Reality and Symbols in Byzantine Ecphrastic Texts of the Ninth and Tenth Centuries

This excursus, necessarily partial, meant to show that ecphrastic Byzantine literature, despite its apparent timelessness, well knew how to adapt to the different needs and demands of ideological symbology: its “mediaeval trend” was that it became progressively more and more filled with religious symbols and metaphors - in a way, one might say, inversely proportional to the magnitude of the buildings described, always less impressive. The ecphrastic, poetic and, in general, literary texts betrayed a well educated tradition and became the vehicle of images and vivid emotions. Though they celebrated actual, historical works of art, at the same time transfigured them, leading the listener, reader and viewer, to recreate in his mind an ideal - Platonic and Neoplatonic - image of a world ruled by a higher, both earthly and otherworldly, taxis.