{"id":149,"date":"2026-04-08T16:30:33","date_gmt":"2026-04-08T15:30:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.stourbend.com\/?p=149"},"modified":"2026-04-08T16:32:32","modified_gmt":"2026-04-08T15:32:32","slug":"one-artwork-in-the-form-of-another-ekphrasis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.stourbend.com\/?p=149","title":{"rendered":"One artwork in the form of another \u2013 \u2018ekphrasis\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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A Christmas present: It\u2019s a collection of elegant, artful essays, A Dream of Stone<\/em>, by Marguerite Yourcenar (2025). She was a mid-twentieth century Belgian-born novelist (1903-1987) whose name I cannot recall ever having heard before opening the package. Each chapter, an artistic piece of writing on its own, discusses some other work. The first, for example, concerns \u201cThe dark brain of Piranesi,\u201d building on a nineteenth century poem by Victor Hugo about the architecture and etchings of Giovanni Battista Piranesi a century earlier: one \u201csong\u201d to the \u201ctune\u201d of another, itself built on a third. Another essay concerns the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo\u2019s great creation, a third about how time transforms sculpture, a fourth on a dream that the German Renaissance artist Albrecht D\u00fcrer<\/a> recorded in his journal.[1]<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The book got me thinking about another form of writing, one that takes the words off the page \u2013 or off the wall \u2013 for the benefit of those who cannot read because they cannot see. Imagine yourself without sight. Now listen to the poem \u201cOde on a Grecian Urn<\/a>,\u201d by John Keats. What picture do you see? How does the voice sound? Is it male, female; old, young; with a London accent or a foreign one? Is it foreign to Keats\u2019s accent, assuming we can hope to know how a London accent sounded a century before technology recorded sound?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Art museums in many cities have attempted something like this \u2013 precisely for the benefit of visitors with impaired sight. Audio descriptions \u2013 a form of ekphrasis<\/em> \u2013 make that possible. In 2024, a dear friend organised a project, called Ensemble, to give sighted people like me a chance to hear various paintings and sculptures<\/a> at a gallery in south London. Each work of art came with two audio descriptions. One was by the artist, the other by a professional audio describer, that is, a professional writer. Visitors to the gallery could listen in turn to the two descriptions and form a mental picture of the work. But they could not see the work of art, only imagine it. The gallery walls were bare.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

More from:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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A Christmas present: It\u2019s a collection of elegant, artful essays, A Dream of Stone, by Marguerite Yourcenar (2025). She was a mid-twentieth century Belgian-born novelist (1903-1987) whose name I cannot recall ever having heard before opening the package. Each chapter, an artistic piece of writing on its own, discusses some other work. The first, for … Continue reading One artwork in the form of another \u2013 \u2018ekphrasis\u2019<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-149","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-don-nordberg-is-on-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stourbend.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stourbend.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stourbend.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stourbend.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stourbend.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=149"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.stourbend.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":151,"href":"https:\/\/www.stourbend.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/149\/revisions\/151"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stourbend.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=149"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stourbend.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=149"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stourbend.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=149"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}