JOHN ELSNER

w. And Christopher Hobin's two names, when taken lOp;ethcr with

'Trespassers after an uncle and William after Trespassers', became
proof. They did not simply prove that Piglet had a grandfather.
They proved that the language-game of two names I.:ould work,
and that it could provide an identity for all concerned for Piglet,
for Piglet'S grandfather, for the sign TRESPASSERS wand for
Christopher Robin. Through competition, the limits of the
credible, of identity itself, had changed. 34

CHAPTER EIGHT

philostratus and the imaginary museum

NORMAN BRYSON

The Imagines of the Elder philostratus must cuunt as one of the

great ruins of antiquity (Fig. ]9). From the Renaissance until the
time of the excavations at Pompeii and ITerculaneum, the-Imagines,
together with tlie--sur~T~ing-!ragments preserved in' RO~le,

~titUted virtually all that couldJ);k~;I~-E~~bpe-::;l~~~r';~~

classical painting. Even today, when so much more of that painting
has been brought to light, the Imagines remains ~ ~~e reso~~c.e.
It is our most extensive account of what a Roman picture gallery,
a Roman catalogue of pictures, ;md the Roman viewing of pictures
may have been like. philostratus claims to base his account in
actuality. In the Proem he assures his reader that his sixty-odd
verb'll descriptions are rendered after original paintings (pil1.akes)
housed in a single collection ill Neapolis (Naples).

",

I was lodging olltside the walls lof Neapolisj in a suburb facing the sea,
where there was a portico built on four, I think, or possibly five terr'lCes,
open to tile east wind and looking out on the Tyrrhl'l\ian sea. It w:!s
resplendent with all the marbles favoured by luxury, blll it was
particularly splendid by reason of the panel-paintings set within the
walls, paintings which I thought had been collected with real
for thev exhibited the skill of very many painters. I

philostratus has been asked by the son of his host to speak about
the paintings, and he agrees. The text that follows presents itsd!" as
the record of his discourses, delivered before an ,IUdience ofynung
men' eager to learn', in the presence of the pictllr('s

lH

Parr of the fascination of the text for the Renaissance and

2~)

-~,..~

PHI LOS T RAT USA N

I)

.......".---

TilE I MAG I N A II Y M {' Sj.

NORMAN BRYSON

eighteenth century seem to have intensified this A t1anti.~-like )

aspect of the Imagines, and in the nineteenth century attempts were

\1,.

.~

undertaken to correlate philostratus' text with the

u..l1earth::J_~ ex~v~ti~~. One consequence of such efforts was that

the ctescriptions were found by some scholars n~~ to correspond,

,I

\,

<-U),}l)'Ut,)l)r1 \...

or not to correspond closely 5nough, wit]I the Campani,ln

paintings. A debate accordingly developed from the second half of

(ft...

the~T;,eteenth century and into the twentieth century in which the

in--l~

l
.

CJuestion of the authenticity of the descriptions became the leading

CJuestion. Were they reliable, or had philostratus invented the.
entire gallery out of nothing as a virtuoso exercise in ec p1Irasis? (
~ll~~n became polarised,~with figures such as Welcker,

>

Brunn, and Wickhotf on the side of authenticity, opposing Cay Ius)

Friedrichs, Matz and Robert. 2 Scholarship in English played a
lesser role in the debate, with the great exception of Karl
Lehmann '5 article 'The Imagines of the Elder Philostratus',
published in Art Bulletin some fifty years ago, in

1941.:1

Coming

almost at the close of the' authenticity' debate, Lehmann's article

advanced what is perhaps the most vigorous and ingenious case
ever mounted in defence of the view that the Imagines were b'lsed
on an actual picture collection from the late second century or
early third century

ok

'J

CEo

Lehmann begins ~h Goethe's essay' Philostrats ~;ema.lde'

written in 1818. 4 Goethe had maintained that the present order of
the sixty-odd elements in the Ifllaljines is confused and confusing.
Acc( ,rdingly he rearranged them under nine separate headings: ( 1)
Heroic an(1 Tragic Subjects; (2) Love and Wooing; (3) Birth and
Education; (4) Deeds of Herakles; ()

Athletic Contests; (i)

Hunters and Hunting; (7) Poetry, Song and

Dance; (8)

Landscapes; and (9) Still Lite. Lehmann takes Goethe's thematic

Fig. 29

modern reader has been the promise contained in the idea of

resurrection: from its pages might be constructed an entire gallery
of the lost paintings of antiquity, together with the context of their

lS(i

re-ordering, which aimed at a clearer editorial se(luence, and puts

it to use within the debate on the authenticity of Philostratus'
pictures. Working entirely from the existing, and apparently
confused, sequence, Lehmann argues that it is possible to account

reception by a living audience. Though the paintin~s at Pompeii

for both the coherence of thematic groupings within the Imar;illes

and Herculaneum antedate philostratus by two centuries, the

and the seeming incoherences of sequence also present in the text

discoveries in Campania anel their publication from the mid

by mapping the Imagines against an arcl!itectura/~

"}

"

-.

~........-.

NOHMAN BRYSON

PHll.OSTRATllS AND TIIF IMA(;INARY ~ll'SE'"

Some examples will help to clarify Lehmann's processes of

20

reasoning. In the second book of the Imagines occur six

r A~'~sl
Africa I

consecutive pictures illustrating the adventures of Herakles.

'I

Lehmann points out that it is inconceivable that this grouping

could be accidental. [. Apart from a fleeting appearance in the

WALL II

picture of the Argonauts (2. I 5), Herakles features nowhere else in

---lUi

the sixty-odd descriptions. And yet, the sequence of the Ilerakles

pictures is strange. The first (2.20) portrays the contest between
Herakles and Atlas; the scene takes place in north-western Africa.
The second (2.21) shows the fight between Heraklcs and Antaios;

'0

"I~

),.1

""I

ej

r libY

___aJ

~
,...

-I

-I

~r

now the scene is Libya. The next depicts Herakles, again in north
Africa, sleeping and attacked by the Pygmies (2.22). Obviously

il3

these three (2.20-2.22) are concerned with Herakles' African

adventures, Then /()liows a picture representing the madness of

~.

Alll'rtM

Herakles, and now a temporal series can be inferred: after

completing the last of the twelve Labours, Herakles voyaged along
the coast of Africa, encountering on the way Antaios and later the

A1IUes~'1

Pygmies, before his return home and his attack of insanity. This

EL

sequence accounts clearly for numbers 2.20-2.23

four of the six

Herakles episodes. But the two remaining pictures (2.24 and 2.25)
do not fit this scheme at all. Picture 2.24 deals with Herakles and

Fi!-,. lO

Theiodamas. In the myth, the episode can be located in two

ending at the 'wrong' points. The sequence should be: the

different regions - Thessaly and Rhodes. philostratus reads the

commencement of Herakles' adventures in Thessaly; Heraklcs and

landscape of 2.24 as Rhodian. To Lehmann, this sounds odd. For

the horses of Diomedes; Herakles and Atlas; then I Ierakles' return

if the painter had intended the landscape as that of Rhodes, the

picture should properly have been placed between the African
adventures and Herakles' final homecoming. Lehmann's resolution
oT the anomaly is to claim that philostratus was wrong to interpret

voyage, including the episodes with Antaios and with the Pygmies,

the landscape as that of Rhodes. In fact the mountains in the

'
picture must be those of Thessaly which is where lIcrakles'

L.a bours begm.

