The classicist Nicholas Horsfall notes that while there is clear evidence for the widespread practice of pictorial illustration in a range of scientific genres in antiquity—including botany, anatomy, and astronomy—the same cannot be said of illustration in literary works. Horsfall assumes that the reason for this absence lies in the ancient belief in literature’s own ability to evoke images—a belief that implies the redundancy of pictorial illustrations.
[W]hen we turn to the illustration of literary texts, the evidence proves to be far more shaky. The case of literary works is indeed intrinsically different. Ancient critics spoke of a great virtue in authors called enargeia, the capacity to conjure up a picture in the mind of the reader. In scientific works, pictures were necessary, in literary one, arguably superfluous, if the author was truly a master of his craft. It is therefore perhaps not altogether surprising that from the very earliest mythological scenes in in Greek art (about 700 B.C.) for the next two hundred years, the artists do no consciously exhibit dependence on a specific scene in the Iliad or Odyssey and indeed it takes as long again before artists at all regularly specify explicitly which literary work they are following.
Horsfall 64–5.
However, it should be noted that we are not aware of a single statement from antiquity that explicitly supports Horsfall’s interesting suggestion. The claim that, in antiquity, illustrations of literary works were dismissed on account of their redundancy thus remains speculation.
The idea that illustrations are redundant is, in any case, likely one of the most widespread arguments against the illustration of literary texts. It shaped debates in the eighteenth century (Voltaire) and nineteenth century (Fairfield). Indeed, it can still be encountered in the twenty-first century. In a short newspaper article from 2008, the prominent German literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki (1920–2013) combines the claim that illustrations are redundant with the charge that illustrations limit the reader’s imagination:
Die Illustrationen zu Romanen, Novellen oder auch zu Buchausgaben von Dramen sind überflüssig; mehr noch: Sie sind oft geradezu schädlich. Denn sie suggerieren den Lesern bestimmte Vorstellungen von Personen und Motiven, von Räumen und Möbeln und bringen ihn damit um das Vergnügen, sich diese Personen oder Gegenstände selber vorzustellen. Auf diese Weise wird in der Regel die Phantasie des Publikums eingeschränkt.
Reich-Ranicki
Works Cited
Fairfield, Sidney. “The Tyranny of the Pictorial.” Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine, June 1985, pp. 861–64.
Horsfall, Nicholas. “The Origins of the Illustrated Book.” A History of Book Illustration: 29 Points of View, edited by William A. Katz, Scarecrow Press, 1994, pp. 60–88.
Reich-Ranicki, Marcel. “Die Einbildungskraft ganz frey erhalten.” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. March 19, 2008. https://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/buecher/fragen-sie-reich-ranicki/fragen-sie-reich-ranicki-die-einbildungskraft-ganz-frey-erhalten-1516577.html
Voltaire. Oeuvres complètes: Nouvelle édition. Garnier frères, 1877–85. [On Voltaire’s critique of literary illustrations, see the comments here.]
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