[Authors and titles are listed at the end of the review]
A second look can make all the difference, the editors of this volume argue. Orpheus at any rate would agree: when he looked back at his wife Eurydice he contravened Hades’ commands and lost his wife forever. Orpheus’ “second gaze”, in particular in Vergil’s Georgics, is both spatial and temporal, and simultaneously textual and visual: just as Orpheus looks back at his wife within the story, so Vergil looks back at texts to which he alludes (and would cast a second and third look at this episode in later allusions).[1] Though the episode itself is not discussed in the volume, it illustrates its key claims: a second gaze allows us to analyse texts and images in conjunction, to read images and to look at texts. Matthias Grawehr, an archaeologist, and Markus Kersten, a Latinist, contend that the various subdisciplines within Classics such as philology, archaeology and art history have long been engaged in a shared endeavour: whether we speak of intertextuality, iconography or intervisuality, the relations between artefacts that we analyse reveal how the visual and textual domains are intertwined and only fully meaningful in combination.
The preface, jointly written by Grawehr and Kersten, highlights the strength of the volume’s interdisciplinary outlook: its focus is a short Latin poem by Ausonius, which confusingly describes a beautiful youth in ways that match partly Hylas and partly Narcissus. Yet visual art shows much cross-contamination in how beautiful youths are depicted. Rather than accusing Ausonius of mythological sloppiness, we can appreciate how he blends iconographies of youths in textual form. The argument is fascinating. One only has to think of Cadmus donning Hercules’ lion skin at the opening of Metamorphoses 3 to see the potential of thinking through intertextuality and iconography simultaneously. The volume’s sixteen chapters offer wide-ranging perspectives, from ekphrasis in Apuleius, remodelled houses in Roman Sicily, parallels in provincial numismatics, to intertextuality on curse tablets. As the chapters are organised neither chronologically nor thematically, the reader moves quickly from literary to archaeological contributions and back again—two chapters on Campana reliefs, for instance, appear in separate places. Yet before I read all these chapters, I took a first peek—perhaps against the spirit of the volume’s title—and I was disappointed to find just a single illustration in the chapters with a primarily literary focus. Not all chapters are equally invested in the interdisciplinary aims laid out in the preface, and while some discussions of intertextuality in well-known Latin authors such as Cicero are valuable, they add little to the volume’s methodological focus. Still, a second gaze and thorough reading revealed much to profit from. I will comment on select representative chapters that exemplify in different ways the volume’s ambition to bridge the textual and visual realms.
Matteo Rossetti casts his gaze skyward in a nuanced analysis of the reception of Aratus’ Phaenomena in three Latin authors: Manilius, Ovid and Germanicus (no case study on Cicero’s translation of Aratus, but its influence is duly noted). His central concept is intervisuality—allusions between texts and visual media, intertexts that cross from one medium into another.[2] One intriguing example is his reading of Ovid’s description of the constellation Dolphin in the Fasti, which may offer interplays with sculptures of the Dolphin. Attentive close readings reveal several such moments where visual culture appears to shape textual expression. As Rossetti notes, intervisuality is particularly apt for the Aratean tradition: ancient readers already accused Aratus of describing not the night sky itself but a celestial globe, thus blurring the line between nature and representation. Ekphrasis is then an important part of the Aratean reception, and a fuller engagement with celestial globes might have further enriched the chapter. Still, there is much to admire. One especially compelling passage discusses a moment in Manilius where the poet reflects on the constructed quality of constellations: constellations are not images in the sky but patterns we impose on scattered stars. The lines between the stars are not actually there, but we draw them, guided by myths, manuals or images already in our minds. In Rossetti’s hands, this becomes a powerful example of how intervisuality depends on a second gaze: on our ability to connect what we see with what we know.
Given how central epigram is to the interplay between image and text,[3] it is fitting that two of the volume’s contributions engage with the genre. Chiara Ballestrazzi analyses a cycle of epigrams on filial love that purport to describe reliefs decorating an otherwise unattested Hellenistic temple of Apollonis (mother of Eumenes II and Attalus of Pergamon)—though the verses themselves may date to late antiquity. This uncertainty in dating and context renders the material challenging. Ballestrazzi notes where epigrams diverge from tragic treatments of the same theme, offering often more upbeat versions of filial love. In one case she convincingly shows how visual depiction of one myth serves as the basis for a literary description of another.
