huilding that is to end the text as motion and desire
are poured all the authors ligures for the command of the subject
massive masonry the prestige of the museum purified form
_ --- ----
PHILOSTRATUS AND THE IMAGINAIY M(SEI
Goethe national culture ethnic centrality profcssionlIisll1 posishy
tive knowledge Which should make Lehmann Philostratus most
inappropriate reader were it not for the brilliance and the yearning of his own visualisation
Among other things Lehmanns reading exemplifies some of
the paradoxes inherent in the tradition of positivist scholarship to
which it belongs It is this aspect that raises his reconstruction
above the category of historiGl1 oddity to adumbrate some of the
vicissitudes of positive knowledfe in more general terms First
Lehmanns relation to the literary to textuality and intenextualitx
is remarkably strained and contradictory The architectural ord~r he proposes for the Imagines is itselfbibliograplllc Lehmann needs
texts 10 enable his reconstruction to take place in order to build
his version of Philostratus villa he must resort to the library what
he says for instance concerning the typology of rooms their
orientation and relation to the seasons is directly dependent on
Vitruvius Yet at the same time his analysis mllst bypass textuality
in order to dissolve the texts into architectural form Necessary at
certain moments of the analysis at others textuality becomes an
obstacle to be scornfully removed Inherently untrustworthy
beside the actuality (the positivism) of the archaeological find texts are aligned in his interpretation with ideas of parasitism and
mediocrity figured here by the lecturer or professor The
reading works both to banish textual corruption completely
(which cannot easily show up ill the analysi~ since hiatuses in the
text arc translated at once into architectural syntax) and to build
the necessity for textual wrruption into his case (as when
Lehmann axes the last eight descriptions as later additions )
Textuality features in this mode of analysis primarily under tlte
sign of repression Where it is able to grow transparent before the
three-dimensional architectural and archaeological order it can be
admitted Where textuality fails to become translucent hcfilfe
reference it must be expelled even if the effort to do so becomes
massive involving the whole battery of figures for the command of th~ sui)ject
Secondly this ef1ort to repress textuality runs counter to many
of the most conspicuous features of Philostratllt PIh So
tgtnHMAN BRYSON
2X2
writing especially its interest in exploring the negative ecphrastic
spaces in which the reader so far from experiencing a dissolution
of writing before the luminous referellt (tlte philostratian
Look ) apprehends the text as a sophisticated web of allusions
parodies puns and tonal plays Lehmanns quest for the stable
masonry of the referent seems altogether blind to the many ways
in which philostratus writing plays to the wplzia of the reader as
one who can see bizarre connections who can understand hidden
narrativcs within imagery (A rachne Mincrva) wilD can
exercise the visual eqllivalent of the elaborate verbal dexterity that
characterises Hellenistic poetry When philostratus says that the
web the spiders make is exceedingly fine (k)perleIIOS) he is
doing more dlan asking liS to visualise something hard to see he
is using a key term from Hellenistic poetics eplOs which means
witty fint clever small-scale sophisticated and doing
so as an invitation or a warning to the reader that his own writing
too is all of these things It is a warning that Lehmann perhaps
wisely does not heed for once ecphrasis is thought of as a form
writing that involves much mort than a simple visualisation of
a text it leaves behind the one certainty that ecphrasis seemed to
hold out to the archaeologist - its promise of presence of
resurrection and becomes something else a mode of writing
whose complexity we are perhaps only beginning to discern and
in relation to which tlie idea of visualisation begins to appear as a
simplification at best
Finally the scrupulous rationality of Lehmanns interpretive
method with its emphasis on what can be deduced and
demonstrated as positive knowledge and as archilectural form
renders it strangely unaware of its own aspect of tellIality of the
ways in which it is itself a working wilh words in whityen the words
carry more associations motivations and effect than the writer is
able to hear or control Working within a highly instrumental and
reduced picture-theory of language Lehmanns analysis radically
underestimates the capacity of words to exceed their allotted
functions of argumentation demonstration and proof Opening
on to other investments and other scenes tban that simply of
archaeology and reconstruction Lehmanns text speaks its own
PllILOSTRATS AND THE IMAGINAHY MliS
uncollscious and it is in that energetic and overdetermined
underside of his text that his deepest engagement with Philostratus
may be found What he writes is perhaps the dream-work of
positivism not the forensics of archaeology but its own buried poetics 42
~
l ltJTES TO PAGES 244--61
O On Pausanils see Frazer (1898) Heer (1979) Jacob (1980)
Habich 1 (1985) and Elsner (1992)
I These include discussions of the wild satyrs of the islands 1235-)
the Ethiopians I334- the Ionian Greeks 722-51) the
marvellous animals collected in Rome 9211-2 the islands of
Sardinia and Corsica 10171-13
32 See Elsner (1992) 17--20
33 See Frazer (1898) xiv compare other second-century CE descripshy
tions of ruins such as Dio Chrysostom on Thebes Oratio 7
Plutarch De ~rcctu oracuorum 8 Lucian Diaog 11I0rt 272
34 This chapter began as a paper on Herodotus pyramids delivered to
Paul Cartledges Ancient History Seminar in Cambridge in 1989 I
wish to thank him John Henderson Jamie Masters and the Editors
of this volume for their comments on earlier drafts My deepest debt
is to Joan Pau Rubies y Mirabet with whom I have fi)r several years
discussed the problems of travel travel-writing and identity This
chapter is dedicated to him
CHApTEH EIGHT PHlLOSTRATliS AND Tin IMA(INARY
MUSEUM
1 English translations are taken from the Loeb edition edited by
T E Page E Capps and W H D Rouse (London and New
York193 1)
2 For the history of the debate see the editions of Jacobs and Welcker
(1825) Kayser (1844) Benndorf and Schenkel (1893) and
Steinmann (1914)
3 Lehmann (1941)
4 The essay is conveniently to be f()Und in vo XXVI of Cottas
standard edition (1868) pp 276fT
Lehmann (1941) 21-4
6 Obviously he describes pictures that were topoglllttphically united
but without regard to the ideological and (JrluaJ rda~m which had
dictated their combination Lehmann (1941) 20
7 Indeed the only explanation of the relationships and the lack of
order is that philostratus saw real pictures which were to a certain
extent arranged on the upper and lower parts of walls Lehmann
(1941) 20
8 Lehmann (1941) 31-3
9 Lehmann (1941) 31-3
NOTES TO P(I-S 2()2
10 [n fact the lmalfines do not supply indications concerning the
dimensions of any particular work
II [t should also be noted that Lehmanns groupings occasionally
require him to rewrite the given titles of pictures
11 These last eight pictures of the second book show a remarkable
absence of any stich relation and connection as we have found
everywhere else Lehmann (1941) 37
13 Lehmann (1941) 39-40
14 The image of weaving is frequently used of writing see for
example Catullus ()45ofr in which the marriage of Peleus and
Thetis is covered with a estis variata figuris pestit decorata
jiguris where filfura is also a literary term for Catullus (wn
rhetoric Perhaps the crucial sites of configuring language image
and weaving are words such as ypaqgteurolv grapIein which means
writedraw design (in thread)
I ~ Worfrs an1 Days 777
16 The presence of Arachne in Looms has been argued since the
Renaissance See for example the gloss on Les Etoiles in Blaise
de Vigeneres edition of 1610 514 Lehmann (1941) 39 also
suggests that the two pictures (227 and 218) both refer to the
Arachne story
17 Ovid Met 65~-8
18 Minerva depicts Rhodope and Ilaemus who dared to cal
themselves gods now turned to mountains the Pygmaean queen
who challenged Juno now turned into a crane Antigone turned
by the angered Juno into a stork Cinyras whose daughters are turned to stone
19 Arachnes tapestry shows Europa abducted by the bull Asterie
carried off by the eagle Leda pursued by the swan Jllpiter
disguised as Amphitryon Danae
20 Met 6140--4
21 Barkan (1986) 4
22 Met 663--6
23 227 1~-19
24 lmaxiner Proem
25 Lehmann (1941) 16
26 In the first paragraph of Lehmanns article Goethe is found to be
disappointed by Pompeii and Herculaneum mere Middletowns as
GoetheLehmann put it from whose limited atmosphere they 112
NOTES TO IAUES 27~-83
turn away towards the Imagines Heference to Goethe recur
at several points in the essay Strangely enough no-one with the
exception of Goethe has ever called attention to the problem of the
general order of the paintings in the two books of philostratus
(19) Yet Goethes rearrangement of the Imapnes is also as
Lehmann put it cavalier his own essay lJl1ilds more sysshy
tematically on Goethes
27 Lehmann (1941) 2S
28 Lehmann (1941) 30
29 Lehmann (1941) 41-2
30 Lehmann (1941) 41
31 Lehmann (1941) 17-18
32 Lehmann (1941) 17middot
33 Imagines 19 18-22 1 have modified the Locb translation
here
34 In Ad Herelfiun the five parts of rhetoric are
eloculio memoria pmllUllialio
3) Yates (1966) 8
36 On architectures relation to the art of memory see the discussion
of Elsner (forthcoming) chapter 2 section v
37 Ad HerenniulII 2873)8 cited by Yates (1966) 18
38 Quimilian inH orat 11220 cited by Yates (1966) 22
39 Quintilian Inst oral 11218 cited by Yates (1966) 22
40 The diagram (Iig 34) is not satisfactory for instance its lines
fixity when the whole point is to suggest fluidity and continuum
But 1hope the reader will follow at least the diagrams gist that the
illlaNille constantly shuttles between words il1la~es and thin~s
Area (5) is that of merger between things and images (6) is the
hybrid area ofwordsubjects (7) is the area of blur between word
and image perhaps the principal ecphrastic space~ he space of the
wurd graphein r 41 Barthes (1977) 145-6
42 1am grateful to the members of the Laurcncc Seminar held in the
Department of Classics at Cambridge in May 1991 ltJr their help in
formulating the ideas presented in this essay and particularly to
Simon Goldhill jas Elsner and Stephen Bann for their very
welcome observations and
List of works cited
For abbreviations see pp xi--xiii
Adler J and Ernst U (1988) Text als Figur 11welle Poesie 101 der
Antike gtis rur Moderne Weinheim
Alpers S (1983) The Art ofDescrihlilg Chicago
Amyx D A (1988) Corinthian Vase Painting orrIe Arclaic Period The
Study of Corinthian Vases Berkeley
Arnheim R (1988) The Poet at rile Center A )tudl ofCompo siti 011 in the
Visual Artr Berkeley
Arnott P (1962) Greek Scellic COlventoils ill til Fijth Celllu~) BC
Oxford
(1989) Puhlic and Performance ill the Greek Theater London
Arnott W G (1987) The Stream and the Gold Two notes 011
Theocritus in Filologia e forme letterarie studi (1fimi a F Della
Corte vol I U rhino
Arthur [Katl] M (1975) Hurtides phoenislae and the Plitics
Diss Yale University
(1977) The curse of civilizatioll the choral odes of the PllOemu-ae
HSCP 81 163-8
Ashmole B (1972) Architect and Sculptor in Classical Greece London
Ashmole B and Yalouris N (1967) Olympia The Sculptures of the
Temple of Zeus London
Baladit H (1980) La Pilopollnese de Strahon Paris
-if Bann s (1989) The True Vine on Visual Representanim ald tllet
- lf7estern Tradition Cambridge -J Barber E J w (1990) Prellistone Textiles the Deleopmellt (Clotll ill
the Neolithic and Brone Ages Princctoll
(1992) The peplos of Athelia in Goddess and Polis tILl PaIlGtIz((c
o H ~l A N B R Y SON
27C
art concealillt art mlkes the dead mailer of leLters and
brushslrokes corne alive BUl this is only one phase ill the
ecphrastic process Equally important are the momellts when the
ecphrasis fails when words revert to being words tapestries
revert to thread and architecture to rubble
One reason that Lehmanns reading banishes Looms from the
Imagines may perhaps be the descriptions eminent f~lilure instead
of giving way to a luminous and ostensible referent
enthusiasm that enables philostratus to say Look The spiders
and Lehmann to say Look The sma - Looms darkens the
picture making it a place of shadows dust and broken
architecture Spatially it figures itself as a ruined courtyard
Textually it traverses not only the place of ecphrastic excitement
where words turn into pictures and pictures turn into things but
all the negative ecphrastic spaces whcre words remain words or
form hybrids with pictures and pictures revert to thei I constituent
elements threads WII hering lint on a loom That philostratus
intends this cffect of netativity and intends it as a figure for his
own ecphrastic enterprise is confirmed by the pairing which
Looms (228) forms with its preceding picture bullThe birth of
Athena (227)
The link of course is Arachne 16 As Ovid tells the tale
Arachne is a human weaver who challenges the skill of the divine
weaver Minerva and is punished ltH Iter hubris when Minerva
turns her into a spider At the contest both welvers set lip their
looms
The web is bound upon the beam the reed separates tlw threads of the warp the woof is threaded through them by the sharp shuttles which their busy fingers ply and when shol through the threads ofdle warp the notched teeth of tilt hammering stay beats it into place l
I~
Minerva pictures the twelve heavenly gods 011 majestic thrones At
the four corners of her tapestry are set miniature scenes of
presumptuous mortals IS Arachne counters this imagery of the
gods punishing humans ()r hubris with scenes of the gods and
especially Jupiter19 violating human females Appalled by
Arachnes work Minerva hits her three times with a shuttle then
robs her of human form
PHI LOS T RAT J SAN D THE I MAG I N A It Y 1lH I
Fig 33
Forthwith her hair touched by the poison fell off and with it both nose and ears and the head shrank up her whole body also was small the slender lingers cling 10 her side as the rest was belly 20
For many interpreters of the Arachne fable the official moral
- a cautionary tale against hubris contains a second level a
of reflection upon the capacities and limitations of an For
Velazquez the competition concerns not only weavers but
painters At the rear of the inner stage in The Fable o( Arachne is
shown Titians painting The Rape of Europa and
presents his own craft in parallel to the art of weaving placed
somewhere perhaps between Arachne and Minerva between the
genre painting of the foreground and Titians history painting in
the middle distance (fig 33) III the reading of Leonard Barkan
this capacity of the Arachne topos to act as arts self-reflexive
shy
2~
OltMAN BRYSON
~~ 2
commentary on art is already present in Ovids text I t requires
no great leap of the imagination to see in Arachnes tapestry all the
elements of Ovids own poetry in the Metamorphoses Just as she
tells the stories of the loves of the gods and the metamorphoses of
their victims so does he 21 Like Velazquez Ovid positions his
own work somewhere between the disorderly profusion
metamorphoses that issue from Arachnes loom and
theologically correct carefully framed tapestries that come
the loom of Minerva
That philostratus intends Looms to unfold in the space of this
a number of details The Birth of
the first subject of Minervas tapestry immediately
precedes the text of Looms in philostratus gallery In Ovid the
contest of Arachne and Minerva is visualised as a spectrum of
iridescent colours
As when after a storm of rain the suns rays strike through and a rainbow with its huge curve stains the wide sky though a thousand different colours shine in it the eye cannot detect the change from each one to the next so appear the adjacent colours22
This is precisely the metaphor philostratus uses to describe the
armour of Athene as the goddess emerges fullv armed from
head of Zeus
As for the material of her panoply no-one could guess iI Ii)r as many as are the colours of the rainbow which changes its light now to one hue gt1d now to another so many are the colours of her armour 2
1
Taking Philostratus two descriptions in sequence one can say
that Looms applies to the competition between Minerva and
Arachne the figure of hathos It is a comic transformation orOvids
contest down-scaled with Penelope in the place of MinerW1
spiders in the place of Arachne
philostratus begins where Ovid left off with Arachnes
metamorphosis the rest was belly is expanded into the spiders
repulsive fuzzy surface and its savage nature and the spiders
grisly meaL Where Ovid uses the Arachne fable as a means to
comment on his own project in the MUal11ornwses niacin his
book somewhere between divine
-~
P II I L () S Tii A T USA N Il TilE J M A ( I N A H Y ~Il S Hmiddot
comically deflated retelling of the fable philostratus places his own
project the Imagines somewhere between the higher artists
(Homer Hesiod Ovid etc) and the beasts Ovid and
use the images of their own
the inverts the rhetoric in a comic
desublimation or parody
Let us touch again on the philostratian exclamation Lookmiddot
k fI
The moment when a picture seems to come alive is encountered
again and again in the 1m agiles In Xenia I philostratlls remark~
that the painted grapes are good to eat and full of winey juice
(r3 I) In Xenia 2 he invites the reader to reach out and take a loaf
from the painted basket (226) In Narcissus he says he cannot
real (123) At the core of the Imagines is the promise tl1at at
ments words
intense experience that
oth pictures and words It is not simply that words arc
tell whether a real bee has been deceived bv the painted Hower or
whetlier we are to be deceived into thinking that a ~
supplemented by pictures and pictures by words To read the
Imagines that way is to model it on the example of the illustrated ~ shybook The logic of the text is in fact closer once again to that of
Derridas supplement What words lack (because they are
words characters on the page marks without light) images can hJluinaJvt with a presence which is based on that lack which grows fro~l it
and turns it into light What images lack (because they are
in time mere pigments on a surf~lce threads on a loom) words Gill
sugply with narration and movement This strange hallueinatoy
power of ecphrasis calls on the capaei~ies of words and I~ to
describe the world but goes beyond their several powers into a
~ _ moment when Look becomes the only appropriate -- ~ ~L
response The exclamation directs the reader not towards the text J t or its Image but past them both into another space where presence )f
~vo to 11 th 0 ooce (gl hdoS tooeh t) fiJtJ - Yet compared with Ovicl (or Vehizquez) philostratlls text is (
clearly self-mocking and self-defeating Its lines move Ollt into all ~ the negative ecpilrastic spaces where the enanIeia of Iookmiddot j
NORMAN BHYlgtON
exactly unfortilcoming Instead of Aracillle the spider instead of the loves of the gods in tapestry an insect meal Oil a web
Accompanying the project of inciting the reader to envision is
Philostratus awareness that with every ecphrasis at some point
the lines and strokes always separate and unravel The text presents
itself as hollowed out by its own rhetorical self-awareness and as
haunted by an inescapably secondary or belated relation to
pictures In the Proem the author dramatises himself as a painter
mangul
Now the story of the men who have mastery in the sciellce of painting and the states and kings that have been passiolltltely devoted to it has been told by others writers Ilotably Aristodemus of Carla whom I
visited for four years In orcler to study paintinf 1n the present discussions however we propose to describe examples of painting in the form of addresses which have been composed for the young 24
Four years of study with Aristodemus have led not to a career in
painting but only in criticism In the scenography of the text
Philostratus is always old and lesser than the young The son of
his host must summon him before he speaks SpJtially he is at the
perimeter beyond the city walls a Greek wandering in Italy
Secondary in relation to painting his pictures are also belated in
time not the work of men who have won mastery in the science
of painting discussed by Pliny but of painters who are never in
fact given names
G- lc o this negative dinlension of the Ima(inegt Lehmann appears
1vt tgt emarkably insensitive Jn his hands the Imagilles are tt come
alive he will infuse them with his own visionary energy~~ resurrecting the fragments of the text into a luminous stoa whose
every corner he can visualise His work with the blta(illes is in a
sense part of the Pompeian tradition which from Winckelmann
to l3ulwer-Lytton to Ilollywood aims to coiJre ivil~ flesh from
the ashes In terms of its own rhetoric Lehmanns is a heroic reading The example of the Irrcltlt Goerhe2f tTllirlp hi274
bull vJ ~_ _
PHILOSTRATLJS AND THE IMAGINARY MI~I
enterprise26
Filling out what remained only tentative in Goethes
essay he perceives an order in the Imagines which not even their
author realised The Imagines have to be wrested from philoshy
stratlls hands Philostratus misreads the mountains of Thes~ly as
mountains of Rhodes Philostratus takes no advantage of these connections and does not mention them27 Although
Philostratus was perfectly able to see immediately many of the
implications of single pictures he did not discuss the cyclic idea
He was not interested in it2R As Lehmanns analysis gains
momentum Philostratus tends to get referred to as thelcctUle~ Like many orators and letter writers and teachers before and after
him he decided to pllblish these lectures as a model of his
tecllllillue and style in handling such a task 29 He paraphrased
rather than described the paintings and pointed out the emotional
values and psychological associations ofeach picture His emphasis
