[In the following excerpt, Benediktson explores Philostratus's ideas on the relationship between literature and the visual arts as they are expressed in Apollonius of Tyana.]

The traditions of Plato, Cicero and Dio come together in Philostratus, the author of the Life of Apollonius of Tyana. … Along with his relative of the same name, who wrote the Imagines, Philostratus has received a great deal of study by art critics. The Life is a biography of a priestly man; the Imagines, … is a series of ekphrases or descriptions of paintings in a museum-guide format. Both treatises are written in Greek for a highly educated and sophisticated reader. A modern critic has tried to ground modern “reader reception” theory in the Life of Apollonius 2.20-41.¹

In his Life of Apollonius of Tyana, Philostratus has Apollonius raise the same objection to the non-Greek gods that Dio had raised: the Egyptians deify animals (6.19; Butcher in fact cites Dio and Philostratus as exceptions to “how little notice the Greeks took of symbolical art”). Apollonius' interlocutor, Thespesion, asks about Greek portrayals (ἀγάλματα). Apollonius responds that the Greek gods are the most beautiful and appropriate (κάλλιστόν τε καὶ θεοφιλέστατον). Thespesion then brings up the theory we have seen, in varying degrees, in Cicero, Dio, and Plotinus: “‘Your artists, then, like Ph[e]idias,’ said the other, ‘and like Praxiteles, went up, I suppose, to heaven and took a copy of the forms of the gods, and then reproduced these by their art, or was there any other influence which presided over and greeted their moulding?’” (VA 6.19) At this point, Philostratus at least attempts to free art and literature from the mimetic limits that had been imposed by Plato and Aristotle but that were beginning to show strain in Plutarch and Dio (VA 6.19):

“There was,” said Apollonius, “and an influence pregnant with wisdom and genius.” “What was that?” said the other, “for I do not think you can adduce any except imitation (μιμήσεωs).” “Imagination [phantasia],” said Apollonius, “wrought these works, a wiser and subtler artist by far than imitation; for imitation can only create as its handiwork what it has seen, but imagination equally what it has not seen; for it will conceive of its ideal with reference to the reality (του̑ ὄντοs), and imitation is often baffled by terror, but imagination by nothing; for it marches undismayed to the goal which it has itself laid down.”²

The artist must create an internal and appropriate image, just as Pheidias did. Thespesion suggests, like Dio, that Egyptian animals are “symbols” (ξύμβολα), but Apollonius replies that surely these images are not effective: “for the mind can more or less delineate and figure them to itself better than can any artist; but you have denied to the gods the privilege of beauty both of the outer eye and of inner suggestion (καὶ τὸ ὁρα̑σθαι καλω̑s καὶ τὸ ὑπονοείσθαι)” (VA 6.19). As Watson comments, “We have, then, in this passage a movement from the praise of art which is based on mental vision to the exaltation of the mental vision itself, even if, or especially when, it does not issue in art.” We might say that for the first time in antiquity the “inner eye” and “inner ear” have been freed from the tyranny of the “outer eye” and the “outer ear.” The creative intelligence is free to contemplate “reality” (τὸ ἄν) without reference to the perception of reality by the senses (τὸ ὁρα̑σθαι καλω̑s). Interestingly, here the doctrine of political and forensic styles is alluded to one final time. Imitation is linked to the forensic style, to be examined on the level of accuracy to detail, while the imagination is linked to the more oral, political style, which attains greatness or Longinian sublime and is to be examined at a distance. Thus, the traditions of the sublime and phantasia do ultimately intertwine, and one of the doctrines linking literature and the visual arts throughout antiquity is ultimately used to dominate the doctrine of mimēsis.³

The centrality of the comparison between literature and the visual arts to Philostratus' phantasia can be seen better in chapter 4.7 of the Life, where Apollonius argues that people make greater fame for their cities than monuments, because they are more mobile:

[H]e encouraged them and increased their zeal, and urged them to take pride rather in themselves than in the beauty of their city; for although they had the most beautiful of cities under the sun, and although they had a friendly sea at their doors, which held the springs of the zephyr, nevertheless, it was more pleasing for the city to be crowned with men than with porticos and pictures, or even with gold in excess of what they needed. For, he said, public edifices remain where they are, and are nowhere seen except in that particular part of the earth where they exist, but good men are conspicuous everywhere, and everywhere talked about.⁴

Philostratus continues with the familiar analogy to Pheidias' Zeus, bound in space to Olympia.

Cocking comments that Philostratus has not completely separated phantasia from mimēsis in an Aristotelian sense; but we cannot ignore the fact that an important step has been taken. Watson correctly states that here literature is greater than visual art because it is “less earthbound,” and also rightly places the passage in the tradition of Cicero, Longinus, Quintilian, and Dio discussed here. Watson finds the source of this tradition in a blend of Stoicism and Neoplatonism, and indeed these schools may have been the proximate source. But the ultimate source of the ideas is to be traced back to Pindar, the lyric poets, and the Sophists, who understood the mobility and temporality of the word to be superior to the spatiality of the visual image before the issue was confused by the mimeticism of Plato and Aristotle. That the tradition extends back to the lyric poets is clear from the reference, noted by Watson in both Dio (Or. 12.79) and Quintilian (6.1.35), to the visual arts as “speechless.”⁵

With Philostratus, literature is at least potentially freed from the spatial limitations of visual art, and visual art is at least potentially freed from the temporal limitations of literature. That these issues continue to dominate literary and artistic theory in the Renaissance and Enlightenment, and in fact are at the core of many issues in the Modernist movement, continues to be the subject of other studies.

Notes

1. Don Fowler, “Even Better,” 58-62, 287-88.

2. Butcher, Aristotle's Theory, 393, n. 1; cf. Atkins (Literary Criticism, 2.344-45), who sees Philostratus in a line from Longinus and Dio to Plotinus and ultimately to Coleridge (“the truth”). For a comparison of Philostratus here and Dio 12.59, see Birmelin, “Die Kunsthistorischen Gedanken,” 394. Translation in F. B. Conybeare, Philostratus, 2.77, 2.77-79.

3. Translation in Conybeare, Philostratus, 2.81. Watson, “Concept,” 4767. On the political style, see Trimpi, “Meaning,” 23, n. 31; on the sublime and phantasia see Rouveret, Histoire, 412-23.

4. Translation in Conybeare, Philostratus, 1.357-59.

5. Cocking, Imagination, 43-47. Watson, “Concept,” especially 4769, 4775, and 4779. On phantasia in relation to sculpture, see Stewart, Greek Sculpture, 20, 45, 83, 220, 258, 262; and Pollitt, Art of Ancient Greece, 5-8, 223-24.

Bibliography

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———. The Art of Ancient Greece: Sources and Documents. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

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