The Shadow of Art

London offers many incredible pieces of art to viewers from all over the world. From the Elgin marbles and the hulking statue of Rameses II to paintings from such artists as Monet, Van Gogh, and Raphael, London certainly offers unlimited sources of artistic inspiration. For those who wish to use that inspiration to write about those artworks, they face the limitations of language to describe a visual experience. Such limitations are not new, proven by John Keats as he also struggled to encapsulate the brilliance of the Elgin Marbles.

Keats did not shy away from ekphrastic poetry. In his "Ode on a Grecian Urn," Keats extensively describes the urn and seeks to discern the meaning of the images painted on it. But his experience of the Elgin marbles proved too much for him to describe the pieces as extensively. For that reason, he opens his sonnet, "On Seeing the Elgin Marbles," not with a descriptive engagement with the art, but with a more personalized, emotional reaction. Keats exclaims, "My spirits are too weak," as he looks on the marbles, unable to articulate further emotion (1). The art produces a physical effect on him as well, as he remarks that "mortality / weighs heavily on [him]" after he views the marbles (1-2). He adds that it is "a gentle luxury to weep" at the "most dizzy pain" produced by this experience of "Grecian grandeur"(6, 11-12). Keats is unable to encapsulate in language the visual aspects of the Elgin marbles, relying instead on a relation of his emotional experience of the art because his words rest in "a shadow of a magnitude" (14). His words are overshadowed by the memory of the looming temple the marbles came from as well as the magnificence of the marbles themselves. Keats, recognizing the inherent difficulty in writing about such a large number of detailed, intricate sculptures in the same manner he wrote about the urn, instead focuses on the overwhelming emotional experience of seeing artwork of such "magnitude."

After seeing the Elgin marbles for myself, I now understand the difficulty Keats faced. Even the air feels a little different in the almost unnaturally quiet rooms the marbles are housed in. The detailing on every figure is mind-boggling. And there are hundreds of figures, in friezes, metopes, and free-standing sculptures. As a person with a fondness for horses, I naturally spent a great deal of time examining the horse head belonging to a figure of the moon goddess Selene's chariot. The sculptor was able to capture the furrows between the horse's flared nostrils, the small folds in the skin where the bottom of the horse's head met its neck, and the exact shape of the horse's premolars. The flicked back ears, gaping mouth, and bulging eyes all suggest the horse's exhaustion from its night in the sky. The sculptor even included the ridges of veins and sinews in the face that only someone with experience around horses would have known to incorporate. If three sentences are necessary to describe only part of a single horse's head, Keats's task of attempting to describe the entire collection in a fourteen line sonnet seems implausible and even ludicrous. When faced with such grandeur, with art of such magnitude, it seems best to let the art speak for itself and only speak to one's experience. The art may cast a shadow, but sometimes there is nothing wrong with sitting in the shade.