How to Describe a Painting

Jaś Elsner is Humfry Payne Senior Research Fellow in Classical Art and Archaeology at Corpus Christi College and Professor of Late Antique Art in the University of Oxford. He is also Visiting Professor of Art and Religion at the University of Chicago and (since 2019) a member of the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft at the Kunsthistorisches Institut at Florence. He has published widely on Graeco-Roman art, comparative art history and the history of religion, and was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2015. Michael Squire holds the Laurence Chair of Classical Archaeology at the University of Cambridge, where he is a Fellow of Trinity College. His research interests encompass the literary and visual cultures of classical antiquity, as well as the reception of ancient art and the history of aesthetics (especially in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Germany). He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2022.

• Introduction: Philostratus' Imagines and the art of description; Part I. Entering the Gallery: Introduction;1. 'Whoever Does Not Salute Painting…': the prefatory frame of the proem; 2. The flow of Homeric poetry and painting: beginning with Scamander; Part II. Paideia: Defining culture and educating the young: Introduction; 3. Paideia and pedagogy: the ends and means of education; 4. Sophistic Paideia: performing Sophia in the Imagines; 5. The positionalities of Paideia: culture and its creative critique; Part III. Silent Poetry, Speaking Pictures: Introduction; 6. Seeing through hearing: the Literary and rhetorical archaeology of ekphrasis; 7. Hearing through seeing: painting talks back; 8. Frame and rhetoric: figurations of contemporary visual culture; Part IV. Philostratean Themes in the Imagines: Introduction; 9. Divine mediations: Religion in the Imagines; 10. The look of the eye: replications of the gaze; Coda: the Imagines in the digital age.