Sounding Out Ecphrasis: Art and Text in Catullus 64

The term ecphrasis in ancient doctrine denoted any poetic or rhetorical description, including descriptions of landscape (topothesia), buildings, battles, and storms. In recent critical idiom it has been narrowed to refer specifically to literary descriptions of visual works of art. This critical focus indicates the interest of the problem of comparing the two media of literature and the visual arts. The great benefit of considering ‘ecphrasis’ in the modern sense is that it forces us to confront both the nature of the visual artistic medium and that of the verbal medium describing it.