[Authors and titles are listed at the end of review]
This collection of essays offers the compelling suggestion of intervisuality as a prismatic term through which to encounter Greek literature. As the term itself suggests, intervisuality is an elaboration of intertextuality, a now canonical approach to the study of ancient texts (e.g. Conte 1986, Hinds 1998). Intervisuality, we learn, is a term first established in studies of visual culture that gets at the interrelation and interaction between various modes of visuality across media. The term finds several harmonious definitions throughout the volume, some explicitly stated and others more implicitly applied, so as to evoke a practice that is at once firmly planted in the genealogy of semiotics but that we are encouraged to imagine as capacious—as a practice ever-evolving and relating to a broader interest in the interplay of the visual as a sense that is not bound to media but which finds signification through its interplay.
Scholars of Greek literature will accept with ease Capra and Floridi’s assertation that visual systems are continuously in collaboration with “and integral to the very process of producing and consuming ‘Greek literature’” (3). In this context, the term intervisuality broadly encompasses the overlapping interrelation between Greek textual practices and the visual. Collectively, the volume applies intervisuality (or often, more implicitly, its general principles of verbal and visual bidirectionality) across the range of genres from archaic, classical, hellenistic, and imperial literature, with the contributions of Prioux and Cadario even fluidly “Pointing to Rome” (to use a turn of phrase from the table of contents). While this review cannot go in depth into all thirteen exhaustive chapters, it is important to acknowledge, even if briefly, that each one re-emphasizes and presents anew the deep visual imaginary and schema that made up the scaffolding of Greek literary practices, and the extent to which visuality was “inscribed both into texts and in the reader’s lived experiences” (Pizzone, 30). The various contributions, moreover, extend intervisuality towards the broader social, civic, and artistic imaginary, encouraging us to think, for example, about intervisuality as an aesthetic (e.g. Höschele, Floridi) or as a means to conceive of the body and the polis across time and space (e.g. Catenacci, Nobili).
The question that emerges from the volume as a whole and in light of the meticulous readings in the chapters is how intervisuality as a practice stands apart from, or perhaps elaborates on, the numerous studies on the interconnectivity of text and image and on the visual dimensions of ancient literature that have already become so foundational to the field such as Squire 2009 and Morales 2004, respectively, just to name two of many (and the editors also make note of this expansive and decades old topic, e.g. p. 4, fn. 10). And while attempting to pivot from intertextuality, one could emphasize that the volume is deeply text based (likely intentionally so in its interest in Greek literature), highlighting the paradox of what it means— to paraphrase Pizzone on the topic— to apply a term that art history has borrowed from literary studies (by way of intertextuality), only to then bring the visually based practice so firmly back to the study of texts (17).
The answers are perhaps found in the editors’ commitment to keeping “the complexity and bidirectionally of the interactions between verbal and visual codes [but] with an eye to the specificity of Greek visual culture” (7). The introduction, in conjunction with Pizzone’s excellent theoretical second chapter, offers four ways of understanding and practicing intervisuality, which also loosely group the various chapters— though it becomes clear that no one category can be practiced without merging with another. First, intervisuality is akin to “interfigurativity”, noting “the allusion made by a literary work to an image, be that to a specific iconographic referent or, more generally, a schema” (5-6). Second, and building off the first, are “intervisual patterns,” which describes a process where images, or schema, “generate a multifaceted and ever-shifting meaning” (6)—or, as Pizzone explains, where “meanings and image-signs are never in a one-to-one correspondence” (17). The Greek term schema is often defined by the volume as the iconographic repertoire and mental images of classical antiquity (18), or, put differently, it emerges as a term that captures the visual structures and arrangements that propose interpretative bounds for intervisual practice. Schema (along with “surplus” discussed below) becomes a through line in examples of intervisual practice presented in the first two chapters and an important operating term in the more theoretically and methodologically oriented moments of the volume. (Schema, for example, is especially important for the contributions of Gazis and Acosta-Hughes, amongst others.)
