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The Early Metaphorical uses of ΣΚΙΑΓΡΑΦΙΑ and ΣΚΗΝΟΓΡΑΦΙΑ

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 July 2017

Wesley Trimpi
Wesley Trimpi*
Affiliation:
Stanford University
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Extract

Precise differentiations between the pictorial techniques referred to by the terms σκιαγϱαφία and σκηνογϱαφία in the fourth century b.c. have proved difficult to establish. The terms occur most often in illustrative metaphors which compare these techniques with restrictions or deficiencies in various disciplines such as metaphysics, epistemology, psychology, optics, ethics, rhetoric and poetry. It is difficult to judge, however, from the metaphors illustrating these limitations just what these techniques were and how they were evaluated in themselves as types of artistic representation. One might use, that is, a skiagraphic sketch, roughed-out in shadow and shading and probably viewed from some distance, to illustrate the incompleteness of knowledge, or use a carefully contrived skenographic perspective, characteristic of stage scenery, to illustrate the deceptiveness of sophistic argumentation, without regarding either artistic method as illegitimate in itself. This paper will deal primarily with the metaphorical applications of these terms in order to clarify further the nature of the literary styles which were described by comparisons with them. Further clarification of the metaphorical illustrations may, in turn, suggest further consideration; for the history of art.

Type
Miscellany
Information
Traditio , Volume 34 , 1978 , pp. 403 - 413
Copyright
Copyright © 1978 New York, Fordham University Press 

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References

1 The following discussion treats in more detail certain materials taken up in two essays on the Horatian phrase ut pictura poesis : 'The Meaning of Horace's Ut Pictura Poesis,' Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 36 (1973) 1–34 (hereafter cited as MHP) and 'Horace's Ut Pictura Poesis: The Argument for Stylistic Decorum,' supra in this volume of Traditio (hereafter cited as HSD). For treatments of the skiagraphic technique itself in painting, see the following: Blümner, H., Technologie und Terminologie der Gewerbe und Künste bei Griechen und Römern (Leipzig 1887) IV 419–23; Pfuhl, E., 'Apollodoros Jahrbuch des deutschen archäologischen Instituts 25 (1910) 12–28 and 'Skiagraphia,' ibid. 27 (1912) 227–31; Schöne, R., ibid. 19–23; Steven, R., 'Plato and the Art of his Time,' Class. Quart. 27 (1933) 149–55; Schuhl, P.-M., Platon el l'art de son temps (Paris 1952) 1–11, 22–32, 77–9, et passim; Pollitt, J., The Ancient View of Greek Art: Criticism, History, and Terminology (New Haven 1974) 236–54; Keuls, E., 'Skiagraphia Once Again,' American Journal of Archeology 79 (1975) 1–16. Citations of the following authors in this paper will be from the editions of their designated works in the Loeb Classical Library: Plato, Aristotle, Polybius, Vitruvius, Dio Chrysostom, Philostratus, Sextus Empiricus, and the Emperor Julian.Google Scholar

2 The same thing is true of unity and multiplicity, whiteness and blackness, or softness and hardness, etc., as of the size of the middle finger. If one could perceive the essence of ‘unity’ as clearly as the essence of 'fingerness,' the estimating faculty would not be awakened. But if a given degree of unity, like the given degree of largeness of the middle finger, could be clearly perceived in relation to multiplicity, i.e. ‘between’ the more unified and the less unified and so appear as both less than the one and more than the other, it would awaken the calculating judgment to decide whether one degree of unity were involved or actually two. See the discussion of Parmenides 165cd below. The distinction between ‘intelligible’ and ‘visible’ objects is from Plato's metaphor of the Divided Line (509d–11e) which immediately precedes his paradeigma of the cave.Google Scholar

3 In 586ac, Plato compares the ever-shifting illusions of pleasures juxtaposed against pains, which are phenomena as indeterminate as shadowy sketches (ἐσκιαγϱαφημέναις), to the wraith of Helen over which, Stesichorus says, the Trojan war was really fought. Plutarch borrows the skiagraphic metaphor in adapting the passage to his criticism of Epicurean hedonism (Mor. 1091de). Dio Cassius (52.7) uses the metaphor in the sense that Plato does in 365c for an external pretense of virtue.Google Scholar

