Picturing Ekphrasis: Image and Text in Shakespeare Painting

In this essay I consider the counter-intuitive (even apparently impossible) enterprise of picturing ekphrasis—of visually depicting verbal representation visual. do so by attending to two paintings, William Martin and James Barry, disturbing scene in Shakespeare’s Cymbeline which Iachimo gains illicit entry Imogen’s bedroom proceeds record details both room her body, he later uses convince Posthumus, exiled husband, infidelity. argue that Martin’s Barry’s attempts paint event ekphrasis as violation—respond need be understood within specific institutional aesthetic contexts vexed intermediality late-eighteenth century London, particular ascendancy spectacular dramaturgy, arrival literary gallery, entrenched notions painting’s textuality. suggest, show order interrogate eschew its rhetorical imperative (image word) iconophobic implication less than word). ekphrasis, their paintings trouble conception painting a would-be poem resist textual textualizing gaze demands they submit procedures reading.