in this collrse ill the appreciation (Ifart was one-sided as flax heen tlwl
elery professor (~f tlzis kind after Ilim (emphases added) ~o
Lehmann himself is not of course a lecturer or professor of this kind
If Philostratus mocks his own secondariness Lehmann expels
secondariness from his text in tbe person of the outmoded
professor who only appreciates and who cannot see what
Lehmann sees the hyper-realistic image of a gallery with all its
rooms envisioned simultaneously and in detail But these abject
personifications the lectlirer and the professor arc not the
bearers of anxiety in his reading or its only scapegoats The
Imapnes need to be reconstructed Lehmann maintains because
without them the third century is the dark century in the history
of ancient painting the era ofa great crisis ofancient art in which
the foundations for the development of later western art were
bid 11 Here are Lehmanns words for the threat his reconstruction is to dispel
In a period lor which a lower-middle-class tomb in Rome like that of the Amelii is used as a cornerstone [or the history of palntin) and Ir which the discovery of the frescoes of a Jewish synagogue in Mesopotamia tends to revolutionize the entire picture of the historv of lnrn
NOH~lAN BRYSON
Is it too much to find in these words a threat to a cherished image
of antiquity an image that must be protected
Art history emerges here in one of its dubious heroising guises
as the custodian of culture working against a background of crisis
and collapse Quite naturally the custodians must live in a great
house resplendent with all the marbles favoured by luxury
but particularly splendid by reason of the panel-paintings set in
the walls The force required to protect the custodians is that of
museum circa 1941 It is a modernist exhibition space
stripped down diagrammatic programmatic yet still (at the end
of the reconstruction) conceived as a house of the great with
dining-chambers for the four seasons Better than most museums
with their difficult diplomatic balance between the needs of
scholars and of patrons it is wholly designed by the art historian
The scholarship that builds this space is to judge by the footnotes
an exclusively German affair And the account endorses the
protocols of a certain strand in the German art history of its time
We shall always regret where fi)nllal problems are concerned the
limitations of a description which aimed not to descrile but to
interpret what the audience saw (emphases added) Painting is to
be approached formally not hermeneutically and interpretation
now a negative term is to be confined to an outpost of
iconography the identification of subjects and programme cycles
Lehmanns own hermeneutic operation presents itself as
opposite of interpretive work It proceeds by excluding lt111 those
images which appear to Lehmann to be editorial additions grafted
01 to the main text supposedly anomalous products of writing and
publication mere word-pictures un backed by actual referents It
prunes away the rhetorical elaborations of the lecn1rer and
bypasses the pictures themselves in order to reach th~ solid
masonry behind them as though representation itself verbal or
pictorial were a barrier to be torn dowH This process is presented
as a series of purifications The text contaminated for publication
is returned to its pristine state The visual field is purged of its
verbal dimension in a double movement from text In architecture
and from arl criticism to archaeology Antiquitys dark age is
banished Its whuralmainstrcam is protected against distortion by
-- - --~-
PHI I 0 S T RAT l SAN Il THE r M A (] N 1 H Y I S I I
inferior and marginlt11 groups Art history triumphs over art
appreciation The end product of these procedurts is the vision of
a purified architectural form whose authority is confirmed by a
tradition of national scholarship and national culture exiled to
America and written up in English yet still in direct contact with
the author of Phiostrats gemalde and with the Graeco-Homan past
Through rhetorical operations such as these Lehmanns
ecplrrasis becomes in a sense a tecitni(lue of the subject It is surely
much more than an archaeological reconstruction Like Auerbad~s Mimesis written in Istanbtll during World War II it mobilises the
energies of cultural resistance to its own dark century It invsts
those energies in an incandescent visualisation that configures the
beleaguered subject as a unified building I t would I think be
wrong to find fault with Lehmanns reading at the level on which
it appears to operate of slellth-like deduction and rationality
Expelled by the texts rational procedures rhetoric returns as
texts unconscious At this buried or subterranean level the
reading actually moves much closer into the Imagines than it is
able to admit Philostratus himself presents the art of painting not
as a copy of the world but ltIS in ternalisation of the world In 19 warns his audience not to be impressed by a works mimetic
realism ill that case he says we should praise an insignificant
feature of the painting and one that has solely to do with imitation
(mimesis) but we shollid nOI be praising its intelligence or
sense of decorum it shows though these I believe are the most
important elements of art l~ lust as painting shows the world as
it has already passed into the subjectivity of the painter so the
beholder should not dwell 011 the external matter of mimesis but
internalise the image drawing it inside the subject On their own
the audience can see pictures and judge mimesis perfectly well
the audience do not yet know are the techniques for
absorbing the pictures into the mind It is precisely
in this assimilation of pictures to subjectivity that the audience has come to hear Philostratus speak
It is in this aspect of internalisation that the Imafiines revcJ rhetoric itself as a techllolov Of elicnlin t1egt If T-_ r
1IIMN BRYSON
of the Ad Herenniuflt names memoria as the fourth part of
rhetoric 34 In order to memorise a lengthy speech the orator
should visualise the successive topics of his discourse as images
arranged in consecutive places within architectural space In the
words of Frances Yates who is that mlfi moving slowly in
lonely building stopping at intervals with an intent face He is a
rhetoric student forming a set of memory loci35 Architectures
role in rhetoric is as the supplier of milieux within which intense
visualisations are to occurUl As Cicero says the images should be
active sharply defined and unusual having the power of speedily
encountering and penetrating the psyche (quae oCCflrrere celerishy
terque percutere animum possim)37 The speech unfolds as
rhetorician walks in his mind past walls each memory-place hung
with a vivid image through rooms doorways stairways
porticoes terraces
The first notion is placed as it were ill the ()recourt the second let us say in the atrium lhe remainder are placed in order round the impluvium and committed not only to bedrooms and parlours but even to statues and the like3R
The stability and dependability of this internal architecture is vital
for the control of the self over its material To forget the existence
of a particular room is to leave out a whole stage of the argument
to lTIisremember the sequence of images is to garble the
presentation of the case
places are chosen and marked om with the utmost possible vlriety as a spacious house divided into a number of rooms Every thinK of note therein is diligently imprinted on the mind in order that thongl n~ay be able to fun through all the parts without let or hindrance The filst task is to secure that there shall be no difficulty in funning through these for that memory must be most firmly fixed which helps another memory all
Here architecture not only stands for the control of the self it is
the actual material means by which the self exercises its control
over its words and its world
If Lehmanns unitary and massively stable architecture stands ~1 _1 _~ bullbull l J ~
~ PHILOSTRATUS AND THE IMA((NARY MlISEU~1
c~) (~~) ( 0 ~ ~
-~ ----~
hI 34
1 reading rejoins Philostratus rhetoric as an operation whose means
is imaginary buildings and whose goal is mastery over self and
over representation Ecphrasis here is a technique for consolidating
the subject in terms of personal and professional control While on
the surface of his text Lehmann disavows hermeneutic art history
and expels the lecturer at other levels of his text Lehmann is
Philostratus shadow-partner or secret sharer Lehmanns entry
into the culture of late antiquity is through a shape-shifting in
which he performs the architectural ars memorativa of a thirdshy
century orator
Yet he does so in terms very different from those supplied in the
Imagines The kind of subject proposed and assllmed by 9
Philostratus text is much less driven by the urge towards unitary
self-possession The Imagines subject exists in a universe where
things images and words may frequently converge but do not
consistently fuse together ill the ardour of imaginary vision The
descriptions show the subject in transit across the interstices where
world pictures and language overlap Especially interesting 10
Philostratus are the hybrid or chiasmic zones where dillerent
registers cross over (fig 34)
Let us return for the last time to Looms Penelopes loom
exists at the place where images and the things of the world cross
over The loom is a thing that makes images yet we do not see the
images it makes only the things - warp threads shuttle it
works with Again when the weavers travel across the web or eat
their squirming prey they are seen as living moving creatures
hill at thl sme time the reader knows they are onlv a static nictllrf -j
--
OIlMAN BRYSON
i(
Elsewhere the text moves to the place where the things of the
world cross over into words The author tells us that the spiders
cables are almost too tine to discern What brings them into view
are in fact Hesiods lines about spiders destending and astending
their threads The word makes the thing exist Or a single word in
Greek -- arachnc is able to generate two utterly different beings
spiders and the weaver who challenged Minerva The characters of
Looms are so to speak engendered by an ecphrastic pun Words
and things change pilCes At other times the text crosses the place
where words and image blend Homers text turns into a picture
then back again into Homers words The line between what is
verbal and visual cannot be drawn4o
The subject of the Imagines is in constant motion and dispersal
across this complex terrain qf wprld jmilg ltlAd texr When the
outward pictures enter the subject and are assimilated to the seWs
interior they scatter across an intricately divided and Auid space
The images of Philostratus exist as r~fractiollS in a multishy
dimensional space in which a variety of voices none of them
original blend and clash 41 The subject who performs this
internalisation is in perpetual motion The moments when at the
philostratian Look the various registers join in visionary
fusion do not last long Almost at once the visions separate out
into their component strands unravelling as fast as they came
together And they lead on to the next image - more than sixty
times The unravelling of one image clears the space for the
coming together of the next one Or better the unravelling of
each image calls into being summons the next It is in that
perpetual Penelope-like emergence and falling away of images
that the subject is spun by the text Not as a central storehp~se or
gallery more a~ a motion or desire
Lehmanns subject is in a sense the opposite of thiJ In
Lehmanns case internalising philostralUs text means seeking a
means to arrest the motions of the text and to tapture and
immobilise its energies in a final culminating form Into the
stability of the huilding that is to end the text as motion and desire
are poured all the authors ligures for the command of the subject
massive masonry the prestige of the museum purified form
_ --- ----
PHILOSTRATUS AND THE IMAGINAIY M(SEI
Goethe national culture ethnic centrality profcssionlIisll1 posishy
tive knowledge Which should make Lehmann Philostratus most
inappropriate reader were it not for the brilliance and the yearning of his own visualisation
Among other things Lehmanns reading exemplifies some of
the paradoxes inherent in the tradition of positivist scholarship to
which it belongs It is this aspect that raises his reconstruction
above the category of historiGl1 oddity to adumbrate some of the
vicissitudes of positive knowledfe in more general terms First
Lehmanns relation to the literary to textuality and intenextualitx
is remarkably strained and contradictory The architectural ord~r he proposes for the Imagines is itselfbibliograplllc Lehmann needs
texts 10 enable his reconstruction to take place in order to build
his version of Philostratus villa he must resort to the library what
he says for instance concerning the typology of rooms their
orientation and relation to the seasons is directly dependent on
Vitruvius Yet at the same time his analysis mllst bypass textuality
in order to dissolve the texts into architectural form Necessary at
certain moments of the analysis at others textuality becomes an
obstacle to be scornfully removed Inherently untrustworthy
beside the actuality (the positivism) of the archaeological find texts are aligned in his interpretation with ideas of parasitism and
mediocrity figured here by the lecturer or professor The
reading works both to banish textual corruption completely
(which cannot easily show up ill the analysi~ since hiatuses in the
text arc translated at once into architectural syntax) and to build
the necessity for textual wrruption into his case (as when
Lehmann axes the last eight descriptions as later additions )
Textuality features in this mode of analysis primarily under tlte
sign of repression Where it is able to grow transparent before the
three-dimensional architectural and archaeological order it can be
admitted Where textuality fails to become translucent hcfilfe
reference it must be expelled even if the effort to do so becomes
massive involving the whole battery of figures for the command of th~ sui)ject
Secondly this ef1ort to repress textuality runs counter to many
of the most conspicuous features of Philostratllt PIh So
tgtnHMAN BRYSON
2X2
writing especially its interest in exploring the negative ecphrastic
spaces in which the reader so far from experiencing a dissolution
of writing before the luminous referellt (tlte philostratian
Look ) apprehends the text as a sophisticated web of allusions
parodies puns and tonal plays Lehmanns quest for the stable
masonry of the referent seems altogether blind to the many ways
in which philostratus writing plays to the wplzia of the reader as
one who can see bizarre connections who can understand hidden
narrativcs within imagery (A rachne Mincrva) wilD can
exercise the visual eqllivalent of the elaborate verbal dexterity that
characterises Hellenistic poetry When philostratus says that the
web the spiders make is exceedingly fine (k)perleIIOS) he is
doing more dlan asking liS to visualise something hard to see he
is using a key term from Hellenistic poetics eplOs which means
witty fint clever small-scale sophisticated and doing
so as an invitation or a warning to the reader that his own writing
too is all of these things It is a warning that Lehmann perhaps
wisely does not heed for once ecphrasis is thought of as a form
writing that involves much mort than a simple visualisation of
a text it leaves behind the one certainty that ecphrasis seemed to
hold out to the archaeologist - its promise of presence of
resurrection and becomes something else a mode of writing
whose complexity we are perhaps only beginning to discern and
in relation to which tlie idea of visualisation begins to appear as a
simplification at best
Finally the scrupulous rationality of Lehmanns interpretive
method with its emphasis on what can be deduced and
demonstrated as positive knowledge and as archilectural form
renders it strangely unaware of its own aspect of tellIality of the
ways in which it is itself a working wilh words in whityen the words
carry more associations motivations and effect than the writer is
able to hear or control Working within a highly instrumental and
reduced picture-theory of language Lehmanns analysis radically
underestimates the capacity of words to exceed their allotted
functions of argumentation demonstration and proof Opening
on to other investments and other scenes tban that simply of
archaeology and reconstruction Lehmanns text speaks its own
PllILOSTRATS AND THE IMAGINAHY MliS
uncollscious and it is in that energetic and overdetermined
underside of his text that his deepest engagement with Philostratus
may be found What he writes is perhaps the dream-work of
positivism not the forensics of archaeology but its own buried poetics 42
~
l ltJTES TO PAGES 244--61
O On Pausanils see Frazer (1898) Heer (1979) Jacob (1980)
Habich 1 (1985) and Elsner (1992)
I These include discussions of the wild satyrs of the islands 1235-)
the Ethiopians I334- the Ionian Greeks 722-51) the
marvellous animals collected in Rome 9211-2 the islands of
Sardinia and Corsica 10171-13
32 See Elsner (1992) 17--20
33 See Frazer (1898) xiv compare other second-century CE descripshy
tions of ruins such as Dio Chrysostom on Thebes Oratio 7
Plutarch De ~rcctu oracuorum 8 Lucian Diaog 11I0rt 272
34 This chapter began as a paper on Herodotus pyramids delivered to
Paul Cartledges Ancient History Seminar in Cambridge in 1989 I
wish to thank him John Henderson Jamie Masters and the Editors
of this volume for their comments on earlier drafts My deepest debt
is to Joan Pau Rubies y Mirabet with whom I have fi)r several years
discussed the problems of travel travel-writing and identity This
chapter is dedicated to him
CHApTEH EIGHT PHlLOSTRATliS AND Tin IMA(INARY
MUSEUM
1 English translations are taken from the Loeb edition edited by
T E Page E Capps and W H D Rouse (London and New
York193 1)
2 For the history of the debate see the editions of Jacobs and Welcker
(1825) Kayser (1844) Benndorf and Schenkel (1893) and
Steinmann (1914)
3 Lehmann (1941)
4 The essay is conveniently to be f()Und in vo XXVI of Cottas
standard edition (1868) pp 276fT
Lehmann (1941) 21-4
6 Obviously he describes pictures that were topoglllttphically united
but without regard to the ideological and (JrluaJ rda~m which had
dictated their combination Lehmann (1941) 20
7 Indeed the only explanation of the relationships and the lack of
order is that philostratus saw real pictures which were to a certain
extent arranged on the upper and lower parts of walls Lehmann
(1941) 20
8 Lehmann (1941) 31-3
9 Lehmann (1941) 31-3
NOTES TO P(I-S 2()2
10 [n fact the lmalfines do not supply indications concerning the
dimensions of any particular work
II [t should also be noted that Lehmanns groupings occasionally
require him to rewrite the given titles of pictures
11 These last eight pictures of the second book show a remarkable
absence of any stich relation and connection as we have found
everywhere else Lehmann (1941) 37
13 Lehmann (1941) 39-40
14 The image of weaving is frequently used of writing see for
example Catullus ()45ofr in which the marriage of Peleus and
Thetis is covered with a estis variata figuris pestit decorata
jiguris where filfura is also a literary term for Catullus (wn
rhetoric Perhaps the crucial sites of configuring language image
and weaving are words such as ypaqgteurolv grapIein which means
writedraw design (in thread)
I ~ Worfrs an1 Days 777
16 The presence of Arachne in Looms has been argued since the
Renaissance See for example the gloss on Les Etoiles in Blaise
de Vigeneres edition of 1610 514 Lehmann (1941) 39 also
suggests that the two pictures (227 and 218) both refer to the
Arachne story
17 Ovid Met 65~-8
18 Minerva depicts Rhodope and Ilaemus who dared to cal
themselves gods now turned to mountains the Pygmaean queen
who challenged Juno now turned into a crane Antigone turned
by the angered Juno into a stork Cinyras whose daughters are turned to stone
19 Arachnes tapestry shows Europa abducted by the bull Asterie
carried off by the eagle Leda pursued by the swan Jllpiter
disguised as Amphitryon Danae
20 Met 6140--4
21 Barkan (1986) 4
22 Met 663--6
23 227 1~-19
24 lmaxiner Proem
25 Lehmann (1941) 16
26 In the first paragraph of Lehmanns article Goethe is found to be
disappointed by Pompeii and Herculaneum mere Middletowns as
GoetheLehmann put it from whose limited atmosphere they 112
NOTES TO IAUES 27~-83
turn away towards the Imagines Heference to Goethe recur
at several points in the essay Strangely enough no-one with the
exception of Goethe has ever called attention to the problem of the
general order of the paintings in the two books of philostratus
(19) Yet Goethes rearrangement of the Imapnes is also as
Lehmann put it cavalier his own essay lJl1ilds more sysshy
tematically on Goethes
27 Lehmann (1941) 2S
28 Lehmann (1941) 30
29 Lehmann (1941) 41-2
30 Lehmann (1941) 41
31 Lehmann (1941) 17-18
32 Lehmann (1941) 17middot
33 Imagines 19 18-22 1 have modified the Locb translation
here
34 In Ad Herelfiun the five parts of rhetoric are
eloculio memoria pmllUllialio
3) Yates (1966) 8
36 On architectures relation to the art of memory see the discussion
of Elsner (forthcoming) chapter 2 section v
37 Ad HerenniulII 2873)8 cited by Yates (1966) 18
38 Quimilian inH orat 11220 cited by Yates (1966) 22
39 Quintilian Inst oral 11218 cited by Yates (1966) 22
40 The diagram (Iig 34) is not satisfactory for instance its lines
fixity when the whole point is to suggest fluidity and continuum
But 1hope the reader will follow at least the diagrams gist that the
illlaNille constantly shuttles between words il1la~es and thin~s
Area (5) is that of merger between things and images (6) is the
hybrid area ofwordsubjects (7) is the area of blur between word
and image perhaps the principal ecphrastic space~ he space of the
