The Corporeal Imagination. Patricia Cox Miller

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СКАЧАТЬ transform the reader into a spectator and that sight was a privileged sense in ekphrastic representation, it is also true that “ekphrastic rhetorical exercises often strove precisely to exceed the visual by evoking tactile, kinetic, aural and olfactory sensations as well.”⁶³ For example, Ausonius’s poem “Cupido Cruciatus” purports to describe a painting of the descent of the god Amor into the underworld, there to be tortured by a series of lovelorn goddesses. It is an ekphrasis filled with images that are difficult to visualize, and its “reality-effect” succeeds only by petitioning senses other than sight. In one passage of this poem, the underworld is depicted as a place “where [Cupid’s] wings move sluggishly in the close darkness.” As Nugent describes it, “the impression is that Cupid is experiencing difficulty in plying his wings, because of the thickness of the night. But what sense, precisely, does this make? While we intuitively grasp its meaning, the image is not actually visual; rather, it seems to draw upon a kind of synaesthetic response—the weight of night and darkness is something that we may sense, but cannot (strictly speaking) see.”⁶⁴

      This kind of ekphrastic engagement of the reader’s imaginative senses is a defining characteristic of the literature, poetic as well as narrative, that grew up around the phenomenon of relics in the course of the fourth century and can in some ways be credited with the creation of the meaning of relics. If it is true, as Victor Saxer has argued, that the holy dead were truly materialized only when they were fragmented and dispersed,⁶⁵ it is also true that those material bits came alive in the literary and artistic appeals that were made to the sensuous imaginations of participants in this form of Christian ritual. These appeals aimed at a virtual re-education of the human senses, teaching viewers to see that a material object might have spiritual life.

      Relics and Figuration

      The phenomenon of relics was characterized by an insistent impulse toward figuration, both verbal and artistic. Damasus, bishop of Rome from C.E. 366–384, for example, appears to have had a hearty appreciation for the function of the trace as a condition of meaning: as he went around Rome establishing shrines at tombs of martyrs, he made the city into a network of traces that was at once geographically tangible and verbally material, since at each shrine he left lines of poetry, the epigrams for which he is famous.⁶⁶ In one of these poems, addressed to the martyr Felix, Damasus made puns on the martyr’s name, engaging in the sort of etymological wordplay that became a standard feature of encomia to martyrs—Augustine, for example, punned on the names of Vincent and Agnes, and Prudentius on the names of Agnes, Hippolytus, and Cyprian.⁶⁷ Again the impulse to bring out the full aesthetic virtuosity of the fragment on two levels is evident. The linguistic filiations spun out of a martyr’s name match the filiations of spiritual power that inhere in a fragment of his or her body. Relics became verbal as well as material artifacts.

      The creative mimesis involved in the sort of dissonant echoing effected when poetry and relic were juxtaposed was also characteristic of late ancient ekphrases that described the art decorating the martyria. Gregory of Nyssa’s encomium on Saint Theodore contains an ekphrasis on the paintings in Theodore’s memoria. Gregory begins by privileging the metaphor of sight, describing the visual splendor of the building and its contents:

      When one comes into a place like this one in which we are assembled today, where the memorial and holy relic of the righteous one are, one is first struck by the magnificence of what there is to see: a building as befits God’s temple, splendidly wrought in terms of its great size and beautiful decoration and in which the woodworker has carved the wood into the shapes of animals and the stonemason has polished the marble slabs to the smoothness of silver. The painter has also colored the walls with the flowers of his art in images representing the martyr’s brave actions, his resistance, his suffering, the brutal appearance of the rulers, the insults, that fiery furnace, the athlete’s most blessed death, and the sketch of Christ, the judge of contests, in human form.⁶⁸

      In the passage that follows, however, sensibilities other than sight are brought into play: “All of this he fashioned by means of colors as though it were a book speaking. He depicted the martyr’s struggles clearly and ornamented the church like a magnificent meadow, for painting, while silent, can speak from the wall and offer the greatest benefit.”⁶⁹

      This ekphrastic passage contains a densely textured play of repetition and variation, as the reader is carried through a series of contiguously related parallels: from the relic that is the occasion of this spectacle, to the painted images, to the linguistic metaphor of the “speech of colors from the wall” that inversely echoes the passage of writing that gives expression to all this—an echoing, that is, of art and words that was also recognized by Asterius of Amaseia when, in a description of a painting of the martyrdom of Saint Euphemia, he says that “we writers [lit. “servants of the Muses”] possess ‘colors’ no worse than those of painters.”⁷⁰

      Although Gregory and Asterius seem to be defending the congruity of art and words, the fact is that the art they describe exists as figurations in their texts, and both of them force the reader’s imaginative participation to shift between two experiences, reading a text and seeing a picture. And there is more: how is one to imagine the visually difficult suggestion that a painting of scenes from a gruesome martyrdom blooms like a meadow? This is an ekphrastic “reality-effect” that borders on the surreal, akin to Ausonius’s Cupid with sluggish wings or—to cite another ekphrasis connected with relics—akin to Paulinus of Nola’s description of a mosaic in the apse of one of the basilicas dedicated to Saint Felix, a scene that according to Paulinus showed “the Father’s voice thundering forth from heaven.”⁷¹ How might one picture a voice in the moment of its thundering? This image of Paulinus’s certainly depends as much on auditory as on visual imagination for its aesthetic effect; it is an image that, in terms of the late ancient Christian corporeal imagination, helped the viewer achieve a transfigured eye.

      Hyper-real images such as that of Paulinus were common in the ekphrastic literature that embedded relics in an aesthetics of discontinuity. The praesentia⁷² or fullness of spiritual power thought to be present in a relic was an abstraction that could only be evoked by effects of visual and sensuous immediacy, as conveyed by Gregory of Nyssa in his well-known description of venerators of Theodore’s relics: “Those who behold them embrace them as though the very body were living and flowering, and they bring all the senses—eyes, mouth, ears—into play; then they shed tears for his piety and suffering and bring forward their prayers of intercession to the martyr as though he were present and whole.”⁷³ Passages such as this signal the late ancient mindset that valued the fragment for the narrative lines it was capable of eliciting. Like words in late ancient poetry, relics were “liberated signifiers” that took on a certain aesthetic dazzle far exceeding the referential function of a dead body part; as Victricius of Rouen noted, relics are “spiritual jewels” that “flower more and more in beauty.”⁷⁴

      The mutual inherence of art, poetry, and relics in a tangled signifying network is nowhere better illustrated than in the Peristephanon of Prudentius. Since the techniques of Prudentius’s visionary storytelling in his hagiographic poems are featured in a later chapter in this book (“Bodies and Spectacles”), I would only note here the pictorial theatricality of his notorious fascination with the bloody gore of martyr-stories, as well as his participation in an aesthetics of writing where “images, intertextual allusions, and etymological wordplay convey more meaning than plot and narrative.”⁷⁵ “As impressive as the poems are as finished products, they are irresistibly more impressive as activities”—an estimation of the poetry of Optatian that is just as true of Prudentius’s work.⁷⁶ The individual units of his collection are marked by the effects of uncanny repetition, in which the metonymic relations among words, wounds, art, and relics are constantly advertised; for example, looking at a painting of the martyr Cassian in his shrine, Prudentius describes him as “a page wet with red ink.”⁷⁷ This is a stark example of the image as “thing” whose blunt affective appeal provokes a change in habitual perception, both of the martyr and of the written СКАЧАТЬ