Diderot’s Hieroglyphs

“The crew of her soul rushed up to the deck of her body.”

–Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

“Ah! Monsieur, combien notre entendement est modifié par les signes.”

— Diderot, Lettre sur les sourds et muets

“Votre âme est un paysage choisi ….”

–Verlaine, Clair de lune

The shield of Achilles has always stopped the show. Interrupting the narrative of the siege of Troy, Homer looks away from the battle to give us more than a passing glance at the warrior’s new armor. This description of Hephaistos’s masterpiece in Book XVIII of the Iliad is one of the first instances of ekphrasis, the literary description of a work of art, in the Western tradition. Centuries later Parisian gazetteers distributed pamphlets describing new paintings by Boucher, Chardin, Greuze, Van Loo and other official members of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, and so enjoined prospective beholders to come see these works exhibited at the biennial Salon. Writing on art–whether it be ekphrastic, art historical, occasional, or critical–has served varying agendas throughout time. It may even be construed as a metaphor for other rhetorical enterprises.