Abstract

The close relationship that can be established between poetry and painting may be studied in the evolution of the concept of ekphrasis, a Greek rhetorical term originally used to refer to a descriptive passage in writing. In recent times, however, the meaning of the term has narrowed gradually, being limited, first, to visual descriptions and then to the description of a real or imagined work of visual art. In this paper, we focus on the ways in which ekphrastic poems simultaneously depend on and enhance the life of the paintings by which they are inspired. This is a process by which the reciprocal mirroring of arts results in a doubly refined meaning which is constituted in and by the reader’s ‘eye’