wurd graphein r 41 Barthes (1977) 145-6
42 1am grateful to the members of the Laurcncc Seminar held in the
Department of Classics at Cambridge in May 1991 ltJr their help in
formulating the ideas presented in this essay and particularly to
Simon Goldhill jas Elsner and Stephen Bann for their very
welcome observations and
List of works cited
For abbreviations see pp xi--xiii
Adler J and Ernst U (1988) Text als Figur 11welle Poesie 101 der
Antike gtis rur Moderne Weinheim
Alpers S (1983) The Art ofDescrihlilg Chicago
Amyx D A (1988) Corinthian Vase Painting orrIe Arclaic Period The
Study of Corinthian Vases Berkeley
Arnheim R (1988) The Poet at rile Center A )tudl ofCompo siti 011 in the
Visual Artr Berkeley
Arnott P (1962) Greek Scellic COlventoils ill til Fijth Celllu~) BC
Oxford
(1989) Puhlic and Performance ill the Greek Theater London
Arnott W G (1987) The Stream and the Gold Two notes 011
Theocritus in Filologia e forme letterarie studi (1fimi a F Della
Corte vol I U rhino
Arthur [Katl] M (1975) Hurtides phoenislae and the Plitics
Diss Yale University
(1977) The curse of civilizatioll the choral odes of the PllOemu-ae
HSCP 81 163-8
Ashmole B (1972) Architect and Sculptor in Classical Greece London
Ashmole B and Yalouris N (1967) Olympia The Sculptures of the
Temple of Zeus London
Baladit H (1980) La Pilopollnese de Strahon Paris
-if Bann s (1989) The True Vine on Visual Representanim ald tllet
- lf7estern Tradition Cambridge -J Barber E J w (1990) Prellistone Textiles the Deleopmellt (Clotll ill
the Neolithic and Brone Ages Princctoll
(1992) The peplos of Athelia in Goddess and Polis tILl PaIlGtIz((c
OltMAN BRYSON
~~ 2
commentary on art is already present in Ovids text I t requires
no great leap of the imagination to see in Arachnes tapestry all the
elements of Ovids own poetry in the Metamorphoses Just as she
tells the stories of the loves of the gods and the metamorphoses of
their victims so does he 21 Like Velazquez Ovid positions his
own work somewhere between the disorderly profusion
metamorphoses that issue from Arachnes loom and
theologically correct carefully framed tapestries that come
the loom of Minerva
That philostratus intends Looms to unfold in the space of this
a number of details The Birth of
the first subject of Minervas tapestry immediately
precedes the text of Looms in philostratus gallery In Ovid the
contest of Arachne and Minerva is visualised as a spectrum of
iridescent colours
As when after a storm of rain the suns rays strike through and a rainbow with its huge curve stains the wide sky though a thousand different colours shine in it the eye cannot detect the change from each one to the next so appear the adjacent colours22
This is precisely the metaphor philostratus uses to describe the
armour of Athene as the goddess emerges fullv armed from
head of Zeus
As for the material of her panoply no-one could guess iI Ii)r as many as are the colours of the rainbow which changes its light now to one hue gt1d now to another so many are the colours of her armour 2
1
Taking Philostratus two descriptions in sequence one can say
that Looms applies to the competition between Minerva and
Arachne the figure of hathos It is a comic transformation orOvids
contest down-scaled with Penelope in the place of MinerW1
spiders in the place of Arachne
philostratus begins where Ovid left off with Arachnes
metamorphosis the rest was belly is expanded into the spiders
repulsive fuzzy surface and its savage nature and the spiders
grisly meaL Where Ovid uses the Arachne fable as a means to
comment on his own project in the MUal11ornwses niacin his
book somewhere between divine
-~
P II I L () S Tii A T USA N Il TilE J M A ( I N A H Y ~Il S Hmiddot
comically deflated retelling of the fable philostratus places his own
project the Imagines somewhere between the higher artists
(Homer Hesiod Ovid etc) and the beasts Ovid and
use the images of their own
the inverts the rhetoric in a comic
desublimation or parody
Let us touch again on the philostratian exclamation Lookmiddot
k fI
The moment when a picture seems to come alive is encountered
again and again in the 1m agiles In Xenia I philostratlls remark~
that the painted grapes are good to eat and full of winey juice
(r3 I) In Xenia 2 he invites the reader to reach out and take a loaf
from the painted basket (226) In Narcissus he says he cannot
real (123) At the core of the Imagines is the promise tl1at at
ments words
intense experience that
oth pictures and words It is not simply that words arc
tell whether a real bee has been deceived bv the painted Hower or
whetlier we are to be deceived into thinking that a ~
supplemented by pictures and pictures by words To read the
Imagines that way is to model it on the example of the illustrated ~ shybook The logic of the text is in fact closer once again to that of
Derridas supplement What words lack (because they are
words characters on the page marks without light) images can hJluinaJvt with a presence which is based on that lack which grows fro~l it
and turns it into light What images lack (because they are
in time mere pigments on a surf~lce threads on a loom) words Gill
sugply with narration and movement This strange hallueinatoy
power of ecphrasis calls on the capaei~ies of words and I~ to
describe the world but goes beyond their several powers into a
~ _ moment when Look becomes the only appropriate -- ~ ~L
response The exclamation directs the reader not towards the text J t or its Image but past them both into another space where presence )f
~vo to 11 th 0 ooce (gl hdoS tooeh t) fiJtJ - Yet compared with Ovicl (or Vehizquez) philostratlls text is (
clearly self-mocking and self-defeating Its lines move Ollt into all ~ the negative ecpilrastic spaces where the enanIeia of Iookmiddot j
NORMAN BHYlgtON
exactly unfortilcoming Instead of Aracillle the spider instead of the loves of the gods in tapestry an insect meal Oil a web
Accompanying the project of inciting the reader to envision is
Philostratus awareness that with every ecphrasis at some point
the lines and strokes always separate and unravel The text presents
itself as hollowed out by its own rhetorical self-awareness and as
haunted by an inescapably secondary or belated relation to
pictures In the Proem the author dramatises himself as a painter
mangul
Now the story of the men who have mastery in the sciellce of painting and the states and kings that have been passiolltltely devoted to it has been told by others writers Ilotably Aristodemus of Carla whom I
visited for four years In orcler to study paintinf 1n the present discussions however we propose to describe examples of painting in the form of addresses which have been composed for the young 24
Four years of study with Aristodemus have led not to a career in
painting but only in criticism In the scenography of the text
Philostratus is always old and lesser than the young The son of
his host must summon him before he speaks SpJtially he is at the
perimeter beyond the city walls a Greek wandering in Italy
Secondary in relation to painting his pictures are also belated in
time not the work of men who have won mastery in the science
of painting discussed by Pliny but of painters who are never in
fact given names
G- lc o this negative dinlension of the Ima(inegt Lehmann appears
1vt tgt emarkably insensitive Jn his hands the Imagilles are tt come
alive he will infuse them with his own visionary energy~~ resurrecting the fragments of the text into a luminous stoa whose
every corner he can visualise His work with the blta(illes is in a
sense part of the Pompeian tradition which from Winckelmann
to l3ulwer-Lytton to Ilollywood aims to coiJre ivil~ flesh from
the ashes In terms of its own rhetoric Lehmanns is a heroic reading The example of the Irrcltlt Goerhe2f tTllirlp hi274
bull vJ ~_ _
PHILOSTRATLJS AND THE IMAGINARY MI~I
enterprise26
Filling out what remained only tentative in Goethes
essay he perceives an order in the Imagines which not even their
author realised The Imagines have to be wrested from philoshy
stratlls hands Philostratus misreads the mountains of Thes~ly as
mountains of Rhodes Philostratus takes no advantage of these connections and does not mention them27 Although
Philostratus was perfectly able to see immediately many of the
implications of single pictures he did not discuss the cyclic idea
He was not interested in it2R As Lehmanns analysis gains
momentum Philostratus tends to get referred to as thelcctUle~ Like many orators and letter writers and teachers before and after
him he decided to pllblish these lectures as a model of his
tecllllillue and style in handling such a task 29 He paraphrased
rather than described the paintings and pointed out the emotional
values and psychological associations ofeach picture His emphasis
in this collrse ill the appreciation (Ifart was one-sided as flax heen tlwl
elery professor (~f tlzis kind after Ilim (emphases added) ~o
Lehmann himself is not of course a lecturer or professor of this kind
If Philostratus mocks his own secondariness Lehmann expels
secondariness from his text in tbe person of the outmoded
professor who only appreciates and who cannot see what
Lehmann sees the hyper-realistic image of a gallery with all its
rooms envisioned simultaneously and in detail But these abject
personifications the lectlirer and the professor arc not the
bearers of anxiety in his reading or its only scapegoats The
Imapnes need to be reconstructed Lehmann maintains because
without them the third century is the dark century in the history
of ancient painting the era ofa great crisis ofancient art in which
the foundations for the development of later western art were
bid 11 Here are Lehmanns words for the threat his reconstruction is to dispel
In a period lor which a lower-middle-class tomb in Rome like that of the Amelii is used as a cornerstone [or the history of palntin) and Ir which the discovery of the frescoes of a Jewish synagogue in Mesopotamia tends to revolutionize the entire picture of the historv of lnrn
NOH~lAN BRYSON
Is it too much to find in these words a threat to a cherished image
of antiquity an image that must be protected
Art history emerges here in one of its dubious heroising guises
as the custodian of culture working against a background of crisis
and collapse Quite naturally the custodians must live in a great
house resplendent with all the marbles favoured by luxury
but particularly splendid by reason of the panel-paintings set in
the walls The force required to protect the custodians is that of
museum circa 1941 It is a modernist exhibition space
stripped down diagrammatic programmatic yet still (at the end
of the reconstruction) conceived as a house of the great with
dining-chambers for the four seasons Better than most museums
with their difficult diplomatic balance between the needs of
scholars and of patrons it is wholly designed by the art historian
The scholarship that builds this space is to judge by the footnotes
an exclusively German affair And the account endorses the
protocols of a certain strand in the German art history of its time
We shall always regret where fi)nllal problems are concerned the
limitations of a description which aimed not to descrile but to
interpret what the audience saw (emphases added) Painting is to
be approached formally not hermeneutically and interpretation
now a negative term is to be confined to an outpost of
iconography the identification of subjects and programme cycles
Lehmanns own hermeneutic operation presents itself as
opposite of interpretive work It proceeds by excluding lt111 those
images which appear to Lehmann to be editorial additions grafted
01 to the main text supposedly anomalous products of writing and
publication mere word-pictures un backed by actual referents It
prunes away the rhetorical elaborations of the lecn1rer and
bypasses the pictures themselves in order to reach th~ solid
masonry behind them as though representation itself verbal or
pictorial were a barrier to be torn dowH This process is presented
as a series of purifications The text contaminated for publication
is returned to its pristine state The visual field is purged of its
verbal dimension in a double movement from text In architecture
and from arl criticism to archaeology Antiquitys dark age is
banished Its whuralmainstrcam is protected against distortion by
-- - --~-
PHI I 0 S T RAT l SAN Il THE r M A (] N 1 H Y I S I I
inferior and marginlt11 groups Art history triumphs over art
appreciation The end product of these procedurts is the vision of
a purified architectural form whose authority is confirmed by a
tradition of national scholarship and national culture exiled to
America and written up in English yet still in direct contact with
the author of Phiostrats gemalde and with the Graeco-Homan past
Through rhetorical operations such as these Lehmanns
ecplrrasis becomes in a sense a tecitni(lue of the subject It is surely
much more than an archaeological reconstruction Like Auerbad~s Mimesis written in Istanbtll during World War II it mobilises the
energies of cultural resistance to its own dark century It invsts
those energies in an incandescent visualisation that configures the
beleaguered subject as a unified building I t would I think be
wrong to find fault with Lehmanns reading at the level on which
it appears to operate of slellth-like deduction and rationality
Expelled by the texts rational procedures rhetoric returns as
texts unconscious At this buried or subterranean level the
reading actually moves much closer into the Imagines than it is
able to admit Philostratus himself presents the art of painting not
as a copy of the world but ltIS in ternalisation of the world In 19 warns his audience not to be impressed by a works mimetic
realism ill that case he says we should praise an insignificant
feature of the painting and one that has solely to do with imitation
(mimesis) but we shollid nOI be praising its intelligence or
sense of decorum it shows though these I believe are the most
important elements of art l~ lust as painting shows the world as
it has already passed into the subjectivity of the painter so the
beholder should not dwell 011 the external matter of mimesis but
internalise the image drawing it inside the subject On their own
the audience can see pictures and judge mimesis perfectly well
the audience do not yet know are the techniques for
absorbing the pictures into the mind It is precisely
in this assimilation of pictures to subjectivity that the audience has come to hear Philostratus speak
It is in this aspect of internalisation that the Imafiines revcJ rhetoric itself as a techllolov Of elicnlin t1egt If T-_ r
1IIMN BRYSON
of the Ad Herenniuflt names memoria as the fourth part of
rhetoric 34 In order to memorise a lengthy speech the orator
should visualise the successive topics of his discourse as images
arranged in consecutive places within architectural space In the
words of Frances Yates who is that mlfi moving slowly in
lonely building stopping at intervals with an intent face He is a
rhetoric student forming a set of memory loci35 Architectures
role in rhetoric is as the supplier of milieux within which intense
visualisations are to occurUl As Cicero says the images should be
active sharply defined and unusual having the power of speedily
encountering and penetrating the psyche (quae oCCflrrere celerishy
terque percutere animum possim)37 The speech unfolds as
rhetorician walks in his mind past walls each memory-place hung
with a vivid image through rooms doorways stairways
porticoes terraces
The first notion is placed as it were ill the ()recourt the second let us say in the atrium lhe remainder are placed in order round the impluvium and committed not only to bedrooms and parlours but even to statues and the like3R
The stability and dependability of this internal architecture is vital
for the control of the self over its material To forget the existence
of a particular room is to leave out a whole stage of the argument
to lTIisremember the sequence of images is to garble the
presentation of the case
places are chosen and marked om with the utmost possible vlriety as a spacious house divided into a number of rooms Every thinK of note therein is diligently imprinted on the mind in order that thongl n~ay be able to fun through all the parts without let or hindrance The filst task is to secure that there shall be no difficulty in funning through these for that memory must be most firmly fixed which helps another memory all
Here architecture not only stands for the control of the self it is
the actual material means by which the self exercises its control
over its words and its world
If Lehmanns unitary and massively stable architecture stands ~1 _1 _~ bullbull l J ~
~ PHILOSTRATUS AND THE IMA((NARY MlISEU~1
c~) (~~) ( 0 ~ ~
-~ ----~
hI 34
1 reading rejoins Philostratus rhetoric as an operation whose means
is imaginary buildings and whose goal is mastery over self and
over representation Ecphrasis here is a technique for consolidating
the subject in terms of personal and professional control While on
the surface of his text Lehmann disavows hermeneutic art history
and expels the lecturer at other levels of his text Lehmann is
Philostratus shadow-partner or secret sharer Lehmanns entry
into the culture of late antiquity is through a shape-shifting in
which he performs the architectural ars memorativa of a thirdshy
century orator
Yet he does so in terms very different from those supplied in the
Imagines The kind of subject proposed and assllmed by 9
Philostratus text is much less driven by the urge towards unitary
self-possession The Imagines subject exists in a universe where
things images and words may frequently converge but do not
consistently fuse together ill the ardour of imaginary vision The
descriptions show the subject in transit across the interstices where
world pictures and language overlap Especially interesting 10
Philostratus are the hybrid or chiasmic zones where dillerent
registers cross over (fig 34)
Let us return for the last time to Looms Penelopes loom
exists at the place where images and the things of the world cross
over The loom is a thing that makes images yet we do not see the
images it makes only the things - warp threads shuttle it
works with Again when the weavers travel across the web or eat
their squirming prey they are seen as living moving creatures
hill at thl sme time the reader knows they are onlv a static nictllrf -j
--
OIlMAN BRYSON
i(
Elsewhere the text moves to the place where the things of the
world cross over into words The author tells us that the spiders
cables are almost too tine to discern What brings them into view
are in fact Hesiods lines about spiders destending and astending
their threads The word makes the thing exist Or a single word in
Greek -- arachnc is able to generate two utterly different beings
spiders and the weaver who challenged Minerva The characters of
Looms are so to speak engendered by an ecphrastic pun Words
and things change pilCes At other times the text crosses the place
where words and image blend Homers text turns into a picture
then back again into Homers words The line between what is
verbal and visual cannot be drawn4o
The subject of the Imagines is in constant motion and dispersal
across this complex terrain qf wprld jmilg ltlAd texr When the
outward pictures enter the subject and are assimilated to the seWs
interior they scatter across an intricately divided and Auid space
The images of Philostratus exist as r~fractiollS in a multishy
dimensional space in which a variety of voices none of them
original blend and clash 41 The subject who performs this
internalisation is in perpetual motion The moments when at the
philostratian Look the various registers join in visionary
fusion do not last long Almost at once the visions separate out
into their component strands unravelling as fast as they came
together And they lead on to the next image - more than sixty
times The unravelling of one image clears the space for the
coming together of the next one Or better the unravelling of
each image calls into being summons the next It is in that
perpetual Penelope-like emergence and falling away of images
that the subject is spun by the text Not as a central storehp~se or
gallery more a~ a motion or desire
Lehmanns subject is in a sense the opposite of thiJ In
Lehmanns case internalising philostralUs text means seeking a
means to arrest the motions of the text and to tapture and
immobilise its energies in a final culminating form Into the
stability of the huilding that is to end the text as motion and desire
are poured all the authors ligures for the command of the subject
massive masonry the prestige of the museum purified form
_ --- ----
PHILOSTRATUS AND THE IMAGINAIY M(SEI
Goethe national culture ethnic centrality profcssionlIisll1 posishy
tive knowledge Which should make Lehmann Philostratus most
inappropriate reader were it not for the brilliance and the yearning of his own visualisation
Among other things Lehmanns reading exemplifies some of
the paradoxes inherent in the tradition of positivist scholarship to
which it belongs It is this aspect that raises his reconstruction
above the category of historiGl1 oddity to adumbrate some of the
vicissitudes of positive knowledfe in more general terms First
Lehmanns relation to the literary to textuality and intenextualitx
is remarkably strained and contradictory The architectural ord~r he proposes for the Imagines is itselfbibliograplllc Lehmann needs
texts 10 enable his reconstruction to take place in order to build
his version of Philostratus villa he must resort to the library what
he says for instance concerning the typology of rooms their
orientation and relation to the seasons is directly dependent on
Vitruvius Yet at the same time his analysis mllst bypass textuality
in order to dissolve the texts into architectural form Necessary at
certain moments of the analysis at others textuality becomes an
obstacle to be scornfully removed Inherently untrustworthy
