Introduction
The concept of intermediality arose in the theoretical discourse about the relations between different systems or products of meaning, such as the relations between music and art, or image and text. The word gained currency in the 1980s in German- and French-language studies of theatre performance, and in scholarship on opera, film, and music, in order to capture the notion of the interconnections between different art forms.Footnote 1 For reasons of utility, the concept has been divided into three kinds: intermediality may refer to the combination of media (as in opera, in which music, dance, and song are conjoined into one aesthetic experience); the transformation or transposition of media (as in a film version of a book); and intermedial references or connections, whereby attention is drawn to another system of meaning, as in the references in literature to a work of art.Footnote 2 The term has entered the field of classics especially via the study of the relations between the narrative and inscriptional modes in literary epigram.Footnote 3
The focus of this article is the third usage of intermediality, that of intermedial references or connections, known in the German scholarship as intermediale Bezüge. This use of the term concerns the engagement of at least two distinct media in signifying an artefact in which only the dominant medium, with its typical signifiers, is present.Footnote 4 Instead of transposing another medium, an intermedial reference ‘thematizes, evokes, or imitates elements or structures of another, conventionally distinct medium through the use of its own media-specific means’.Footnote 5 The medium of the text, for example, can absorb another medium into its own system of meaning and mode of communication; but while the other medium is subsumed under the textual one, its own semiotic and aesthetic functions remain active.
The study of intermediality was developed in part upon the theory of intertextuality, which explains how meaning is created through a dynamic mosaic of quotations that includes absorptions and transformations of other texts.Footnote 6 Intermedial reference differs from intertextuality by connecting two entirely different systems of meaning; it employs allusions not to another text but to another semiotic system.Footnote 7 An intermedial reference uses signifiers integral to its own medium; the aesthetic features of another medium may be denoted only when these can be conveyed by the referring medium.Footnote 8 In the case of literature and art, the point of contact between the different media products also allows the reader to perceive the features of another system, that is, features which are literary and visual. By seeking to replicate in text the altermedial product, the literary medium alerts the reader to the material properties of the other medium. As will be made clear from the instances of intermedial references discussed below, intermedial narratives ‘put new demands on the reader's involvement with the text’.Footnote 9
Ekphrasis, the literary representation of a visual representation, seeks to describe in literary form what appears, or is imagined to appear, to the eyes.Footnote 10 Within ekphrasis, intermediality concerns the point at which the text strives to intersect or coincide with art. In theoretical terms, ekphrastic intermediality concerns the blending, blurring, or slippage of the unique properties of text and image.Footnote 11 While it is the dominant medium, the ekphrastic text employs intermediality in order to minimize the gap or distance that exists between literature and the plastic arts. Thus, rather than approaching the relationship between art and text according to the traditional theoretical model of competition between the arts in which one seeks to displace or destroy the other, intermediality in ekphrastic texts draws attention to the junction of distinct media in order to construct new meanings.Footnote 12
This article seeks to illustrate how intermediality in Latin epic ekphrasis employs ambivalence and ambiguity in order to identify and articulate the place at which the different media merge or converge. In ekphrastic texts the explicit mention of the material, physical qualities of the object introduces the intermedial reference. Words expressive of the act of viewing also draw attention to the (imagined) object and thus heighten the reader's awareness of the other medium. The two media fuse when the text assumes the function of signifying the other medium as well as its own. It is through the use of equivocal diction, ambivalent grammar and syntax, and ambiguity in meaning that the text is able to produce meanings for two media simultaneously. The most well-known type of ekphrasis, that of shields in epic poetry, involves a three-dimensional object (the shield), the scenes depicted or engraved upon it, and the text which represents them. By fusing object, image, and text, intermediality produces a plane of meaning which enhances the thematic concerns of the text.
