Desert Hawk Books

 

Literature and the Visual Arts in Ancient Greece 
and Rome

D. Thomas Benediktson

 

Hardcover
272  pages
6 B&W Illustration
5.5" x 8.5"

Quantity:   $37.95 & S/H  

 

Does art merely imitate reality, or does it also create reality? Where does imagination come into the creative process? How do the arts portray movement through time and space? In Literature and the Visual Arts in Ancient Greece and Rome, D. Thomas Benediktson looks to the ancient Greek and Roman worlds to see how these and other questions were formulated and answered. As scholars have sought a unified doctrine for comparing written and visual arts, they have given the mimetic doctrines of Plato and Aristotle the most attention. By tracing ancient comparisons between the two art forms, Benediktson shows that there was no dominant theory of ut pictura poesis, or "as painting, poetry." Rather, as the ancient Mediterranean world moved from an oral to a written culture, literature became increasingly distinct from the visual arts, compelling the ancients to grapple with a variety of theoretical issues.

"D. Thomas Benediktson's careful tracing of comparison passages throughout successive 'stylistic' or cultural periods shows that these are much more numerous than most people, event classicists, realize. They involve, as he demonstrates, all forms of visual art: sculpture and architecture as well as the painting that Horace's famous phrase ut pictura poesis specifies." - Eleanor Winsor Leach, author of Vergil's Eclogues: Landscapes of Experience.

D. Thomas Benediktson is Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature and Associate Dean, College of Arts and Sciences, University of Tulsa. He is the author of Propertius: Modernist Poet of Antiquity..