Poetry about visual art is such a common phenomenon, there’s a name for it: ekphrastic poetry. A less common phenomenon is prose about art. So, are there any ekphrastic novels?
In Greek, ekphrasis comes from ek (out) and phrazein (to speak), meaning ‘to speak out’. More modern translations suggest it translates to ‘description in vivid detail’. Yet few novels go into such detail that they would be considered truly ekphrastic. Perhaps that’s because it is notoriously difficult to write about art. You see it in artspeak all the time: near unintelligible descriptions of an exhibition, a curator who overuses wordiness to the point of saying nothing at all. As artist and art critic David Hockney phrased it, “A lot of art is best talked about by talking about something else, lest writing shatter the art like a fragile leaf in clumsy hands.” After all, how do you describe a colour? A brush stroke? How do you interpret a beauty that resides in the eye of the beholder?
How do you interpret a beauty that resides in the eye of the beholder?
Many authors touch upon art without describing it in vivid detail. Others, who certainly have the ability to practice ekphrasis, intentionally choose not to. My favourite novel, Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse, comes to mind. In the book, visual art symbolises the creative process, taking the emphasis away from the artwork and placing it on activity. Woolf describes the act of painting, rather than the painting itself. In fact, we never even see the finished product. The novel ends when the process is complete: an irony summarised by the famous last words: “Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision.” As a cornerstone of the magic portrait genre, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Grey, too, revolves around visual art. Wilde includes elements of ekphrasis when describing Dorian’s deteriorating figure in the attic, yet he deliberately avoids going into vivid detail, leaving the specifics of the uglification to where it’s most disturbing: the reader’s imagination.
In The Iliad, Homer includes what is often considered the earliest example of ekphrasis in his famous description of Achilles’ shield, which is a work of art crafted by the Greek god Hephaestus. The description of the shield spans over many lines of the epic, containing scene after scene depicted in the artwork. Some of the details include “a herd of straight-horned cattle, in gold and tin” and “girls joyfully carrying off the ripe grapes in wicker baskets, while in their midst a boy sang of Linos in a sweet treble voice”. You might ask, how can you describe a boy on an artwork singing a song? But that’s ekphrastic poetry for you. The detailed description has captured imaginations for centuries. It has even inspired an interesting ekphrastic inversion in which visual artists have attempted to depict the literary shield – for example, Philip Rundell’s sculpture in 1822.
But the answer is yes, by the way. There are ekphrastic novels. The modern novel – a genre typically centred on a single hero’s inner journey – increasingly falls into the category, as art motivates character development. Ali Smith’s How To Be Both revolves around 15th-century frescoes, particularly the ‘Allegory of March’ found in the Palazzo Schifanoia (The Palace of Not Being Bored) in the Italian city of Ferrara. These artworks bridge the 450-year gap between the viewer, George, and the artist, Francesco del Cossa, helping our hero embrace ‘bothness’ as she accepts her deceased mother as simultaneously absent and present in her daily life.
Another is Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, in which a single artwork is the crux of the story. Carel Fabritius’ famous painting becomes inextricably linked to the main character’s love for his mother, who loves the painting. It becomes a complex, comforting burden, even a reminder of past trauma that he carries through the novel. Anyone can describe ‘The Goldfinch’. There’s a bird; it’s yellow, black and red; it’s chained to its stand. But only someone like Tartt can describe the painting, the feeling it evokes and tell you something about the person looking at it all at once. In The Goldfinch she writes, “It’s hard not to see the human in the finch. Dignified, vulnerable. One prisoner looking at another… even a child can see its dignity: thimble of bravery, all fluff and brittle bone. Not timid, not even hopeless, but steady and holding its place. Refusing to pull back from the world.”
There are other ekphrastic novels: Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror and the Light, Hannah Rothschild’s The Improbability of Love, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, each attempting one of literature’s most difficult tasks. We might think of writing and painting as inherently different. One requires movement, the other requires stillness; one is linear, the other holistic. Or could either be both? If anything, a writer’s desire to write about art (or a painter’s desire to paint a poem) shows how integrated they really are, two art forms striving for the same thing: the most literal meaning of ekphrasis, to speak out.