Intermediality and ekphrasis in Augustan epic
Although the term was not used in antiquity, intermedial reference was exercised by ancient writers and was known to their commentators. This is shown, for example, in the well-known description of the shield of Aeneas in Aeneid 8.Footnote 13 Depicted at the centre of the ekphrasis of the shield is the battle of Actium, a vignette the poet invests with contemporary political and social implications:
In these lines two expressions of viewing – namely cernere erat (emphatic in its archaic form) and videres (addressing the putative reader) – foreground the presence of the shield-object, and so alert or remind the reader of the presence of its semiotic system.Footnote 15 The conflation of media is suggested first by the adjectival phrase in medio, itself suggestive of the place where the semiotic systems intersect. For as Servius Auctus, the late fourth-century commentator, points out, in medio may modify the understood noun clipeo (‘shield’), or mari (‘sea’) in the image on the shield.Footnote 16 This ambivalence in the referent of in medio is also revealed by the differing interpretations of Virgil's modern editors. Peerlkamp assumes an understood maris, but Henry, noting that the position of the phrase in the first sedes of the hexameter line parallels other locative phrases in the ekphrasis such as nec procul hinc (8.635) and atque hic (8.655), holds that the phrase means in summa clipei parte, ‘at the top of the shield-object’.Footnote 17 The absence of a specific noun to denote the shield as physical object creates grammatical uncertainty, thus making the reader sensitive to different materials – the shield, the painted picture, and the text which refers to them. This ambivalent signification is reinforced further by the adjective aeratas (‘bronze’, 8.675), used of the fleets of ships (classes aeratas, 8.675). For while it is an ordinary epithet for ships, in the context of these lines it may also indicate the material of which Vulcan fashioned them upon the shield.Footnote 18 In the same manner, the golden shimmer of the waves (auroque effulgere fluctus, 8.677) may refer to the effect of the precious metal in which they are displayed or to the reflection of the sun in the scene. The ambiguities regarding the things signified cause the reader to reflect on the medial qualities of the shield and of shield design.
The text's participation in intermediality is enhanced further by the fact that in medio occurs at the exact midway point of the description in the text (lines 628–728). As R. F. Thomas has shown, in ekphrasis the centre is often the locus of a key theme in the poem.Footnote 19 While denoting the middle of the shield-scene, the equivocal reference in medio grants access to a construction of meaning wherein the adjective may be applied to the ekphrastic text itself. In other words, the expression forms also a self-reflexive, metaliterary indication of the convergence of the text medium with the artistic ones: the picture of the ships on the middle of the sea, the entire scene in the middle of the shield, and the very middle of the descriptive passage itself. In these lines, then, the medial scene of Augustus’ defeat of Marc Antony and the forces of the East at the Battle of Actium, which involved even the Olympian gods in a struggle against the theriomorphic Egyptian deities, celebrates a critical event in the ascent of the Augustan Principate. The central importance of the thematic concerns is expressed by the centrality shared by the three media of object, scene, and text.
The Augustan poet Ovid develops Virgil's intermedial references in the description of the palace of the sun god which opens the second book of the Metamorphoses (2.1–18). Interplay between reality, art, and textual representation is evoked by the description of the universe depicted on the palace doors (2.5–18), which, as A. Feldherr has recently pointed out, recalls the account of the creation of the cosmos in 1.5–68.Footnote 20 The palace description also bears political overtones, reminding contemporary readers of the temple of Palatine Apollo.Footnote 21 In the broader story of Phaethon's rash determination of his divine parentage in Metamorphoses 2.1–234, the dominant theme is that of accepting the limitations of human capability. This theme is broached in the ekphrasis by the description of Sol's palace located high above the mortal realm: ‘the palace of the sun-god stood tall on lofty pillars’ (regia solis erat sublimibus alta columnis; 2.1). It is noteworthy that in order to thematize their function the intermedial references are placed not at the centre but the top of the described scene:
