Epic Visions

Visuality in Greek and Latin Epic and its Reception

Helen Lovatt, Caroline Vout

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781107039384
• eBook ISBN:
  9781316260821
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This wide-ranging, interdisciplinary collection explores different ways of visualising Greek and Roman epic from Homer to Statius, in both ancient and modern culture. The book presents new perspectives on Homer, Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, Valerius Flaccus and Statius, and covers the re-working of epic matter in tragedy, opera, film, late antique speeches of praise, story-boarding, sculpture and wall-painting. The chapters use a variety of methods to address the relationship between narrative and visuality, exploring how and why epic has inspired artists, authors and directors, and offering fresh visual interpretations of epic texts. Themes and issues discussed include: intermediality, ekphrasis and panegyric, illusion and deception, imagery and deferral, alienation and involvement, the multiplicity of possible visual responses to texts, three-dimensionality, miniaturisation, epic as cultural capital, and the specificity of genres, both literary and visual.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• Contributors
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Seeing in the dark: kleos, tragedy and perception in Iliad 101
• 2 Operatic visions: Berlioz stages Virgil
• 3 Visualising Venus: epiphany and anagnorisis in Valerius Flaccus' Argonautica
• 4 The look of the Late Antique Emperor and the art of praise
• 5 Intermediality in Latin epic - en video quaecumque audita
• 6 Viewing violence in Statius' Thebaid and the films of Quentin Tarantino
• 7 Storyboarding and epic
• 8 Epic in the round
• 9 Split-screen visions: Heracles on top of Troy in the Casa di Octavius Quartio in Pompeii
• 10 Epic visions on the Tabulae Iliacae
• Bibliography
• Index locorum
• General index