ABSTRACT
As the narrative impetus of The Faerie Queene originates in Arthur’s dream-vision of Gloriana, so the epic journey of Virgil’s Aeneid properly starts with a picture. When Aeneas enters the temple of Juno in Carthage and gazes at scenes of the fall of Troy depicted on its walls, his tears of recognition and remembrance confirm him as an epic hero with a mission.1 Very soon, he will meet and fall in love with Dido, and although Carthage will prove a false haven, his time there sets in motion the Augustan myth of the founding of Rome. In the Arcadia, Sir Philip Sidney makes good use of pictures in prompting romance adventures. It is the sight of a painting of Philoclea in Kalander’s ekphrastic ‘garden-house’ that sets Musidorus on his new adventures of love, after shipwreck has apparently curtailed his homosocial adventures with Pyrocles.2 Spenser thus has encouraging precedents for his strategic embedding of artistic images in his own epic romance. In the figure of ekphrasis, all of the conflicting imperatives and challenging processes of the visual episteme are enacted under pressure and in slow-motion, as it were, making them an invaluable resource for interrogations of the relationship between seeing and knowing.
