A Structural analysis and visual abstraction of the pictorial in the Aeneid, I-VI

Abstract

The pictorial elements of the first six books of the Aeneid can be evidenced through an examination of its structural components. With commentaries on such literary devices as parallels and antipodes, interwoven themes, cyclic patterns, and strategic placement of words in the text, three genres of painting are treated individually in Chapter 1 to illustrate the poet's consistency of design and to prove him a craftsman of the visual arts. In the first division, "Cinematic progression," attention is directed to the language which conveys movement and frequentative action, with special emphasis placed on specific passages whose verbal components possess sculptural or third-dimensional traits and contribute to the "spiral" and "circle" motifs, the appropriate visual agents for animation. Depiction of mythological subjects comprises the second division entitled "Cameos and snapshots." Three selections, dubbed monstra, are explicated with such cross references as to illustrate the poet's use of epithets which he distributes passim to elicit verbal echoes of other passages. The final division, "The Vergilian landscape," addresses two major themes, antithetical in nature, the martial and the pastoral. Their sequential juxtaposition in the text renders a marked contrast in mood which is manifested pictorially in the transition from darkness to light. A panoramic chiaroscuro emerges which is the tapestry against which Aeneas makes his sojourn through the Underworld. It is the perfect backdrop to accompany the overriding theme of "things hidden," res latentes, which encompasses a greater part of the epic and becomes the culminant motif of the paintings which comprise the visual presentation. Chapter 2 functions as a catalogue raisonne for art inspired by the Aeneid from early antiquity up to the present day. Such examples of artistic expression provide a continuum with which to appropriate Horace's maxim, ut pictura poesis, in their evaluation. The verbal exegeses in Chapter 1 have been programmed to comport with the thematic content of the visual presentation in Chapter 3, a critique exemplifying the transposition of the verbal to the pictorial. With these canvases I have attempted to render a new perspective of Vergil's epic in the genre of abstract expressionism.