beside the actuality (the positivism) of the archaeological find texts are aligned in his interpretation with ideas of parasitism and
mediocrity figured here by the lecturer or professor The
reading works both to banish textual corruption completely
(which cannot easily show up ill the analysi~ since hiatuses in the
text arc translated at once into architectural syntax) and to build
the necessity for textual wrruption into his case (as when
Lehmann axes the last eight descriptions as later additions )
Textuality features in this mode of analysis primarily under tlte
sign of repression Where it is able to grow transparent before the
three-dimensional architectural and archaeological order it can be
admitted Where textuality fails to become translucent hcfilfe
reference it must be expelled even if the effort to do so becomes
massive involving the whole battery of figures for the command of th~ sui)ject
Secondly this ef1ort to repress textuality runs counter to many
of the most conspicuous features of Philostratllt PIh So
tgtnHMAN BRYSON
2X2
writing especially its interest in exploring the negative ecphrastic
spaces in which the reader so far from experiencing a dissolution
of writing before the luminous referellt (tlte philostratian
Look ) apprehends the text as a sophisticated web of allusions
parodies puns and tonal plays Lehmanns quest for the stable
masonry of the referent seems altogether blind to the many ways
in which philostratus writing plays to the wplzia of the reader as
one who can see bizarre connections who can understand hidden
narrativcs within imagery (A rachne Mincrva) wilD can
exercise the visual eqllivalent of the elaborate verbal dexterity that
characterises Hellenistic poetry When philostratus says that the
web the spiders make is exceedingly fine (k)perleIIOS) he is
doing more dlan asking liS to visualise something hard to see he
is using a key term from Hellenistic poetics eplOs which means
witty fint clever small-scale sophisticated and doing
so as an invitation or a warning to the reader that his own writing
too is all of these things It is a warning that Lehmann perhaps
wisely does not heed for once ecphrasis is thought of as a form
writing that involves much mort than a simple visualisation of
a text it leaves behind the one certainty that ecphrasis seemed to
hold out to the archaeologist - its promise of presence of
resurrection and becomes something else a mode of writing
whose complexity we are perhaps only beginning to discern and
in relation to which tlie idea of visualisation begins to appear as a
simplification at best
Finally the scrupulous rationality of Lehmanns interpretive
method with its emphasis on what can be deduced and
demonstrated as positive knowledge and as archilectural form
renders it strangely unaware of its own aspect of tellIality of the
ways in which it is itself a working wilh words in whityen the words
carry more associations motivations and effect than the writer is
able to hear or control Working within a highly instrumental and
reduced picture-theory of language Lehmanns analysis radically
underestimates the capacity of words to exceed their allotted
functions of argumentation demonstration and proof Opening
on to other investments and other scenes tban that simply of
archaeology and reconstruction Lehmanns text speaks its own
PllILOSTRATS AND THE IMAGINAHY MliS
uncollscious and it is in that energetic and overdetermined
underside of his text that his deepest engagement with Philostratus
may be found What he writes is perhaps the dream-work of
positivism not the forensics of archaeology but its own buried poetics 42
~
l ltJTES TO PAGES 244--61
O On Pausanils see Frazer (1898) Heer (1979) Jacob (1980)
Habich 1 (1985) and Elsner (1992)
I These include discussions of the wild satyrs of the islands 1235-)
the Ethiopians I334- the Ionian Greeks 722-51) the
marvellous animals collected in Rome 9211-2 the islands of
Sardinia and Corsica 10171-13
32 See Elsner (1992) 17--20
33 See Frazer (1898) xiv compare other second-century CE descripshy
tions of ruins such as Dio Chrysostom on Thebes Oratio 7
Plutarch De ~rcctu oracuorum 8 Lucian Diaog 11I0rt 272
34 This chapter began as a paper on Herodotus pyramids delivered to
Paul Cartledges Ancient History Seminar in Cambridge in 1989 I
wish to thank him John Henderson Jamie Masters and the Editors
of this volume for their comments on earlier drafts My deepest debt
is to Joan Pau Rubies y Mirabet with whom I have fi)r several years
discussed the problems of travel travel-writing and identity This
chapter is dedicated to him
CHApTEH EIGHT PHlLOSTRATliS AND Tin IMA(INARY
MUSEUM
1 English translations are taken from the Loeb edition edited by
T E Page E Capps and W H D Rouse (London and New
York193 1)
2 For the history of the debate see the editions of Jacobs and Welcker
(1825) Kayser (1844) Benndorf and Schenkel (1893) and
Steinmann (1914)
3 Lehmann (1941)
4 The essay is conveniently to be f()Und in vo XXVI of Cottas
standard edition (1868) pp 276fT
Lehmann (1941) 21-4
6 Obviously he describes pictures that were topoglllttphically united
but without regard to the ideological and (JrluaJ rda~m which had
dictated their combination Lehmann (1941) 20
7 Indeed the only explanation of the relationships and the lack of
order is that philostratus saw real pictures which were to a certain
extent arranged on the upper and lower parts of walls Lehmann
(1941) 20
8 Lehmann (1941) 31-3
9 Lehmann (1941) 31-3
NOTES TO P(I-S 2()2
10 [n fact the lmalfines do not supply indications concerning the
dimensions of any particular work
II [t should also be noted that Lehmanns groupings occasionally
require him to rewrite the given titles of pictures
11 These last eight pictures of the second book show a remarkable
absence of any stich relation and connection as we have found
everywhere else Lehmann (1941) 37
13 Lehmann (1941) 39-40
14 The image of weaving is frequently used of writing see for
example Catullus ()45ofr in which the marriage of Peleus and
Thetis is covered with a estis variata figuris pestit decorata
jiguris where filfura is also a literary term for Catullus (wn
rhetoric Perhaps the crucial sites of configuring language image
and weaving are words such as ypaqgteurolv grapIein which means
writedraw design (in thread)
I ~ Worfrs an1 Days 777
16 The presence of Arachne in Looms has been argued since the
Renaissance See for example the gloss on Les Etoiles in Blaise
de Vigeneres edition of 1610 514 Lehmann (1941) 39 also
suggests that the two pictures (227 and 218) both refer to the
Arachne story
17 Ovid Met 65~-8
18 Minerva depicts Rhodope and Ilaemus who dared to cal
themselves gods now turned to mountains the Pygmaean queen
who challenged Juno now turned into a crane Antigone turned
by the angered Juno into a stork Cinyras whose daughters are turned to stone
19 Arachnes tapestry shows Europa abducted by the bull Asterie
carried off by the eagle Leda pursued by the swan Jllpiter
disguised as Amphitryon Danae
20 Met 6140--4
21 Barkan (1986) 4
22 Met 663--6
23 227 1~-19
24 lmaxiner Proem
25 Lehmann (1941) 16
26 In the first paragraph of Lehmanns article Goethe is found to be
disappointed by Pompeii and Herculaneum mere Middletowns as
GoetheLehmann put it from whose limited atmosphere they 112
NOTES TO IAUES 27~-83
turn away towards the Imagines Heference to Goethe recur
at several points in the essay Strangely enough no-one with the
exception of Goethe has ever called attention to the problem of the
general order of the paintings in the two books of philostratus
(19) Yet Goethes rearrangement of the Imapnes is also as
Lehmann put it cavalier his own essay lJl1ilds more sysshy
tematically on Goethes
27 Lehmann (1941) 2S
28 Lehmann (1941) 30
29 Lehmann (1941) 41-2
30 Lehmann (1941) 41
31 Lehmann (1941) 17-18
32 Lehmann (1941) 17middot
33 Imagines 19 18-22 1 have modified the Locb translation
here
34 In Ad Herelfiun the five parts of rhetoric are
eloculio memoria pmllUllialio
3) Yates (1966) 8
36 On architectures relation to the art of memory see the discussion
of Elsner (forthcoming) chapter 2 section v
37 Ad HerenniulII 2873)8 cited by Yates (1966) 18
38 Quimilian inH orat 11220 cited by Yates (1966) 22
39 Quintilian Inst oral 11218 cited by Yates (1966) 22
40 The diagram (Iig 34) is not satisfactory for instance its lines
fixity when the whole point is to suggest fluidity and continuum
But 1hope the reader will follow at least the diagrams gist that the
illlaNille constantly shuttles between words il1la~es and thin~s
Area (5) is that of merger between things and images (6) is the
hybrid area ofwordsubjects (7) is the area of blur between word
and image perhaps the principal ecphrastic space~ he space of the
wurd graphein r 41 Barthes (1977) 145-6
42 1am grateful to the members of the Laurcncc Seminar held in the
Department of Classics at Cambridge in May 1991 ltJr their help in
formulating the ideas presented in this essay and particularly to
Simon Goldhill jas Elsner and Stephen Bann for their very
welcome observations and
List of works cited
For abbreviations see pp xi--xiii
Adler J and Ernst U (1988) Text als Figur 11welle Poesie 101 der
Antike gtis rur Moderne Weinheim
Alpers S (1983) The Art ofDescrihlilg Chicago
Amyx D A (1988) Corinthian Vase Painting orrIe Arclaic Period The
Study of Corinthian Vases Berkeley
Arnheim R (1988) The Poet at rile Center A )tudl ofCompo siti 011 in the
Visual Artr Berkeley
Arnott P (1962) Greek Scellic COlventoils ill til Fijth Celllu~) BC
Oxford
(1989) Puhlic and Performance ill the Greek Theater London
Arnott W G (1987) The Stream and the Gold Two notes 011
Theocritus in Filologia e forme letterarie studi (1fimi a F Della
Corte vol I U rhino
Arthur [Katl] M (1975) Hurtides phoenislae and the Plitics
Diss Yale University
(1977) The curse of civilizatioll the choral odes of the PllOemu-ae
HSCP 81 163-8
Ashmole B (1972) Architect and Sculptor in Classical Greece London
Ashmole B and Yalouris N (1967) Olympia The Sculptures of the
Temple of Zeus London
Baladit H (1980) La Pilopollnese de Strahon Paris
-if Bann s (1989) The True Vine on Visual Representanim ald tllet
- lf7estern Tradition Cambridge -J Barber E J w (1990) Prellistone Textiles the Deleopmellt (Clotll ill
the Neolithic and Brone Ages Princctoll
(1992) The peplos of Athelia in Goddess and Polis tILl PaIlGtIz((c
NORMAN BHYlgtON
exactly unfortilcoming Instead of Aracillle the spider instead of the loves of the gods in tapestry an insect meal Oil a web
Accompanying the project of inciting the reader to envision is
Philostratus awareness that with every ecphrasis at some point
the lines and strokes always separate and unravel The text presents
itself as hollowed out by its own rhetorical self-awareness and as
haunted by an inescapably secondary or belated relation to
pictures In the Proem the author dramatises himself as a painter
mangul
Now the story of the men who have mastery in the sciellce of painting and the states and kings that have been passiolltltely devoted to it has been told by others writers Ilotably Aristodemus of Carla whom I
visited for four years In orcler to study paintinf 1n the present discussions however we propose to describe examples of painting in the form of addresses which have been composed for the young 24
Four years of study with Aristodemus have led not to a career in
painting but only in criticism In the scenography of the text
Philostratus is always old and lesser than the young The son of
his host must summon him before he speaks SpJtially he is at the
perimeter beyond the city walls a Greek wandering in Italy
Secondary in relation to painting his pictures are also belated in
time not the work of men who have won mastery in the science
of painting discussed by Pliny but of painters who are never in
fact given names
G- lc o this negative dinlension of the Ima(inegt Lehmann appears
1vt tgt emarkably insensitive Jn his hands the Imagilles are tt come
alive he will infuse them with his own visionary energy~~ resurrecting the fragments of the text into a luminous stoa whose
every corner he can visualise His work with the blta(illes is in a
sense part of the Pompeian tradition which from Winckelmann
to l3ulwer-Lytton to Ilollywood aims to coiJre ivil~ flesh from
the ashes In terms of its own rhetoric Lehmanns is a heroic reading The example of the Irrcltlt Goerhe2f tTllirlp hi274
bull vJ ~_ _
PHILOSTRATLJS AND THE IMAGINARY MI~I
enterprise26
Filling out what remained only tentative in Goethes
essay he perceives an order in the Imagines which not even their
author realised The Imagines have to be wrested from philoshy
stratlls hands Philostratus misreads the mountains of Thes~ly as
mountains of Rhodes Philostratus takes no advantage of these connections and does not mention them27 Although
Philostratus was perfectly able to see immediately many of the
implications of single pictures he did not discuss the cyclic idea
He was not interested in it2R As Lehmanns analysis gains
momentum Philostratus tends to get referred to as thelcctUle~ Like many orators and letter writers and teachers before and after
him he decided to pllblish these lectures as a model of his
tecllllillue and style in handling such a task 29 He paraphrased
rather than described the paintings and pointed out the emotional
values and psychological associations ofeach picture His emphasis
in this collrse ill the appreciation (Ifart was one-sided as flax heen tlwl
elery professor (~f tlzis kind after Ilim (emphases added) ~o
Lehmann himself is not of course a lecturer or professor of this kind
If Philostratus mocks his own secondariness Lehmann expels
secondariness from his text in tbe person of the outmoded
professor who only appreciates and who cannot see what
Lehmann sees the hyper-realistic image of a gallery with all its
rooms envisioned simultaneously and in detail But these abject
personifications the lectlirer and the professor arc not the
bearers of anxiety in his reading or its only scapegoats The
Imapnes need to be reconstructed Lehmann maintains because
without them the third century is the dark century in the history
of ancient painting the era ofa great crisis ofancient art in which
the foundations for the development of later western art were
bid 11 Here are Lehmanns words for the threat his reconstruction is to dispel
In a period lor which a lower-middle-class tomb in Rome like that of the Amelii is used as a cornerstone [or the history of palntin) and Ir which the discovery of the frescoes of a Jewish synagogue in Mesopotamia tends to revolutionize the entire picture of the historv of lnrn
NOH~lAN BRYSON
Is it too much to find in these words a threat to a cherished image
of antiquity an image that must be protected
Art history emerges here in one of its dubious heroising guises
as the custodian of culture working against a background of crisis
and collapse Quite naturally the custodians must live in a great
house resplendent with all the marbles favoured by luxury
but particularly splendid by reason of the panel-paintings set in
the walls The force required to protect the custodians is that of
museum circa 1941 It is a modernist exhibition space
stripped down diagrammatic programmatic yet still (at the end
of the reconstruction) conceived as a house of the great with
dining-chambers for the four seasons Better than most museums
with their difficult diplomatic balance between the needs of
scholars and of patrons it is wholly designed by the art historian
The scholarship that builds this space is to judge by the footnotes
an exclusively German affair And the account endorses the
protocols of a certain strand in the German art history of its time
We shall always regret where fi)nllal problems are concerned the
limitations of a description which aimed not to descrile but to
interpret what the audience saw (emphases added) Painting is to
be approached formally not hermeneutically and interpretation
now a negative term is to be confined to an outpost of
iconography the identification of subjects and programme cycles
Lehmanns own hermeneutic operation presents itself as
opposite of interpretive work It proceeds by excluding lt111 those
images which appear to Lehmann to be editorial additions grafted
01 to the main text supposedly anomalous products of writing and
publication mere word-pictures un backed by actual referents It
prunes away the rhetorical elaborations of the lecn1rer and
bypasses the pictures themselves in order to reach th~ solid
masonry behind them as though representation itself verbal or
pictorial were a barrier to be torn dowH This process is presented
as a series of purifications The text contaminated for publication
is returned to its pristine state The visual field is purged of its
verbal dimension in a double movement from text In architecture
and from arl criticism to archaeology Antiquitys dark age is
banished Its whuralmainstrcam is protected against distortion by
-- - --~-
PHI I 0 S T RAT l SAN Il THE r M A (] N 1 H Y I S I I
inferior and marginlt11 groups Art history triumphs over art
appreciation The end product of these procedurts is the vision of
a purified architectural form whose authority is confirmed by a
tradition of national scholarship and national culture exiled to
America and written up in English yet still in direct contact with
the author of Phiostrats gemalde and with the Graeco-Homan past
Through rhetorical operations such as these Lehmanns
ecplrrasis becomes in a sense a tecitni(lue of the subject It is surely
much more than an archaeological reconstruction Like Auerbad~s Mimesis written in Istanbtll during World War II it mobilises the
energies of cultural resistance to its own dark century It invsts
those energies in an incandescent visualisation that configures the
beleaguered subject as a unified building I t would I think be
wrong to find fault with Lehmanns reading at the level on which
it appears to operate of slellth-like deduction and rationality
Expelled by the texts rational procedures rhetoric returns as
texts unconscious At this buried or subterranean level the
reading actually moves much closer into the Imagines than it is
able to admit Philostratus himself presents the art of painting not
as a copy of the world but ltIS in ternalisation of the world In 19 warns his audience not to be impressed by a works mimetic
realism ill that case he says we should praise an insignificant
feature of the painting and one that has solely to do with imitation
(mimesis) but we shollid nOI be praising its intelligence or
sense of decorum it shows though these I believe are the most
important elements of art l~ lust as painting shows the world as
it has already passed into the subjectivity of the painter so the
beholder should not dwell 011 the external matter of mimesis but
internalise the image drawing it inside the subject On their own
the audience can see pictures and judge mimesis perfectly well
the audience do not yet know are the techniques for
absorbing the pictures into the mind It is precisely
in this assimilation of pictures to subjectivity that the audience has come to hear Philostratus speak
It is in this aspect of internalisation that the Imafiines revcJ rhetoric itself as a techllolov Of elicnlin t1egt If T-_ r
1IIMN BRYSON
of the Ad Herenniuflt names memoria as the fourth part of
rhetoric 34 In order to memorise a lengthy speech the orator
should visualise the successive topics of his discourse as images
arranged in consecutive places within architectural space In the
words of Frances Yates who is that mlfi moving slowly in
lonely building stopping at intervals with an intent face He is a
rhetoric student forming a set of memory loci35 Architectures
role in rhetoric is as the supplier of milieux within which intense
visualisations are to occurUl As Cicero says the images should be
active sharply defined and unusual having the power of speedily
encountering and penetrating the psyche (quae oCCflrrere celerishy
terque percutere animum possim)37 The speech unfolds as
rhetorician walks in his mind past walls each memory-place hung
with a vivid image through rooms doorways stairways
porticoes terraces
The first notion is placed as it were ill the ()recourt the second let us say in the atrium lhe remainder are placed in order round the impluvium and committed not only to bedrooms and parlours but even to statues and the like3R
The stability and dependability of this internal architecture is vital
for the control of the self over its material To forget the existence
of a particular room is to leave out a whole stage of the argument
to lTIisremember the sequence of images is to garble the
presentation of the case
places are chosen and marked om with the utmost possible vlriety as a spacious house divided into a number of rooms Every thinK of note therein is diligently imprinted on the mind in order that thongl n~ay be able to fun through all the parts without let or hindrance The filst task is to secure that there shall be no difficulty in funning through these for that memory must be most firmly fixed which helps another memory all
Here architecture not only stands for the control of the self it is
the actual material means by which the self exercises its control
over its words and its world
If Lehmanns unitary and massively stable architecture stands ~1 _1 _~ bullbull l J ~
~ PHILOSTRATUS AND THE IMA((NARY MlISEU~1
c~) (~~) ( 0 ~ ~
-~ ----~
hI 34
1 reading rejoins Philostratus rhetoric as an operation whose means
is imaginary buildings and whose goal is mastery over self and
over representation Ecphrasis here is a technique for consolidating
the subject in terms of personal and professional control While on
the surface of his text Lehmann disavows hermeneutic art history
and expels the lecturer at other levels of his text Lehmann is
Philostratus shadow-partner or secret sharer Lehmanns entry
into the culture of late antiquity is through a shape-shifting in
which he performs the architectural ars memorativa of a thirdshy
century orator