In the second epigram contribution, Ivan Foletti and Marie Okáčová explore inscriptions and mosaics in early Christian churches in Rome. This chapter may most fully embrace the volume’s interdisciplinary agenda, offering a rich analysis of the interplay between text and image. The authors highlight how two-dimensional imagery in Christian spaces frames the viewer’s gaze—unlike the multi-perspectival freedom of pagan statuary; and they offer thoughtful commentary on the visual layout of inscriptions: the colour and placement of script, and how golden letters interact with golden mosaics to reflect “the light of the world” in more than one sense. This attention to the layout of inscriptions opens up new interpretive possibilities for how literate and illiterate audiences might have differently experienced these texts. A quibble: I was not entirely persuaded by all the classical allusions the authors propose in the epigrams. But I learned a great deal from this ambitious and visually attentive study of early Christian space.
Texts are not just abstract vehicles of meaning: they might also be scrolls to be unrolled, imposing stone inscriptions to look up to, pattern poems that arrange words in the shape of an image, such as an altar, or they might be arranged as stanzas that look like lyric even before we read them. The visual and material dimensions of text are the focus of two contributions on Vergil by Daniel Falkemback Ribeiro and Markus Kersten. Ribeiro considers the motif of carving verse into trees in Vergil’s Eclogues and its reception in later pastoral. A point made repeatedly is that it does trees no good to carve 20-plus lines of Latin hexameters on them: the transmission of culture and the maintenance of biodiversity are at odds. It’s an engaging argument, though the chapter risks repetition, and it would have benefited from reference to Brian Breed’s monograph on inscriptions in the Eclogues.[4]
Kersten, by contrast, zooms in on just four lines from the Georgics dealing with the theme of labor—though the material is slender it has inspired many learned and laborious volumes. His interest lies in the mise en page: how these lines might have appeared in ancient books written in continuous capitals, with no punctuation but with interpuncts as word dividers; or how they do appear in the extant manuscript Vergilius Romanus. He explores how this layout can suggest divergent interpretations, whether one reads in silent contemplation or recites the passage. I’m not entirely persuaded that the textual ambiguities he identifies are as consequential as he suggests. But the real value of the piece lies in the method: it reminds us to attend to layout, to the visual presentation of texts, and to what meanings might emerge from looking, not just reading.[5] This seems well worth a second look.
Michael Paschalis examines a particularly marked form of intertextuality: recusatio, the poet’s refusal to write in a more prestigious genre. His focus is Horace’s final lyric poem, Odes 4.15, in which Horace, once more, like other Augustan poets, declines to write a national epic celebrating Augustus. Perhaps like Horace himself, Paschalis doesn’t quite do what he might have been expected to (there is little here about visuality or other media), but he nonetheless makes us see many new things in Horace. One especially compelling claim is that Odes 4.15 alludes successively to Vergil’s Eclogues, Georgics and Aeneid: the poem retraces Vergil’s career at the very moment when Horace refuses to emulate it.[6] Also noteworthy is Paschalis’ observation that Odes 4.15 looks back to the first lyric recusatio in Odes 1.6, the ode to Agrippa: where Homer once served as the measure of epic, now it is Vergil; and where Horace once associated banquets with erotic encounters, he now makes them a space for heroic song in the manner of the legendary, already then lost carmina convivalia.
Other reviewers will be better placed to assess the detailed claims of the archaeological and numismatic chapters. But I wish to comment briefly on the role of intertextuality as a theoretical tool, originally developed in literary criticism, but fruitfully applied to visual and material culture and to sub-literary curse tablets in this volume.[7] Thus Florian Sommer detects Vergil’s and Ovid’s influence in curse tablets, broadening our view of this device. And Rolf Sporleder analyses Campana reliefs, terracotta reliefs with mythological and other scenes that were serially produced (another chapter on this topic is written by Arne Reinhardt). Sporleder shows the importance of parallels and context for these images: juxtapositions of friezes can create surprising scenes, and individual friezes might depict episodes from myth not elsewhere present in the visual repertoire. Either way, the viewer is challenged to create meaning through parallels, comparable perhaps to intertextuality.
A similar theoretical gesture underpins Raphael Szeider’s chapter on Hadrianic architecture, which is read as referencing Augustan models (note the textual metaphors “Referenzen und Architekturzitaten”, p.134). This chapter appears to present early work from the author’s dissertation project and, to this reader at least, felt more expository than fully developed: much remains preliminary and somewhat sweeping. That said, the idea that intertextuality can illuminate architectural allusion is promising, as both Matthew Roller and Diane Conlin, have shown in studies of Augustan and Flavian monuments.[8]
This is an ambitious volume with a wide remit. The editors deserve thanks for bringing together scholars from such diverse subdisciplines and for editing, in record time, a collection that includes contributions in English, Italian and German (some following Swiss German orthography), alongside a striking variety of evidence: colour photographs, architectural sketches and statistical tables as well as Greek and Latin quotations. Bringing these disparate materials together, methodologically and logistically, could not have been an easy task. Another asset of the volume is that it is available online as open access.
