ABSTRACT
In the early third century CE, a Greek sophist of the Roman imperial period, Philostratus of Lemnos, wrote a set of poems called Eikones in which he described 65 pictures exhibited, as he tells in his introduction, in a Neapolitan villa. Paul Klee famously drew inspiration from music, musical forms, and even notation for his paintings. Both Ondine’s and the knight’s themes consist of a melodic core. The characteristic features of these “cores” relate the musical themes to the two main protagonists: Ondine is represented by a somewhat languishing, wave-like, repeated outline. Ondine’s “song” starts under the “magic spell” of seven sharps. Ondine’s seven sharps are briefly reintroduced in the line in which the beginning of the knight’s theme returns to its whole-tone objectivity. Ekphrasis also worked in an opposite direction: many musical compositions referring to works of visual art or works of literature equally give vivid, evocative representations of the form and essence of their artistic object.