The phrases introducing the ekphrasis stress the material quality of the palace, especially the heights from which Phaethon is destined to fall: the ‘topmost pediments’ (fastigia summa) and ‘the heavens that look down on earth’ (caelum quod imminet orbi) tower over the ‘seas below’ (illic aequora). Even the craftsmanship is ‘far beyond the quality of its construction’ (materiam superabat opus).Footnote 23 The intermedial reference occurs in the ambivalent expression haec super, which may refer to the scenes of earth, sea, and sky (2.6–7), or to the doors (2.4).Footnote 24 Drawing attention to itself by the hysteron–proteron arrangement, the neuter plural pronoun haec lacks a specific grammatical antecedent and so locates the shining heavens in a position beyond the pictures and the doors. Surpassing Virgil's ekphrastic centrepiece by ‘going over the top’, Ovid employs intermedial reference to advance the theme of mortal risks in transgressing the limits set by nature.Footnote 25
Intermediality and ekphrasis in Latin imperial epic
Intermedial fusion was developed by the poets of the Imperial period into more extended correlations between the material object, the represented image, and the thematic concerns of the text. Such convergence is exemplified by the description of Hannibal's shield in Silius Italicus’ Punica 2.395–456. A gift from the people of Spain (2.395–405), the shield which Hannibal bears into the battle at Saguntum displays events in the history of Carthage from the time it was founded until the Punic Wars. The pro-Roman narrator visualizes the conflict between Rome and Carthage by presenting two groups of images on each side of the shield (2.406–31, 432–45), while another encircles the outer rim (2.449–52).Footnote 26 Whereas Hannibal interprets the scenes as justifying the Punic attack upon Rome and its ally Saguntum, the narrator employs literary allusion to undermine the apparently positive imagery.Footnote 27 Coursing around the shield's outer edge is the Iberian river Ebro, and the Carthaginian general is shown crossing this geopolitical boundary:
This passage adapts the final scene of the river Oceanus at the edge of the globe in the archetypal ekphrasis of Achilles’ shield in Iliad 18.607–8 to the historical context of the Punic Wars and so heightens the relevance of the scene to the thematic interests of the narrative.Footnote 29 Silius modifies Homer's map-like shield-scene for an intermedial connection between the orb of the earth and the sphere of Hannibal's shield.
The convergence between image and object commences with the phrase extrema clipei in…ora, as the word ora can denote the extremity of the earth (OLD, s.v. 3) as well as a brim or border.Footnote 30 Cicero, for example, uses the word to convey ‘the outer edge and boundary of the world’ (extrema ora et determinatio mundi; Nat. D. 2.40.101). Like Oceanus, the river Ebro courses around the globe and the shield. These intermedial extremities are illustrated at the textual level by the separation of the adjective extrema from the noun ora which it modifies, and by the position of ora in the final sedes of the hexameter line. Meanwhile, clipeus, the proper word for a Roman military shield, may stand metonymously for any round object: the vault of heaven, the sun, or even the world.Footnote 31 In similar fashion, ingens orbis (‘the vast circuit’; 2.450) may denote simultaneously the circle of the globe and that of the shield.Footnote 32 Virgil, Silius’ model, in the ekphrasis of Aeneas’ shield likewise infuses orbis with dual, intermedial meaning: et circum argento clari delphines in orbem / aequora verrebant (‘round and round shiny silver dolphins were skimming over the waters in a circle’; Aen. 8.673–4). Servius takes the word orbem in Aen. 8.673 to mean in circuitu, that is, the outer edge of the shield.Footnote 33 In the description of Hannibal's shield the words curvatis…flexibus (‘the curves and windings’; 2.450) may thus refer equally to bends in the river Ebro in the scene or to the rounded rim of the shield.
The purpose of these intermedial references is to thematize the boundaries fixed in the depicted scene and in the shield-object in order to characterize Hannibal, who bears the shield, as one who purposefully crosses physical, political, and moral limits. By crossing the Iberian river, Hannibal intentionally broke the Ebro Treaty of 226 bce, which had determined this geographical marker as the boundary separating Roman from Carthaginian control. In fact, throughout the Punica Hannibal is portrayed as a perfidious man who breaks treaties by transgressing boundaries.Footnote 34 Jupiter sums up the character of Hannibal as that of ‘a ferocious man who knows no limit’ (sine fine feroci… / viro; Pun. 12.694–5).Footnote 35 Here, on the very weapon he bears into battle, Hannibal is shown as breaking the treaty (abrupto…foedere; 2.451), crossing the depicted river (transgressus…ripas; 2.451), and transgressing even the physical boundary of the shield. In sum, the intermedial references which blur the distinctions between text, art scene, and physical object advance the thematic point in the scene description.