') X

l'

in North Africa; finally Herakles' homecoming and madness. If

Philostratus' account were cut and resequenced it would make up
a single story. How has this Raw in the presentation come about?
It is here that Lehmann advances the hypothesis of the Room
(fig. 30 ). If the secluence is laid out as it continuous chronicle, its
six component episodes can be thought of as forming a band of

Picture 2.24 thus inaugurates the narrative sequence. The next

picture in the Imagilles shows one of the Labours - the taming of

pictures inset into the walls of a single chamber. The hypothesis of

the Room then permits Lehmann to advance the corollary idea, of

the horses of Diomcdcs. Though it comes last in the series, in

terms of a continuous chronicle it follows 2.24 and precedes the
later episodes, 2.20 to 2.23. \Vhat has happened is that the
Imagines has run through a continuous story, but starting and

the Doorway. That the Imagines confusingly recounts the

Herakles episodes in the order 3/4/5 /6/ 1/2 can be explained if
PiJilostr;Ht!s is imagined entering the room through a
placed between the second and third pictures (2.2~, . The horses of

]., II

..... .......... ..
;

,'~

~~.

NOHMIIN BRYSON

PHILOSTRATliS AND THE IMAGINARY MI'SEl','

Diomedes' and

2.20,

'Atlas '). philostratus passes through the

door, turns to one side, and begins his text in the middle of the
Herakles legend (fig. 30). Observing the 'correct' narrative
sequence is evidently less important to him than describing the
pictures as he Ilnds them in situ, set into the walls. I f the existence
of room and doorway is accepted, the break in sequence can be

WALL

read as an architectural caesura, not a textual glitch. (In Lehmann's

9

reading, all textual discontinuities will be projected as architectural

registers: disunity in the text is to be resolved into the unity of the

!l.

building; the text's openings, interruptions, and incompleteness

J,

will be transformed, through a specific ecphrastic operation, into

the wholeness of an image, an edifice, a museum.)
Having tested the hypotheses of the room and the doorway and
finding them secure, Lehmann now proceeds to blot'k in the walls

of his ml/see imaginaire from dado to cornice. s For it turns out that

sometimes, within an evidently coherent sequence, such as that of

AI1WM

Herakles, there appear quite unrelated pictures, pictures that

interrupt the sequence for no apparent reason. Such cases can be

resolved by hypothesising a second tier of pictures, placed above

the Ilrst, towards the ceiling. 7 The opening pictures of book

(SOlV.JO

2,
UOP~SOd

Lehmann maintains, form a continuous series of episodes to do

with love. To the group as a whole he gives the name' Room of

~dOj3d

II!
oP.

}UOH

-~_o~e.~ ~~ ~~Q~~~P

6r

I-i~, .11

Aphrodite '.R Love's power features in the opening scene, showing

girls in a procession for Aphrodite (2.1); it continues in the stories

common is that both show the corpses of young men); while the

of Hippolytus refusing to love Phaedra (2,4), in the love of

idea of Antilochus as a young Olympian victor can draw to itself

Critheis and Meles (2.8), in the suicide of Palltlteia (2.9), and the

the story of the birth of Pindar, 'the f~lmous bard of such victories'
(2.12). And, since Pan is present at Pindar's birth, Pan's presence

death of Cassandra (2.10). Yet this catalogue of love's woes is

i~terrupted by pictures quite unconnected with love: Chei ron

with nymphs in an adjacent picture (2.11) can also be explained.

educating Achilles (2.2) and female Centaurs (2.3). Chciron goes

Lehmann docs not stop with the room. To enclose the whole of

widl female Centaurs, but not with the Aphrodite seriet yet the

the text, he must build an edillcr, a stoa. How is it to be lit? The

interruption can be resolved if these pictures are imagined a~"a pair,

walls require windows, and windows turn out to be doubly useful:

placed above the' main' scene. This upper tier can now establi<;h

they provide light for the pictures; and they fill up space when

its own band and its own independent life. The education of

there seem to be not enough pictures

Achilles (2.2) and female Centaurs (2.3) can absorb a third scene
frnm the life of Achilles, where he mourns the death of Antilochus
(,,,

put

or

!Sn"J11:z JOll1

{~ -~

(",;

~~'"

to

go round. Consider, for

instance, the Hoom of Dionysus (fig. 31).9 In Lehmann's analysis

this comprises a lower-level tier devoted to six Dionysian suhjects,

(2,7). The picture of the youthful Antilocltus can then attract as its

and an upper tier with eleven miscellaneous scenes. Ohviously

cornire partner a picture of Arrhidikos (2..6; the feature held in

there is a difficulty here, How could walls which, in their lower

.. I':.

N()I~MAN

BRYSON

PHILOSTRATllS AND TilE IMA(;INAIIY MUS,.!,

tier, show only six scenes, leave space for eleven scenes above?

Whatever changes of sequence that might have bef:lllen the text in

Evidently, the upper pictures should be imagined as smaller in

its transmission from the third century would inevitably take the

small enoll!!;h to allow, on Wall 2, as many as live scenes

(2.18"2.24) to lit above two below. lo Still, it makes for a long wall,

f()rm of architectural synt<lX, as doors, windows, cornices, dadoes,

porticoes, terraces. It could also be said that, at many places, the

its lower level. But if a low

criterion defining what constitutes the semantic centre of a group

scale

and one which has only two pictures

Oil

seems strained.

wall's lower section is filled. Lehmann's museum is now rapidly

acquiring detail. The question arises of the layout of room to

Agamemnon (2.10), or the victory of Rhodogune and the Persians

(2.S) as types of love.

room. Goethe had proposed nine divisiol1s, but Lehmann arrives

Blit to quarrel with Lehmann's argument in this fashion would

at five, the number corresponding to Philostratus' recollection of

the four, I think, or possibly five terraces '. Now the final

be to miss what is most enduringly interesting about 1is

commentary. The central claim of his essay is that both the

architectural touches are ready. At the end of each of the two

coherence of thematic groupin!!;s in the Imagines, and the seeming

books, Lehmann argues, stand stilllifes: these mark, then, the exits

disturbances of sequence that also occur, can both be explained by

of the text, the porticoes of the building. The room size remains

proj('cting the text as architectonic form. Lehmann's primary

remarkably unchanging, but this would not be surprising if the

readi IIg strategies involve heavy use of the tropes of metaphor and

It is hard to conceive of Cassandra with

building is thought of as a s10a composed of separate terraces. In

metonymy. It is metonymic liaison that provides some of

terrace architecture the principal variable is not room size but the

Lehmann's most convincing se(luences, tor instance the reconfigu

placement and size of windows, which, Lehmann further suggests,

ration of the Herakles pictures in the torm of a continuous band or

are adapted to the seasons. This makes for four seasonal dining

Jabula. The patterns deriving from metaphor are able to embrace

halls: an aesthJum, given over to pictures of rivers; an alllumllale,

dominated by stories of Dionysus; a trielillium Female, set aside
for Aphrodite; alld a hibernale with scenes of the primitive,
Saturnine world. Finally, the whole ensemble, 'resplendent with
all the marbles favoured by luxury', is turned to the West; the sun
casts its changing se,lsonal li!!;ht on the different cll,lmiJers of the

r~

~)t

!~,

~.

disparate as a singing procession of maidens, the deaths of

;~
.s:

Lehmann's groupings resemble those of Goethe, or perhaps of any

\'!'I'

I
1:

being elastic (to say the least), is able to ullite scenes even as
Cassandra and Agamemnon, and the suicide of Pantheia. So

. 'j;j

II

even more extensive segments of the text. A term such as 'love',

i>

'."~.;
.'.

house, before setting in the Tvrrhenian sea.

2(;2

ll

window is added (between 2.18 and 2.19), the emptiness of the

~k,

editor or reader seeking to give order to a gnomic and fragmentary

text. What is interesting is the way that with Lehmann till' tropes
of mctonymy and metaphor do not remain editorial or textual
operations but are figured in terms that are visual and volumetric.

