Kijken en zien Het structurele belang van Juno's tempel in Carthago voor de Aeneis

The temple-ekphrasis in Aeneid 1 should be interpreted in connection with its pendant, the song of Iopas at the end of the same book. When seen in this light, it appears that that is no reason to suppose, as many critics from Lessing onwards have done, that the Aeneid constructs an opposition between visual and literary art: on the contrary, the two passages show striking continuity, and together suggest that human interpretation of both artistic media is strongly embedded in the present, while on the other hand the works of art themselves seem to contain extra-temporal truth. The projection of significance onto artistic representation, however, should not be taken to reveal Vergilian reservations vis-à-vis the ‘truth’ of ‘art’, but simply underline that at different stages in different places, the same things may carry different meanings. Thus Vergil, in his implicit poetics in Book 1, constructs a pre-figuration of modern recepetion-theory.