As was also noted for Virgil and Ovid, the phrases ora, orbis, curvatis flexibus, and clipeus in this passage of the Punica show that intermediality in epic ekphrasis brings about correlations between object, art, and text by means of ambiguous language not only for scene location but also for the object's material construction.Footnote 36 This effect of blurring the distinction between scene and material surface is produced most remarkably in the fourth book of Statius’ Thebais, by the intermedial references in the description of the shield borne by the impious Argive warrior Capaneus in the attack upon Thebes. His weapon displays a single scene of Hydra, the multi-headed monstrous serpent, recently slain by Hercules. Surrounding this central picture and adorning the edge of the shield is the swamp river Lernaea:
This ekphrasis begins with an emphatically periphrastic expression alerting the reader to the presence of the three-dimensional medium: ‘the burden of four hides torn from the backs of wild steers and its surface made hard with a covering of massy bronze’ (166–8).Footnote 38 The last line intimates a conflation of scene with material object, as the Lernaean river encircles the shield's steel rim (172). The preposition circum (172), as it governs no stated grammatical object, may apply equally to the shield's rim and to the internal image. Moreover, in these lines there are no conventional scene-dividers such as in medio, super haec, or in alia parte, so that the depicted scene and the shield proper are identified more closely. The language describing the Hydra in the scene applies equally to the materiality of the shield: the verb squalet (OLD, s.v.: ‘cover with a rough or scaly layer’) suits the embossed weapon as well as the Hydra by its popular etymology from squama (‘scale’).Footnote 39 The word corona, the serpent's coil, may also denote the enclosing ring on a shield's surface.Footnote 40 The verb micat aptly expresses the flashing glitter of the snakes in pars anguibus aspera vivis /…micat, ‘part…glitters fierce with moving snakes’ (4.169–70), but it performs the double duty of also depicting the light that gleams from Capaneus’ weapon, as elsewhere in the Thebais the verb micare is used mainly of armour.Footnote 41
This interplay between text, artefact, and image is further corroborated by the repetition of the word pars in pars anguibus aspera vivis / argento caelata micat, pars arte reperta / conditur (‘part, embossed in silver, glitters fierce with moving snakes, part is sunken by means of clever skill’; Theb. 4.169–71). Pars is a conventional marker for the relative position of a scene depicted in literary ekphrases, beginning with Catullus 64, in which it introduces a new tableau on the coverlet of Peleus’ wedding couch: at parte ex alia (‘but in another part’; 64.251).Footnote 42 In the ekphrasis of Thebais 4, the repeated pars hints strongly at the conventional arrangement of the images on the shield, although it applies properly to the Hydra within the scene. This blurring effect is reinforced by the word conditur in pars arte reperta / conditur et fulvo moriens nigrescit in auro (‘part by means of clever skill is sunken, and as it dies grows dark against the tawny gold’; 4.170–1), for, as Håkanson has observed, condere is a nearly technical term for putting a scene in the background of a picture.Footnote 43 In terms of the theory of intermediality, it is in relation to the artistic medium that the textual medium constitutes itself.Footnote 44
The purpose of the intermedial references in the description of the scenes on Capaneus’ shield is to diminish the gap between the media of the shield-object, the shield-scene, and the descriptive text in order to reinforce the thematic relevance of it to the surrounding narrative of the attack upon Thebes generally and to Capaneus’ actions in particular. The depiction of the Hydra as slain recently by Hercules’ fiery darts (Theb. 4.168–71) foreshadows the death of Capaneus by thunderbolt, as told in Theb. 10.927–39. Just as the Hydra ‘grows dark in death against the tawny gold’ (fulvo moriens nigrescit in auro; Theb. 4.171), so too Capaneus’ shield, struck by Zeus's lightning bolt, grows black against the warrior's glistening limbs: clipei niger umbo cadit, iamqe omnia lucent / membra viri (‘the shield, its boss blackened, falls to the ground while all the hero's limbs glow’; Theb. 10.929–30). The intermedial references remove the gap between image and shield, and so apply the import of the scene more closely to Capaneus.