"

Metonymy projects as the gaze of a beholder who, standing at

It would be possible to object to Lehmann's reconstructib'n on ,\

the centre of the room, traces a continuous narrative frieze across

number of counts. His case rests on an unargued premise that

the tiers; or as the pathway of the spectator's body moving from

Philost~atus ney~. <Lmits_,!ny pictures from the collection he is

room to room, up and down staircases and across terraces, and

supposed to describe; philostratus is denied any powers of

finally out of the building at its exits, Xenia

selection over the works he discllsses. Moreover, there is a further

and 2.26). Metaphor projects as the repetition of enclosing frames,

unar!!;uecl assumption that the text of the I1I1a{(ine<~ sll~~i~~lS a

perfect avatar of its fIrst edition. Textual corruption is not
something that cOI~I~1 ~,~iIy show up in Lehmann's ,malysis.

wherehy the unity suggested by shared semantic features (' love.,

and Xenia

(r. 36

'primitive world') is concretised as the singleness and un

brokenness of mlJr~1 "n~('.' 'In,, .k,.<~

,<

i'i () 1\ \[ A N B 1\ Y SON

PlIlLOSTI\AT\lS ANIl TilE IMA(;[NAHY ~[I:S' I

singular risks of uncurtailability. Once a common feature such as

admission there remains a grollp of pictures that fall qllitl' olltside

'love' is unleashed, it is hard to see what story may not, one way

the boundary of his analysis. Beviewing his work from its end,

or another, be subsumed into the resulting series. Similarly, once

Lehmann reckons that he has been able to account for all thirty-six

the idea of chronological series cOllies into play, it becomes in

sections of book

principle possible to order all sixty-odd descriptions into over

'miscellaneous' cases remain. 12 Accordingly, Lehmann expels the

lapping temporal groups. i3ut the potential of both metaphor and

entire group from his definition of the imagines. He concilldes

metonymy for unlimited expansion across the whole corpus of the

that, lacking in the relations he has been proposing, the peccant

imagines is held in check by the spatial boundaries of dado and

images are in fact later additions, grafted on 'either before the real

cornice, window and door, terrace and swircase. Architecture

publication or else for a second edition '.13 nearing ill mind what

I,

and the first twenty-six of book

2.

Yet eight

emerges as the containment and pacification of textual energies

Denida calls the 'logic of the sllpplement', by pressing on what

which, without that binding inAuence from matter fixed in space,

Lehmann rejects one may come to see the principles of l'xclusiotJ

would soon run across the text from end to end.

by which his interpretation is structured. That supplement to the

What governs both metaphor and metonymy is another figure:

imagines, so far from standing beyond its pale, may delineate that

visualisation. The text as a whole is envisioned as a luxurious

which Lehmann's reading must constantly repress in order to

Neapolitan building. This response to the imagines is Lehmann's

sustain itself; and, as part of this, what may be the features of the

distinctive ecphrastic operation. H is work wi th rhilostratus' text

imagines which are the hardest for commentary in general to

results in a crossing from text to image. Lehmann reacts to each

reach.

round of difiiculty within the imagines by creating a new building

One would wish to examine in detail all eight' supplementary'

feature. First, the room, whose walls soon present dadoes, cornices

items (2.27-2.34). Here just the first two in the group will be

and doorways; they are lit by windows of varying size and

considered, and especially

position; the rooms are tiered as the terraces of a stoa; finally, like

sense justified by Lehmann', own gesture ofexc\usion. His system

any good architect, Lehmann considers his building in relation to

has been working well; it has brollght order to all the previous

2.28, '

Looms'. The selection is in some

the seasons, and the orientation of the site. He is faced with a text

pictures in both books, however bizarre or dislocated they may

filled with hiatuses and inconsistencies. Under pressure from the

have initially appeared. Yet after Xenia 2 (at 2.26), the system

text's internal stress lines he produces, step by step, an architecture

breaks down entirely. In spatial terms, Lehmann's (re)construction

of containment. \Vhat emerges within the text as difficulty and

of the stoa is now complete. With the placing of the second still

disruption is projected in the visual domain as plenitude and unity.

life, Philostratus writes' The End'. The reader passes out of the

The text's moments of incoherence and disruption produce an

portico - out of Lehmann's text-as-architecture --- into th(' outer,

architecture of massive and stable blocks.

disorderly world. Interestingly, the bce which the world presents

i"

It is in this doubling of the broken text as an IInbrokelj:image,

rather than in his deductive reasoning, that Lehmann enacts a

reading of the imagines which, I want to suggest, is entirely
sensitive to the contours and topology of rhilostratlls' writing. At
the same time, this sensitivity is consigned by Lehmann to the
unconscious of this text. To help locate that other, submerged
20 4

-.Aj,-"

..

is exactly that of a broken building filled with debris:

Now Ih;~ doorway belong<; to a house by no means prosperolls; you will
say it has been abandoned by its master, and the court wilhin seems
deserted, nor do the columns still support its roof, for they have set tied
and collapsed. No, it is inhabited by spiders only, !<ll' Ihis cre,lIure loves
to weave its web in quiet. (' Looms', 2.1-6)

reading of the imagilles, one can begin by noticing that, successflll

Lehmann's inspired solution to his text's difiiculties - its dOlIbling

though Lehmann finds his own analysis to be, by his own

as a perfect building ensemble - confronts at its exit the spectacle

..,(:.e

_ " " , , - , - -.. '_14_"""""",-

IOI\MAN BRYSON

PHILOSTRATliS AND THE IMAGINARY M\ISF1'\1

of a ruination at once textual and architectural. What the ti~ure of

the building had particularly enabled was the transfer of all

merge in a moment of visionary presence. Out of the diverse tissue

problems of the text back into the space supposed to stand behind

woven by the spider, the painter and the writer comes a living

it: the terraced spaces of the villa. The moment when Lehmann

image: 'the weavers travel across [their webs J, drawing tight such

declares the 'true' text of Imagines to have ended is that of an

of the threads as have become loose '. In this visionary space there

edifice collapsing.
Lehmann's entire reading turns on a suppressioll of the text's

is no separating the individual strands of image, text or web. The

ecphrasis itself draws tight any threads that come away, pulling

being as written representation; his gradual construction of the

them back into the unitary ima~e that is at the same time a web, a

stoa, with all of its !loms mapped and its piuures securely placed
in tiers within chambers, depends on a reading of the Imagines in

pit.:ture and a text. With part of itself, the ecphrasis seeks to shed
the opacities it possesses by virtue of being made of words

terms of transparency before a pre-existing referent. Concerning

only an arbitrary connection to things. It seeks

philostratus' work within language, and of the pictures' work with

into something beyond wurds, an image, a picture; and then to

their represented scenes, Lehmann's account says nothing. In

fuse that picture with what is real, in a web tltat is no longer lexical
but pictorial, and no longer pictorial but alive.

pointing this out, the aim is not, in fact, to criticise or fault

to

fuse the words

Lehmann's interpretation. One of the principal desires of the

Lehmann's desire for a text of the Imafiines that will dissolve

descriptions in the Imagines is exactly to cease being words on the

first into the pictures of a collection, and then into the architectural

page, to come alive in the f<>rIn of an imaJ!;e, to pass from the

ensemble that hOllses them, is ullcannily true to this aspect of

opacity of words to the luminous scenes behind the words.

philostratus' text. Yet it embodies only part of that text's energies.

