Ekphrasis
Based on Wikipedia: Ekphrasis
In a dingy tavern called the Spouter-Inn, a young man named Ishmael stares at a painting so dark and weathered he can barely make out what it depicts. Is that a ship? A whale? Some kind of apocalyptic storm? Herman Melville spends an entire page of Moby Dick describing this battered oil painting, and scholars have called it a turning point in American literature. Not because of what the painting shows, but because of how Melville writes about it—transforming a piece of visual art into pure language, making us see something that doesn't exist outside his words.
This is ekphrasis.
The Art of Making Words Paint Pictures
The term comes from ancient Greek: ek meaning "out" and phrásis meaning "speak." To speak out. To proclaim. The verb ekphrázein literally means "to call an inanimate object by name"—which is a beautifully strange way to describe what writers do when they try to capture art in language.
At its simplest, ekphrasis is a written description of a visual artwork. But that definition undersells what's actually happening. When a poet describes a painting or a novelist dwells on a sculpture, they're not just transcribing what they see. They're competing with it. They're trying to prove that words can do something that paint and marble and bronze cannot.
The artwork being described might be real—something you could go see in a museum. Or it might be entirely imaginary, existing only in the writer's mind and then, through their words, in yours. Sometimes it's genuinely impossible to tell which is which, and that ambiguity is part of the game.
Where It All Started: Homer's Impossible Shield
The oldest and most famous example of ekphrasis in Western literature comes from Book 18 of Homer's Iliad, composed nearly three thousand years ago. Achilles needs new armor, so the god Hephaestus forges him a magnificent shield. Homer doesn't just tell us the shield was impressive. He describes every scene depicted on its surface in exhaustive detail: cities at peace and cities at war, a wedding celebration, a murder trial, farmers plowing fields, a vineyard at harvest, dancing youths, and the great river Ocean encircling everything.
The description goes on for over a hundred lines.
Here's what makes it strange: Homer describes scenes that couldn't possibly appear on a single shield. He describes movement and sound and the passage of time—things that static metalwork simply cannot depict. The shield shows a city under siege where "the women on the walls were crying." It shows lions attacking cattle "and drinking the dark blood." These aren't decorations. They're stories.
Homer isn't trying to describe a real object. He's showing off what language can do that visual art cannot. The shield is impossible, and that's the point.
Socrates Under the Plane Tree
A few centuries after Homer, Plato captured something important about ekphrasis in his dialogue Phaedrus. Socrates is sitting with a young man named Phaedrus in a lovely spot outside Athens, under a plane tree by a stream. And Socrates describes this spot in elaborate, almost excessive detail—the size of the tree, the shade it casts, the blossoms, the spring of cool water, the soft grass.
Phaedrus thinks his teacher is laying it on a bit thick.
But then Socrates makes a comparison that gets at something deep about the relationship between words and images:
"You know, Phaedrus, that is the strange thing about writing, which makes it truly correspond to painting. The painter's products stand before us as though they were alive, but if you question them, they maintain a most majestic silence. It is the same with written words; they seem to talk to you as if they were intelligent, but if you ask them anything about what they say, from a desire to be instructed, they go on telling you just the same thing forever."
Both painting and writing create the illusion of presence. Both seem alive. But neither can respond to you. The painting just hangs there. The text just says what it says. Ekphrasis—writing about art—layers one kind of silent illusion on top of another.
A Gallery That May or May Not Have Existed
The most ambitious ekphrastic work from the ancient world is Philostratus's Eikones, written around 200 CE. It describes sixty-four paintings supposedly displayed in a villa near Naples. Philostratus walks through the gallery with a group of young men, describing each painting in vivid detail, drawing out moral lessons, pointing out artistic techniques.
Scholars have argued for centuries about whether these paintings were real.
Some say Philostratus must have been describing actual artworks—the details are too specific, too strange, too particular to be invented. Others say the whole thing is an elaborate fiction, a showcase for rhetorical skill. The most interesting interpretation is that Philostratus deliberately left the question unanswerable. Maybe some paintings were real and some weren't. Maybe the reader is supposed to wonder.
This matters beyond ancient literary games because virtually no Greek and Roman paintings have survived to the present day. Almost everything we know about Greco-Roman painting comes from written descriptions. Art historians have to decide how much they can trust texts like the Eikones—knowing that the writers were often more interested in showing off their prose than in accurate documentation.
The Medieval Gap
Something strange happens to ekphrasis in the Middle Ages: it almost disappears.