4 The Emperor Julian, for instance, uses the skiagraphic metaphor to describe the ‘fantastic’ illusionism of an epideictic style which Polybius had compared to a skēnographia. It is clear from the lines in Euripides' Phoenissae (469–72) which Julian cites (214b) that ‘skiagraphic’ for him does not mean simple and unadorned (ἁπλοṽς) but rather subtly sophistic (ποικཷλων:… ἑομη&nU:∊νμάτων:) and deceptively colored (φαϱμάκων… σοφῶν). This may indicate the fact that σκηνογϱαφία had become confined to optics by the fourth century a.d. or that Julian is simply using σκιαγϱαφίaL in the way that Neoplatonists used it as a literary term for all mimetic representation.Google Scholar

5 The translations of Proclus and ‘Damianus’ are by Pollitt 238–40.Google Scholar

6 In view of their great importance for the transmission of literary theory, I must put most of these adaptations aside for a later, more detailed treatment. Proclus' use of σκιαγϱαφία in his commentary on Alcibiades I (ed. Westerink, L. G. [Amsterdam 1954] 155.12) is recorded by Liddell, , Scott, , and Jones, in their Greek-English Lexicon (further occurrences in Westerink are 72.11; 99.8; 101.9, 19; 108.11), but none are cited from Proclus' In Platonis Rem publicam (ed. Kroll, W. [Leipzig 1899–1901] I 179.25; II 278.27, 308.1, 327.28, 328.9).Google Scholar

7 The term chiaroscuro in our modern sense implies a subtlety of visual refinement inappropriate for a skiagraphic picture. Despite Pollitt's circumspect discussion of the problem (251–2), I do not believe that a skiagraphia could have been primarily an attempt ‘to simulate our normal optical experience of how light falls on objects.’ In the distance and in the full sun such an experience would be too simplified to take in the necessary modulations of light and shade. Plutarch's characterization of Apollodorus, furthermore, as one who gives, according to Pollitt, the impression of shadow through ‘the modulation of color values on the surface of an object due to the position and texture of the object and its distance from the beholder’ seems an even more appropriate characterization of Vitruvius' skënographic master of adumbratio. There is no particular reason to associate Plutarch's passage, which does not call Apollodorus a σκιαγϱἀφος with the scholium on Homer which does (250). The uncertain date of the scholium, as well, makes it difficult to know whether σϳιαγϱάφος might not already be a synonym for σκηνογϱάφος, in which case the reference can tell us little about either technique.Google Scholar

8 I am indebted for this reference and its translation to Pollitt, J., who cites as well Alexander of Aphrodisias' use of σκιαγϱαφᾙα to refer to schematic sketches in pebbles on a wall (249–50). The term is used in the sense of a general outline by Philostratus (VA 2.28), by Philostratus Lemnius (Imag. 1.14), and for preliminary sketching by Himerius (Oral. 61). Themistius uses it for a generalized ‘portrait’ on a funeral tablet below or beside which a name might be engraved (Orat. 13.168a, ed. Dindorf, W. [Leipzig 1832]).Google Scholar

9 This skiagraphic connotation of something to be brought into existence or to be completed persists in Themistius (Oral. 11.151a: ἡ πόλις σοι ἀληθιν;ῶς ἤδη πόλιι καὶ οὐκέτι σκιαγαφία; also Orat. 18.222d). More interesting are two uses by Ioannes Philoponus, who compares the evolution from a sketch into a completed image to what resembles (metaphorically) a biological process. ( De aeternitate mundi 14.1, 3, ed Rabe, H. [Leipzig 1899] 542.21, 547.11). The second comparison reads In the various indexes to the Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca , edd. Busse, A. et al., 14 vols. (Berlin 1891–1902), the noun and its verbal forms occur from time to time, usually meaning a sketch in outline, to illustrate by an outline, or, as in the case of the best artists (οἱ ἄϱιστοι τῶν γϱαφέων), a sketch made first as a preparation for the completed picture (XII 53.11–5).Google Scholar

