Leopoldo Iribarren (Paris) THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES (Ilias XVIII, 478-608) AND SIMONIDES’ APOTHEGM ON PAINTING AND POETRY (T101 Poltera) Some thoughts on the fruitfulness of a well-matched couple 1 Le dottrine debbono cominciare da quando cominciano le materie che trattano. (Giambattista Vico, Scienza Nuova [1744] I, CVI). This essay traces the intertwined reception of two texts: the shield of Achilles in the Iliad and Simonides’ apothegm stating that “painting is silent poetry and poetry is silent painting”. Although there is not a historical connection or intertextual relation between them, these texts came to be bound through a common posterity in works that are central to the history of aesthetic thought, ranging from the Plutarchean Essay on the Life and Poetry of Homer to Gotthold E. Lessing’s Laocoön, with treatments by Angelo Poliziano, Guillaume Budé, Giorgio Vasari, Charles Perrault, André Dacier, Jean Boivin and Alexander Pope. In this shared posterity, the apo- thegm serves as a theoretical framework for the Shield and the Shield offers an anticipated application of the apothegm’s postulate. The connection between these texts raises two questions which I embrace in this essay. The first concerns the “elective affinity” of the couple: why did the Shield, and not some other passage of the epic, become the privileged object of Simonides’ apothegm in subsequent aes- thetic theory? The second question pertains to the functionality of the couple in the larger context of aesthetic theory. Far from being a rhetorical commonplace with a standardized role in discourse, the couple formed by the Shield and the apothegm shows a remarkable versatility in both the scope of theories that appeal to it (rheto- ric, poetics, art history, philosophy of art) and the range of specific functions it ac- complishes within them (e. g. the Shield can either be a paradigm of “speaking painting” or of “silent poetry”). I argue that the couple formed by the Shield and the apothegm – considered as “theoretical object” in its own right – helped to shape the critical exploration of relations between the verbal and the visual over the course of at least fifteen centuries. 1 An earlier version of this essay was presented at the colloquium “Aux origines de la théorie et de la littérature artistiques”, held at the Sorbonne in December 2012. I would like to thank in particular Pierre Caye for inviting me. I am also grateful to Mark de Kreij, Glenn Most, and Alexandra Pappas who commented on my arguments and generously shared their own thoughts with me. Poetica-44 3-4.indd 289 Poetica-44 3-4.indd 289 26.03.13 11:02 26.03.13 11:02