Copyright by Laura Mareike Sager 2006 - The University of Texas at ...

Photographs as examples of ekphrasis represented visually. The following four
chapters deal with the representation of selected works of art, and focus on social
vs. aesthetic concerns, and issues of gender. In order to minimize the scope and
range of my study, and thus the danger of generalizations, I have limited myself
not only to a controlled sample of three artists, Goya, Rembrandt, and Vermeer,
but even further, to only one work of art or a clearly identifiable group by each:
Goya’s Capricho 43: El sueño de la razón produce monstrous, Rembrandt’s self-
portraits, and Vermeer’s paintings of single women, particularly Girl with a Pearl
Earring and Woman with a Pearl Necklace.
The first three analyses largely focus on aesthetic and socio-political
concerns, looking at ekphrases on works by Goya and Rembrandt. In chapter
three, I discuss how Goya’s Capricho 43, El sueño de la razón produce
monstrous, is used in a poem, a drama, and a film. Chapter four continues this
analysis of Goya’s etching in a novel and its film version. In all of them,
ekphrasis functions as a dramatization of the parallel between private-aesthetic
and socio-political conflicts and the artist’s ability to control them with his art. In
chapter five, on Rembrandt’s self-portraits, I analyze the role of ekphrasis as
dramatization of the painter’s self-clarification in a screenplay and a film. Here, I
show how the film tends to intensify the screenplay’s interpretation of the artist’s
public role play through his self portraits, and uses cinematic re-constructions of
those self portraits to create its own version of “Rembrandt.” In the last chapter I
turn to gender issues. Chapter six examines two novels and films about Vermeer,
analyzing how the novels use ekphrasis for female empowerment, whereas the
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