10 I use the word ‘impressionism’ much more broadly here than in MHP (30) and than Keuls, E. does in her interesting analysis of the skiagraphic application of color cited above (n. 1). She argues that units of ‘unmixed’ color are applied in juxtaposition to one another, and, when the viewer steps back, they come into ‘optical fusion’ on his retina — a process similar to viewing juxtaposed areas of ‘pure’ color in a tapestry. Her fine treatment of Rep. 586b (13) is philologically persuasive with respect to this usage of Plato's skiagraphic metaphor. The parallel that she cites in Philebus 42b, however, is incomplete (n. 65). There, both an exactly appropriate distance and a juxtaposition of relative amounts of pleasure and pain — similar to the relative sizes of the three fingers — occur without the metaphor. This combination of conditions is the same as that which is necessary to awaken the estimating faculty, I believe, and which leads Socrates in Rep. 523b to reject the skiagraphic comparison in favor of one more suited to exact calculation. Unlike Keuls (7), I am still uncertain about lumen et umbrae as a translation of σκιαγφία. Nor is it yet possible to say how much umbrae or σκιαί involve ‘shades’ or hues of varying color spectrums as opposed to simple degrees of light and darkness in a spectrum from white to black (cf. 523d). Two uses of σκιαγϱαφία which she does not cite, clearly contrast σκιαγϱαφία with both a combination of color and line and with color itself in the Roman period (Dio Chrysostom, 12.44; Philostratus, , Lives 592). For other uncertainties, see above (n. 7). Keuls is wrong, I think, in saying that ‘the factor of distance’ in Aristotle's Rhetoric 3.12 'lends no meaning to the topic of rhetorical style itself (12). Aristotle's illustration, like Horace's, of something seen or heard from a distance elucidates the reason for there being different degrees of stylistic refinement appropriate to the genres in question. For their arguments, see MHP and HSD. She mistakes, in part, the application of the skiagraphic metaphor itself in Plato's Critias 107ad (11).Google Scholar

11 The speaker before a large miscellaneous audience would have to assume that most of his audience possessed a simple, uncultivated (ἁπλοῦς) soul rather than a complex, sophisticated (ποικίλους) one, and therefore to be effective he must, as Plato says in the Phaedrus (277c), address such an audience in a comparably simple style (ἁπλοῦς δέ ἁπλῆ) Google Scholar

12 In the Renaissance, the connection between an anamorphic painting and an allegorical narrative is unforgettably made by Galileo in his Considerazioni al Tasso. Panofsky, E. has discussed the significance of Galileo's analogy with respect to his further remarks on style in a way which exemplifies the distinctions I have been making (Galileo as a Critic of the Arts [The Hague 1954] 13–4, 16–20). Tasso's abrupt transitions and disconnected conceits resemble a ‘tarsia’ picture — recalling the ancient metaphor of tesserulae for fragmentary lamina (cf. Cicero, , Orat. 149) — while Ariosto's lines gradually merge the narrative details with one another like colors in an oil painting. Ariosto's poem is like a long high gallery which displays, in its extension, important works of art in a clear relation to one another as if they formed a unified whole. Tasso's poem, on the contrary, is like a manneristic ‘Kunst- und Wunderkammer’ full of trivial curiosities to be individually picked up and scrutinized. Ariosto's is seen from in front and is ‘skiagraphic’; each detail will, in Longinus' sense (17.2–3), ‘shade’ into the whole throughout its luminous atmospheric space. Tasso's is oblique and ‘fantastic’; each detail must glint in the obscurum of the studietto in order to strike and hold the eye. In addition to criticizing Tasso's lack of stylistic cohesion, Galileo criticizes his crowding of details by comparing his descriptions to a painted hunting scene overburdened with every conceivable kind of animal. This criticism resembles that which Longinus makes of a lavish description by Theopompus, which he compares to a ‘confectioner's shop’ (43.2–4, trans. Roberts, W. R.). In illustrating just how the historian might have improved his account by describing the scene in broader outline (δλοσχεϱῶς), Longinus provides the Neoclassicists of the 17th and 18th centuries with an excellent practical example of skiagraphic simplification.Google Scholar

13 The tracing of this tendency from antiquity through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance to their modern beneficiaries is a subject for a separate study. Let it suffice here to point out one late and famous instance. In his paraphrase of Horace's skiagraphic illustration of Homer's style, Alexander Pope exemplifies the victory of the optical over the ontological terminology in An Essay on Criticism: Google Scholar

I know there are, to whose presumptuous Thoughts Google Scholar

Those Freer Beauties, ev'n in Them [the ancient masters], seem Faults:Google Scholar

Some Figures monstrous and mis-shap'd appear,Google Scholar

Consider'd singly, or beheld too near ,Google Scholar

Which, but proportion'd to their Light, or Place ,Google Scholar

Due Distance reconciles to Form and Grace…. Google Scholar

Those oft are Stratagems which Errors seem,Google Scholar

Nor is it Homer Nods, but We that Dream. Google Scholar

The Poems of Alexander Pope, edd. Audra, E. and Williams, A. (New Haven 1961) I 259–61, lines 169–74, 179–80.Google Scholar