What is the viewer to make of this? As Hollander goes on to ask, “Who is this Charity? She is not accompanied by the usual iconographically familiar sign (a flame or a candle) nor is she involved in any of her usual occupations of attending those in need. Instead, she is riding on a ‘triumphal elephant’ and is about to cut off the right hand of her helpless adversary.”
Thus, we might say, the inscription is problematic in relationship to the tapestry, and requires a cognitive effort on our part. The modern viewer must sort out the relationship between text and tapestry. Marianne Moore regards the tapestry and goes on to create a new parable. As her poem develops she gives Envy a voice with which to beg pity of Charity. Moore ends with an ironic deliverance that pays tribute (in a metaphoric reference to weaving) to the timeless quality of the iconography when she declares: “the Giordian knot need not be cut”; the action, iconographically suspended in time, need never be completed. Envy is condemned to beg for pity in perpetuity.
As Marianne Moore’s poem is an ekphrasis of the tapestry, I call this tapestry a reverse ekphrasis of the text, a visual iconographic description (albeit an enigmatic one) of a written text.
Another example of a literal (or actual) reverse ekphrasis is a linear narrative tapestry the 23 episodes of the woven vita of St. Stephen, now hanging in the Cluny Museum in Paris, but originally woven for the Cathedral of Auxerre around 1500 a section of which can be seen in figure 9, The Capture, Stoning and Vigil of St. Stephen.
Figure 9 The Legend of St. Stephen Scenes 6, 7, 8
6 Laura Weigert and Micheline Durand, Histoire de Saint Etienne. La tenture de la cathedrale d’Auxerre, (Auxerre, 2000), Musées d’Art et d’Histoire d’Auxerre.
