Epic Visions Visuality in Greek and Latin Epic and its Reception

This wide-ranging, interdisciplinary collection explores different ways of visualising Greek and Roman epic from Homer to Statius, in both ancient and modern culture. The book presents new perspectives on Homer, Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, Valerius Flaccus and Statius, and covers the re-working of epic matter in tragedy, opera, film, late antique speeches of praise, story-boarding, sculpture and wall-painting. The chapters use a variety of methods to address the relationship between narrative and visuality, exploring how and why epic has inspired artists, authors and directors, and offering fresh visual interpretations of epic texts. Themes and issues discussed include: intermediality, ekphrasis and panegyric, illusion and deception, imagery and deferral, alienation and involvement, the multiplicity of possible visual responses to texts, three-dimensionality, miniaturisation, epic as cultural capital, and the specificity of genres, both literary and visual.

Introduction Helen Lovatt and Caroline Vout; 1. Seeing in the dark: kleos, tragedy and perception in Iliad 10 Jon Hesk; 2. Operatic visions: Berlioz stages Virgil Helen Lovatt; 3. Visualising Venus: epiphany and anagnorisis in Valerius Flaccus' Argonautica Emma Buckley; 4. The look of the late antique emperor and the art of praise Roger Rees; 5. Intermediality in Latin epic - en video quaecumque audita Martin T. Dinter; 6. Viewing violence in Statius' Thebaid and the films of Quentin Tarantino Kyle Gervais; 7. Storyboarding and epic Lynn S. Fotheringham and Matt Brooker; 8. Epic in the round Caroline Vout; 9. 'Split-screen' visions: Heracles on top of Troy in the Casa di Octavius Quartio in Pompeii Katharina Lorenz; 10. Epic visions on the Tabulae Iliacae Michael Squire.

Helen Lovatt is Associate Professor in Classics at the University of Nottingham. She is the author of Statius and Epic Games (2005) as well as a monograph closely related to this volume, The Epic Gaze: Vision, Gender and Narrative in Ancient Epic (Cambridge, 2013). Current and future projects include a history of the Argonautic myth, an exploration of the life and works of Ugolino Verino, and an edited volume on children's literature and classics.
Caroline Vout is a Senior Lecturer in Classics at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Christ's College, Cambridge and the Society of Antiquaries. Her recent publications include Power and Eroticism in Imperial Rome (2007), The Hills of Rome: Signature of an Eternal City (2012) and Sex on Show: Seeing the Erotic in Greece and Rome (2013). In 2008 she was awarded a prestigious Philip Leverhulme Prize, and in 2006 she curated the sculpture-exhibition, 'Antinous: the Face of the Antique', at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds. She is also an editor of the Cambridge Classical Journal and Perspective, and is the current Chair of the Criticos Prize.