Yet he does so in terms very different from those supplied in the
Imagines The kind of subject proposed and assllmed by 9
Philostratus text is much less driven by the urge towards unitary
self-possession The Imagines subject exists in a universe where
things images and words may frequently converge but do not
consistently fuse together ill the ardour of imaginary vision The
descriptions show the subject in transit across the interstices where
world pictures and language overlap Especially interesting 10
Philostratus are the hybrid or chiasmic zones where dillerent
registers cross over (fig 34)
Let us return for the last time to Looms Penelopes loom
exists at the place where images and the things of the world cross
over The loom is a thing that makes images yet we do not see the
images it makes only the things - warp threads shuttle it
works with Again when the weavers travel across the web or eat
their squirming prey they are seen as living moving creatures
hill at thl sme time the reader knows they are onlv a static nictllrf -j
--
OIlMAN BRYSON
i(
Elsewhere the text moves to the place where the things of the
world cross over into words The author tells us that the spiders
cables are almost too tine to discern What brings them into view
are in fact Hesiods lines about spiders destending and astending
their threads The word makes the thing exist Or a single word in
Greek -- arachnc is able to generate two utterly different beings
spiders and the weaver who challenged Minerva The characters of
Looms are so to speak engendered by an ecphrastic pun Words
and things change pilCes At other times the text crosses the place
where words and image blend Homers text turns into a picture
then back again into Homers words The line between what is
verbal and visual cannot be drawn4o
The subject of the Imagines is in constant motion and dispersal
across this complex terrain qf wprld jmilg ltlAd texr When the
outward pictures enter the subject and are assimilated to the seWs
interior they scatter across an intricately divided and Auid space
The images of Philostratus exist as r~fractiollS in a multishy
dimensional space in which a variety of voices none of them
original blend and clash 41 The subject who performs this
internalisation is in perpetual motion The moments when at the
philostratian Look the various registers join in visionary
fusion do not last long Almost at once the visions separate out
into their component strands unravelling as fast as they came
together And they lead on to the next image - more than sixty
times The unravelling of one image clears the space for the
coming together of the next one Or better the unravelling of
each image calls into being summons the next It is in that
perpetual Penelope-like emergence and falling away of images
that the subject is spun by the text Not as a central storehp~se or
gallery more a~ a motion or desire
Lehmanns subject is in a sense the opposite of thiJ In
Lehmanns case internalising philostralUs text means seeking a
means to arrest the motions of the text and to tapture and
immobilise its energies in a final culminating form Into the
stability of the huilding that is to end the text as motion and desire
are poured all the authors ligures for the command of the subject
massive masonry the prestige of the museum purified form
_ --- ----
PHILOSTRATUS AND THE IMAGINAIY M(SEI
Goethe national culture ethnic centrality profcssionlIisll1 posishy
tive knowledge Which should make Lehmann Philostratus most
inappropriate reader were it not for the brilliance and the yearning of his own visualisation
Among other things Lehmanns reading exemplifies some of
the paradoxes inherent in the tradition of positivist scholarship to
which it belongs It is this aspect that raises his reconstruction
above the category of historiGl1 oddity to adumbrate some of the
vicissitudes of positive knowledfe in more general terms First
Lehmanns relation to the literary to textuality and intenextualitx
is remarkably strained and contradictory The architectural ord~r he proposes for the Imagines is itselfbibliograplllc Lehmann needs
texts 10 enable his reconstruction to take place in order to build
his version of Philostratus villa he must resort to the library what
he says for instance concerning the typology of rooms their
orientation and relation to the seasons is directly dependent on
Vitruvius Yet at the same time his analysis mllst bypass textuality
in order to dissolve the texts into architectural form Necessary at
certain moments of the analysis at others textuality becomes an
obstacle to be scornfully removed Inherently untrustworthy
beside the actuality (the positivism) of the archaeological find texts are aligned in his interpretation with ideas of parasitism and
mediocrity figured here by the lecturer or professor The
reading works both to banish textual corruption completely
(which cannot easily show up ill the analysi~ since hiatuses in the
text arc translated at once into architectural syntax) and to build
the necessity for textual wrruption into his case (as when
Lehmann axes the last eight descriptions as later additions )
Textuality features in this mode of analysis primarily under tlte
sign of repression Where it is able to grow transparent before the
three-dimensional architectural and archaeological order it can be
admitted Where textuality fails to become translucent hcfilfe
reference it must be expelled even if the effort to do so becomes
massive involving the whole battery of figures for the command of th~ sui)ject
Secondly this ef1ort to repress textuality runs counter to many
of the most conspicuous features of Philostratllt PIh So
tgtnHMAN BRYSON
2X2
writing especially its interest in exploring the negative ecphrastic
spaces in which the reader so far from experiencing a dissolution
of writing before the luminous referellt (tlte philostratian
Look ) apprehends the text as a sophisticated web of allusions
parodies puns and tonal plays Lehmanns quest for the stable
masonry of the referent seems altogether blind to the many ways
in which philostratus writing plays to the wplzia of the reader as
one who can see bizarre connections who can understand hidden
narrativcs within imagery (A rachne Mincrva) wilD can
exercise the visual eqllivalent of the elaborate verbal dexterity that
characterises Hellenistic poetry When philostratus says that the
web the spiders make is exceedingly fine (k)perleIIOS) he is
doing more dlan asking liS to visualise something hard to see he
is using a key term from Hellenistic poetics eplOs which means
witty fint clever small-scale sophisticated and doing
so as an invitation or a warning to the reader that his own writing
too is all of these things It is a warning that Lehmann perhaps
wisely does not heed for once ecphrasis is thought of as a form
writing that involves much mort than a simple visualisation of
a text it leaves behind the one certainty that ecphrasis seemed to
hold out to the archaeologist - its promise of presence of
resurrection and becomes something else a mode of writing
whose complexity we are perhaps only beginning to discern and
in relation to which tlie idea of visualisation begins to appear as a
simplification at best
Finally the scrupulous rationality of Lehmanns interpretive
method with its emphasis on what can be deduced and
demonstrated as positive knowledge and as archilectural form
renders it strangely unaware of its own aspect of tellIality of the
ways in which it is itself a working wilh words in whityen the words
carry more associations motivations and effect than the writer is
able to hear or control Working within a highly instrumental and
reduced picture-theory of language Lehmanns analysis radically
underestimates the capacity of words to exceed their allotted
functions of argumentation demonstration and proof Opening
on to other investments and other scenes tban that simply of
archaeology and reconstruction Lehmanns text speaks its own
PllILOSTRATS AND THE IMAGINAHY MliS
uncollscious and it is in that energetic and overdetermined
underside of his text that his deepest engagement with Philostratus
may be found What he writes is perhaps the dream-work of
positivism not the forensics of archaeology but its own buried poetics 42
~
l ltJTES TO PAGES 244--61
O On Pausanils see Frazer (1898) Heer (1979) Jacob (1980)
Habich 1 (1985) and Elsner (1992)
I These include discussions of the wild satyrs of the islands 1235-)
the Ethiopians I334- the Ionian Greeks 722-51) the
marvellous animals collected in Rome 9211-2 the islands of
Sardinia and Corsica 10171-13
32 See Elsner (1992) 17--20
33 See Frazer (1898) xiv compare other second-century CE descripshy
tions of ruins such as Dio Chrysostom on Thebes Oratio 7
Plutarch De ~rcctu oracuorum 8 Lucian Diaog 11I0rt 272
34 This chapter began as a paper on Herodotus pyramids delivered to
Paul Cartledges Ancient History Seminar in Cambridge in 1989 I
wish to thank him John Henderson Jamie Masters and the Editors
of this volume for their comments on earlier drafts My deepest debt
is to Joan Pau Rubies y Mirabet with whom I have fi)r several years
discussed the problems of travel travel-writing and identity This
chapter is dedicated to him
CHApTEH EIGHT PHlLOSTRATliS AND Tin IMA(INARY
MUSEUM
1 English translations are taken from the Loeb edition edited by
T E Page E Capps and W H D Rouse (London and New
York193 1)
2 For the history of the debate see the editions of Jacobs and Welcker
(1825) Kayser (1844) Benndorf and Schenkel (1893) and
Steinmann (1914)
3 Lehmann (1941)
4 The essay is conveniently to be f()Und in vo XXVI of Cottas
standard edition (1868) pp 276fT
Lehmann (1941) 21-4
6 Obviously he describes pictures that were topoglllttphically united
but without regard to the ideological and (JrluaJ rda~m which had
dictated their combination Lehmann (1941) 20
7 Indeed the only explanation of the relationships and the lack of
order is that philostratus saw real pictures which were to a certain
extent arranged on the upper and lower parts of walls Lehmann
(1941) 20
8 Lehmann (1941) 31-3
9 Lehmann (1941) 31-3
NOTES TO P(I-S 2()2
10 [n fact the lmalfines do not supply indications concerning the
dimensions of any particular work
II [t should also be noted that Lehmanns groupings occasionally
require him to rewrite the given titles of pictures
11 These last eight pictures of the second book show a remarkable
absence of any stich relation and connection as we have found
everywhere else Lehmann (1941) 37
13 Lehmann (1941) 39-40
14 The image of weaving is frequently used of writing see for
example Catullus ()45ofr in which the marriage of Peleus and
Thetis is covered with a estis variata figuris pestit decorata
jiguris where filfura is also a literary term for Catullus (wn
rhetoric Perhaps the crucial sites of configuring language image
and weaving are words such as ypaqgteurolv grapIein which means
writedraw design (in thread)
I ~ Worfrs an1 Days 777
16 The presence of Arachne in Looms has been argued since the
Renaissance See for example the gloss on Les Etoiles in Blaise
de Vigeneres edition of 1610 514 Lehmann (1941) 39 also
suggests that the two pictures (227 and 218) both refer to the
Arachne story
17 Ovid Met 65~-8
18 Minerva depicts Rhodope and Ilaemus who dared to cal
themselves gods now turned to mountains the Pygmaean queen
who challenged Juno now turned into a crane Antigone turned
by the angered Juno into a stork Cinyras whose daughters are turned to stone
19 Arachnes tapestry shows Europa abducted by the bull Asterie
carried off by the eagle Leda pursued by the swan Jllpiter
disguised as Amphitryon Danae
20 Met 6140--4
21 Barkan (1986) 4
22 Met 663--6
23 227 1~-19
24 lmaxiner Proem
25 Lehmann (1941) 16
26 In the first paragraph of Lehmanns article Goethe is found to be
disappointed by Pompeii and Herculaneum mere Middletowns as
GoetheLehmann put it from whose limited atmosphere they 112
NOTES TO IAUES 27~-83
turn away towards the Imagines Heference to Goethe recur
at several points in the essay Strangely enough no-one with the
exception of Goethe has ever called attention to the problem of the
general order of the paintings in the two books of philostratus
(19) Yet Goethes rearrangement of the Imapnes is also as
Lehmann put it cavalier his own essay lJl1ilds more sysshy
tematically on Goethes
27 Lehmann (1941) 2S
28 Lehmann (1941) 30
29 Lehmann (1941) 41-2
30 Lehmann (1941) 41
31 Lehmann (1941) 17-18
32 Lehmann (1941) 17middot
33 Imagines 19 18-22 1 have modified the Locb translation
here
34 In Ad Herelfiun the five parts of rhetoric are
eloculio memoria pmllUllialio
3) Yates (1966) 8
36 On architectures relation to the art of memory see the discussion
of Elsner (forthcoming) chapter 2 section v
37 Ad HerenniulII 2873)8 cited by Yates (1966) 18
38 Quimilian inH orat 11220 cited by Yates (1966) 22
39 Quintilian Inst oral 11218 cited by Yates (1966) 22
40 The diagram (Iig 34) is not satisfactory for instance its lines
fixity when the whole point is to suggest fluidity and continuum
But 1hope the reader will follow at least the diagrams gist that the
illlaNille constantly shuttles between words il1la~es and thin~s
Area (5) is that of merger between things and images (6) is the
hybrid area ofwordsubjects (7) is the area of blur between word
and image perhaps the principal ecphrastic space~ he space of the
wurd graphein r 41 Barthes (1977) 145-6
42 1am grateful to the members of the Laurcncc Seminar held in the
Department of Classics at Cambridge in May 1991 ltJr their help in
formulating the ideas presented in this essay and particularly to
Simon Goldhill jas Elsner and Stephen Bann for their very
welcome observations and
List of works cited
For abbreviations see pp xi--xiii
Adler J and Ernst U (1988) Text als Figur 11welle Poesie 101 der
Antike gtis rur Moderne Weinheim
Alpers S (1983) The Art ofDescrihlilg Chicago
Amyx D A (1988) Corinthian Vase Painting orrIe Arclaic Period The
Study of Corinthian Vases Berkeley
Arnheim R (1988) The Poet at rile Center A )tudl ofCompo siti 011 in the
Visual Artr Berkeley
Arnott P (1962) Greek Scellic COlventoils ill til Fijth Celllu~) BC
Oxford
(1989) Puhlic and Performance ill the Greek Theater London
Arnott W G (1987) The Stream and the Gold Two notes 011
Theocritus in Filologia e forme letterarie studi (1fimi a F Della
Corte vol I U rhino
Arthur [Katl] M (1975) Hurtides phoenislae and the Plitics
Diss Yale University
(1977) The curse of civilizatioll the choral odes of the PllOemu-ae
HSCP 81 163-8
Ashmole B (1972) Architect and Sculptor in Classical Greece London
Ashmole B and Yalouris N (1967) Olympia The Sculptures of the
Temple of Zeus London
Baladit H (1980) La Pilopollnese de Strahon Paris
-if Bann s (1989) The True Vine on Visual Representanim ald tllet
- lf7estern Tradition Cambridge -J Barber E J w (1990) Prellistone Textiles the Deleopmellt (Clotll ill
the Neolithic and Brone Ages Princctoll
(1992) The peplos of Athelia in Goddess and Polis tILl PaIlGtIz((c
NOH~lAN BRYSON
Is it too much to find in these words a threat to a cherished image
of antiquity an image that must be protected
Art history emerges here in one of its dubious heroising guises
as the custodian of culture working against a background of crisis
and collapse Quite naturally the custodians must live in a great
house resplendent with all the marbles favoured by luxury
but particularly splendid by reason of the panel-paintings set in
the walls The force required to protect the custodians is that of
museum circa 1941 It is a modernist exhibition space
stripped down diagrammatic programmatic yet still (at the end
of the reconstruction) conceived as a house of the great with
dining-chambers for the four seasons Better than most museums
with their difficult diplomatic balance between the needs of
scholars and of patrons it is wholly designed by the art historian
The scholarship that builds this space is to judge by the footnotes
an exclusively German affair And the account endorses the
protocols of a certain strand in the German art history of its time
We shall always regret where fi)nllal problems are concerned the
limitations of a description which aimed not to descrile but to
interpret what the audience saw (emphases added) Painting is to
be approached formally not hermeneutically and interpretation
now a negative term is to be confined to an outpost of
iconography the identification of subjects and programme cycles
Lehmanns own hermeneutic operation presents itself as
opposite of interpretive work It proceeds by excluding lt111 those
images which appear to Lehmann to be editorial additions grafted
01 to the main text supposedly anomalous products of writing and
publication mere word-pictures un backed by actual referents It
prunes away the rhetorical elaborations of the lecn1rer and
bypasses the pictures themselves in order to reach th~ solid
masonry behind them as though representation itself verbal or
pictorial were a barrier to be torn dowH This process is presented
as a series of purifications The text contaminated for publication
is returned to its pristine state The visual field is purged of its
verbal dimension in a double movement from text In architecture
and from arl criticism to archaeology Antiquitys dark age is
banished Its whuralmainstrcam is protected against distortion by
-- - --~-
PHI I 0 S T RAT l SAN Il THE r M A (] N 1 H Y I S I I
inferior and marginlt11 groups Art history triumphs over art
appreciation The end product of these procedurts is the vision of
a purified architectural form whose authority is confirmed by a
tradition of national scholarship and national culture exiled to
America and written up in English yet still in direct contact with
the author of Phiostrats gemalde and with the Graeco-Homan past
Through rhetorical operations such as these Lehmanns
ecplrrasis becomes in a sense a tecitni(lue of the subject It is surely
much more than an archaeological reconstruction Like Auerbad~s Mimesis written in Istanbtll during World War II it mobilises the
energies of cultural resistance to its own dark century It invsts
those energies in an incandescent visualisation that configures the
beleaguered subject as a unified building I t would I think be
wrong to find fault with Lehmanns reading at the level on which
it appears to operate of slellth-like deduction and rationality
Expelled by the texts rational procedures rhetoric returns as
texts unconscious At this buried or subterranean level the
reading actually moves much closer into the Imagines than it is
able to admit Philostratus himself presents the art of painting not
as a copy of the world but ltIS in ternalisation of the world In 19 warns his audience not to be impressed by a works mimetic
realism ill that case he says we should praise an insignificant
feature of the painting and one that has solely to do with imitation
(mimesis) but we shollid nOI be praising its intelligence or
sense of decorum it shows though these I believe are the most
important elements of art l~ lust as painting shows the world as
it has already passed into the subjectivity of the painter so the
beholder should not dwell 011 the external matter of mimesis but
internalise the image drawing it inside the subject On their own
the audience can see pictures and judge mimesis perfectly well
the audience do not yet know are the techniques for
absorbing the pictures into the mind It is precisely
in this assimilation of pictures to subjectivity that the audience has come to hear Philostratus speak
It is in this aspect of internalisation that the Imafiines revcJ rhetoric itself as a techllolov Of elicnlin t1egt If T-_ r
1IIMN BRYSON
of the Ad Herenniuflt names memoria as the fourth part of
rhetoric 34 In order to memorise a lengthy speech the orator
should visualise the successive topics of his discourse as images
arranged in consecutive places within architectural space In the
words of Frances Yates who is that mlfi moving slowly in
lonely building stopping at intervals with an intent face He is a
rhetoric student forming a set of memory loci35 Architectures
role in rhetoric is as the supplier of milieux within which intense
visualisations are to occurUl As Cicero says the images should be
active sharply defined and unusual having the power of speedily
encountering and penetrating the psyche (quae oCCflrrere celerishy
terque percutere animum possim)37 The speech unfolds as
rhetorician walks in his mind past walls each memory-place hung
with a vivid image through rooms doorways stairways
porticoes terraces
The first notion is placed as it were ill the ()recourt the second let us say in the atrium lhe remainder are placed in order round the impluvium and committed not only to bedrooms and parlours but even to statues and the like3R
The stability and dependability of this internal architecture is vital
for the control of the self over its material To forget the existence
of a particular room is to leave out a whole stage of the argument
to lTIisremember the sequence of images is to garble the
presentation of the case
places are chosen and marked om with the utmost possible vlriety as a spacious house divided into a number of rooms Every thinK of note therein is diligently imprinted on the mind in order that thongl n~ay be able to fun through all the parts without let or hindrance The filst task is to secure that there shall be no difficulty in funning through these for that memory must be most firmly fixed which helps another memory all
Here architecture not only stands for the control of the self it is
the actual material means by which the self exercises its control
over its words and its world
If Lehmanns unitary and massively stable architecture stands ~1 _1 _~ bullbull l J ~
~ PHILOSTRATUS AND THE IMA((NARY MlISEU~1
c~) (~~) ( 0 ~ ~
-~ ----~
hI 34
1 reading rejoins Philostratus rhetoric as an operation whose means
is imaginary buildings and whose goal is mastery over self and
over representation Ecphrasis here is a technique for consolidating
the subject in terms of personal and professional control While on
