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featuring figurative motifs, could have been Persian from the era of the
sassanid dynasty (224–641 C.e.).78
ermoldus devotes part of Book IV of his In honorem Hludowici to an
orderly, succinct ekphrastic run-through of the frescoes that adorned the
royal church and hall at Ingelheim. first he mentions the biblical stories
featured in the church, with old testament episodes on the left and new
testament ones on the right (lines 187–244), and then the secular stories
in the hall, with ancient history on the left and modern history on the right
(lines 245–82). this example of ekphrasis is especially interesting because
it fairly closely precedes the section of the Book that covers the the baptism
of king Herioldus and his queen in 826.
only a short time later, in 829 or thereabouts, Walahfrid strabo made
ekphrasis the opening gambit in his highly complex poem entitled De
imagine Tetrici ‘on the statue of theodoric’.79 this was the famous eques-
trian statue of theodoric the Great which Charlemagne appropriated from
Ravenna and placed at his palace at Aachen. Having comprehensively,
and no doubt controversially, subjected it to scorn, Walahfrid moves on
to contrast Louis, a new Moses leading his people to freedom, with
Charlemagne, whose values are by implication as damnable as those of
theodoric.80 the ekphrasis takes in such motifs as the spear and shield and
golden adornments of the main human figure, the nudity and black skin of
the ancillary figures, the rigid breast and running gait of the horse and the
stone and lead of the plinth.81 Walahfrid’s work, like theodulf’s ekphrases
on the vase and rug, indicates that the ekphrastic mode was sufficiently
familiar to serve a variety of polemical purposes.
As a final example from perhaps a decade later I shall mention the
78 Mildred jackson o’Brien, The Rug and Carpet Book (new york: M. Barrows, 1946), 7.
79 Carmen XXIII in Poetae Latini Aevi Carolini, 2:370–78; Michael Herren, ‘the “de imagine
tetrici” of Walahfrid strabo: edition and translation’, Journal of Medieval Latin 1 (1991):
118–39, also Michael Herren, ‘Walahfrid strabo’s “de Imagine tetrici”: An Interpretation’,
in Latin Culture and Medieval Germanic Europe, ed. Richard north and tette Hofstra,
Germania Latina, vol. 1 (Groningen: e. forsten, 1992), 25–41.
80 janet L. nelson, ‘Carolingian Royal funerals’, in Rituals of Power: From Late Antiquity to
the Early Middle Ages, ed. frans theuws and janet L. nelson, the transformation of the
Roman World, vol. 8 (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 156.
81 Agnellus of Ravenna, The Book of Pontiffs of the Church of Ravenna, trans. deborah
Mauskopf deliyannis, Medieval texts in translation (Washington, dC: the Catholic
university of America Press, 2009), 78–9.
sCHoLARs And skALds