Frecluently met with, in the Ima/iines, is a textual moment at

Though in the passage just quoted the separate re~isters of

weaving, of picturing, and of describing all come together ill
radiant fusion at Philostraws' , For look!', elsewhere the' Looms'

the description at last feels its own language to dissolve into the
of the scene it opens upon. This is the philostratian ' Look!':
Now the painter has been successful in these respects also: that he has
wrought the spider itself ill so painstaking a fashioll, has matched its
spots with fidelity to nature and has painted its repulsive fuzzy surface
and its savage nature - all this is the mark of a good craftsman and one
skilled in depicting the truth. For look! here is a cord I;)rming a
squaPe ... (' Looms', 3. I

description presents these registers as separable, separate and out

of phase.
In fact, 'Looms' opens with a picture of - representation. The
first, and seemingly gratui tous, pictu re in the description shows

The painter's attention to truth has realised the spider in all its

Penelope's loom, complete with its shuttle, warp, threads and lint.
What opens the ecphrasis, then, is an image describing the
fabrication of images, the representational means by which

repulsive detail. Having traced that' fidelity to nature' wittl'a .pen

Penelope creates iJer tapestry. The image is made (and, with

no less observant than the painter's, Philostratus earns the riglhfor

Penelope, unmade), within the apparatus of representation. The

ecphrasis begins by emphasising representation not as something

his OWl] words also to be recognised as fully backed by truth. After

his exclaimed 'For look!', the description at last rcaches the
moment of lift-off.
Three related labours come together in a single disclosure and

.(,

line by line. 14 At 'look! ' the words, the paint and the spiders' web

presence: the work of rhe spicier, building its web strand

strand; the work of the painter, tracing each of the threads stroke
stroke; the work of the ecphrasist, tracing the two previous sets

which vanishes before its referent, but which stays stubbornly

visible and in place, as material technique.
Similarly, 'Looms' foregrounds Its own apparatus of rep
resentation, language. Penelope is presented not only as tlte site of
work with images, but of work with words. She is the creation of
Homer, and it is with Hnmpr'" linE'C: th,,. nh;l,w<r.",," 1".:1.1, L:_

----

..

NIlHMAN EllYSON

-""-

PHILOSTRATliS AND TilE IMA(;JNAHI' ~ll1SI.1

own picture of her. Penelope

III

Homer melts the snow with them.' This is a

reference to Oc{yssey 19.24: Her tears flowed and her face melted

Against Lehmann's maps of the architectural referent one might

as the snow melts on the lofty mountains ... and as it melts the

posit another topology of things, pictures and words, not as these

streams of the rivers flow full: so her fair cheeks melted as they

come together in the ensemble of a resurrected museum but as they

, In the same way, philostratus makes a point of telling his

fail to connect, in a fracture or ruin of representation. The

reader that the fine threads on which the spiders drop from the roof

{magines work with three dil1'erellt 'substances': words, things,

Phi!ostratus;- act ()t' descriptio-n
and images. With part
w;;rks t~ blur these three in visionary merger (fIg. )2).

and then climb up again, are taken froll] llesiod.

in the text the words exactly

15

At these points

t~lil to dissolve, either into pictures

(Penelope) or into things (spiders). They remain the embedded

lines of Homer and of Hesiod, woven into a text which refuses to
assimilate them as its own or to dissolve them before a referent in
pictures or in the world.
Just as the text insists on its own opacities, its ineradicable
wordiness, so it points to ways in which nature itself will not be
absorbed into the supposedly higher realm of human represen
tation and culture. The place of the spiders is presented as the

(:,"~;
~.~

(-)
~

lp,

Penelupe, and apply to their webs the terms of

In the heat of this

or

J2

words turn into images, or images

into real things:

geometric measurement (lelral'iaslOs), but the webs take over

!' (4) But such excitement and

animation is only one of the Imagines' many possibilities. There

where human creation comes to its end. Interestingly, the spiders

are others, less ecstatic. Words come unstuck from things: they

in 'Looms' are imagined not only as they appear in the picture,

hark back, not to things in the world but to other words, by

description also includes a scene which exceeds that picture:

Homer or Hesiod (3). Or images pull away from the task of

the flat [nests] are good to summer in. and the hollow sorl. .. is

representation: they are shown as products of material technique,

in winter'. This is a
to other times and

within it. The

aside, a

threads, weft, lint, looms (J). Or the world pulls away from its

the picture but

representation in art and language (2): the courtyard appears as

that moment

deserted, . abandoned by its master', a place where the visual order

race across their web; it does not shd~ ,them in

imposed by human cultivation collapses alld the primary

of human space - columlls, roof, shelter
way to the
openness of nature.

other seasons, when in summer spiders choose the ~~t webs

and in the winter the hollow ones. 'Looms' points to another life
of spiders which the scene, in other words, implies but does not

I t is appropriate that' Looms' opens with

state; to a world of ruins, silences, and spider-life that goes on

standing both for the capacity of art to provide marvellous

whether or not there are people around to see it. Nature takes over

of the world, and for the unravelling of art back into mere
and lint. The ecphrasis is in t;Jct in continuous
aeros... all
of the interstices between the world. til/' word, and
Image
1 to 7; see also fig .
A t times (' For
! ') it seems I hal

from culture; culture in fact collapses, its columns broken, but

spiders silently persist, away from the human labours of building,
.1.(, X

//

Fi~.

annihilation of human work. ~/here roofs and columns

the spiders thrive. Human observers may compare the

weaving, painting and describing.

~)

(~, \

o H ~l A N B R Y SON

PHI LOS T RAT {J SAN D THE I MAG I N A It Y \1l'!H

art, concealillt?; art, m,lkes the dead mailer of leLters and

brushslrokes corne alive. BUl this is only one phase ill the
ecphrastic process. Equally important are the momellts when the
ecphrasis 'fails', when words revert to being words, tapestries
revert to thread, and architecture to rubble.
One reason that Lehmann's reading banishes' Looms' from the

Imagines may perhaps be the description's eminent f~lilure: instead

of giving way to a luminous and ostensible referent
enthusiasm that enables philostratus to say' Look! The spiders'
and Lehmann to say 'Look! The sma' - ' Looms' darkens the
picture, making it a place of shadows, dust, and

broken

architecture. Spatially, it figures itself as a ruined courtyard.

Textually, it traverses not only the place of ecphrastic excitement
where words turn into pictures and pictures turn into things, but
all the negative ecphrastic spaces whcre words remain words, or
form hybrids with pictures, and pictures revert to thei I' constituent

WII hering lint on a loom. That philostratus

intends this cffect of net?;ativity, and intends it as a figure for his

elements, threads

own ecphrastic enterprise, is confirmed by the pairing which

'Looms' (2.28) forms with its preceding picture, The birth of
Athena' (2.27).
The link, of course, is Arachne. 16 As Ovid tells the tale,

Fig. 33

Arachne is a human weaver who challenges the skill of the divine

weaver, Minerva, and is punished !<H' Iter hubris when Minerva
turns her into a spider. At the contest, both we,lvers set lip their
looms.

The web is bound upon the beam, the reed separates tlw threads of the

27C

Forthwith her hair, touched by the poison, fell off, and with it both nose
and ears; and the head shrank up; her whole body also was small; the
slender lingers cling 10 her side as
. the rest was belly. 20
For many interpreters of the Arachne fable, the official moral

warp, the woof is threaded through them by the sharp shuttles which
their busy fingers ply, and when shol through the threads of.dle warp,
the notched teeth of tilt' hammering stay beats it into place. l ? I~

- a cautionary tale against hubris

Minerva pictures the twelve heavenly gods

painters. At the rear of the inner stage in The Fable o( Arachne is

011

majestic thrones. At

contains a second level, a

of reflection upon the capacities and limitations of an. For

Velazquez, the competition concerns not only weavers but

the four corners of her tapestry are set miniature scenes of

shown. Titian's painting The Rape of Europa, and

presumptuous mortals. IS Arachne counters this imagery of the

presents his own craft in parallel to the art of weaving, placed

gods punishing humans !()r hubris with scenes of the gods, and

somewhere, perhaps, between Arachne and Minerva, between the

especially Jupiter,19 violating human

genre painting of the foreground and Titian's history painting in

females.