the surface of his text Lehmann disavows hermeneutic art history
and expels the lecturer at other levels of his text Lehmann is
Philostratus shadow-partner or secret sharer Lehmanns entry
into the culture of late antiquity is through a shape-shifting in
which he performs the architectural ars memorativa of a thirdshy
century orator
Yet he does so in terms very different from those supplied in the
Imagines The kind of subject proposed and assllmed by 9
Philostratus text is much less driven by the urge towards unitary
self-possession The Imagines subject exists in a universe where
things images and words may frequently converge but do not
consistently fuse together ill the ardour of imaginary vision The
descriptions show the subject in transit across the interstices where
world pictures and language overlap Especially interesting 10
Philostratus are the hybrid or chiasmic zones where dillerent
registers cross over (fig 34)
Let us return for the last time to Looms Penelopes loom
exists at the place where images and the things of the world cross
over The loom is a thing that makes images yet we do not see the
images it makes only the things - warp threads shuttle it
works with Again when the weavers travel across the web or eat
their squirming prey they are seen as living moving creatures
hill at thl sme time the reader knows they are onlv a static nictllrf -j
--
OIlMAN BRYSON
i(
Elsewhere the text moves to the place where the things of the
world cross over into words The author tells us that the spiders
cables are almost too tine to discern What brings them into view
are in fact Hesiods lines about spiders destending and astending
their threads The word makes the thing exist Or a single word in
Greek -- arachnc is able to generate two utterly different beings
spiders and the weaver who challenged Minerva The characters of
Looms are so to speak engendered by an ecphrastic pun Words
and things change pilCes At other times the text crosses the place
where words and image blend Homers text turns into a picture
then back again into Homers words The line between what is
verbal and visual cannot be drawn4o
The subject of the Imagines is in constant motion and dispersal
across this complex terrain qf wprld jmilg ltlAd texr When the
outward pictures enter the subject and are assimilated to the seWs
interior they scatter across an intricately divided and Auid space
The images of Philostratus exist as r~fractiollS in a multishy
dimensional space in which a variety of voices none of them
original blend and clash 41 The subject who performs this
internalisation is in perpetual motion The moments when at the
philostratian Look the various registers join in visionary
fusion do not last long Almost at once the visions separate out
into their component strands unravelling as fast as they came
together And they lead on to the next image - more than sixty
times The unravelling of one image clears the space for the
coming together of the next one Or better the unravelling of
each image calls into being summons the next It is in that
perpetual Penelope-like emergence and falling away of images
that the subject is spun by the text Not as a central storehp~se or
gallery more a~ a motion or desire
Lehmanns subject is in a sense the opposite of thiJ In
Lehmanns case internalising philostralUs text means seeking a
means to arrest the motions of the text and to tapture and
immobilise its energies in a final culminating form Into the
stability of the huilding that is to end the text as motion and desire
are poured all the authors ligures for the command of the subject
massive masonry the prestige of the museum purified form
_ --- ----
PHILOSTRATUS AND THE IMAGINAIY M(SEI
Goethe national culture ethnic centrality profcssionlIisll1 posishy
tive knowledge Which should make Lehmann Philostratus most
inappropriate reader were it not for the brilliance and the yearning of his own visualisation
Among other things Lehmanns reading exemplifies some of
the paradoxes inherent in the tradition of positivist scholarship to
which it belongs It is this aspect that raises his reconstruction
above the category of historiGl1 oddity to adumbrate some of the
vicissitudes of positive knowledfe in more general terms First
Lehmanns relation to the literary to textuality and intenextualitx
is remarkably strained and contradictory The architectural ord~r he proposes for the Imagines is itselfbibliograplllc Lehmann needs
texts 10 enable his reconstruction to take place in order to build
his version of Philostratus villa he must resort to the library what
he says for instance concerning the typology of rooms their
orientation and relation to the seasons is directly dependent on
Vitruvius Yet at the same time his analysis mllst bypass textuality
in order to dissolve the texts into architectural form Necessary at
certain moments of the analysis at others textuality becomes an
obstacle to be scornfully removed Inherently untrustworthy
beside the actuality (the positivism) of the archaeological find texts are aligned in his interpretation with ideas of parasitism and
mediocrity figured here by the lecturer or professor The
reading works both to banish textual corruption completely
(which cannot easily show up ill the analysi~ since hiatuses in the
text arc translated at once into architectural syntax) and to build
the necessity for textual wrruption into his case (as when
Lehmann axes the last eight descriptions as later additions )
Textuality features in this mode of analysis primarily under tlte
sign of repression Where it is able to grow transparent before the
three-dimensional architectural and archaeological order it can be
admitted Where textuality fails to become translucent hcfilfe
reference it must be expelled even if the effort to do so becomes
massive involving the whole battery of figures for the command of th~ sui)ject
Secondly this ef1ort to repress textuality runs counter to many
of the most conspicuous features of Philostratllt PIh So
tgtnHMAN BRYSON
2X2
writing especially its interest in exploring the negative ecphrastic
spaces in which the reader so far from experiencing a dissolution
of writing before the luminous referellt (tlte philostratian
Look ) apprehends the text as a sophisticated web of allusions
parodies puns and tonal plays Lehmanns quest for the stable
masonry of the referent seems altogether blind to the many ways
in which philostratus writing plays to the wplzia of the reader as
one who can see bizarre connections who can understand hidden
narrativcs within imagery (A rachne Mincrva) wilD can
exercise the visual eqllivalent of the elaborate verbal dexterity that
characterises Hellenistic poetry When philostratus says that the
web the spiders make is exceedingly fine (k)perleIIOS) he is
doing more dlan asking liS to visualise something hard to see he
is using a key term from Hellenistic poetics eplOs which means
witty fint clever small-scale sophisticated and doing
so as an invitation or a warning to the reader that his own writing
too is all of these things It is a warning that Lehmann perhaps
wisely does not heed for once ecphrasis is thought of as a form
writing that involves much mort than a simple visualisation of
a text it leaves behind the one certainty that ecphrasis seemed to
hold out to the archaeologist - its promise of presence of
resurrection and becomes something else a mode of writing
whose complexity we are perhaps only beginning to discern and
in relation to which tlie idea of visualisation begins to appear as a
simplification at best
Finally the scrupulous rationality of Lehmanns interpretive
method with its emphasis on what can be deduced and
demonstrated as positive knowledge and as archilectural form
renders it strangely unaware of its own aspect of tellIality of the
ways in which it is itself a working wilh words in whityen the words
carry more associations motivations and effect than the writer is
able to hear or control Working within a highly instrumental and
reduced picture-theory of language Lehmanns analysis radically
underestimates the capacity of words to exceed their allotted
functions of argumentation demonstration and proof Opening
on to other investments and other scenes tban that simply of
archaeology and reconstruction Lehmanns text speaks its own
PllILOSTRATS AND THE IMAGINAHY MliS
uncollscious and it is in that energetic and overdetermined
underside of his text that his deepest engagement with Philostratus
may be found What he writes is perhaps the dream-work of
positivism not the forensics of archaeology but its own buried poetics 42
~
l ltJTES TO PAGES 244--61
O On Pausanils see Frazer (1898) Heer (1979) Jacob (1980)
Habich 1 (1985) and Elsner (1992)
I These include discussions of the wild satyrs of the islands 1235-)
the Ethiopians I334- the Ionian Greeks 722-51) the
marvellous animals collected in Rome 9211-2 the islands of
Sardinia and Corsica 10171-13
32 See Elsner (1992) 17--20
33 See Frazer (1898) xiv compare other second-century CE descripshy
tions of ruins such as Dio Chrysostom on Thebes Oratio 7
Plutarch De ~rcctu oracuorum 8 Lucian Diaog 11I0rt 272
34 This chapter began as a paper on Herodotus pyramids delivered to
Paul Cartledges Ancient History Seminar in Cambridge in 1989 I
wish to thank him John Henderson Jamie Masters and the Editors
of this volume for their comments on earlier drafts My deepest debt
is to Joan Pau Rubies y Mirabet with whom I have fi)r several years
discussed the problems of travel travel-writing and identity This
chapter is dedicated to him
CHApTEH EIGHT PHlLOSTRATliS AND Tin IMA(INARY
MUSEUM
1 English translations are taken from the Loeb edition edited by
T E Page E Capps and W H D Rouse (London and New
York193 1)
2 For the history of the debate see the editions of Jacobs and Welcker
(1825) Kayser (1844) Benndorf and Schenkel (1893) and
Steinmann (1914)
3 Lehmann (1941)
4 The essay is conveniently to be f()Und in vo XXVI of Cottas
standard edition (1868) pp 276fT
Lehmann (1941) 21-4
6 Obviously he describes pictures that were topoglllttphically united
but without regard to the ideological and (JrluaJ rda~m which had
dictated their combination Lehmann (1941) 20
7 Indeed the only explanation of the relationships and the lack of
order is that philostratus saw real pictures which were to a certain
extent arranged on the upper and lower parts of walls Lehmann
(1941) 20
8 Lehmann (1941) 31-3
9 Lehmann (1941) 31-3
NOTES TO P(I-S 2()2
10 [n fact the lmalfines do not supply indications concerning the
dimensions of any particular work
II [t should also be noted that Lehmanns groupings occasionally
require him to rewrite the given titles of pictures
11 These last eight pictures of the second book show a remarkable
absence of any stich relation and connection as we have found
everywhere else Lehmann (1941) 37
13 Lehmann (1941) 39-40
14 The image of weaving is frequently used of writing see for
example Catullus ()45ofr in which the marriage of Peleus and
Thetis is covered with a estis variata figuris pestit decorata
jiguris where filfura is also a literary term for Catullus (wn
rhetoric Perhaps the crucial sites of configuring language image
and weaving are words such as ypaqgteurolv grapIein which means
writedraw design (in thread)
I ~ Worfrs an1 Days 777
16 The presence of Arachne in Looms has been argued since the
Renaissance See for example the gloss on Les Etoiles in Blaise
de Vigeneres edition of 1610 514 Lehmann (1941) 39 also
suggests that the two pictures (227 and 218) both refer to the
Arachne story
17 Ovid Met 65~-8
18 Minerva depicts Rhodope and Ilaemus who dared to cal
themselves gods now turned to mountains the Pygmaean queen
who challenged Juno now turned into a crane Antigone turned
by the angered Juno into a stork Cinyras whose daughters are turned to stone
19 Arachnes tapestry shows Europa abducted by the bull Asterie
carried off by the eagle Leda pursued by the swan Jllpiter
disguised as Amphitryon Danae
20 Met 6140--4
21 Barkan (1986) 4
22 Met 663--6
23 227 1~-19
24 lmaxiner Proem
25 Lehmann (1941) 16
26 In the first paragraph of Lehmanns article Goethe is found to be
disappointed by Pompeii and Herculaneum mere Middletowns as
GoetheLehmann put it from whose limited atmosphere they 112
NOTES TO IAUES 27~-83
turn away towards the Imagines Heference to Goethe recur
at several points in the essay Strangely enough no-one with the
exception of Goethe has ever called attention to the problem of the
general order of the paintings in the two books of philostratus
(19) Yet Goethes rearrangement of the Imapnes is also as
Lehmann put it cavalier his own essay lJl1ilds more sysshy
tematically on Goethes
27 Lehmann (1941) 2S
28 Lehmann (1941) 30
29 Lehmann (1941) 41-2
30 Lehmann (1941) 41
31 Lehmann (1941) 17-18
32 Lehmann (1941) 17middot
33 Imagines 19 18-22 1 have modified the Locb translation
here
34 In Ad Herelfiun the five parts of rhetoric are
eloculio memoria pmllUllialio
3) Yates (1966) 8
36 On architectures relation to the art of memory see the discussion
of Elsner (forthcoming) chapter 2 section v
37 Ad HerenniulII 2873)8 cited by Yates (1966) 18
38 Quimilian inH orat 11220 cited by Yates (1966) 22
39 Quintilian Inst oral 11218 cited by Yates (1966) 22
40 The diagram (Iig 34) is not satisfactory for instance its lines
fixity when the whole point is to suggest fluidity and continuum
But 1hope the reader will follow at least the diagrams gist that the
illlaNille constantly shuttles between words il1la~es and thin~s
Area (5) is that of merger between things and images (6) is the
hybrid area ofwordsubjects (7) is the area of blur between word
and image perhaps the principal ecphrastic space~ he space of the
wurd graphein r 41 Barthes (1977) 145-6
42 1am grateful to the members of the Laurcncc Seminar held in the
Department of Classics at Cambridge in May 1991 ltJr their help in
formulating the ideas presented in this essay and particularly to
Simon Goldhill jas Elsner and Stephen Bann for their very
welcome observations and
List of works cited
For abbreviations see pp xi--xiii
Adler J and Ernst U (1988) Text als Figur 11welle Poesie 101 der
Antike gtis rur Moderne Weinheim
Alpers S (1983) The Art ofDescrihlilg Chicago
Amyx D A (1988) Corinthian Vase Painting orrIe Arclaic Period The
Study of Corinthian Vases Berkeley
Arnheim R (1988) The Poet at rile Center A )tudl ofCompo siti 011 in the
Visual Artr Berkeley
Arnott P (1962) Greek Scellic COlventoils ill til Fijth Celllu~) BC
Oxford
(1989) Puhlic and Performance ill the Greek Theater London
Arnott W G (1987) The Stream and the Gold Two notes 011
Theocritus in Filologia e forme letterarie studi (1fimi a F Della
Corte vol I U rhino
Arthur [Katl] M (1975) Hurtides phoenislae and the Plitics
Diss Yale University
(1977) The curse of civilizatioll the choral odes of the PllOemu-ae
HSCP 81 163-8
Ashmole B (1972) Architect and Sculptor in Classical Greece London
Ashmole B and Yalouris N (1967) Olympia The Sculptures of the
Temple of Zeus London
Baladit H (1980) La Pilopollnese de Strahon Paris
-if Bann s (1989) The True Vine on Visual Representanim ald tllet
- lf7estern Tradition Cambridge -J Barber E J w (1990) Prellistone Textiles the Deleopmellt (Clotll ill
the Neolithic and Brone Ages Princctoll
(1992) The peplos of Athelia in Goddess and Polis tILl PaIlGtIz((c
1IIMN BRYSON
of the Ad Herenniuflt names memoria as the fourth part of
rhetoric 34 In order to memorise a lengthy speech the orator
should visualise the successive topics of his discourse as images
arranged in consecutive places within architectural space In the
words of Frances Yates who is that mlfi moving slowly in
lonely building stopping at intervals with an intent face He is a
rhetoric student forming a set of memory loci35 Architectures
role in rhetoric is as the supplier of milieux within which intense
visualisations are to occurUl As Cicero says the images should be
active sharply defined and unusual having the power of speedily
encountering and penetrating the psyche (quae oCCflrrere celerishy
terque percutere animum possim)37 The speech unfolds as
rhetorician walks in his mind past walls each memory-place hung
with a vivid image through rooms doorways stairways
porticoes terraces
The first notion is placed as it were ill the ()recourt the second let us say in the atrium lhe remainder are placed in order round the impluvium and committed not only to bedrooms and parlours but even to statues and the like3R
The stability and dependability of this internal architecture is vital
for the control of the self over its material To forget the existence
of a particular room is to leave out a whole stage of the argument
to lTIisremember the sequence of images is to garble the
presentation of the case
places are chosen and marked om with the utmost possible vlriety as a spacious house divided into a number of rooms Every thinK of note therein is diligently imprinted on the mind in order that thongl n~ay be able to fun through all the parts without let or hindrance The filst task is to secure that there shall be no difficulty in funning through these for that memory must be most firmly fixed which helps another memory all
Here architecture not only stands for the control of the self it is
the actual material means by which the self exercises its control
over its words and its world
If Lehmanns unitary and massively stable architecture stands ~1 _1 _~ bullbull l J ~
~ PHILOSTRATUS AND THE IMA((NARY MlISEU~1
c~) (~~) ( 0 ~ ~
-~ ----~
hI 34
1 reading rejoins Philostratus rhetoric as an operation whose means
is imaginary buildings and whose goal is mastery over self and
over representation Ecphrasis here is a technique for consolidating
the subject in terms of personal and professional control While on
the surface of his text Lehmann disavows hermeneutic art history
and expels the lecturer at other levels of his text Lehmann is
Philostratus shadow-partner or secret sharer Lehmanns entry
into the culture of late antiquity is through a shape-shifting in
which he performs the architectural ars memorativa of a thirdshy
century orator
Yet he does so in terms very different from those supplied in the
Imagines The kind of subject proposed and assllmed by 9
Philostratus text is much less driven by the urge towards unitary
self-possession The Imagines subject exists in a universe where
things images and words may frequently converge but do not
consistently fuse together ill the ardour of imaginary vision The
descriptions show the subject in transit across the interstices where
world pictures and language overlap Especially interesting 10
Philostratus are the hybrid or chiasmic zones where dillerent
registers cross over (fig 34)
Let us return for the last time to Looms Penelopes loom
exists at the place where images and the things of the world cross
over The loom is a thing that makes images yet we do not see the
images it makes only the things - warp threads shuttle it
works with Again when the weavers travel across the web or eat
their squirming prey they are seen as living moving creatures
hill at thl sme time the reader knows they are onlv a static nictllrf -j
--
OIlMAN BRYSON
i(
Elsewhere the text moves to the place where the things of the
world cross over into words The author tells us that the spiders
cables are almost too tine to discern What brings them into view
are in fact Hesiods lines about spiders destending and astending
their threads The word makes the thing exist Or a single word in
Greek -- arachnc is able to generate two utterly different beings
spiders and the weaver who challenged Minerva The characters of
Looms are so to speak engendered by an ecphrastic pun Words
and things change pilCes At other times the text crosses the place
where words and image blend Homers text turns into a picture
then back again into Homers words The line between what is
verbal and visual cannot be drawn4o
The subject of the Imagines is in constant motion and dispersal
across this complex terrain qf wprld jmilg ltlAd texr When the
outward pictures enter the subject and are assimilated to the seWs
interior they scatter across an intricately divided and Auid space
The images of Philostratus exist as r~fractiollS in a multishy
dimensional space in which a variety of voices none of them
original blend and clash 41 The subject who performs this
internalisation is in perpetual motion The moments when at the
philostratian Look the various registers join in visionary
fusion do not last long Almost at once the visions separate out
into their component strands unravelling as fast as they came
together And they lead on to the next image - more than sixty
times The unravelling of one image clears the space for the
coming together of the next one Or better the unravelling of
each image calls into being summons the next It is in that
perpetual Penelope-like emergence and falling away of images
that the subject is spun by the text Not as a central storehp~se or
gallery more a~ a motion or desire
Lehmanns subject is in a sense the opposite of thiJ In
Lehmanns case internalising philostralUs text means seeking a
means to arrest the motions of the text and to tapture and
immobilise its energies in a final culminating form Into the
stability of the huilding that is to end the text as motion and desire
are poured all the authors ligures for the command of the subject
massive masonry the prestige of the museum purified form
_ --- ----
PHILOSTRATUS AND THE IMAGINAIY M(SEI
Goethe national culture ethnic centrality profcssionlIisll1 posishy
tive knowledge Which should make Lehmann Philostratus most
inappropriate reader were it not for the brilliance and the yearning of his own visualisation
Among other things Lehmanns reading exemplifies some of
the paradoxes inherent in the tradition of positivist scholarship to
which it belongs It is this aspect that raises his reconstruction
above the category of historiGl1 oddity to adumbrate some of the
vicissitudes of positive knowledfe in more general terms First
Lehmanns relation to the literary to textuality and intenextualitx
