Poetry in a World of Things: Aesthetics and Empiricism in Renaissance Ekphrasis by Rachel Eisendrath

Author:Rachel Eisendrath
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: University of Chicago Press

CHAPTER SIX

Coda: Make Me Not Object

After Virgil’s refugees from the Trojan War are shipwrecked on the shores of Carthage, they set out to explore the territory. In a grove, Aeneas comes upon a temple of Juno on the walls of which, amazingly, he encounters paintings of the war he has just lived through. “Behold, there is Priam!” Aeneas exclaims with tears in his eyes (1.461).1 It is as though the terrible experiences that he has had to hold tightly locked within himself have been suddenly externalized and now stand before him objectively as things.

Transfixed, he studies the sequence of images, recognizing one figure after another—indeed, eventually recognizing himself. The moment when he sees himself is astonishing, not unlike the moment I analyzed at the beginning of this book in Petrarch’s Africa where the Carthaginian envoys recognized their own things on display in the Temple of Jupiter. In this Virgilian ekphrasis, which Petrarch undoubtedly had in mind, it is as though the present has already become the past—as if Aeneas were already able to witness the historical construction of himself, encountering in these paintings who he will have become (in the future perfect tense) once he has been rendered into a thing of history. In his case, the moment is one of almost fantastical fulfillment. “Here are the tears of things,” he famously says, “and mortal matters touch the mind” (1.462, sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt). These things, whether understood as the events depicted or as the paintings, now have the capacity to move people in a manner that he imagines as almost tactile—Aeneas’s verb is tangere, to touch. The Roman desire to, as Shakespeare’s Enobarbus will put it, earn “a place i’ th’ story” (3.13.47) has been achieved.2

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