As always, editors of conference volumes depend on the kindness of strangers. While the volume may not yet demonstrate that all philologists, archaeologists and art historians are engaged in a single shared endeavour of the “second gaze”, it compellingly encourages us to give one another’s work, materials and methodologies a second look.
Authors and titles
- Matthias Grawehr and Markus Kersten: “A Second Gaze: Transient Meanings beyond Intertextuality and Iconography”
- Islème Sassi: “Drei Blicke auf das Verbotene: Die Diana-Gruppe im Goldenen Esel des Apuleius”
- Matteo Rossetti: “Intervisualità e intertestualità nella poesia astronomica latina di età augustea”
- Amy C. Miranda: “Palmyrene Portraiture through Gazes Cast. The Practice of Collective Memory in Archaeological Archives”
- Elisa Dal Chiele: “Quoting, Translating, Paraphrasing: Poetic ‘Reuse’ in Cicero’s Philosophical Work”
- Raphael Szeider: “Hadrian, seine Zeit und Augustus: Architektonische Bezugnahmen auf Augustus im 2. Jh. n. Chr.”
- Chiara Ballestrazzi: “Tra immagini e parole: Le tante vite del tempio 151 di Apollonide di Cizico”
- Ivan Foletti and Marie Okáčová: “Aurea concisis surgit pictura metallis: An Epistemological and Methodological Approximation of Early Christian Multimedia Visuality.”
- Rolf Sporleder: “Invitation to Look Twice: Mythological Images on Campana Reliefs”
- Florian Sommer: “Theonomastik und Intertextualität in lateinischen Fluchtafeln”
- Elisabeth Günther and Sven Günther: “Roman only at First Glance? The Adaptation of Imperial Iconography in the Coin Types of Mannos Philorhomaios”
- Nicole Berlin: “Reconstructing the Renovation of House B at Tyndaris”
- Arne Reinhardt: “Das Verschönerungsangebot: Wiederverwendete ‚Campana-Reliefs‘ zwischen Pragmatismus und Bilderliebe”
- Daniel Falkemback Ribeiro: “Carving More Trees: Memory and Environment in Virgil and Calpurnius Siculus”
- Michael Paschalis: “Horatian recusatio in the Shadow of Virgil”
- Markus Kersten: “Sinn im Zwischenraum: Über zwei Arten des zweiten Blicks und die Wirkung des Schriftbilds bei Vergil”
Notes
[1] Gale, M. (2003). “Poetry and the backward glance in Virgil’s Georgics and Aeneid”. TAPhA 133: 323–52.
[2] A stated influence for this chapter is A. Capra and L. Floridi, eds., (2023) Intervisuality. New approaches to Greek literature, Berlin and Boston, a volume that pursues aims similar to those of the book under review.
[3] Important work in this area has been carried out by, among others, Michael Squire, Irmgard Männlein-Robert, and Évelyne Prioux—though the latter two are not cited in the volume.
[4] B. Breed, (2006) Pastoral inscriptions. Reading and writing Virgil’s Eclogues, London, esp. ch. 3. Engagement with this book seems to me more urgently needed than with a shorter article of Breed that the chapter does cite at one point.
[5] Related work esp. by John Schafer might have deserved mention: “Authorial pagination in the Eclogues and Georgics”. TAPhA 147 (2017): 135–78.
[6] The chapter thus chimes well with current interest in Vergil’s biography, e.g., T. Kearey (2023) “Virgil’s voice and ancient reading”. Helios 50: 171–98.
[7] T. Nelson, (2023) Markers of allusion in archaic Greek poetry, Cambridge was published probably too late for consideration in the volume.
[8] M. Roller (2013). “On the intersignification of monuments in Augustan Rome”. AJPh 134: 119–31; D.A. Conlin, (2021). “Assemblages and appropriation of Augustan art and topography in Flavian Rome”. In R. Marks and M. Mogetta, eds. Domitian’s Rome and the Augustan legacy, 15–31. Ann Arbor. Cf. C. Edwards (1996) Writing Rome. Textual approaches to the city. Cambridge.