In this essay I seek to challenge the premise that Gotthold Ephriam Lessing’s Laocoön (1766)
represented a radical overhaul of eighteenth-century conceptions of ekphrasis in English
Literature. Lessing famously argued that painting and poetry are not interchangeable, namely
because the former operates in the spatial realm and the latter is confined to temporality. His
argument in this respect challenges the idea of the ‘Sister Arts’ in a way which is often
heralded as revolutionary: I suggest, however, that the seeds of this idea had been planted
long before Lessing’s text. A close examination of Alexander Pope’s notes in his own
translation of the Iliad nearly fifty years previously reveals some similarities to Lessing,
albeit veiled in the rhetoric of antiquity, and the second half of my essay focuses specifically
on the poet’s rendering of the Shield of Achilles to provide evidence for this claim.
Ultimately I argue (with the help of a quotation from Pope’s own Essay on Criticism) that
Lessing did not so much overturn pre-existing ekphrastic theory as give voice to alreadyexisting ideas about the relationship between poetry and painting, so that the widespread
critical movement away from the ‘Sister Arts’ can be seen retrospectively as a gradual
process rather than an ‘overnight’ phenomenon.
To what extent do the ‘Observations on the Shield of Achilles’ (circa.1720) by Alexander
Pope thematically preclude Laocoön (1766) by Gotthold Ephriam Lessing?
I had intended to approach Alexander Pope’s ‘translation’ of, and notes about, Homer’s
Shield of Achilles (in Book XVIII of his Iliad) with a veneer of Historicist scepticism, and
thus remove the poem from the context of 1720 to demonstrate aspects of ‘modern’
ekphrastic concerns in the text. By doing so, I had hoped to confirm my suspicion that the
status of Gotthold Ephriam Lessing’s Laocoön (1766) as a ‘turning-point’ in the history of
ekphrasis was a convenient fiction, or the product of a critical tendency to oversimplify the
processes of bygone literary theory. Rather than accepting the generalised binary of pre-and
post- Laocoön ekphrasis – that is, where the more ‘naïve’ interpretations of ut pictura poesis
are immediately replaced by a ‘knowing’ disunity between poetry and painting1 – I had
expected that Pope’s famous rendering of the shield would in some way preclude what we
now perhaps think of as an exclusively ‘recent’ distrust about writing for art. In truth,
however, I could find little in this section of Pope’s Iliad which operated against the
seemingly too-easy relationship between the ‘Sister Arts’ – the ‘once friendly’ before
Lessing’s ‘now irreconcilable’ – that I had intended to dispel. The poet’s revealing notes
about Homer’s shield of Achilles, complex though they may be, appear to be ‘of their time’
in their rhetorical attachment to both neoclassical pictorialism and what Christopher Braider
highlights as ‘the ostensible parity of the Sister Arts [which] in effect turned painting into a
mirror in which poetry ceaselessly contemplated its own likeness.’2
In short, I was initially surprised by how ‘innocent’ or ‘simple’ Pope’s ideas of (the
oft-misquoted) ut pictura poesis appeared to be in that he rarely showed himself to be
sensitive to the conflicts inherent in writing for art which we now think of as commonplace.