Appalled by

Arachne's work, Minerva hits her three times with a shuttle. then

the middle distance (fig. 33). III the reading of Leonard Barkan,

robs her of human form.

this capacity of the Arachne topos to act as art's self-reflexive

2~

,,-~

P II I L () S Tii A T USA N Il TilE J M A (; I N A H Y

OltMAN BRYSON

commentary on art is already present in Ovid's text: 'I t requires

comically deflated retelling of the fable philostratus places his own

no great leap of the imagination to see in Arachne's tapestry all the

project, the Imagines, somewhere between the higher artists

elements of Ovid's own poetry in the Metamorphoses.' Just as she

(Homer, Hesiod, Ovid, etc.) and the beasts. Ovid and

tells the stories of the loves of the gods and the metamorphoses of

use the

~Il!

S H

images of their own

their victims, so does he. 21 Like Velazquez, Ovid positions his

the

metamorphoses that issue from Arachne's loom, and

desublimation or parody.

theologically correct, carefully framed tapestries that come

the loom of Minerva.
That philostratus intends' Looms' to unfold in the space of this
a number of details. The Birth of

Let us touch again on the philostratian exclamation, 'Look!'

The moment when a picture seems to come alive is encountered

k ..

'fI

again and again in the 1m agi/les. In Xenia

philostratlls remark~

the first subject of Minerva's tapestry, immediately

(r.3 I). In Xenia 2 he invites the reader to reach out and take a loaf

precedes the text of' Looms' in philostratus' gallery. In Ovid, the

from the painted basket (2.26). In' Narcissus' he says he cannot

contest of Arachne and Minerva is visualised as a spectrum of

tell' whether a real bee has been deceived bv the painted Hower or

iridescent colours:

whetlier we are to be deceived into thinking that a

ments, words
intense experience that
oth pictures and words. It is not simply that words arc
Imagines that way is to model it on the example of the illustrated

book. The logic of the text is in fact closer, once again, to that of

head of Zeus:

Derrida's supplement. What words lack (because they are

As for the material of her panoply, no-one could guess iI, Ii)r as many
as are the colours of the rainbow, which changes its light now to one hue
21
;>'1d now to another. so many are the colours of her armour. :

hJlui.naJv.t

words, characters on the page, marks without light), images can

with a presence which is based on that lack, which grows

fro~l it,

and turns it into light. What images lack (because they are

Taking Philostratus' two descriptions in sequence, one can say

in time, mere pigments on a surf~lce, threads on a loom), words Gill

that' Looms' applies to the competition between Minerva and

sugply with narration and movement. This strange, hallueinato;y

capaei~ies of words and I~

Arachne the figure of hathos. It is a comic transformation orOvid's

power of ecphrasis calls on the

contest, down-scaled, with Penelope in the place of MinerW1

describe the world, but goes beyond their several powers into a
".~

spiders in the place of Arachne.

philostratus begins where Ovid left off, with Arachne's

to

_ moment when' Look!' becomes the only appropriate

response. The exclamation directs the reader not towards the text,

metamorphosis: 'the rest was belly' is expanded into the spider's

or its Image, but past them both into another space where presence

'repulsive fuzzy surface and its savage nature', and the spider's

grisly meaL Where Ovid uses the Arachne fable as a means to

-.

book somewhere between divine

supplemented by pictures and pictures by words. To read the

armour of Athene as the goddess emerges fullv armed from

comment on his own project in the MUal11orn/wses. niacin!! his

real' (1.23)' At the core of the Imagines is the promise tl1at. at

This is precisely the metaphor philostratus uses to describe the

that the painted grapes' are good to eat and full of winey juice;

As when after a storm of rain the sun's rays strike through, and a
rainbow with its huge curve stains the wide sky, though a thousand
different colours shine in it, the eye cannot detect the change from each
one to the next; so appear the adjacent colours.22

~~;.

inverts the rhetoric, in a comic

own work somewhere between the disorderly profusion

;, ,~vo to ,11 th,

"0'" "' ooce (';gl", h"doS, tooeh, t"''')'

Yet compared with Ovicl (or Vehizquez), philostratlls' text is

clearly self-mocking and self-defeating. Its lines move Ollt into all
the negative ecpilrastic spaces where the enanIeia of ' I.ook' j"

"",-\-

~ ~L

'fiJ:;;tJ
(.

')f

" .vJ.. ..,~ _

_ . ........,.

NORMAN BHYl>ON
PHILOSTRATLJS AND THE IMAGINARY M{I~I

exactly unfortilcoming. Instead of Aracillle, the spider; instead of

...

the loves of the gods in tapestry, an insect meal

Accompanying the project of inciting the reader

to

Oil

a web.

envision, is

enterprise.

26

Filling out what remained only tentative in Goethe's

essay, he perceives an order in the Imagines which not even their

author realised. The Imagines have to be wrested from philo

Philostratus' awareness that with every ecphrasis, at some point

stratlls' hands. Philostratus misreads the mountains of Thes~ly as

the lines and strokes always separate and unravel. The text presents

mountains of Rhodes. 'Philostratus takes no advantage of

itself as hollowed out by its own rhetorical self-awareness and as

haunted by an inescapably secondary or belated relation to
pictures. In the Proem the author dramatises himself as a painter
mangul:

these connections and does not mention them.'27 'Although

Philostratus was perfectly able to see immediately many of the
implications of single pictures, he did not discuss the cyclic idea.
He was not interested in it.'2R As Lehmann's analysis gains

Now the story of the men who have mastery in the sciellce of painting,
and the states and kings that have been passio'l<ltely devoted to it, has
been told by others writers, Ilotably Aristodemus of Carla, whom I
visited for four years In orcler to study paintinf!; ... 1n the present
discussions, however, .. we propose to describe examples of painting in
the form of addresses which have been composed for the young. 24
Four years of study with Aristodemus have led not to a career in
painting but only in criticism. In the scenography of the text,
Philostratus is always old, and lesser than the young. The son of
his host must summon him before he speaks. SpJtially he is at the

momentum, Philostratus tends to get referred to as

'the'lcctUl'e~':

'Like many orators and letter writers and teachers before and after
him, he decided to pllblish these lectures as a model of his
tecllllillue and style in handling such a task' ;29 'He paraphrased
rather than described the paintings and pointed out the emotional
values and psychological associations of each picture. His emphasis
in this collrse ill the appreciation (Ifart was one-sided, as flax heen tlwl
el'ery

professor (~f tlzis kind after Ilim' (emphases added). ~o

Lehmann himself is not, of course, a lecturer or professor of this

kind.

perimeter, beyond the city walls, a Greek wandering in Italy.

If Philostratus mocks his own secondariness, Lehmann expels

Secondary in relation to painting, his pictures are also belated in

secondariness from his text in tbe person of the outmoded

time; not the work of' men who have won mastery in the science

professor who only 'appreciates' and who cannot see what

of painting' discussed by Pliny but of painters who are never, in

Lehmann sees, the hyper-realistic image of a gallery with all its

rooms envisioned simultaneously and in detail. But these abject

fact, given names.

personifications, 'the lectlirer' and' the professor', arc not the

1\vt, t>

~~

bearers of anxiety in his reading or its only scapegoats. The

Imap'nes need to be reconstructed, Lehmann maintains, because

l'

o this negative dinlension of the Ima{(ine.>, Lehmann appears

emarkably insensitive. J n his hands the Imagilles are tt; come

alive; he will infuse them with his own visionary energy,
resurrecting the fragments of the text into a luminous stoa whose

without them the third century is 'the dark century in the history
of ancient painting', the era of a' great crisis of ancient art in which
the foundations for the development of later western art were
bid '.:11 Here are Lehmann's words for the threat his reconstruction
is to dispel:

every corner he can visualise. His work with the blta{(illes is in a

sense part of the' Pompeian' tradition which, from Winckelmann
to l3ulwer-Lytton to Ilollywood, aims to co!!i!Jre !ivi!l~ flesh from,

274

the ashes.
In terms of its own rhetoric, Lehmann's is a heroic
,......
reading. The example of 'the Irrc<lt Goerhe'2f, tTllirlp, hi,

In a period lor which a lower-middle-class tomb in Rome, like that of the

Amelii, is used as a cornerstone [or the history of palntin).!;, and I"r which
the discovery of the frescoes of a Jewish synagogue in Mesopotamia
tends to revolutionize the entire picture of the historv of ;lnr;"n.