Third, intervisuality is interperformativity, working through “a succession of images” characteristic of performance (6). Bowie’s chapter on declamation and sung poetry is one example. And finally, is the category of “intervisual reading,” i.e. the reading of the intersection of image and text that we see in medieval manuscripts (21-22), on Greek painted pottery, and in ekphrastic writing (7). Numerous chapters deploy intervisual reading. In particular, Palmisciano’s contribution is an instantiation of how the editors also identify “intervisual reading” as akin to “intermediality” (7). The connection between intervisuality and intermediality is also presented earlier through Parks’s (2002: 285) definition of the former as “the practice of thinking and analyzing across and between media rather than focusing upon the unique properties of each medium” (1 n.3).[1]
As the various contributions enact precisely this fluid movement across media, each in their own way, two things emerge: i) the inevitable excess of media that is the product of creating and that the Greek term poiēsis in its conceptual, verbal, and tactile meanings captures. And ii) that “every art or media thus seems to find its means [and meanings] in other media, unsettling the borders between them” (Méchoulan 2015:3). In fact, the sooner we recognize the instability of the categorizations of media (ibid), the better equipped we become to note the sensory (in this case visual) arrangements that thread them together. And since intervisuality is not interested in isolating media but rather in creating bidirectional conversations between them, then perhaps this instability is important to an approach that thrives on the excess of ancient artistic practices. Moreover, if we allow ourselves to conceptualize text as a sort of matter, then it’s worthwhile to think about the meaning and sensation embedded in its thickness, instead of the bidirectional dialogue with media it evokes, since text itself is capable of re-arranging media in new visual configurations. Athanassaki reminds us early on in her contribution of the connection between intertext and the Latin ‘texere’, to weave, (171-172) that not only implies dialogue but thickness in the verbal arts, and the various ways media can be woven into the fabric of another.
Pizzone’s indispensable chapter approaches this excess in her discussion and introduction of the term “surplus.” Drawing on Michael Camille’s work (1991), Pizzone identifies “surplus” as an object of intervisuality, the excess of the image-signs/schemata that “[creates] a space in which meaning can move, thus generating multiple connections” (18). It is within this surplus, or because of it, that the readerly imagination works and where cognition and sensation merge, “overcoming purely visual and bidimensional readings” (22-23). This “surplus” arises in numerous other contributions, notably Bierl’s thorough reading of the visual excess of the Oresteia. The same metaphors he identifies as the core of myths are also the core of the surplus, moving us through a series of fixed and moving images, to visualizations and imaginings in the mind’s eyes.
Overall, intervisuality and the volume as a whole live and thrive in this surplus. Because there’s no single approach for the term, no one way to imagine its practice, intervisuality emerges through the thirteen chapters not as a specific method but as a prism through which to convey the dynamism of allowing the experience of a world of free forming media to inform our practice of reading Greek literature.
Works Cited
Conte, M. 1986. The Rhetoric of Imitation: Genre and Poetic Memory in Virgil and Other Latin Poets. Cornell University Press.
Hinds, S. 1998. Allusion and Intertext: Dynamics of Appropriation in Roman Poetry. Cambridge University Press.
Parks, L. 2002. “Satellite and Cyber Visualities” in The Visual Culture Reader 2nd Edition. Ed. N. Mirzoeff. Routledge.
Mechoulan, E. 2015 “Intermediality: An Introduction to the Arts of Transmission.” SubStance 44.3: 3–18.
Morales, H. 2004 Vision and Narrative in Achilles Tatius’ Leucippe and Clitophon. Cambridge, UK; Cambridge University Press.
Squire, M. 2009 Image and Text in Graeco-Roman Antiquity. Cambridge, UK; Cambridge University Press.
Authors and Titles
Introduction (Andrea Capra and Lucia Floridi)
PART I: IN LIMINE
- À rebours: intervisuality from the Middle Ages to classical antiquity (Aglae Pizzone)
- From image to theatrical play in Aeschylus’ Oresteia: Iconicity, intervisuality, the image act, and the dramatic performance act (Anton Bierl)
PART II: ARCHAIC AND CLASSICAL AGE
- Homer and the art of cinematic warfare (George Alexander Gazis)
- Intervisuality in the Greek symposium (Riccardo Palmisciano)
- The protohistory of portraits in words and images (sixth–fifth century BCE): tyrants, poets, and artists (Carmine Catenacci)
- Looking at Athens through the lyric lens (Cecilia Nobili)
- The politics of intervisuality: Euripides’ Erechtheus, the West Pediment of the Parthenon, the Erechtheion, and the temple of Athena Nike (Lucia Athanassaki)
PART III: HELLENISTIC AND IMPERIAL AGE
- The goddess playing with gold: On the cult of Arsinoe-Aphrodite in image and text (Benjamin Acosta-Hughes)
- Intervisuality in declamation and sung poetry in imperial Greek cities (Ewen L. Bowie)
- Intervisual allusions in Lucian, Dialogues of the Sea Gods (Lucia Floridi)
- Was Philostratus the Elder an admirer of Ovidian enargeia? (Évelyne Prioux)
- ἐκ τῶν πινάκων. Aristaenetus’ intervisual allusions to Philostratus’ art gallery (Regina Höschele)
PART IV: POINTING TO ROME
- Ordering the res gestae: observations on the relationship between texts and images in Roman ‘historical’ representations (Matteo Cadario)
Notes
[1] Though the editors in a footnote make a distinction between intervisuality and intermediality where the latter is defined more strictly as an explicit intersection of media while intervisuality is a more implicit interaction of text and image (7 n.13).