The rhetoric of space: Literary and artistic representations of landscape in Republican and Augustan Rome

Abstract

Horace's famous Ut pictura poesis serves as the point of departure for this book. It is a much discussed passage, in our time and in the past, because it has been subjected to widely divergent interpretations. This follows from the assumption that Horace meant pictures are like poems. Leach, however, argues he meant no such thing; instead, he compared the ways visual and literary works address themselves to the beholder, an aesthetics and semiology of reception, not expression. The subject matter of this book is ancient Roman landscape, not gardens per se, nor cities, although architectural settings (and sets) are discussed; rather, Leach explores the sort of outdoor terrain, in pictures and poems that serves as the site of events: for example, harbours, hillsides, battlefields and temple compounds as places of arrival and departure, epiphany, war and religious rite. The sources examined range from the writings of Virgil, Caesar, Lucretius, Varro, Horace, Pliny, Propertius and Ovid to the panel and fresco paintings in Rome, Naples, Pompeii and elsewhere. The wide and inclusive expanse of Leach's ‘landscape’ makes the book very long, seemingly wandering in places and nearly intractable as a whole. The argument is best sustained at a local level when specific writings and works are considered, especially those ofVirgil in the context of the Odyssey landscapes.