The readings for Wednesday, September 25, are all poems about visual art. This kind of poem is called “ekphrasis” (also sometimes spelled “ecphrasis”): it is the verbal act of describing an artistic object (such a photograph, a painting, a sculpture, an urn) that cannot speak for itself. One of the most famous poems of this genre in the English tradition is Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (1819). Keats was inspired to write this poem after visiting an exhibit of marble fragments from the Parthenon that were on display in London (you can still see them today at the British Museum there). One thing to keep in mind about this poem is that the urn that Keats describes it was an imaginary one: the images of “men or gods” he refers to are loosely based on the various marble figures he saw in the exhibit, not a single urn. One thing you notice when you visit the collection at the Met in New York is that these “urns” had all kinds of storage uses (they held oil, water, wine, and other foodstuffs), and some have other names, such as “amphora.”
The photos above were taken in the Greek and Roman wing at the Metropolitan Museum of art. They give you some sense of the kind of artifact that Keats describes in his poem, but they are also somewhat different. These are made of terracotta (clay) rather than the marble, in what is known as the “red figure style,” in which the people and gods are red against a black background, which is created by applying layers of dark glaze. In a 21st century museum, they also come with the kind of detailed historical labels that Keats lacked. How would the poem be different if Keats had been able to listen to an audio tour or Google the sculpture he was looking at on his iPad?
In addition to the poems, you have been asked to read the first three chapters of John Berger’s “Ways of Seeing.” There is much in this that we can discuss in class, but I just want to raise one question beforehand. Berger seems to prefers the term image, more than “art work,” or “visual art” or “painting.” Please note how he defines his term on pp. 9-10, and consider why the “image” might be so important for Berger’s approach.