ABSTRACT
The road to Athanasius’s stunning visual metaphor begins in classical literature and rhetoric and, as with so many aspects of late antique culture, represents “a redistribution and reorchestration of components that had already existed for centuries in the Mediterranean world.”2 We can begin at the beginning. Homer’s description of the shield of Achilles in Iliad 18.468-608 holds what has been called the first ekphrasis in western literature, an artistic literary description of a work of visual art.3 The poet’s vividness (enargeia) allows the audience to “see” the images on the shield. Hearing or reading is transformed into seeing. This tradition
1 See W.J.T. Mitchell, “The Pictorial Turn,” in idem, Picture Theory: Essays in Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago, 1995), 11-34.
