SOURCE: Rigolot, François. “Ekphrasis and the Fantastic: Genesis of an Aberration.” Comparative Literature 49, no. 2 (spring 1997): 97-112.

In the following essay, Rigolot offers a reading of “The Venus d'Ille” in order “to shed some light on the complex definition of the fantastic as a displaced mode of ekphrastic representation.”

To these dead forms, came living beauties essence Able to make them startle with her presence. 

—George Chapman, “Ovid's Banquet of Sense”

A fascination with the idea of illusionist representations pervades the history of Western culture. From time immemorial great artists have been endowed with a power to instill a supernatural degree of life into their artifacts. In his classic study, Art and Illusion, Ernst Hans Gombrich takes the Pygmalion fantasy as the starting point of his discussion of the illusionist qualities of art. The famous Greek myth, one recalls, exemplifies the belief in the power of art to...