..

--...- ..
NOH~lAN

--~-

BRYSON
PHI I. 0 S T RAT l' SAN Il THE

Is it too much to find in these words a threat

to

a cherished image

of antiquity, an image that must be protected?

a purified architectural form, whose authority is confirmed by a

as the custodian of culture working against a background of crisis

tradition of national scholarship and national culture, exiled to

and collapse. Quite naturally, the custodians must live in a great

America and written up in English, yet still in direct contact with

house, 'resplendent with all the marbles favoured by luxury,

the author of Phi/ostrats gemalde and with the Graeco-Homan

past.

the walls'. The force required to protect the custodians is that of

museum, circa 1941. It is a modernist exhibition space:

Through rhetorical operations such as these, Lehmann's

ecplrrasis becomes, in a sense, a tecitni(lue of the subject. It is surely

stripped down, diagrammatic, programmatic, yet still (at the end

much more than an archaeological reconstruction. Like Auerbad~s

of the reconstruction) conceived as a house of the great, with

Mimesis, written in Istanbtll during World War II, it mobilises the

dining-chambers for the four seasons. Better than most museums,

energies of cultural resistance to its own' dark century'. It inv{'sts

with their difficult diplomatic balance between the needs of

those energies in an incandescent visualisation that configures the

scholars and of patrons, it is wholly designed by the art historian.

beleaguered subject as a unified building. I t would, I think, be

The scholarship that builds this space is, to judge by the footnotes,
an exclusively German affair. And the account endorses the
protocols of a certain strand in the German art history of its time.
'We shall always regret where fi)nllal problems are concerned the

text's unconscious. At this buried or subterranean level, the

limitations of a description which aimed not

be approached formally, not hermeneutically, and interpretation,

reading actually moves much closer into the Imagines than it is

able to admit. Philostratus himself presents the art of painting not

as a copy of the world but <IS in ternalisation of the world. In 1.9

now a negative term, is to be confined to an outpost of

warns his audience not to be impressed by a work's mimetic

descril,e but

to

interpret what the audience saw' (emphases added). Painting is to

iconography, the identification of subjects and programme cycles.

realism: ill that case, he says, 'we should praise an insignificant

Lehmann's own hermeneutic operation presents itself as

feature of the painting and one that has solely to do with imitation
(mimesis); but we shollid nOI be praising its intelligence or

opposite of interpretive work. It proceeds by excluding <111 those

images which appear to Lehmann to be editorial additions grafted
to the main text, supposedly anomalous products of writing and

sense of decorum it shows, though these, I believe, are the most

important elements of art '.:l~ .lust as painting shows the world as

publication, mere word-pictures un backed by actual referents. It

prunes away the rhetorical elaborations of 'the lecn1rer' and

it has already passed into the subjectivity of the painter, so the

beholder should not dwell 011 the external matter of mimesis but

01'\'

S I.

wrong to find fault with Lehmann's reading at the level on which

it appears to operate, of slellth-like deduction and rationality.

Expelled by the text's rational procedures, rhetoric returns as

to

N 1\ H Y \I

inferior and margin<11 groups. Art history triumphs over 'art

appreciation '. The end product of these procedurt,s is the vision of

Art history emerges here in one of its dubious heroising guises,

but ... particularly splendid by reason of the panel-paintings set in

r M A (;]

bypasses the pictures themselves in order to reach th~ solid

internalise the image, drawing it inside the subject. On their own

masonry behind them, as though representation itself, verbal or

the audience can see pictures, and judge mimesis, perfectly well;

pictorial, were a barrier to be torn dowH. This process is presented

as a series of purifications. The text contaminated for publication

the audience do not yet know are the techniques for

absorbing the pictures into the mind. It is precisely

is returned to its pristine state. The visual field is purged of its

verbal dimension in a double movement from text In architecture
and from arl criticism to archaeology. Antiquity's dark age is
banished. Its whuralmainstrcam is protected against distortion by

in this assimilation of pictures to subjectivity that the audience has

come to hear Philostratus speak.
It is in this aspect of internalisation that the Imafiines revc,J/
rhetoric itself as a techllolo{!v Of eli"c;nlin., ,,' t1,e> ""If 'T-\._ .r

..

1IIM,\N BRYSON

PHILOSTRATUS AND THE IMA(;(NARY MlISEU~1

of the Ad Herenniuflt names memoria as the fourth part of

rhetoric. 34 In order to memorise a lengthy speech, the orator
should visualise the successive topics of his discourse as images
arranged in consecutive places within architectural space. In the
words of Frances Yates, 'who is that m,lfi moving slowly in
lonely building, stopping at intervals with an intent face? He is a
rhetoric student forming a set of memory loci.'35 Architecture's
role in rhetoric is as the supplier of milieux within which intense
Ul

visualisations are to occur.: As Cicero says, the images should be

... c':~) .

(~~,)

.
./
-~

.(~. .0

-.---~ ...'"

hI'. 34

, active, sharply defined, and unusual, having the power of speedily

encountering and penetrating the psyche' (quae oCCflrrere celeri

reading rejoins Philostratus' rhetoric as an operation whose means'

terque percutere animum possim). 37 The speech unfolds as

is imaginary buildings and whose goal is mastery over self and

rhetorician walks in his mind past walls, each memory-place hung

over representation. Ecphrasis here is a technique for consolidating

with a vivid image, through rooms, doorways, stairways,

the subject in terms of personal and professional control. While on

porticoes, terraces.

the surface of his text Lehmann disavows hermeneutic art history

and expels 'the lecturer', at other levels of his text Lehmann is

The first notion is placed, as it were, ill the !()recourt; the second, let us
say, in the atrium; lhe remainder are placed in order round the
impluvium, and committed not only to bedrooms and parlours, but even
3R
to statues and the like.

Philostratus' shadow-partner or secret sharer. Lehmann's entry

into the culture of late antiquity is through a shape-shifting in
which he performs the architectural ars memorativa of a third
century orator.

The stability and dependability of this internal architecture is vital

Yet he does so in terms very different from those supplied in the

for the control of the self over its material. To forget the existence

Imagines. The kind of subject proposed and assllmed by

of a particular room is to leave out a whole stage of the argument;

Philostratus' text is much less driven by the urge towards unitary

to lTIisremember the sequence of images is

self-possession. The Imagines' subject exists in a universe where

to garble

the

things, images and words may frequently converge but do not

presentation of the case.

consistently fuse together ill the ardour of imaginary vision. The

places are chosen, and marked om with the utmost possible v,lriety, as
a spacious house divided into a number of rooms. Every thinK of note
therein is diligently imprinted on the mind, in order that thongl\! n~ay be
able to fun through all the parts without let or hindrance. The filst task
is to secure that there shall be no difficulty in funning through these, for
that memory must be most firmly fixed which helps another memory. all

descriptions show the subject in transit across the interstices where

Here architecture not only stands for the control of the self; it is

over. The loom is a thing that makes images, yet we do not see the

world, pictures and language overlap. Especially interesting 10

Philostratus are the hybrid or chiasmic zones where dillerent
registers cross over (fig. 34).
Let us return, for the last time, to 'Looms '. Penelope's loom
exists at the place where images and the things of the world cross

the actual material means by which the self exercises its control

images it makes, only the things - warp, threads, shuttle

over its words and its world.

works with. Again, when the weavers travel across the web, or eat

If Lehmann's unitary and massively stable architecture stands

~1

...... _1

_~ l...;

..... "",.