Medieval writers rarely describe artworks in any meaningful way. When they do mention art objects, they focus on things that would frustrate any modern art historian: how much the materials cost, how heavy the gold was, whether the object had the status of a relic. A medieval chronicle might note that a monastery acquired a magnificent reliquary studded with gems worth forty pounds of silver. What did it look like? What scenes were depicted on it? The chronicle doesn't say.
The irony is painful. We have written records of countless medieval artworks that no longer exist—and those records tell us almost nothing about what we've lost.
Renaissance Revival
Ekphrasis came roaring back in the Renaissance, often describing imaginary artworks that allowed writers to show off their learning and creativity simultaneously.
In Canto 33 of Orlando Furioso, the Italian poet Ludovico Ariosto describes a picture gallery created by the wizard Merlin. The paintings don't just depict scenes—they prophesy the future, turning ekphrasis into a device for embedding one kind of narrative inside another.
In Spain, the playwright Lope de Vega frequently incorporated descriptions of Italian paintings into his works, and even made the painter Titian a character in some of his plays. His contemporary Calderón de la Barca wrote a drama called The Painter of His Dishonor, where the act of painting becomes central to the plot. Miguel de Cervantes, who spent formative years in Italy, scattered references to Renaissance frescoes and paintings throughout Don Quixote.
Shakespeare's most extended ekphrasis comes in an unexpected place: The Rape of Lucrece, his long narrative poem about a Roman noblewoman's assault and suicide. At one point, Lucrece contemplates a painting depicting the Greek army before Troy, and Shakespeare spends two hundred lines describing what she sees. The painting becomes a mirror for her own suffering—the betrayal, the siege, the fall.
The Painting That Could Destroy Faith
In 1867, the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky stood before a painting in Basel, Switzerland, and couldn't look away. The painting was Hans Holbein the Younger's The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb, painted in 1521. It shows Jesus lying in a coffin, viewed from the side: a gaunt corpse beginning to decompose, wounds visible, eyes open and glazed, mouth slack.
There is nothing beautiful about it. Nothing divine. Just death.
Dostoevsky told his wife Anna that the painting "could make a believer lose his faith."
A few months later, he began writing The Idiot, and the Holbein painting appears in the novel with devastating effect. The innocent Prince Myshkin visits the house of the passionate Rogozhin and sees a copy of the painting hanging on the wall. Later, another character named Hippolyte describes the painting at length:
The painting depicts the face of a man who has just been taken down from the cross, still bearing the marks of the warmth of life. Nothing in it yet had time to grow rigid, so that the face of the dead man seems still to be suffering, as though still feeling the agony... There is no trace of beauty.
Rogozhin himself says the painting has the power to take away a man's faith—echoing what Dostoevsky said to his wife. The ekphrasis becomes a turning point in the novel, crystallizing its themes of faith, doubt, suffering, and the difficulty of finding the divine in a world of brutal physical reality.
The Portrait That Ages Instead of You
Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray might be the most famous ekphrastic novel ever written—even though the painting at its center is never fully described.
The premise is simple and horrifying. The painter Basil Hallward creates a portrait of the beautiful young Dorian Gray. Dorian, corrupted by the philosophy of Lord Henry Wotton, wishes that the painting would age instead of him. His wish comes true. As Dorian descends into cruelty and debauchery over the decades, he remains eternally young and beautiful. The portrait, hidden in a locked room, grows hideous—recording every sin, every act of cruelty, every moral decay.
Throughout the novel, Wilde gives us glimpses of the painting's deterioration without ever fully describing what it shows. We learn that the portrait has developed "lines of cruelty round the mouth" and that there is something in the eyes that makes Dorian shudder. But Wilde never itemizes the horrors. The portrait remains partially in shadow, and our imagination fills in what our eyes cannot see.
This is ekphrasis through suggestion rather than specification. Wilde understood that some things are more powerful when they remain partly invisible.
Keats and the Urn
"Ode on a Grecian Urn" is probably the most anthologized ekphrastic poem in English, and it demonstrates something important about how poetry can engage with visual art.
John Keats describes the scenes painted on an ancient Greek vase: a young man pursuing a maiden, a musician playing pipes beneath trees, a procession leading a heifer to sacrifice. But Keats isn't interested in describing these scenes as a catalog. He's interested in what it means that they're frozen in time.