The description of Hannibal's shield in Punica 2, discussed above, presents a similar fusion of object and painted scene through ambiguous language. The phrases extrema…ora, clipeus, orbis, and curvatis flexibus draw attention to the outer rim of the shield on which the scenes appear. Locative phrases are also employed elsewhere in the ekphrasis to distinguish diverse scenes: has inter species (‘among these images’; 2.412), hinc (‘here’; 416), nec procul (‘not far away’; 420), parte alia (‘in another part’; 426), and nec non et laevum (‘and on the left side’; 432). In light of the significance of medial scenes in Virgilian shield descriptions, it is remarkable that the central scene – that of the city of Saguntum faithful to Rome – lacks an explicit signpost:
A locative adverbial phrase such as in medio to indicate the central position of this scene is absent, but several intermedial references show that this scene is located upon the rounded boss at the centre of the shield. The first word, eminet, literally means ‘to stand out against a background’, as in art (OLD, s.v. 2). The participle excelso is defined literally as ‘extending to a great height’ (OLD, s.v. excelsus). And the noun collis, or ‘hill’, means any physical ‘eminence’ (OLD, s.v.), so that it may stand as synonym for the umbo, or raised mound, of the shield.Footnote 45 The locative expression quam circa (2.450) may refer to an understood urbem (that is, Saguntos) or to the protruding central boss, while the verb cingo (2.450) may be used as a technical term for embossing or setting metal, and so underscores the materiality of the raised steel rim upon the shield.Footnote 46
The significance in the conflation of the object with the scene of lofty Saguntum is that it illustrates the moral superiority of the city's inhabitants. In the historical narrative around the ekphrasis Saguntum is represented as a strong ally of Rome, a city characterized by fides – ‘a symbol of moral grandeur’.Footnote 47 This quality is conveyed by the figurative sense in the verb eminet, which is to stand out for one's good qualities (OLD, s.v. emineo 3). The participle excelso, which depicts the hill whereon the city is located, figuratively means ‘lofty, sublime, noble’ (OLD, s.v. excelsus 2 A). Thus the intermedial references foreground the thematic concern of the narrative: the moral pre-eminence of the Saguntine people faithful to Rome. The theme of fides versus perfidia that courses throughout the poem is demonstrated here by the Romans and their allies over against the Carthaginians.Footnote 48 The people of Saguntum, faithful allies of Rome, stand out like the central boss of Hannibal's shield from the enemies who surround and attack them.
Conclusions
Intermedial references in Latin epic ekphrases promote new levels of meaning through the connections they establish between two or more semiotic systems. Such intermedial references are effected in literary ekphrases by ambivalent language and ambiguous grammatical constructions which permit the distance between different systems of meaning to be diminished or even removed. Consequently, altermedial qualities may be transferred into the medium of the text. Employing, in particular, factors of materiality, form, structure, and colour, intermediality in Latin epic ekphrases increases the reader's consciousness of the presence of altermedial products and so incorporates these products into the thematic concerns of the text.
The preceding examination of representative descriptive passages in the poetry of Virgil, Ovid, Silius Italicus, and Statius has revealed that intermediality is an essential quality, or constitutional element, of Latin epic ekphrasis.Footnote 49 It may be concluded, moreover, that the textual medium's consciousness of intermedial convergence occurs especially at junctures of heightened thematic importance. The sharpened awareness in the text to the borders, periphery, and centre of the physical object indicates that these structural elements form points of significant contact between the diverse systems of meaning. Thus intermedial references not only generate the illusion of practices in other media but also co-opt them into the narrative strategies of the text. By imitating or reproducing the features peculiar to other media and thematizing them, intermediality contributes to the overall signification of ekphrasis. In sum, the theory of intermediality may function profitably in the analysis of the interconnections between literary ekphrasis and works of art.