In the notes to his translation of Homer’s shield (entitled ‘Observations on the Shield of
Achilles’) the poet states that “I shall attempt what has not yet been done, to consider it [the
verbal Buckler] as a Work of Painting, and prove it in all respects comfortable to the most
just Ideas and establish’d Rules of that Art”, and goes on to say that the shield represents “a
John Hollander, in The Gazer’s Spirit: Poems Speaking to Silent Works of Art (Chicago: University Press,
1995) heralds Laocoön as ‘a far-reaching and profound commentary, after which the concept of ut pictura
poesis would never be the same.’ (p.102)
1
2
Christopher Braider, Refiguring the Real: Picture and Modernity in Word and Image 1400-1700 (New Jersey:
Princeton University Press) p.7
full and exact Idea of Painting in all its Parts; that is to say, in the Invention, the Composition,
the Expression, &c.”3 In light of these statements Jean H. Hagstrum observes that ‘Pope’s
explanatory notes, intended to comment on Homer as a poet, also express the view that to be
a poet was to be a painter’.4 While the practice of treating Homer as a painter was both
established (Hagstrum attributes it, through Petrarch, to Cicero) and ideologically justifiable
(through the competition between the Arts expressed in the term paragone), the strength of
Pope’s conviction about the Sister Arts is surprising in retrospect given his (albeit
unknowing) position in the history of ekphrasis: Lessing’s influential essay Laocoön would
soon completely reject such similarities between poetry and painting by claiming that
‘painting employs wholly different signs or means of imitation from poetry, – the one using
forms and colours in space, the other articulate sounds in time’,5 and it seems almost
inconceivable that only fifty years earlier a foremost ‘Wit’ would have been so ‘unprepared’
for, or ‘unaware’ of, this imminent (in relative terms) revelation.
Despite the influential and persistent nature of Lessing’s discoveries in Laocoön about
the impossibility of ekphrasis, I am not going to argue within the confines of this essay that
he was any ‘righter’ than Pope before him. After all, recent theory about writing for art has
placed great emphasis on the idea that binary oppositions can reasonably be held in
suspension: ekphrasis may be at once selfless and self-serving, explicatory and dominant,
revelatory and concealing or (in this case) alike and dissimilar to its subject. What I will
explore is whether Pope’s ‘Observations’ on the Bower of Achilles anticipated or
foreshadowed Lessing in any way, and the sense of ‘movement’ evident in Homer’s shield is
a suitably controversial starting-point for this inquiry:
Two Lions rushing from the Wood appear’d;
And seiz’d a Bull, the Master of the Herd:
He roar’d: in vain the Dogs, the Men withstood,
They tore his Flesh, and drank the sable Blood.
The Dogs (oft’ chear’d in vain) desert the Prey,
Dread the grim Terrors, and at distance bay. (Homer’s Iliad, Book XVIII, ll. 671-676)
Pope acknowledges in his notes that the dynamic portrayal of the shield has been subject to
attack, accepting that many critics “object in the first place, that ‘tis impossible to represent
All primary references to Pope’s Iliad and his ‘Observations on the Shield of Achilles’ are taken from The
Poems of Alexander Pope, Volume VIII, Edited by Maynard Mack (London: Methuen, 1967)
4
Jean H. Hagstrum, The Sister Arts (Chicago: University Press, 1965) p.229
5
Gotthold Ephriam Lessing, Laocoön: An Essay upon the Limits of Painting and Poetry, translated by Ellen
Frothingham (New York: Dover Publications, 1898) p.91
3
the Movement of the Figures [on a shield].” The English writer responds to criticism of the
bower by Eustathius (who laments that Homer “took care to say that they moved and fought,
as if they were living Men”) when continuing immediately that those ancients who claimed
that the Greek Poet should not make his description more “admirable and marvellous”
through animation, since “the Original should always excel the Copy”, had “founded this
ridiculous Opinion on a Rule of Aristotle”. Perhaps it is inevitable that Pope should rally
against the Platonic hierarchy of art to which he alludes: after all, to subscribe to this order
would be to place his own work – as a translation of a verbal representation of a created
visual representation of ‘Two [‘real’] Lions rushing from the Wood’ – at four removes (in
simplistic terms) from Plato’s privileged conception of ‘Lion-ness’. The problem here
resides less in Pope’s rubbishing of Aristotelian principles, though, and more in what he fails
to address in response to the implicit interrogation of pictorial art within his own echoing of
the line “tis impossible to represent the Movement of Figures”.
What Pope evades throughout his ‘Observations on the Shield of Achilles’ is the basic
inability of static paintings and plastic arts (or shields) to represent the temporal structures
imposed on the (translated) Shield of Achilles. In Laocoön Lessing argues that ‘succession in
time is the province of the poet, coexistence in space that of the artist’,6 so that the narrative
construction of Homer’s (and Pope’s) presentation of the shield – of the “rushing” lions, or
the dogs who “withstood” before they “desert the Prey”, or ‘The rev’rend Elders nodded o’er
the case; | Alternate, each th’attesting Scepter took’ (ll. 586-7, my italics) – will soon come to
be viewed as an impossibility, or as the ekphrastic illusion of Lessing’s ‘pregnant moment’.