is remarkably strained and contradictory The architectural ord~r he proposes for the Imagines is itselfbibliograplllc Lehmann needs
texts 10 enable his reconstruction to take place in order to build
his version of Philostratus villa he must resort to the library what
he says for instance concerning the typology of rooms their
orientation and relation to the seasons is directly dependent on
Vitruvius Yet at the same time his analysis mllst bypass textuality
in order to dissolve the texts into architectural form Necessary at
certain moments of the analysis at others textuality becomes an
obstacle to be scornfully removed Inherently untrustworthy
beside the actuality (the positivism) of the archaeological find texts are aligned in his interpretation with ideas of parasitism and
mediocrity figured here by the lecturer or professor The
reading works both to banish textual corruption completely
(which cannot easily show up ill the analysi~ since hiatuses in the
text arc translated at once into architectural syntax) and to build
the necessity for textual wrruption into his case (as when
Lehmann axes the last eight descriptions as later additions )
Textuality features in this mode of analysis primarily under tlte
sign of repression Where it is able to grow transparent before the
three-dimensional architectural and archaeological order it can be
admitted Where textuality fails to become translucent hcfilfe
reference it must be expelled even if the effort to do so becomes
massive involving the whole battery of figures for the command of th~ sui)ject
Secondly this ef1ort to repress textuality runs counter to many
of the most conspicuous features of Philostratllt PIh So
tgtnHMAN BRYSON
2X2
writing especially its interest in exploring the negative ecphrastic
spaces in which the reader so far from experiencing a dissolution
of writing before the luminous referellt (tlte philostratian
Look ) apprehends the text as a sophisticated web of allusions
parodies puns and tonal plays Lehmanns quest for the stable
masonry of the referent seems altogether blind to the many ways
in which philostratus writing plays to the wplzia of the reader as
one who can see bizarre connections who can understand hidden
narrativcs within imagery (A rachne Mincrva) wilD can
exercise the visual eqllivalent of the elaborate verbal dexterity that
characterises Hellenistic poetry When philostratus says that the
web the spiders make is exceedingly fine (k)perleIIOS) he is
doing more dlan asking liS to visualise something hard to see he
is using a key term from Hellenistic poetics eplOs which means
witty fint clever small-scale sophisticated and doing
so as an invitation or a warning to the reader that his own writing
too is all of these things It is a warning that Lehmann perhaps
wisely does not heed for once ecphrasis is thought of as a form
writing that involves much mort than a simple visualisation of
a text it leaves behind the one certainty that ecphrasis seemed to
hold out to the archaeologist - its promise of presence of
resurrection and becomes something else a mode of writing
whose complexity we are perhaps only beginning to discern and
in relation to which tlie idea of visualisation begins to appear as a
simplification at best
Finally the scrupulous rationality of Lehmanns interpretive
method with its emphasis on what can be deduced and
demonstrated as positive knowledge and as archilectural form
renders it strangely unaware of its own aspect of tellIality of the
ways in which it is itself a working wilh words in whityen the words
carry more associations motivations and effect than the writer is
able to hear or control Working within a highly instrumental and
reduced picture-theory of language Lehmanns analysis radically
underestimates the capacity of words to exceed their allotted
functions of argumentation demonstration and proof Opening
on to other investments and other scenes tban that simply of
archaeology and reconstruction Lehmanns text speaks its own
PllILOSTRATS AND THE IMAGINAHY MliS
uncollscious and it is in that energetic and overdetermined
underside of his text that his deepest engagement with Philostratus
may be found What he writes is perhaps the dream-work of
positivism not the forensics of archaeology but its own buried poetics 42
~
l ltJTES TO PAGES 244--61
O On Pausanils see Frazer (1898) Heer (1979) Jacob (1980)
Habich 1 (1985) and Elsner (1992)
I These include discussions of the wild satyrs of the islands 1235-)
the Ethiopians I334- the Ionian Greeks 722-51) the
marvellous animals collected in Rome 9211-2 the islands of
Sardinia and Corsica 10171-13
32 See Elsner (1992) 17--20
33 See Frazer (1898) xiv compare other second-century CE descripshy
tions of ruins such as Dio Chrysostom on Thebes Oratio 7
Plutarch De ~rcctu oracuorum 8 Lucian Diaog 11I0rt 272
34 This chapter began as a paper on Herodotus pyramids delivered to
Paul Cartledges Ancient History Seminar in Cambridge in 1989 I
wish to thank him John Henderson Jamie Masters and the Editors
of this volume for their comments on earlier drafts My deepest debt
is to Joan Pau Rubies y Mirabet with whom I have fi)r several years
discussed the problems of travel travel-writing and identity This
chapter is dedicated to him
CHApTEH EIGHT PHlLOSTRATliS AND Tin IMA(INARY
MUSEUM
1 English translations are taken from the Loeb edition edited by
T E Page E Capps and W H D Rouse (London and New
York193 1)
2 For the history of the debate see the editions of Jacobs and Welcker
(1825) Kayser (1844) Benndorf and Schenkel (1893) and
Steinmann (1914)
3 Lehmann (1941)
4 The essay is conveniently to be f()Und in vo XXVI of Cottas
standard edition (1868) pp 276fT
Lehmann (1941) 21-4
6 Obviously he describes pictures that were topoglllttphically united
but without regard to the ideological and (JrluaJ rda~m which had
dictated their combination Lehmann (1941) 20
7 Indeed the only explanation of the relationships and the lack of
order is that philostratus saw real pictures which were to a certain
extent arranged on the upper and lower parts of walls Lehmann
(1941) 20
8 Lehmann (1941) 31-3
9 Lehmann (1941) 31-3
NOTES TO P(I-S 2()2
10 [n fact the lmalfines do not supply indications concerning the
dimensions of any particular work
II [t should also be noted that Lehmanns groupings occasionally
require him to rewrite the given titles of pictures
11 These last eight pictures of the second book show a remarkable
absence of any stich relation and connection as we have found
everywhere else Lehmann (1941) 37
13 Lehmann (1941) 39-40
14 The image of weaving is frequently used of writing see for
example Catullus ()45ofr in which the marriage of Peleus and
Thetis is covered with a estis variata figuris pestit decorata
jiguris where filfura is also a literary term for Catullus (wn
rhetoric Perhaps the crucial sites of configuring language image
and weaving are words such as ypaqgteurolv grapIein which means
writedraw design (in thread)
I ~ Worfrs an1 Days 777
16 The presence of Arachne in Looms has been argued since the
Renaissance See for example the gloss on Les Etoiles in Blaise
de Vigeneres edition of 1610 514 Lehmann (1941) 39 also
suggests that the two pictures (227 and 218) both refer to the
Arachne story
17 Ovid Met 65~-8
18 Minerva depicts Rhodope and Ilaemus who dared to cal
themselves gods now turned to mountains the Pygmaean queen
who challenged Juno now turned into a crane Antigone turned
by the angered Juno into a stork Cinyras whose daughters are turned to stone
19 Arachnes tapestry shows Europa abducted by the bull Asterie
carried off by the eagle Leda pursued by the swan Jllpiter
disguised as Amphitryon Danae
20 Met 6140--4
21 Barkan (1986) 4
22 Met 663--6
23 227 1~-19
24 lmaxiner Proem
25 Lehmann (1941) 16
26 In the first paragraph of Lehmanns article Goethe is found to be
disappointed by Pompeii and Herculaneum mere Middletowns as
GoetheLehmann put it from whose limited atmosphere they 112
NOTES TO IAUES 27~-83
turn away towards the Imagines Heference to Goethe recur
at several points in the essay Strangely enough no-one with the
exception of Goethe has ever called attention to the problem of the
general order of the paintings in the two books of philostratus
(19) Yet Goethes rearrangement of the Imapnes is also as
Lehmann put it cavalier his own essay lJl1ilds more sysshy
tematically on Goethes
27 Lehmann (1941) 2S
28 Lehmann (1941) 30
29 Lehmann (1941) 41-2
30 Lehmann (1941) 41
31 Lehmann (1941) 17-18
32 Lehmann (1941) 17middot
33 Imagines 19 18-22 1 have modified the Locb translation
here
34 In Ad Herelfiun the five parts of rhetoric are
eloculio memoria pmllUllialio
3) Yates (1966) 8
36 On architectures relation to the art of memory see the discussion
of Elsner (forthcoming) chapter 2 section v
37 Ad HerenniulII 2873)8 cited by Yates (1966) 18
38 Quimilian inH orat 11220 cited by Yates (1966) 22
39 Quintilian Inst oral 11218 cited by Yates (1966) 22
40 The diagram (Iig 34) is not satisfactory for instance its lines
fixity when the whole point is to suggest fluidity and continuum
But 1hope the reader will follow at least the diagrams gist that the
illlaNille constantly shuttles between words il1la~es and thin~s
Area (5) is that of merger between things and images (6) is the
hybrid area ofwordsubjects (7) is the area of blur between word
and image perhaps the principal ecphrastic space~ he space of the
wurd graphein r 41 Barthes (1977) 145-6
42 1am grateful to the members of the Laurcncc Seminar held in the
Department of Classics at Cambridge in May 1991 ltJr their help in
formulating the ideas presented in this essay and particularly to
Simon Goldhill jas Elsner and Stephen Bann for their very
welcome observations and
List of works cited
For abbreviations see pp xi--xiii
Adler J and Ernst U (1988) Text als Figur 11welle Poesie 101 der
Antike gtis rur Moderne Weinheim
Alpers S (1983) The Art ofDescrihlilg Chicago
Amyx D A (1988) Corinthian Vase Painting orrIe Arclaic Period The
Study of Corinthian Vases Berkeley
Arnheim R (1988) The Poet at rile Center A )tudl ofCompo siti 011 in the
Visual Artr Berkeley
Arnott P (1962) Greek Scellic COlventoils ill til Fijth Celllu~) BC
Oxford
(1989) Puhlic and Performance ill the Greek Theater London
Arnott W G (1987) The Stream and the Gold Two notes 011
Theocritus in Filologia e forme letterarie studi (1fimi a F Della
Corte vol I U rhino
Arthur [Katl] M (1975) Hurtides phoenislae and the Plitics
Diss Yale University
(1977) The curse of civilizatioll the choral odes of the PllOemu-ae
HSCP 81 163-8
Ashmole B (1972) Architect and Sculptor in Classical Greece London
Ashmole B and Yalouris N (1967) Olympia The Sculptures of the
Temple of Zeus London
Baladit H (1980) La Pilopollnese de Strahon Paris
-if Bann s (1989) The True Vine on Visual Representanim ald tllet
- lf7estern Tradition Cambridge -J Barber E J w (1990) Prellistone Textiles the Deleopmellt (Clotll ill
the Neolithic and Brone Ages Princctoll
(1992) The peplos of Athelia in Goddess and Polis tILl PaIlGtIz((c
--
OIlMAN BRYSON
i(
Elsewhere the text moves to the place where the things of the
world cross over into words The author tells us that the spiders
cables are almost too tine to discern What brings them into view
are in fact Hesiods lines about spiders destending and astending
their threads The word makes the thing exist Or a single word in
Greek -- arachnc is able to generate two utterly different beings
spiders and the weaver who challenged Minerva The characters of
Looms are so to speak engendered by an ecphrastic pun Words
and things change pilCes At other times the text crosses the place
where words and image blend Homers text turns into a picture
then back again into Homers words The line between what is
verbal and visual cannot be drawn4o
The subject of the Imagines is in constant motion and dispersal
across this complex terrain qf wprld jmilg ltlAd texr When the
outward pictures enter the subject and are assimilated to the seWs
interior they scatter across an intricately divided and Auid space
The images of Philostratus exist as r~fractiollS in a multishy
dimensional space in which a variety of voices none of them
original blend and clash 41 The subject who performs this
internalisation is in perpetual motion The moments when at the
philostratian Look the various registers join in visionary
fusion do not last long Almost at once the visions separate out
into their component strands unravelling as fast as they came
together And they lead on to the next image - more than sixty
times The unravelling of one image clears the space for the
coming together of the next one Or better the unravelling of
each image calls into being summons the next It is in that
perpetual Penelope-like emergence and falling away of images
that the subject is spun by the text Not as a central storehp~se or
gallery more a~ a motion or desire
Lehmanns subject is in a sense the opposite of thiJ In
Lehmanns case internalising philostralUs text means seeking a
means to arrest the motions of the text and to tapture and
immobilise its energies in a final culminating form Into the
stability of the huilding that is to end the text as motion and desire
are poured all the authors ligures for the command of the subject
massive masonry the prestige of the museum purified form
_ --- ----
PHILOSTRATUS AND THE IMAGINAIY M(SEI
Goethe national culture ethnic centrality profcssionlIisll1 posishy
tive knowledge Which should make Lehmann Philostratus most
inappropriate reader were it not for the brilliance and the yearning of his own visualisation
Among other things Lehmanns reading exemplifies some of
the paradoxes inherent in the tradition of positivist scholarship to
which it belongs It is this aspect that raises his reconstruction
above the category of historiGl1 oddity to adumbrate some of the
vicissitudes of positive knowledfe in more general terms First
Lehmanns relation to the literary to textuality and intenextualitx
is remarkably strained and contradictory The architectural ord~r he proposes for the Imagines is itselfbibliograplllc Lehmann needs
texts 10 enable his reconstruction to take place in order to build
his version of Philostratus villa he must resort to the library what
he says for instance concerning the typology of rooms their
orientation and relation to the seasons is directly dependent on
Vitruvius Yet at the same time his analysis mllst bypass textuality
in order to dissolve the texts into architectural form Necessary at
certain moments of the analysis at others textuality becomes an
obstacle to be scornfully removed Inherently untrustworthy
beside the actuality (the positivism) of the archaeological find texts are aligned in his interpretation with ideas of parasitism and
mediocrity figured here by the lecturer or professor The
reading works both to banish textual corruption completely
(which cannot easily show up ill the analysi~ since hiatuses in the
text arc translated at once into architectural syntax) and to build
the necessity for textual wrruption into his case (as when
Lehmann axes the last eight descriptions as later additions )
Textuality features in this mode of analysis primarily under tlte
sign of repression Where it is able to grow transparent before the
three-dimensional architectural and archaeological order it can be
admitted Where textuality fails to become translucent hcfilfe
reference it must be expelled even if the effort to do so becomes
massive involving the whole battery of figures for the command of th~ sui)ject
Secondly this ef1ort to repress textuality runs counter to many
of the most conspicuous features of Philostratllt PIh So
tgtnHMAN BRYSON
2X2
writing especially its interest in exploring the negative ecphrastic
spaces in which the reader so far from experiencing a dissolution
of writing before the luminous referellt (tlte philostratian
Look ) apprehends the text as a sophisticated web of allusions
parodies puns and tonal plays Lehmanns quest for the stable
masonry of the referent seems altogether blind to the many ways
in which philostratus writing plays to the wplzia of the reader as
one who can see bizarre connections who can understand hidden
narrativcs within imagery (A rachne Mincrva) wilD can
exercise the visual eqllivalent of the elaborate verbal dexterity that
characterises Hellenistic poetry When philostratus says that the
web the spiders make is exceedingly fine (k)perleIIOS) he is
doing more dlan asking liS to visualise something hard to see he
is using a key term from Hellenistic poetics eplOs which means
witty fint clever small-scale sophisticated and doing
so as an invitation or a warning to the reader that his own writing
too is all of these things It is a warning that Lehmann perhaps
wisely does not heed for once ecphrasis is thought of as a form
writing that involves much mort than a simple visualisation of
a text it leaves behind the one certainty that ecphrasis seemed to
hold out to the archaeologist - its promise of presence of
resurrection and becomes something else a mode of writing
whose complexity we are perhaps only beginning to discern and
in relation to which tlie idea of visualisation begins to appear as a
simplification at best
Finally the scrupulous rationality of Lehmanns interpretive
method with its emphasis on what can be deduced and
demonstrated as positive knowledge and as archilectural form
renders it strangely unaware of its own aspect of tellIality of the
ways in which it is itself a working wilh words in whityen the words
carry more associations motivations and effect than the writer is
able to hear or control Working within a highly instrumental and
reduced picture-theory of language Lehmanns analysis radically
underestimates the capacity of words to exceed their allotted
functions of argumentation demonstration and proof Opening
on to other investments and other scenes tban that simply of
archaeology and reconstruction Lehmanns text speaks its own
PllILOSTRATS AND THE IMAGINAHY MliS
uncollscious and it is in that energetic and overdetermined
underside of his text that his deepest engagement with Philostratus
may be found What he writes is perhaps the dream-work of
positivism not the forensics of archaeology but its own buried poetics 42
~
l ltJTES TO PAGES 244--61
O On Pausanils see Frazer (1898) Heer (1979) Jacob (1980)
Habich 1 (1985) and Elsner (1992)
I These include discussions of the wild satyrs of the islands 1235-)
the Ethiopians I334- the Ionian Greeks 722-51) the
marvellous animals collected in Rome 9211-2 the islands of
Sardinia and Corsica 10171-13
32 See Elsner (1992) 17--20
33 See Frazer (1898) xiv compare other second-century CE descripshy
tions of ruins such as Dio Chrysostom on Thebes Oratio 7
Plutarch De ~rcctu oracuorum 8 Lucian Diaog 11I0rt 272
34 This chapter began as a paper on Herodotus pyramids delivered to
Paul Cartledges Ancient History Seminar in Cambridge in 1989 I
wish to thank him John Henderson Jamie Masters and the Editors
of this volume for their comments on earlier drafts My deepest debt
is to Joan Pau Rubies y Mirabet with whom I have fi)r several years
discussed the problems of travel travel-writing and identity This
chapter is dedicated to him
CHApTEH EIGHT PHlLOSTRATliS AND Tin IMA(INARY
MUSEUM
1 English translations are taken from the Loeb edition edited by
T E Page E Capps and W H D Rouse (London and New
York193 1)
2 For the history of the debate see the editions of Jacobs and Welcker
(1825) Kayser (1844) Benndorf and Schenkel (1893) and
Steinmann (1914)
3 Lehmann (1941)
4 The essay is conveniently to be f()Und in vo XXVI of Cottas
standard edition (1868) pp 276fT
Lehmann (1941) 21-4
6 Obviously he describes pictures that were topoglllttphically united
but without regard to the ideological and (JrluaJ rda~m which had
dictated their combination Lehmann (1941) 20
7 Indeed the only explanation of the relationships and the lack of
order is that philostratus saw real pictures which were to a certain
extent arranged on the upper and lower parts of walls Lehmann
(1941) 20
8 Lehmann (1941) 31-3
9 Lehmann (1941) 31-3
NOTES TO P(I-S 2()2
10 [n fact the lmalfines do not supply indications concerning the
dimensions of any particular work
II [t should also be noted that Lehmanns groupings occasionally
require him to rewrite the given titles of pictures
11 These last eight pictures of the second book show a remarkable
absence of any stich relation and connection as we have found
everywhere else Lehmann (1941) 37
13 Lehmann (1941) 39-40
14 The image of weaving is frequently used of writing see for
example Catullus ()45ofr in which the marriage of Peleus and
Thetis is covered with a estis variata figuris pestit decorata
jiguris where filfura is also a literary term for Catullus (wn
rhetoric Perhaps the crucial sites of configuring language image
and weaving are words such as ypaqgteurolv grapIein which means
writedraw design (in thread)
I ~ Worfrs an1 Days 777
16 The presence of Arachne in Looms has been argued since the
Renaissance See for example the gloss on Les Etoiles in Blaise
de Vigeneres edition of 1610 514 Lehmann (1941) 39 also
suggests that the two pictures (227 and 218) both refer to the
Arachne story
17 Ovid Met 65~-8
18 Minerva depicts Rhodope and Ilaemus who dared to cal
themselves gods now turned to mountains the Pygmaean queen
who challenged Juno now turned into a crane Antigone turned
by the angered Juno into a stork Cinyras whose daughters are turned to stone
19 Arachnes tapestry shows Europa abducted by the bull Asterie
carried off by the eagle Leda pursued by the swan Jllpiter
disguised as Amphitryon Danae
20 Met 6140--4
21 Barkan (1986) 4
22 Met 663--6
23 227 1~-19
24 lmaxiner Proem
25 Lehmann (1941) 16
26 In the first paragraph of Lehmanns article Goethe is found to be
disappointed by Pompeii and Herculaneum mere Middletowns as
GoetheLehmann put it from whose limited atmosphere they 112
NOTES TO IAUES 27~-83
turn away towards the Imagines Heference to Goethe recur
at several points in the essay Strangely enough no-one with the
