Ekphrasis

Ekphrasis (Greek: ἔκφρασις) is a technique originating in ancient Greek rhetoric (the art of speech) that aims to vividly and detailedly describe a visual object, artwork, or scene through words, so as to evoke a mental image in the listener or reader. Etymologically, it is formed from the Greek words ek (εκ), meaning “out” or “from within,” and phrazein (φράζειν), meaning “to speak, explain, or utter.” In its most fundamental definition, it is “the verbal representation of a visual representation.” Although the concept has been translated into Turkish as “sözedökme” or “resimbetim,” its original form is also used due to its interdisciplinary scope.

Ekphrasis: Visual Narratives Converge with Verbal Art (Generated by Artificial Intelligence)

Historical Development

Ancient Era and Rhetorical Tradition

One of the earliest known literary examples of ekphrasis is the description of Achilles’ shield in Homer’s Iliad. In this passage, a fictional object—the shield—is detailed over 130 lines, with its depicted scenes rendered with precision. In antiquity, ekphrasis was primarily used not as a description of an artwork but as a rhetorical exercise within progymnasmata texts, where topics such as cities, battles, festivals, and people were brought to life through vivid narration. The central aim of these descriptions was to produce energia, the rhetorical effect of making the audience feel as if they were witnessing the scene before their eyes.

The philosophical debates by Plato and Aristotle on art’s function of mimesis (representation) laid the conceptual groundwork for ekphrasis. One of the earliest expressions addressing the relationship between literature and visual art is attributed by Plutarch to the Greek poet Simonides: “Poetry is a speaking picture, and painting is a silent poetry.”

Roman Period and “Ut Pictura Poesis”

The phrase “ut pictura poesis” (“poetry is a painting” or “poetry resembles painting”) from Horace’s Ars Poetica became a foundational principle defining the relationship between visual arts and literature. This principle emphasized the affinities and similarities between the two disciplines without establishing a hierarchy, paving the way for their mutual identification as “sister arts.”

Post-Renaissance Debates and the Role of Museums

The relationship between the arts was revisited during the Renaissance under the title of paragone (comparison). Leonardo da Vinci argued that painting was superior to poetry because it appealed to the highest sense—sight—and could present its narrative simultaneously. In the 18th century, the German thinker Gotthold Ephraim Lessing challenged this view in his work Laocoön, defending the superiority of literature. According to Lessing, visual arts like painting depict objects side by side in space, capturing a single static moment, whereas poetry unfolds actions sequentially over time, conveying motion and thereby constructing a richer mental world.

The proliferation of ekphrasis in the West was decisively influenced by the establishment of public museums from the 18th and 19th centuries onward. Artworks displayed in these institutions became direct sources of inspiration for poets and writers, significantly increasing the number of ekphrastic works produced.

Theoretical Approaches

Place and Function in Narrative

From the perspective of narratology, ekphrasis is viewed as a “narrative pause,” a moment in which the flow of the narrative halts and time ceases to progress. Traditionally regarded as a subordinate element (ancilla narrationis), description was considered secondary because it did not advance the plot. However, modern approaches argue that ekphrasis integrates into the narrative through psychological, metaphorical, or metonymic connections, creating an interpretive space.

20th Century Theories

From the second half of the 20th century, ekphrasis entered the domain of literary theory.

• Leo Spitzer, in a 1955 article, incorporated the concept into modern literary discourse, removing it from its status as a mere rhetorical exercise and defining it as “the verbal re-creation of sensory-perceived artworks,” thereby positioning it as an original poetic genre.

• Murray Krieger expanded the concept through his definition of the “ekphrastic principle.” For Krieger, ekphrasis is not limited to the description of a specific artwork but encompasses all literary efforts that use linguistic formal patterns to create spatial forms and emulate visual arts.

• James A. W. Heffernan refined Krieger’s broad definition by more precisely framing ekphrasis as “the verbal representation of a visual representation.”

• W. J. T. Mitchell interprets the concept as a three-stage process he terms “ekphrastic indifference, ekphrastic hope, and ekphrastic fear.” This process is built on the recognition that verbal and visual representations can never fully correspond (indifference), the belief in language’s metaphorical power to animate the visual (hope), and the tension arising from the irreducible difference and competition between the two modes of representation (fear).

Ekphrasis as Intersemiosis

Contemporary approaches interpret ekphrasis within the framework of “intersemiosis”—the transfer or translation of meaning between different sign systems (verbal, visual, auditory, etc.). According to this view, ekphrasis is not confined to the movement from visual to verbal; it can also function as a transitional mechanism between verbal to visual (reverse ekphrasis), visual to visual, or literature to music. Claus Clüver, in this direction, defines ekphrasis as “the verbal representation of a non-verbal sign system’s real or fictional text,” thereby including fields such as architecture and music.

Applications

Originally emerging as a poetic technique, ekphrasis has since found application in other literary genres and across various artistic disciplines.

Literature

Poetry

This is the most traditional and widespread application of ekphrasis. Works by Romantic poets such as Percy B. Shelley, John Keats, and William Wordsworth are among the Western literary examples of this genre. In Turkish literature, examples appear from the Tanzimat period onward. Hüseyin Haşim’s poem “Kocakarı ve Kedi” is considered one of the earliest instances. Tevfik Fikret’s “portrait poems,” Melih Cevdet Anday’s poem “Ölümü İkaros,” and the works of Nâzım Hikmet are other notable applications. Nâzım Hikmet wrote the first ekphrastic poem in Turkish literature on the cover of a book, titled Bir Şiir Kitabının Kapak Resmi, and published the first entirely ekphrastic poetry collection, Jokond ile Si-Ya-U.

Novel and Travel Writing

Ekphrasis is also used in narrative genres such as the novel and travel writing to describe spaces, objects, or artworks. The architectural, pictorial, and sculptural descriptions in Evliya Çelebi’s Seyahatnâme are regarded as examples of ekphrastic narration. Orhan Pamuk’s novels frequently employ this technique.

Architecture

In architectural design, the use of a literary text as a program is one application of ekphrasis in architecture. In this approach, the structural, semantic, and atmospheric qualities of a text are translated into architectural space.

• Danteum: An unbuilt project by Italian architect Giuseppe Terragni, inspired by Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy. Terragni translated both the numerical and geometric structure of the poem (golden ratio, symbolic numbers such as 3 and 7) and its allegorical content (the atmospheres of Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise) into architectural language. The use of columns as a metaphor for the human body exemplifies semantic transfer.

• Museum of Innocence: A project designed and realized simultaneously with Orhan Pamuk’s novel of the same name. In this project, the novel (text) and the museum (space) coexist as complementary representations of the same story. Everyday objects displayed in the museum become physical manifestations of the memories of the novel’s characters and narrative, while the text functions as a catalog of the space.

Other Arts

The concept of ekphrasis is also used to analyze relationships between other art forms such as cinema, music, and photography. A cinematic adaptation of a painting or literary work, a musical composition inspired by a poem, or a photograph reinterpreting a painting are all examples demonstrating the expanding applications of ekphrasis.