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- Title
Kijken en zien.
- Authors
RIJSER, DAVID
- Abstract
The temple-ekphrasis in Aeneid 1 should be interpreted in connection with its pendant, the song of Iopas at the end of the same book. Both passages together engage in an intricately cross-cut dialogue with the Demodocus-episode in the Odyssey and the ekphrasis of the shield of Achilles in the Iliad. When seen in this light, it appears that there is no reason to suppose, as many critics from Lessing onwards have done, that the Aeneid constructs an opposition between visual and literary art. On the contrary, the two passages show striking continuity, suggesting that human interpretation of artistic media is by necessity embedded in the present, while on the other hand the works of art themselves seem to contain extratemporal truth. The inevitable bias of human interpretation, however, should not be taken to reveal Virgilian reservations vis-à-vis the ‘truth' of ‘art', but simply underlines that at different stages in different places, the same things may carry different meanings. Thus Virgil, in his implicit poetics in Book 1, constructs a prefiguration of modern reception theory.
- Publication
Lampas, 2016, Vol 49, Issue 3, p252
- ISSN
0165-8204
- Publication type
Article