Between Text and Icon: Towards A Representational Model for Ekphrastic Relations

Especially before the current, markedly visual-dominated society, ekphrasis, i.e. the textual description of art objects as a formal analysis of them, was regarded as a vital component in discourses about art history, aesthetics and transmediality. Beyond its classical roots, modern perspectives on ekphrasis explore its role in intermediality and visual studies, emphasizing the dynamic relationships between text and image. Supported by the increasing diffusion of Semantic Web technologies, several interdisciplinary research fields leverage theoretical frameworks close to iconology to pursue quantitative art history with computational methods. Nevertheless, while iconographic studies have been recently addressed in ontologies, a complete description of aspects relevant to ekphrasis is still missing. This paper provides a structured formalization of ekphrasis, enabling scholars to annotate, compare, and visualize the interpretive layers of ekphrastic descriptions across multiple works. The presentation, therefore, aims to: (1) survey the theoretical background regarding ekphrasis to represent a formal model by extending and reusing existing ontologies; (2) apply the proposed ontology to the peculiar case study of Giuseppe Raimondi’s writings; and (3) create an annotator prototype to leverage the model.