The lover pursuing the maiden will never catch her—but she will also never grow old. The musician playing his pipes will never hear the melody—but he will also never stop playing. The heifer will never reach the altar—but it will also never die.
The poem's most famous lines have puzzled readers for two centuries:
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."
Who is speaking these lines? The poet? The urn itself? Keats frames them as words spoken by the urn to humanity, but what do they mean? The poem refuses to answer. It turns ekphrasis into philosophy, using a piece of pottery as a launching point for meditation on time, beauty, mortality, and the nature of art.
The Fall of Icarus, Twice
One of the strangest facts about ekphrastic poetry is how often multiple poets write about the same painting.
The painting known as Landscape with the Fall of Icarus hangs in the Royal Museums of Fine Arts in Brussels. For decades, it was attributed to the Flemish master Pieter Brueghel the Elder; scholars now believe it's a later copy "after" Brueghel, but the attribution doesn't really matter for our purposes. What matters is what the painting shows.
You've probably heard the myth: Icarus flew too close to the sun on wings made of feathers and wax. The wax melted. He fell into the sea and drowned. It's one of the most dramatic stories in Greek mythology—a tragedy about pride, youth, and the dangers of ambition.
But in the painting, you can barely find Icarus at all.
The foreground shows a farmer plowing his field. A shepherd tends his flock. A ship sails on calm waters. The sun shines. Everything is peaceful and ordinary. And if you look very carefully at the lower right corner of the painting, you can see two pale legs sticking out of the water—all that's visible of Icarus as he drowns.
Nobody notices. Nobody cares. Life goes on.
W. H. Auden's poem "Musée des Beaux Arts" (French for "Museum of Fine Arts") uses the painting as the climax of a meditation on suffering:
About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along
The plowman may have heard the splash and the cry, Auden writes, but for him "it was not an important failure." The ship must have seen "a boy falling out of the sky" but it "had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on."
William Carlos Williams wrote his own poem about the same painting, titled simply "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus." His version is sparer, more imagistic, focusing on the spring plowing and the "edge of the sea / concerned / with itself." Both poets found in Brueghel's painting the same devastating observation: that catastrophe and ordinary life exist side by side, and ordinary life rarely looks up.
When Writers Lie About Art
Here's the problem for art historians: ekphrasis is fundamentally untrustworthy.
When writers describe artworks, they're rarely trying to provide accurate documentation. They're showing off their rhetorical skill. They're competing with the artist. They're using the artwork as a springboard for their own themes and ideas. An ancient description of a painting might tell us more about the writer's literary ambitions than about what the painting actually looked like.
And yet these descriptions are often all we have.
The Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf contains tantalizingly vague descriptions of gold objects and decorated weapons. Art historians inevitably compare these passages to the treasures found at Sutton Hoo and the Staffordshire Hoard—real seventh-century metalwork that survived into our era. But the Beowulf poet wasn't writing a catalog. He was composing an epic. How much can we trust his descriptions?
The same problem haunts scholars of late antiquity. Asterius, Bishop of Amasea around 400 CE, wrote several vivid descriptions of paintings and mosaics. Art historians cite him constantly because so little Christian art from his period survives. But Asterius was a trained rhetorician who had practiced ekphrasis as a school exercise. His descriptions follow classical formulas. He was probably more interested in demonstrating his literary skill than in preserving accurate records for future generations.
The Birth of Art Criticism
In the eighteenth century, ekphrasis evolved into something new: art criticism as a literary genre.
The French philosopher Denis Diderot essentially invented journalistic art criticism through his long, passionate reviews of the Paris Salon—the official exhibition of new art held by the French Royal Academy. Starting in 1759 and continuing for two decades, Diderot wrote sprawling essays about the paintings and sculptures on display, praising what he loved and savaging what he hated.
These weren't academic analyses. Diderot couldn't include illustrations. His readers would probably never see the actual works. So he had to make them see through words alone—and he had to convey not just what the paintings showed but why they succeeded or failed as art.
This tradition spread throughout Western journalism. Art criticism became a seasonal feature, timed to major exhibitions. Critics developed their own styles of descriptive writing, and particularly memorable denunciations became a kind of literary entertainment. Harsh criticism, it turned out, was often more fun to read than praise.
Edward Hopper's Long Shadow
Some artists seem to invite ekphrasis more than others. The American painter Edward Hopper has inspired more poetry than perhaps any other twentieth-century artist.
