Building on the concept of enargeia, Chapter 4 examines the cinematism of epic ecphrases: passages containing detailed descriptions of remarkable objects. To the ancients, Homer’s vividness of presentation put him in the forefront of painters, while film directors, chiefly Eisenstein, have repeatedly referred to him as a precursor. In particular, the stories told on the shield of Achilles in the Iliad validate Eisenstein’s concept. Eisenstein wrote extensively about Lessing’s thesis, advanced in his influential Laocoön, about the limits of painting and poetry; both authors’ approaches are evaluated here, with Eisenstein’s argument proven the stronger one. The story of Theseus and Ariadne depicted on the coverlet in Catullus’ poem 64, the most complex ecphrasis in classical literature, is then treated as the basis of a film adaptation, which reveals the astonishing sophistication that can be discovered from the perspective of cinematism. Shorter observations about Virgil and, in passing, Juvenal round out this chapter.

Chapter 2 analyzes an Athenian vase painting by Douris that is as unique as it is mysterious: Jason in the dragon’s maw. Traditional scholars have never reached a consensus about its meaning and have proposed various and often contradictory or mutually exclusive interpretations. On the basis of a critical survey of the painting’s reception history, this chapter proposes an approach that has been entirely neglected so far. It extends our appreciation of Douris’ sophistication into the age of moving images, adducing Aristotle’s concept of “the Now,” Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s “fruitful moment,” Henri Cartier-Bresson’s “decisive moment,” and Agnès Varda’s approach to photography and cinema. In cases like the one presented here, long-standing irresolution about an ancient work of art can be overcome when it is related to later works, even those of a kind that could not yet have existed when the original was created.