Was the English poet naïve in his ignorance of the impossible divide between the Sister Arts,
where he (fore)sees no complications in calling Homer’s poetry “a complete Idea of
Painting”? Or was he perhaps unknowingly prefiguring Emile L. Bergman, who recognised
that ‘while the “primary” illusion of painting may be spatial, it is not limited to creating the
illusion of three dimensions on a two-dimensional surface’? 7 The resolution to this question
would also decide (as considered in my introduction) whether Pope’s apparent attachment to
the idea of ut pictura poesis was forged in complete ignorance of the ideas which would soon
succeed him, or in spite of his anticipation of the possibility for arguments like that of
Laocoön.
6
Lessing, p.109
Emile L. Bergman, Art Inscribed: An Essay on Ekphrasis in Spanish Golden Age Poetry (Cambridge Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1979) p.5
7
In his renowned Essay on Criticism Pope makes the following declaration about
human understanding:
True Wit is Nature to advantage dress'd
What oft was thought, but ne'er so well express'd;
Something whose truth convinced at sight we find,
That gives us back the image of our mind. (Book II, ll. 97-100)
In looking to universal “Nature” as the source of true wit, the poet suggests that we all share a
sort of latent knowledge (“What oft was thought”) which strangely ‘comes back to us’ (“truth
convinced at sight we find”) when it is “well express’d” by somebody else. This
phenomenon has been exemplified in modern times by Magritte’s Pipe, which brilliantly
illustrates the gap between a pipe and the image of a pipe to make explicit our own
internalised awareness of the disparity between image and represented object. The question
that I ask is: ‘is this true of Pope and Lessing?’ Would Pope have hypothetically ‘recognised’
some of his own (perhaps repressed) knowledge in Laocoön, and similarly was Lessing
inspired to write his ‘Essay upon the Limits of Painting and Poetry’ by any undercurrents of
suspicion already present in the ‘innocent’ pictorial tradition typified by Pope’s
‘Observations’? Heffernan’s claim that ekphrasis ‘delivers from the pregnant moment of
visual art its embryonically narrative impulse, and thus makes explicit the story that visual art
only tells by implication’8 suggests that to attempt ekphrasis is to attempt an impossible
reconciliation, and I would suggest (although not definitively) that it is possible that Lessing
too ‘makes explicit’ what Pope’s translation of Homer ‘only tells by implication’ and
becomes, like Magritte’s pipe, less of a ‘turning-point’ and more an articulation of what a
major pre-Laocoön ekphrastic critic had already deeply suspected or ‘known’.