J.. ~"

it

their squirming prey, they are seen as living, moving creatures;

hill at thl' s;!me time the reader knows they are onlv a static nictllrf'.

,9

_ ...-.-- ---- ......

...

..

'

".....

'.OIlMAN BRYSON
PHILOSTRATUS AND THE IMAGINAI\Y M(,SEI'\'

Elsewhere, the text moves to the place where the things of the
world cross over into words. The author tells us that the spiders'
'cables' are almost too tine to discern. What brings them into view
are in fact Hesiod's lines about spiders dest:ending and ast:ending
their threads. The word makes the thing exist. Or a single word in
Greek -- arachnc is able to generate two utterly different beings,
spiders and the weaver who challenged Minerva. The characters of
'Looms' are, so to speak, engendered by an ecphrastic pun. Words
and things change pi'lCes. At other times, the text crosses the place
where words and image blend. Homer's text turns into a picture,
then back again into Homer's words. The line between what is
verbal and visual cannot be drawn. 4o
(

Among other things, Lehmann's reading exemplifies some of

the paradoxes inherent in the tradition of positivist scholarship to
which it belongs. It is this aspect that raises his reconstruction
above the category of historiGl1 oddity, to adumbrate some of the
vicissitudes of positive knowledf!;e in more general terms. First,
Lehmann's relation to the literary, to textuality and intenextualitx,
is remarkably strained and contradictory. The architectural ord~r

The subject of the Imagines is in constant motion and dispersal

he proposes for the Imagines is itselfbibliograplllc: Lehmann needs

texts 10 enable his reconstruction to take place; in order to build

across this complex terrain qf wprld, jmilg@ <lAd te:xr. When the
outward pictures enter the subject and are assimilated to the seWs

his version of Philostratus' villa he must resort to the library; what

interior, they scatter across an intricately divided and Auid space.

The images of Philostratus exist as r~fractiollS in 'a multi
dimensional space in which a variety of voices, none of them
original, blend and clash '.41 The subject who performs this

--

he says, for instance, concerning the typology of rooms, their

orientation and relation to the seasons, is directly dependent on
Vitruvius. Yet at the same time his analysis mllst bypass textuality
in order to dissolve the texts into architectural form. Necessary at
certain moments of the analysis, at others textuality becomes an

internalisation is in perpetual motion. The moments when, at the

philostratian 'Look!', the various registers join in visionary

obstacle to be scornfully removed. Inherently untrustworthy

beside the actuality (the positivism) of the archaeological find,

fusion, do not last long. Almost at once the visions separate out

texts are aligned in his interpretation with ideas of parasitism and

mediocrity, figured here by the 'lecturer' or 'professor'. The

into their component strands, unravelling as fast as they came

together. And they lead on to the next image - more than sixty
times. The unravelling of one image clears the space for the
coming together of the next one. Or, better, the unravelling of
each image calls into being, summons, the next. It is in that
perpetual, Penelope-like emergence and falling away of images
that the subject is spun by the text. Not as a central storehp~se or

So

Goethe, national culture, ethnic centrality, profcssion,lIisll1, posi

tive knowledge. Which should make Lehmann Philostratus' most
inappropriate reader, were it not for the brilliance and the yearning
of his own visualisation.

gallery, more a~ a motion or desire.

.
Lehmann's subject is in a sense the opposite of thiJ. In
Lehmann's case, internalising philostralUs' text means seeking a
means to arrest the motions of the text and to t:apture and
immobilise its energies in a final, culminating form. Into the
stability of the huilding that is to end the text as motion and desire
are poured all the author's ligures for the command of the subject:
massive masonry, the prestige of the museum, purified form,

reading works both to banish textual corruption completely

(which cannot easily show up ill the analysi~, since hiatuses in the
text arc translated at once into architectural syntax), and to build
the necessity for textual wrruption into his case (as when
Lehmann axes the last eight descriptions, as 'later additions ').
Textuality features in this mode of analysis primarily under tlte
sign of repression. Where it is able to grow transparent before the
three-dimensional architectural and archaeological order, it can be
admitted. Where textuality fails to become translucent hcfilfe
reference it must be expelled, even if the effort to do so becomes
massive, involving the whole battery of figures for the command
of th~ sui)ject.
Secondly, this ef1:ort to repress textuality runs counter to many
of the most conspicuous features of Philostratl,<;' PI'"h,..".,;..

t>:nHMAN BRYSON

PllILOSTRAT!!S AND THE IMAGINAHY MliS

writing, especially its interest in exploring the' negative' ecphrastic

spaces in which the reader, so far from experiencing a dissolution

underside of his text that his deepest engagement with Philostratus

of writing before the luminous referellt (tlte philostratian

may be found. What he writes is, perhaps, the dream-work of

'Look! '), apprehends the text as a sophisticated web of allusions,

positivism; not the forensics of archaeology, but its own buried

poetics. 42

parodies, puns, and tonal plays. Lehmann's quest for the stable

uncollscious, and it is in that energetic and overdetermined

masonry of the referent seems altogether blind to the many ways

in which philostratus' writing plays to the ,wplzia of the reader, as
one who can see bizarre connections, who can understand hidden
narrativcs within imagery (A rachne, Mincrva), wilD can
exercise the visual eqllivalent of the elaborate verbal dexterity that
characterises Hellenistic poetry. When philostratus says that the
web the spiders make is 'exceedingly fine' (k)p erleI'IOS) , he is
doing more dlan asking

liS

to visualise something hard

to

see; he

is using a key term from Hellenistic poetics, /eplOs, which means

'witty', 'fint", 'clever', 'small-scale', 'sophisticated', and doing
so as an invitation or a warning to the reader that his own writing,
too, is all of these things. It is a warning that Lehmann, perhaps
wisely, does not heed: for once ecphrasis is thought of as a form
writing that involves much mort' than a simple visualisation of
a text, it leaves behind the one certainty that ecphrasis seemed to
hold out to the archaeologist - its promise of presence, of
resurrection

and becomes something else, a mode of writing

whose complexity we are perhaps only beginning to discern, and

in relation to which tlie idea of visualisation begins to appear as a
simplification, at best.
Finally, the scrupulous rationality of Lehmann's interpretive
method, with its emphasis on what can be deduced and
demonstrated as positive knowledge and as archilectural form,
renders it strangely unaware of its own aspect of te'l'lIality, of the
ways in which it is itself a working wilh words in whit\ the words
carry more associations, motivations, and effect than the writer is
able

to

hear or control. Working within a highly instrumental and

reduced picture-theory of language, Lehmann's analysis radically

underestimates the capacity of words to exceed their allotted
functions of argumentation, demonstration, and proof. Opening
2X2

on to other investments and other scenes tban that simply of

archaeology and reconstruction, Lehmann's text speaks its own

.' ; ~

l'. <JTES TO PAGES

244--61

NOTES TO P,\(;I-:S

}O On

Pausani,ls, see Frazer (1898), Heer (1979), Jacob (1980),

Habich 1 (1985) and Elsner (1992).

}I These

include discussions of the wild satyrs of the islands, 1.23.5-{);

I. 33.4-{,;

the Ethiopians,

10 [n fact the lmalfines do not supply indications concerning the

dimensions of any particular work.

II

the Ionian Greeks, 7.2.2-5.1); the

marvellous animals collected in Rome, 9.21.1-2; the islands of

2()2

[t should also be noted that Lehmann's groupings occasionally

require him to rewrite the given titles of pictures.