It's not hard to understand why. Hopper's paintings—diners at night, solitary figures in hotel rooms, gas stations on empty roads—feel like stories interrupted. They show moments that seem pregnant with narrative but refuse to explain themselves. A woman sits on a bed in the morning light, staring at something outside the frame. What is she thinking? What happened last night? What will happen next?
Hopper himself was famously tight-lipped about his work. "If I could say it in words," he reportedly said, "there would be no reason to paint."
Poets have taken that silence as an invitation. The French poet Claude Esteban published an entire book of poems about Hopper paintings, Soleil dans une pièce vide (Sun in an Empty Room). The Catalan poet Ernest Farrés did the same. Collections of Hopper-inspired poetry have appeared in English, and individual poems about his work number in the hundreds.
What makes Hopper so compelling for poets is precisely what makes his paintings feel unfinished: the suggestion of story without resolution, the glimpse of lives we'll never fully know. Ekphrasis lets poets fill those silences with their own words.
Full Circle: Auden's Shield
In 1952, W. H. Auden published a poem called "The Shield of Achilles" that brings the tradition back to its origins while inverting everything Homer did.
In Auden's version, the sea-goddess Thetis watches Hephaestus forge her son's shield, expecting to see the beautiful scenes Homer described: "vines and olive trees, / Marble well-governed cities / And ships upon untamed seas." Instead, she sees something terrible:
A plain without a feature, bare and brown,
No blade of grass, no sign of neighborhood,
Nothing to eat and nowhere to sit down
The shield shows barbed wire and concentration camps, refugees and arbitrary executions, "a million eyes, a million boots in line, / Without expression, waiting for a sign." Where Homer's shield depicted the fullness of human life, Auden's depicts the horrors of the twentieth century.
Thetis looks over Hephaestus's shoulder expecting beauty and finds atrocity. The poem ends with her realizing that her son Achilles will be "Iron-hearted man-slaying" and will die young. The decorations on his shield are not a celebration of civilization but a prophecy of what war does to human beings.
Auden uses ekphrasis against itself. He describes an imaginary artwork to make a political argument, invoking Homer only to show how much the world has changed—and how much it has stayed the same.
The Feedback Loop
One of the strangest aspects of ekphrasis is when it starts flowing in the opposite direction—when artists create visual works based on literary descriptions.
In 1888, the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen published The Lady from the Sea. The first act opens with characters discussing a painting of a mermaid dying on the shore and a sculpture of a woman having a nightmare about a former lover. These artworks don't exist; Ibsen invented them for the play. They foreshadow the plot: the protagonist, Ellida Wangel, is a woman who yearns for the sea and is later visited by a former lover she thought was dead.
Eight years later, in 1896, the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch painted a work he called Lady from the Sea. It depicts a woman standing before the ocean, her body dissolving into the waves. Munch had created a real painting based on Ibsen's imaginary ones—closing the loop between literature and visual art.
This happens more often than you might expect. Artists illustrate literary descriptions. Writers describe those illustrations. Other artists reinterpret the descriptions. The boundary between word and image keeps blurring.
Why Any of This Matters
If you're reading about literature for a magazine focused on contemporary writing, you might wonder why an ancient rhetorical technique matters. The answer is that ekphrasis has never gone away, and understanding it can deepen how you read—and how you write.
Whenever a story pauses to describe a painting, whenever a poem contemplates a sculpture, whenever a novel dwells on a photograph or a film or a building, something more is happening than description. The writer is choosing to stop the narrative and make you look. They're translating one medium into another. They're often competing with the original artwork, trying to prove that words can do something the visual image cannot.
The most powerful ekphrastic writing doesn't just describe what an artwork looks like. It describes what the artwork means—or what it means to the character looking at it, or what it reveals about the world, or what impossible thing it suggests. Homer's shield shows scenes that could never appear on actual metalwork. Keats's urn speaks philosophical pronouncements. Dostoevsky's Holbein painting threatens to destroy faith. Wilde's portrait records moral decay that no paint could capture.
Ekphrasis reminds us that seeing is never simple. We don't just look at art; we interpret it, argue with it, project ourselves onto it. Writing about art forces those interpretive acts into the open. It makes us conscious of what we're doing when we look.
And in an age when images flood past us constantly—on phones, on screens, on billboards and buses—the discipline of stopping to really describe what we see might be more valuable than ever. Ekphrasis is slow looking translated into words. It asks us to attend, to notice, to make our seeing visible to others.
That's a skill worth practicing, whether or not you ever write a poem about a Grecian urn.