Is Intervisuality a thing? Clearly the editors think so, apparently by analogy with ‘intertextuality’ (e.g. p. 1). But (admittedly after a rich few decades of scholarship) what intertextuality and what an intertext are, are clear. Whatever intervisuality may be, the idea of an intervis (or is that an intervisual?) is not at all clear. First, and above all, intertextuality is mono-medial: one text relates to and plays on another (or many). Is intervisuality about images playing on images or about texts playing on images or about images playing on texts? And if it is about all these things, does the difference make a difference? In other words, the intermedial problem matters and needs thinking through. If you call a book Intervisuality, it might be natural for readers to expect an extended discussion and definition, the argued development of a position that will make intervisuality a thing. But Capra and Floridi's eleven-page introduction offers only a few ‘tentative takes’. The one chapter, ‘Intervisuality from the Middle Ages to Classical Antiquity’ by A. Pizzone, that might threaten a definition, starts off with a couple of medieval art historians and then skips lightly across some eclectically chosen examples from antiquity. None of this establishes anything. I remain as unclear about the controlling concept as I was before I had heard of it, and nothing in the book has sharpened the focus. But if the concept is to have any value and traction theoretically, it needs clear expression, definition and an argued justification.
So much for a grumpy introduction. It is fair because the editors have failed the concept that their grandiose title over-signals. It is unfair because this is a rather good collection of essays on the complicated and good old theme of image and text in ancient culture (not a young topic when T.B.L. Webster published Greek Art and Literature in 1939), an area of intense, rich and high-octane scholarly discussion in the last four decades (just like ‘intertextuality’, but without a catchy title). We are offered thirteen papers in addition to the introduction, with no obvious direct connection, but all loosely assembled around the ‘intervisuality’ banner. After Pizzone's opener attempting to justify the main theme, we are offered a disappointingly chronological framework: six papers on the ‘Archaic and Classical Age’, five on the ‘Hellenistic and Imperial Age’ (when on earth and in what mindset were these one?), which only offer one piece on pre-Imperial and one that is deeply Byzantine, and finally a parting shot ‘Pointing to Rome’. This arrangement is odd, but is perhaps excusable in the subtitle of ‘Greek literature’. After all, as many are now showing (we may add recent contributions by D. Jolowicz and O. Hodkinson to É. Prioux's article in this volume), Greeks read Latin and Romans read Greek widely, deeply and late – at least into the fourth century: so why separate Roman historical representations from the world of imperial Greece?
Many of the papers are, despite the unfortunate framing, rather interesting. Let us begin according to the order given by the editors. A. Bierl offers a long and thoughtful account of how Aeschylus uses the visual in the Oresteia, in the sense both of what was done and seen on stage and how the world of imagery was conjured through words. I am not sure why G. Gazis's paper refers to ‘cinematic warfare’ in the title (which implies a flaky anachronism that would need much theory to justify), since what he offers is a sound and interesting exploration of the aristeia in relation both to memory and to the duel motif in Mycenaean and Minoan art, especially seals. R. Palmisciano contributes a piece on the interrelation of imagery and poetry from the symposium (i.e. a lot of it is about sex), but does not enlarge on his (I suspect largely correct) observation that the vast majority of ‘the most graphic paintings’, despite their Athenian provenance, ‘were geared to the tastes and needs of Etruscan clients’. C. Catenacci proposes a very promising topic – ‘The Protohistory of Portraits in Words and Images’ – a vast and complex arena into which he can offer only the beginnings of a glimpse. C. Nobili addresses the interesting issue of how archaic lyric mapped and envisioned the spaces it celebrated (a field that has sprung to life in the last decade with a series of significant contributions by the likes of R. Neer and L. Kurke, L. Athanassaki and D. Fearn), focusing in this piece on Athens. The excellent chapter by Athanassaki – building on her own earlier work and some by F. Zeitlin – wonderfully explores the imaginaire of the Athenian temples in Euripides (notably the Ion and the fragmentary Erechtheus). Looking at these two papers, you wonder why this sort of thing has been so little attempted in such a long history of writing on both Greek poetry/drama and Greek art …
The one Hellenistic paper is B. Acosta-Hughes's reading of the statuary of Arsinoe II against the contemporary surviving poetry of Posidippus, Callimachus and Theocritus. In a virtuoso performance that is not awfully intervisual but very inter-generic, E. Bowie kicks off the imperial section with a brilliant account of declamation, deixis, agonistic poetry and hymnody in the second century ce. Taking on the most consistently visually interested writer of the Second Sophistic, Floridi turns to Europa in Lucian's Dialogues of the Sea Gods. Interestingly, and anticipating Prioux's paper on Philostratus the Elder that follows, Floridi supports the likelihood that Lucian had read Ovid, and shows also the ways in which he picks up on visual schemata of his time in order to evoke what she calls ‘his rich fresco in words’. Prioux's thought-provoking chapter on Philostratus’ Imagines asks if Philostratus was an admirer of Ovidian enargeia, and offers close comparative readings between the two authors especially in relation to Narcissus and Phaethon. Sticking with the Imagines, R. Höschele shows the dependence of Aristaenetus’ late antique erotic letters on a range of Philostratean allusion. Finally, in an odd stand-out paper since it is obvious that Roman material is as much part of this range of subjects as Greek, M. Cadario looks at the relationship of texts and images in Roman ‘historical’ representations, a very old and rich topic in the history of Roman art.
Most of these papers are not really very ‘intervisual’ (whatever that means), but they are all alive to varieties of visuality – from art of a given period (whether as image-types and iconographies or specific distinguished monuments) to the ways in which texts create the mental impression of the visual through such techniques as ekphrasis and enargeia. In this they bring to bear an important and continuing strand of intermedial interest between text and image – already embodied in Webster's work of nearly a century ago although not named or theorised in that way until much more recently. The fact that the intermedial is of unrelenting significance in Greek (and Latin) thought from the Shield of Achilles in the Iliad to Greek poetry and prose in the Christian period, whether ekphrastic epigram or the epics of Nonnus or the tradition of Philostratus extending deep into Byzantium, is an important issue in ancient literature: K. Thein's recent savvy book on Ecphrastic Shields (2021) is a good entré. Likewise, the continuing imbrication of material works of art with inscriptions – from archaic dedications via all kinds of honorific and sacred statuary, public buildings and official monuments in the Hellenistic and Roman worlds to the vibrant epigraphic life of churches and Christian sacred art both east and west – indicates the same concerns with a deep intermedial connection across the entire historical trajectory of ancient visual culture. The issues change with different periods and period-concerns as well as political/social contexts given the specific subject one is looking at. They also change depending on the differing cultural lenses contemporary scholarship may apply. Those lenses are in radical free-floating transformation in our time with the move of the book from material printed codex into digital forms, the incredible speed of the shift to virtual platforms in all forms of communication, teaching and academic exchange (not to speak of entertainment and gaming), the extraordinary rise of a visual-dominated society through the internet (coupled with all the problems of verification of realities in the new world of ultra-convincing deep fakes and VR). In other words, the intellectual space for scholarly exploration signalled by this book is only going to expand exponentially – with many benefits in terms of the new intelligent reflections about ancient intermedialities that will become possible in the light of radical transformations in contemporary experience. But – and this is to return to my critique at the start – the issues need critical distance and theoretical formulation, so we can understand what is at stake (both for antiquity and for modernity) in intervisuality's intervention in every aspect of life. That critical reflection and understanding is the task of an academic vocation.