exception of Goethe has ever called attention to the problem of the
general order of the paintings in the two books of philostratus
(19) Yet Goethes rearrangement of the Imapnes is also as
Lehmann put it cavalier his own essay lJl1ilds more sysshy
tematically on Goethes
27 Lehmann (1941) 2S
28 Lehmann (1941) 30
29 Lehmann (1941) 41-2
30 Lehmann (1941) 41
31 Lehmann (1941) 17-18
32 Lehmann (1941) 17middot
33 Imagines 19 18-22 1 have modified the Locb translation
here
34 In Ad Herelfiun the five parts of rhetoric are
eloculio memoria pmllUllialio
3) Yates (1966) 8
36 On architectures relation to the art of memory see the discussion
of Elsner (forthcoming) chapter 2 section v
37 Ad HerenniulII 2873)8 cited by Yates (1966) 18
38 Quimilian inH orat 11220 cited by Yates (1966) 22
39 Quintilian Inst oral 11218 cited by Yates (1966) 22
40 The diagram (Iig 34) is not satisfactory for instance its lines
fixity when the whole point is to suggest fluidity and continuum
But 1hope the reader will follow at least the diagrams gist that the
illlaNille constantly shuttles between words il1la~es and thin~s
Area (5) is that of merger between things and images (6) is the
hybrid area ofwordsubjects (7) is the area of blur between word
and image perhaps the principal ecphrastic space~ he space of the
wurd graphein r 41 Barthes (1977) 145-6
42 1am grateful to the members of the Laurcncc Seminar held in the
Department of Classics at Cambridge in May 1991 ltJr their help in
formulating the ideas presented in this essay and particularly to
Simon Goldhill jas Elsner and Stephen Bann for their very
welcome observations and
List of works cited
For abbreviations see pp xi--xiii
Adler J and Ernst U (1988) Text als Figur 11welle Poesie 101 der
Antike gtis rur Moderne Weinheim
Alpers S (1983) The Art ofDescrihlilg Chicago
Amyx D A (1988) Corinthian Vase Painting orrIe Arclaic Period The
Study of Corinthian Vases Berkeley
Arnheim R (1988) The Poet at rile Center A )tudl ofCompo siti 011 in the
Visual Artr Berkeley
Arnott P (1962) Greek Scellic COlventoils ill til Fijth Celllu~) BC
Oxford
(1989) Puhlic and Performance ill the Greek Theater London
Arnott W G (1987) The Stream and the Gold Two notes 011
Theocritus in Filologia e forme letterarie studi (1fimi a F Della
Corte vol I U rhino
Arthur [Katl] M (1975) Hurtides phoenislae and the Plitics
Diss Yale University
(1977) The curse of civilizatioll the choral odes of the PllOemu-ae
HSCP 81 163-8
Ashmole B (1972) Architect and Sculptor in Classical Greece London
Ashmole B and Yalouris N (1967) Olympia The Sculptures of the
Temple of Zeus London
Baladit H (1980) La Pilopollnese de Strahon Paris
-if Bann s (1989) The True Vine on Visual Representanim ald tllet
- lf7estern Tradition Cambridge -J Barber E J w (1990) Prellistone Textiles the Deleopmellt (Clotll ill
the Neolithic and Brone Ages Princctoll
(1992) The peplos of Athelia in Goddess and Polis tILl PaIlGtIz((c
tgtnHMAN BRYSON
2X2
writing especially its interest in exploring the negative ecphrastic
spaces in which the reader so far from experiencing a dissolution
of writing before the luminous referellt (tlte philostratian
Look ) apprehends the text as a sophisticated web of allusions
parodies puns and tonal plays Lehmanns quest for the stable
masonry of the referent seems altogether blind to the many ways
in which philostratus writing plays to the wplzia of the reader as
one who can see bizarre connections who can understand hidden
narrativcs within imagery (A rachne Mincrva) wilD can
exercise the visual eqllivalent of the elaborate verbal dexterity that
characterises Hellenistic poetry When philostratus says that the
web the spiders make is exceedingly fine (k)perleIIOS) he is
doing more dlan asking liS to visualise something hard to see he
is using a key term from Hellenistic poetics eplOs which means
witty fint clever small-scale sophisticated and doing
so as an invitation or a warning to the reader that his own writing
too is all of these things It is a warning that Lehmann perhaps
wisely does not heed for once ecphrasis is thought of as a form
writing that involves much mort than a simple visualisation of
a text it leaves behind the one certainty that ecphrasis seemed to
hold out to the archaeologist - its promise of presence of
resurrection and becomes something else a mode of writing
whose complexity we are perhaps only beginning to discern and
in relation to which tlie idea of visualisation begins to appear as a
simplification at best
Finally the scrupulous rationality of Lehmanns interpretive
method with its emphasis on what can be deduced and
demonstrated as positive knowledge and as archilectural form
renders it strangely unaware of its own aspect of tellIality of the
ways in which it is itself a working wilh words in whityen the words
carry more associations motivations and effect than the writer is
able to hear or control Working within a highly instrumental and
reduced picture-theory of language Lehmanns analysis radically
underestimates the capacity of words to exceed their allotted
functions of argumentation demonstration and proof Opening
on to other investments and other scenes tban that simply of
archaeology and reconstruction Lehmanns text speaks its own
PllILOSTRATS AND THE IMAGINAHY MliS
uncollscious and it is in that energetic and overdetermined
underside of his text that his deepest engagement with Philostratus
may be found What he writes is perhaps the dream-work of
positivism not the forensics of archaeology but its own buried poetics 42
~
l ltJTES TO PAGES 244--61
O On Pausanils see Frazer (1898) Heer (1979) Jacob (1980)
Habich 1 (1985) and Elsner (1992)
I These include discussions of the wild satyrs of the islands 1235-)
the Ethiopians I334- the Ionian Greeks 722-51) the
marvellous animals collected in Rome 9211-2 the islands of
Sardinia and Corsica 10171-13
32 See Elsner (1992) 17--20
33 See Frazer (1898) xiv compare other second-century CE descripshy
tions of ruins such as Dio Chrysostom on Thebes Oratio 7
Plutarch De ~rcctu oracuorum 8 Lucian Diaog 11I0rt 272
34 This chapter began as a paper on Herodotus pyramids delivered to
Paul Cartledges Ancient History Seminar in Cambridge in 1989 I
wish to thank him John Henderson Jamie Masters and the Editors
of this volume for their comments on earlier drafts My deepest debt
is to Joan Pau Rubies y Mirabet with whom I have fi)r several years
discussed the problems of travel travel-writing and identity This
chapter is dedicated to him
CHApTEH EIGHT PHlLOSTRATliS AND Tin IMA(INARY
MUSEUM
1 English translations are taken from the Loeb edition edited by
T E Page E Capps and W H D Rouse (London and New
York193 1)
2 For the history of the debate see the editions of Jacobs and Welcker
(1825) Kayser (1844) Benndorf and Schenkel (1893) and
Steinmann (1914)
3 Lehmann (1941)
4 The essay is conveniently to be f()Und in vo XXVI of Cottas
standard edition (1868) pp 276fT
Lehmann (1941) 21-4
6 Obviously he describes pictures that were topoglllttphically united
but without regard to the ideological and (JrluaJ rda~m which had
dictated their combination Lehmann (1941) 20
7 Indeed the only explanation of the relationships and the lack of
order is that philostratus saw real pictures which were to a certain
extent arranged on the upper and lower parts of walls Lehmann
(1941) 20
8 Lehmann (1941) 31-3
9 Lehmann (1941) 31-3
NOTES TO P(I-S 2()2
10 [n fact the lmalfines do not supply indications concerning the
dimensions of any particular work
II [t should also be noted that Lehmanns groupings occasionally
require him to rewrite the given titles of pictures
11 These last eight pictures of the second book show a remarkable
absence of any stich relation and connection as we have found
everywhere else Lehmann (1941) 37
13 Lehmann (1941) 39-40
14 The image of weaving is frequently used of writing see for
example Catullus ()45ofr in which the marriage of Peleus and
Thetis is covered with a estis variata figuris pestit decorata
jiguris where filfura is also a literary term for Catullus (wn
rhetoric Perhaps the crucial sites of configuring language image
and weaving are words such as ypaqgteurolv grapIein which means
writedraw design (in thread)
I ~ Worfrs an1 Days 777
16 The presence of Arachne in Looms has been argued since the
Renaissance See for example the gloss on Les Etoiles in Blaise
de Vigeneres edition of 1610 514 Lehmann (1941) 39 also
suggests that the two pictures (227 and 218) both refer to the
Arachne story
17 Ovid Met 65~-8
18 Minerva depicts Rhodope and Ilaemus who dared to cal
themselves gods now turned to mountains the Pygmaean queen
who challenged Juno now turned into a crane Antigone turned
by the angered Juno into a stork Cinyras whose daughters are turned to stone
19 Arachnes tapestry shows Europa abducted by the bull Asterie
carried off by the eagle Leda pursued by the swan Jllpiter
disguised as Amphitryon Danae
20 Met 6140--4
21 Barkan (1986) 4
22 Met 663--6
23 227 1~-19
24 lmaxiner Proem
25 Lehmann (1941) 16
26 In the first paragraph of Lehmanns article Goethe is found to be
disappointed by Pompeii and Herculaneum mere Middletowns as
GoetheLehmann put it from whose limited atmosphere they 112
NOTES TO IAUES 27~-83
turn away towards the Imagines Heference to Goethe recur
at several points in the essay Strangely enough no-one with the
exception of Goethe has ever called attention to the problem of the
general order of the paintings in the two books of philostratus
(19) Yet Goethes rearrangement of the Imapnes is also as
Lehmann put it cavalier his own essay lJl1ilds more sysshy
tematically on Goethes
27 Lehmann (1941) 2S
28 Lehmann (1941) 30
29 Lehmann (1941) 41-2
30 Lehmann (1941) 41
31 Lehmann (1941) 17-18
32 Lehmann (1941) 17middot
33 Imagines 19 18-22 1 have modified the Locb translation
here
34 In Ad Herelfiun the five parts of rhetoric are
eloculio memoria pmllUllialio
3) Yates (1966) 8
36 On architectures relation to the art of memory see the discussion
of Elsner (forthcoming) chapter 2 section v
37 Ad HerenniulII 2873)8 cited by Yates (1966) 18
38 Quimilian inH orat 11220 cited by Yates (1966) 22
39 Quintilian Inst oral 11218 cited by Yates (1966) 22
40 The diagram (Iig 34) is not satisfactory for instance its lines
fixity when the whole point is to suggest fluidity and continuum
But 1hope the reader will follow at least the diagrams gist that the
illlaNille constantly shuttles between words il1la~es and thin~s
Area (5) is that of merger between things and images (6) is the
hybrid area ofwordsubjects (7) is the area of blur between word
and image perhaps the principal ecphrastic space~ he space of the
wurd graphein r 41 Barthes (1977) 145-6
42 1am grateful to the members of the Laurcncc Seminar held in the
Department of Classics at Cambridge in May 1991 ltJr their help in
formulating the ideas presented in this essay and particularly to
Simon Goldhill jas Elsner and Stephen Bann for their very
welcome observations and
List of works cited
For abbreviations see pp xi--xiii
Adler J and Ernst U (1988) Text als Figur 11welle Poesie 101 der
Antike gtis rur Moderne Weinheim
Alpers S (1983) The Art ofDescrihlilg Chicago
Amyx D A (1988) Corinthian Vase Painting orrIe Arclaic Period The
Study of Corinthian Vases Berkeley
Arnheim R (1988) The Poet at rile Center A )tudl ofCompo siti 011 in the
Visual Artr Berkeley
Arnott P (1962) Greek Scellic COlventoils ill til Fijth Celllu~) BC
Oxford
(1989) Puhlic and Performance ill the Greek Theater London
Arnott W G (1987) The Stream and the Gold Two notes 011
Theocritus in Filologia e forme letterarie studi (1fimi a F Della
Corte vol I U rhino
Arthur [Katl] M (1975) Hurtides phoenislae and the Plitics
Diss Yale University
(1977) The curse of civilizatioll the choral odes of the PllOemu-ae
HSCP 81 163-8
Ashmole B (1972) Architect and Sculptor in Classical Greece London
Ashmole B and Yalouris N (1967) Olympia The Sculptures of the
Temple of Zeus London
Baladit H (1980) La Pilopollnese de Strahon Paris
-if Bann s (1989) The True Vine on Visual Representanim ald tllet
- lf7estern Tradition Cambridge -J Barber E J w (1990) Prellistone Textiles the Deleopmellt (Clotll ill
the Neolithic and Brone Ages Princctoll
(1992) The peplos of Athelia in Goddess and Polis tILl PaIlGtIz((c
l ltJTES TO PAGES 244--61
O On Pausanils see Frazer (1898) Heer (1979) Jacob (1980)
Habich 1 (1985) and Elsner (1992)
I These include discussions of the wild satyrs of the islands 1235-)
the Ethiopians I334- the Ionian Greeks 722-51) the
marvellous animals collected in Rome 9211-2 the islands of
Sardinia and Corsica 10171-13
32 See Elsner (1992) 17--20
33 See Frazer (1898) xiv compare other second-century CE descripshy
tions of ruins such as Dio Chrysostom on Thebes Oratio 7
Plutarch De ~rcctu oracuorum 8 Lucian Diaog 11I0rt 272
34 This chapter began as a paper on Herodotus pyramids delivered to
Paul Cartledges Ancient History Seminar in Cambridge in 1989 I
wish to thank him John Henderson Jamie Masters and the Editors
of this volume for their comments on earlier drafts My deepest debt
is to Joan Pau Rubies y Mirabet with whom I have fi)r several years
discussed the problems of travel travel-writing and identity This
chapter is dedicated to him
CHApTEH EIGHT PHlLOSTRATliS AND Tin IMA(INARY
MUSEUM
1 English translations are taken from the Loeb edition edited by
T E Page E Capps and W H D Rouse (London and New
York193 1)
2 For the history of the debate see the editions of Jacobs and Welcker
(1825) Kayser (1844) Benndorf and Schenkel (1893) and
Steinmann (1914)
3 Lehmann (1941)
4 The essay is conveniently to be f()Und in vo XXVI of Cottas
standard edition (1868) pp 276fT
Lehmann (1941) 21-4
6 Obviously he describes pictures that were topoglllttphically united
but without regard to the ideological and (JrluaJ rda~m which had
dictated their combination Lehmann (1941) 20
7 Indeed the only explanation of the relationships and the lack of
order is that philostratus saw real pictures which were to a certain
extent arranged on the upper and lower parts of walls Lehmann
(1941) 20
8 Lehmann (1941) 31-3
9 Lehmann (1941) 31-3
NOTES TO P(I-S 2()2
10 [n fact the lmalfines do not supply indications concerning the
dimensions of any particular work
II [t should also be noted that Lehmanns groupings occasionally
require him to rewrite the given titles of pictures
11 These last eight pictures of the second book show a remarkable
absence of any stich relation and connection as we have found
everywhere else Lehmann (1941) 37
13 Lehmann (1941) 39-40
14 The image of weaving is frequently used of writing see for
example Catullus ()45ofr in which the marriage of Peleus and
Thetis is covered with a estis variata figuris pestit decorata
jiguris where filfura is also a literary term for Catullus (wn
rhetoric Perhaps the crucial sites of configuring language image
and weaving are words such as ypaqgteurolv grapIein which means
writedraw design (in thread)
I ~ Worfrs an1 Days 777
16 The presence of Arachne in Looms has been argued since the
Renaissance See for example the gloss on Les Etoiles in Blaise
de Vigeneres edition of 1610 514 Lehmann (1941) 39 also
suggests that the two pictures (227 and 218) both refer to the
Arachne story
17 Ovid Met 65~-8
18 Minerva depicts Rhodope and Ilaemus who dared to cal
themselves gods now turned to mountains the Pygmaean queen
who challenged Juno now turned into a crane Antigone turned
by the angered Juno into a stork Cinyras whose daughters are turned to stone
19 Arachnes tapestry shows Europa abducted by the bull Asterie
carried off by the eagle Leda pursued by the swan Jllpiter
disguised as Amphitryon Danae
20 Met 6140--4
21 Barkan (1986) 4
22 Met 663--6
23 227 1~-19
24 lmaxiner Proem
25 Lehmann (1941) 16
26 In the first paragraph of Lehmanns article Goethe is found to be
disappointed by Pompeii and Herculaneum mere Middletowns as
GoetheLehmann put it from whose limited atmosphere they 112
NOTES TO IAUES 27~-83
turn away towards the Imagines Heference to Goethe recur
at several points in the essay Strangely enough no-one with the
exception of Goethe has ever called attention to the problem of the
general order of the paintings in the two books of philostratus
(19) Yet Goethes rearrangement of the Imapnes is also as
Lehmann put it cavalier his own essay lJl1ilds more sysshy
tematically on Goethes
27 Lehmann (1941) 2S
28 Lehmann (1941) 30
29 Lehmann (1941) 41-2
30 Lehmann (1941) 41
31 Lehmann (1941) 17-18
32 Lehmann (1941) 17middot
33 Imagines 19 18-22 1 have modified the Locb translation
here
34 In Ad Herelfiun the five parts of rhetoric are
eloculio memoria pmllUllialio
3) Yates (1966) 8
36 On architectures relation to the art of memory see the discussion
of Elsner (forthcoming) chapter 2 section v
37 Ad HerenniulII 2873)8 cited by Yates (1966) 18
38 Quimilian inH orat 11220 cited by Yates (1966) 22
39 Quintilian Inst oral 11218 cited by Yates (1966) 22
40 The diagram (Iig 34) is not satisfactory for instance its lines
fixity when the whole point is to suggest fluidity and continuum
But 1hope the reader will follow at least the diagrams gist that the
illlaNille constantly shuttles between words il1la~es and thin~s
Area (5) is that of merger between things and images (6) is the
hybrid area ofwordsubjects (7) is the area of blur between word
and image perhaps the principal ecphrastic space~ he space of the
wurd graphein r 41 Barthes (1977) 145-6
42 1am grateful to the members of the Laurcncc Seminar held in the
Department of Classics at Cambridge in May 1991 ltJr their help in
formulating the ideas presented in this essay and particularly to
Simon Goldhill jas Elsner and Stephen Bann for their very
welcome observations and
List of works cited
For abbreviations see pp xi--xiii
Adler J and Ernst U (1988) Text als Figur 11welle Poesie 101 der
Antike gtis rur Moderne Weinheim
Alpers S (1983) The Art ofDescrihlilg Chicago
Amyx D A (1988) Corinthian Vase Painting orrIe Arclaic Period The
Study of Corinthian Vases Berkeley
Arnheim R (1988) The Poet at rile Center A )tudl ofCompo siti 011 in the
Visual Artr Berkeley
Arnott P (1962) Greek Scellic COlventoils ill til Fijth Celllu~) BC
Oxford
(1989) Puhlic and Performance ill the Greek Theater London
Arnott W G (1987) The Stream and the Gold Two notes 011
Theocritus in Filologia e forme letterarie studi (1fimi a F Della
Corte vol I U rhino
Arthur [Katl] M (1975) Hurtides phoenislae and the Plitics
Diss Yale University
(1977) The curse of civilizatioll the choral odes of the PllOemu-ae
HSCP 81 163-8
Ashmole B (1972) Architect and Sculptor in Classical Greece London
Ashmole B and Yalouris N (1967) Olympia The Sculptures of the
Temple of Zeus London
Baladit H (1980) La Pilopollnese de Strahon Paris
-if Bann s (1989) The True Vine on Visual Representanim ald tllet
- lf7estern Tradition Cambridge -J Barber E J w (1990) Prellistone Textiles the Deleopmellt (Clotll ill
the Neolithic and Brone Ages Princctoll
(1992) The peplos of Athelia in Goddess and Polis tILl PaIlGtIz((c
NOTES TO IAUES 27~-83
turn away towards the Imagines Heference to Goethe recur
at several points in the essay Strangely enough no-one with the
exception of Goethe has ever called attention to the problem of the
general order of the paintings in the two books of philostratus
(19) Yet Goethes rearrangement of the Imapnes is also as
Lehmann put it cavalier his own essay lJl1ilds more sysshy
tematically on Goethes
27 Lehmann (1941) 2S
28 Lehmann (1941) 30
29 Lehmann (1941) 41-2
30 Lehmann (1941) 41
31 Lehmann (1941) 17-18
32 Lehmann (1941) 17middot
33 Imagines 19 18-22 1 have modified the Locb translation
here
34 In Ad Herelfiun the five parts of rhetoric are
eloculio memoria pmllUllialio
3) Yates (1966) 8
36 On architectures relation to the art of memory see the discussion
of Elsner (forthcoming) chapter 2 section v
37 Ad HerenniulII 2873)8 cited by Yates (1966) 18
38 Quimilian inH orat 11220 cited by Yates (1966) 22
39 Quintilian Inst oral 11218 cited by Yates (1966) 22
40 The diagram (Iig 34) is not satisfactory for instance its lines
fixity when the whole point is to suggest fluidity and continuum
But 1hope the reader will follow at least the diagrams gist that the
illlaNille constantly shuttles between words il1la~es and thin~s
Area (5) is that of merger between things and images (6) is the
hybrid area ofwordsubjects (7) is the area of blur between word
and image perhaps the principal ecphrastic space~ he space of the
wurd graphein r 41 Barthes (1977) 145-6
42 1am grateful to the members of the Laurcncc Seminar held in the
Department of Classics at Cambridge in May 1991 ltJr their help in
formulating the ideas presented in this essay and particularly to
Simon Goldhill jas Elsner and Stephen Bann for their very
welcome observations and
List of works cited
For abbreviations see pp xi--xiii
Adler J and Ernst U (1988) Text als Figur 11welle Poesie 101 der
Antike gtis rur Moderne Weinheim
Alpers S (1983) The Art ofDescrihlilg Chicago
Amyx D A (1988) Corinthian Vase Painting orrIe Arclaic Period The
Study of Corinthian Vases Berkeley
Arnheim R (1988) The Poet at rile Center A )tudl ofCompo siti 011 in the
Visual Artr Berkeley
Arnott P (1962) Greek Scellic COlventoils ill til Fijth Celllu~) BC
Oxford
(1989) Puhlic and Performance ill the Greek Theater London
Arnott W G (1987) The Stream and the Gold Two notes 011
Theocritus in Filologia e forme letterarie studi (1fimi a F Della
Corte vol I U rhino
Arthur [Katl] M (1975) Hurtides phoenislae and the Plitics
Diss Yale University
(1977) The curse of civilizatioll the choral odes of the PllOemu-ae
HSCP 81 163-8
Ashmole B (1972) Architect and Sculptor in Classical Greece London
Ashmole B and Yalouris N (1967) Olympia The Sculptures of the
Temple of Zeus London
Baladit H (1980) La Pilopollnese de Strahon Paris
-if Bann s (1989) The True Vine on Visual Representanim ald tllet
- lf7estern Tradition Cambridge -J Barber E J w (1990) Prellistone Textiles the Deleopmellt (Clotll ill
the Neolithic and Brone Ages Princctoll
(1992) The peplos of Athelia in Goddess and Polis tILl PaIlGtIz((c