It is easy to forget that Pope’s ‘Observations on the Shield of Achilles’ are ultimately
about Homer’s poetry rather than about the engravings of an actual shield: like Keats’s urn,
the art object (if a functional shield can be considered an art object) does not exist
independently outside of the text. For two reminders of this, I direct you to Plate 1 and Plate
2 at the bottom of this essay. Plate 1 is an engraving of the Shield of Achilles designed by
Nicolas Vleughels (1688-1737) and was included in Pope’s first quarto; Plate 2 is Pope’s own
sketch of the shield in his manuscripts. Both of these artworks try to visually portray the
subject of Homer’s poetry, becoming what Murray Krieger calls ‘a reverse ekphrasis’ in that
‘they seek in the visual arts to produce an equivalent of the verbal text instead of the other
8
James A. W. Heffernan, Museum of Words (Chicago: University Press, 1995) p.5
way round.’9 For Krieger, this attempt ‘must be vain, and may very well have been
undertaken partly to reveal the impossibility of an adequate rendering because of the
unmatchable superiority of the verbal text (…) Not only do [Homer’s and Virgil’s respective
shields] not exist independently of their verbal descriptions, but the narrative – the beforeafter – character of their described images defies any attempt by the plastic artist to produce
an object that is totally answerable to the words as their visual equivalent. From the first,
then, to look into ekphrasis is to look into the illusionary representation of the
unrepresentable’ (my italics).10
Forgive the length of this quotation, because I think it captures perfectly a suspicion
that Lessing’s displacement of the idea of the ‘Sister Arts’ was less of a complete overhaul
and more of a ‘giving voice’ to what had hitherto been merely hinted at. The complete
failure of plastic art and painting (even if it is only a sketch) to replicate the verbal Bower of
Achilles in Plates 1 and 2 works in direct opposition to Pope’s rhetoric that “The Shield is not
only describ’d as a Piece of Sculpture but of Painting”, and instead recalls John Hollander’s
echoing of Laocoön in his claim that ‘the particular resources of each art must generate
paradoxes in the attempts of each to represent elements of the other.’11 These two thwarted
attempts of reverse-ekphrasis displayed in Pope’s manuscripts, defeated by what Hollander
observes as ekphrastic poetry calling attention to its ‘generating a verbal enargeia reciprocal
to the pictorial one they celebrate’,12 serve as evidence of the rivalry (or paragone) at work
between poetry and painting in Pope’s mind. In trying to match the vividness or ‘reality’ of
an engraved shield through the rich verbal elaboration and, crucially, temporality (what
Krieger calls the ‘before-after’ narrative) of his poetry Pope (like Homer before him)
paradoxically ensured that the described object cannot be effectively ‘converted back’ into
the stasis of its ‘original’ visual image. The visible impossibility of this interchangeability or
‘return’ to painting for a temporal, verbal description seems to foreshadow the central
argument of Laocoön: despite my early reservations, I suspect that Pope (had he been alive
and able to read him) would have recognised something of his own doubts about the ‘Sister
Arts’ in Lessing fifty years later; something embryonic or implicit that “oft was thought, but
ne’er so well express’d”.
9
Murray Krieger, Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press,
1992) p.xiii
10
Krieger, p.xv
11
Hollander, p.102
12
Hollander, p.19
Bibliography
Primary Reading:
Lessing, Gotthold Ephriam, Laocoön: An Essay upon the Limits of Painting and Poetry,
translated by Ellen Frothingham (New York: Dover Publications, 1898)
Pope, Alexander, Homer’s Iliad, Book XVIII, from The Poems of Alexander Pope, Volume
VIII, Edited by Maynard Mack (London: Methuen, 1967) pages 322-357
Pope, Alexander, ‘Observations on the Shield of Achilles’, from The Poems of Alexander
Pope, Volume VIII, Edited by Maynard Mack (London: Methuen, 1967) pages 358-370
Secondary Reading:
Bergman, Emile L., Art Inscribed: An Essay on Ekphrasis in Spanish Golden Age Poetry
(Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979) page 5
Braider, Christopher, Refiguring the Real: Picture and Modernity in Word and Image 14001700 (New Jersey: Princeton University Press) pages 1-15, 234-257
Cheeke, Stephen, Writing for Art: the Aesthetics of Ekphrasis (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 2008) pages 78-181
Hagstrum, Jean H., The Sister Arts (Chicago: University Press, 1965) pages 211-232
Heffernan, James H. W., Museum of Words (Chicago: University Press, 1995) page 5
Hollander, John, The Gazer’s Spirit: Poems Speaking to Silent Works of Art (Chicago:
University Press, 1995) pages 1-34, 92-107
Krieger, Murray, Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign (Baltimore: The John Hopkins
University Press, 1992) pages xiii-xvii, 245-258
[Plate 1 ‘The Shield of Achilles: engraving in Pope’s quarto’. From The Poems of Alexander
Pope, Volume VIII, Edited by Maynard Mack (London: Methuen, 1967) page 367]
[Plate 2 ‘Leaf of the Homer MSS showing Pope’s rough sketch and first description of the
Shield of Achilles’. From The Poems of Alexander Pope, Volume VIII, Edited by Maynard
Mack (London: Methuen, 1967) page 368]