11 'These last eight pictures of the second book show a remarkable

Sardinia and Corsica, 10.17.1-13.

absence of any stich relation and connection as we have found

everywhere else.' Lehmann (1941) 37.

32 See Elsner (1992) 17--20.

33 See Frazer (1898) xiv; compare other second-century

CE

descrip

tions of ruins, such as Dio Chrysostom on Thebes, Oratio 7,

Plutarch, De "~rcctu oracu/orum 8, Lucian, Dia/og. 11I0rt.

13 Lehmann (1941) 39-40.

14 The image of weaving is frequently used of writing; see, for

27.2.

example, Catullus ()4.5ofr., in which the marriage of Peleus and

34 This chapter began as a paper on Herodotus' pyramids delivered to

Thetis is covered with a ,'estis ... variata .figuris, pestit decorata

Paul Cartledge's Ancient History Seminar in Cambridge in 1989. I

jiguris, where filfura is also a literary term for Catullus' (;wn

wish to thank him, John Henderson, Jamie Masters and the Editors

rhetoric. Perhaps the crucial sites of configuring language, image

of this volume for their comments on earlier drafts. My deepest debt

and weaving are words such as ypaq>lv, grap/Iein, which means

'write'/'draw '/' design , (in thread).

is to Joan Pau Rubies y Mirabet, with whom I have fi)r several years
discussed the problems of travel, travel-writing and identity. This
chapter is dedicated to him.

Worfrs an,1 Days 777.

16 The presence of Arachne in 'Looms' has been argued since the

Renaissance. See, for example, the gloss on 'Les Etoiles' in Blaise

CHApTEH EIGHT

PHlLOSTRATliS AND

Tin:

IMA(;INARY

MUSEUM

1 English translations are taken from the Loeb edition, edited by

T. E. Page, E. Capps and W. H. D. Rouse (London and New

17 Ovid, Met. 6.5~-8.

York,193 1).

18 Minerva depicts Rhodope and Ilaemus, who dared

2 For the history of the debate see the editions of Jacobs and Welcker

to

cal!

themselves gods, now turned to mountains; the Pygmaean queen

(1825); Kayser (1844); Benndorf and Schenkel (1893); and

who challenged Juno, now turned into a crane; Antigone, turned

Steinmann (1914).

by the angered Juno into a stork; Cinyras, whose daughters are

turned to stone.

3 Lehmann (1941).
4 The essay is conveniently to be f()Und in vo!'

XXVI

of Cotta's

standard edition (1868) pp. 276fT.

6 'Obviously he describes pictures that were topogll<'tphically united,
but without regard to the ideological and /(JrluaJ rda\~m which had
dictated their combination.' Lehmann (1941)

20.

7 'Indeed, the only explanation of the relationships and the lack of

order is that philostratus saw real pictures which were, to a certain
extent, arranged on the upper and lower parts of walls ... ' Lehmann
(1941) 20.
8 Lehmann (1941) 31-3.
9 Lehmann (1941) 31-3.

19 Arachne's tapestry shows Europa abducted by the bull; Asterie

carried off by the eagle; Leda pursued by the swan;
disguised as Amphitryon; Danae.

Lehmann (1941) 21-4.

112

de Vigenere's edition of 1610, 514. Lehmann (1941) 39 also

suggests that the two pictures (2.27 and 2.18) both refer to the
Arachne story.

Jllpiter

20 Met. 6.140--4.
21 Barkan (1986) 4.
22 Met

6.63--6.

23 2.27. 1~-19.

24 lmaxine.r Proem.

25 Lehmann (1941) 16.

26 In the first paragraph of Lehmann's article, Goethe is found

to

be

disappointed by Pompeii and Herculaneum, mere' Middletowns' as

Goethe/Lehmann put it, from whose' limited atmosphere' they

,,

NOTES TO I'AUES 27~-83

turn away towards the Imagines. Heference to Goethe recur

at several points in the essay: 'Strangely enough, no-one, with the
exception of Goethe, has ever called attention to the problem of the
general order of the paintings in the two books of philostratus'

List of works cited

(19). Yet Goethe's rearrangement of the Imap'nes is also, as

Lehmann put it, 'cavalier': his own essay lJl1ilds more sys
tematically on Goethe's

27 Lehmann (1941) 2S.

28 Lehmann (1941) 30.
29 Lehmann (1941) 41-2.
30 Lehmann (1941) 41.
31 Lehmann (1941) 17-18.

For abbreviations, see pp. xi--xiii.

32 Lehmann (1941) 17

Adler,

33 Imagines 1.9 18-22.; 1 have

modified the Locb translation

Study of Corinthian Vases. Berkeley.

3) Yates (1966) 8.

Arnheim, R. (1988) The Poet at

the art of memory see the discussion

of Elsner (forthcoming) chapter

2,

section v.

Arnott, P. (1962) Greek Scellic COl/vent/oils ill til/! Fijth Celllu~)' B.C.
Oxford.

38 Quimilian, in.H. orat. 11.2.20, cited by Yates (1966) 22.

39 Quintilian, Inst. oral., 11.2.18, cited by Yates (1966)

(19 89) Puhlic and Performance ill the Greek Theater. London.

22.

Arnott, W. G. (1987) 'The Stream and the Gold. Two notes

40 The diagram (Iig. 34) is not satisfactory; for instance its lines
to

Corte, vol.

illlaNille., constantly shuttles between words, il1la~es and thin~s.

(1977) 'The curse of civilizatioll: the choral odes of the PllOem.u-ae',

HSCP 81: 163-8,.

and image: perhaps the principal ecphrastic space~ \he space of the

Ashmole, B. (1972) Architect and Sculptor in Classical Greece. London.

Ashmole, B. and Yalouris, N. (1967) Olympia. The Sculptures of the

41 Barthes (1977) 145-6.

42 1 am grateful to the members of the Laurcncc Seminar, held in the
to

Simon Goldhill, jas Elsner and Stephen Bann for their very

U rhino,

Diss. Yale University.

hybrid area ofwords/ubjects; (7) is the area of blur between word

Department of Classics at Cambridge in May 1991, !<Jr their help in

I.

Arthur [Katl,], M. (1975) Hurt/,ides' phoenis,lae and the P"litics

Area (5) is that of merger between things and images; (6) is the

formulating the ideas presented in this essay, and particularly

011

Theocritus', in Filologia e forme letterarie: studi (1fimi a F. Della

suggest fluidity and continuum.

But 1 hope the reader will follow at least the diagram's gist: that the

welcome observations and

rile Center. A ,)'tudl' ofCompo siti011 in the

Visual Art.r. Berkeley.

37 Ad HerenniulII 2.87.3)8, cited by Yates (1966) 18.

wurd graphein.

der

Amyx, D. A. (1988) Corinthian Vase Painting orr/Ie Arc/laic Period. The

eloculio, memoria, pmllUl!lialio.

fixity, when the whole point is

1'0.'1

Alpers, S. (1983) The Art of Descrihlilg. Chicago.

34 In Ad Herel/f/iun/ the five parts of rhetoric are:

to

and Ernst, U. (1988) Text als Figur: 1'1:welle Poesie

Antike !>is rur Moderne. Weinheim.

here.

36 On architecture's relation

J.

Temple of Zeus. London.

Baladit" H. (1980) La Pilopollnese de Strahon. Paris.

-if. \Bann,
-

s. (1989) The True Vine: on Visual Representanim al/d tllet

lf7estern Tradition. Cambridge.

-J

J, w.

(1990) Prelliston'e Textiles: the Del'e/opmellt ,,(Clotll ill

the Neolithic and Bron{e Ages. Princctoll.
(199 2) . The peplos of Athelia', in Goddess and Polis: tILl' PaIlGtIz('//(//c

Barber, E.