
Contents
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4.1. Dido’s Visual Feast 4.1. Dido’s Visual Feast
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4.2. Picturing Virgil’s Words: Dido in the Middle 4.2. Picturing Virgil’s Words: Dido in the Middle
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4.3. Golden Dido 4.3. Golden Dido
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4.4. On Keeping Dido Unfathomable 4.4. On Keeping Dido Unfathomable
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4.5. Girl on Fire 4.5. Girl on Fire
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Cite
Abstract
This chapter visits one of the less-traveled corners of the Aeneid, providing a full-scale visual analysis of the magnificent feast that Dido lays out for Aeneas near the end of Aeneid book 1. Covering more than sixty lines at the end of the epic’s first book, the feast is rich in visual details, but it does not seem to “do” much, qua finale, other than set a dazzling backdrop for the story-telling of book 2. Here it is argued that the visual details are not mere decorations: they are what happens at the feast. Taken for the darker images they evoke, the visuals of the feast tell a story of their own that runs counter to the glossy surface that they create. Demonstrating this is the main project of the chapter, but in the process of making these demonstrations the chapter includes a related study of the feast’s realization in visible form over time, by artists who represented the scene in their own ways, for their own purposes. The study of these images makes clear that no two artists have ever “seen” Virgil’s story in anything like the same way; that no matter how rich and detailed this text is in what it gives us to see, most of what we end up visualizing “from” the text is the product of our own imaginations: artwork of our own conjuring, made for our own purposes, in collaboration with Virgil’s text.
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