This interdisciplinary panel, sponsored by the Colloquium for Ancient Rhetoric, an SCS-affiliated group, seeks to explore the role of Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria (henceforth IO) in the formation of discourses about the relationship between art, rhetoric and literature in Roman antiquity and beyond. We aim to capitalize on the recent proliferation of scholarship on Quintilian and expand upon the works of scholars (e.g. Webb; Platt; Elsner and Meyer), who have highlighted the centrality of analogies with the fine arts in ancient rhetorical analysis (e.g. evidentia; color). The concept of style is fundamental to both the history of classical literature and the history of ancient art and is often evoked to construct and delimit the identity of specific authors/artists and specific periods. Quintilian’s IO is often cited as the go-to source for the definition of rhetorical categories, but despite the fact that it is one of the earliest and most extensive sources for concepts such as style and art, the work remains largely overlooked as a productive and foundational contribution to the discourse on art and rhetoric. The very structure of Quintilian’s work (2.14.5) engages with crafts and the visual arts, since it follows the novel threefold distinction between ars (bene dicendi scientia), artifex (orator) and opus (oratio). Perhaps most strikingly, Quintilian’s articulation of stylistic development in IO 12.10 is among the most important sources for the reconstruction of the history of Greek art (cf. Cicero, Brutus 70; Pliny the Elder, Natural History35-6). Starting already in the High Middle Ages, Quintilian’s IO also plays a crucial role as a source for pedagogies of both rhetoric (Agricola), language (Valla), literature (Vives, Erasmus) and the fine arts (Vasari, Winckelmann).
Milette Gaifman (Yale) will discuss Quintilian’s role as the source for the primary framework of Winckelmann’s Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums (1764), the first modern account of Greek art. Laura Loporcaro (Ghent) will examine how the domains of painting and sculpture in the IO elucidate specific elements of the orator’s craft, such as narratio and dispositio. Whereas the previous papers focus largely on painting and sculpture, Stephen Kidd (Brown)’s paper highlights how the banausic arts offer a paradigm for the key concept of iudicium in the IO. Finally, Kirsten Burke (Harvard) will speak about the role that Quintilian played in the development of writing about art in early Modern Europe not just in the better known treatises by Alberti and Vasari but also in the development of an aesthetics of writing. Christopher van den Berg (Amherst) will deliver a response.
The following are possible productive intersections between papers for contributors, discussants and participants to explore: