From Homer's shield of Achilles to Auden's, ekphrasis, "the verbal representation of visual representation,"(FN1) has featured prominently in Western literature and has inspired an equally rich critical tradition. Throughout this critical history, ekphrasis has been received primarily as a semiotic phenomenon.(FN2) This is true also of Chaucer's several notable uses of ekphrasis. Having translated the depictions of the vices on the garden wall in the Roman de la Rose, Chaucer awakens in The Book of the Duchess in a room painted with images from the same poem and with windows portraying the story of Troy. In the House of Fame, Chaucer "reads" the story of Aeneas and Dido on the walls, and in the Parliament of Fowls he describes the paintings in the temple of Venus. Chaucer's most extensive use of the trope comes in the descriptions of the decorations in the temples in part 3 of the Knight's Tale. As Jean Hagstrum has shown, however, these Chaucerian passages are representative of a general problem in the medieval use of ekphrasis: they do not clearly or emphatically distinguish between the verbal description and visual representation. Hagstrum sees this as a failure of the medieval poets to understand the function of the trope in their classical sources: "It must be admitted that the verbal 'pictures' of medieval poetry are often nothing more than repeated convention... The medieval poet keeps saying he sees -- it is, for example, an essential part of Chaucer's and others' manner to insert at frequent intervals 'I saugh,' 'then I saugh' -- without always giving evidence that he has actually seen." Hagstrum allows that Chaucer is capable, as in the description of the Temple of Venus in the House of Fame, of moments of authentic "firsthand observation of art," but she finds the bulk of his contributions to be secondhand and imitative.(FN3) Margaret Bridges agrees that the passages in the dream visions are non-pictorial; instead, Chaucerian ekphrasis functions "as a metaphor for the fiction in which it is inserted, indeed, as a metaphor for fiction itself."(FN4) James Heffernan has countered that the temple descriptions in the Knight's Tale are highly visual: "Here, the narrator does gratify the reader's inner eye."(FN5)
    All of these critical interventions work from the assumption that the function of the trope is essentially semiotic. While Chaucer's ekphrastic passages are intentionally and complexly meta-textual, the uses of ekphrasis in the Knight's Tale show that Chaucer's main interests are not semiotic or meta-critical, but political: Chaucer is using the trope to comment on art in its social contexts. For it is in the construction of the temples in part 3 of the Knight's Tak that the champion Theseus enters the field of cultural production.
    The first of the temple scenes is the one that most resembles the ekphrastic passages in the dream-visions. The description of Venus herself, in fact, closely resembles the goddess's depiction in Parliament of Fowls, and it is the portion of the Knight's Tale that: most, as Heffernan says, "does gratify the reader's inner eye," and gives the impression that Chaucer may actually be evoking the images and style of trecento painting (though he is presumably describing a statue):
    The rest of the Temple of Venus, however, is a catalog of allegorical personifications, heavy on shorthand references to familiar attributes and light on visual or painterly imagery:
    The ekphrastic problem here is not merely abstraction but allegory itself. Steven Nichols has observed that allegory undermines the ancient dynamic of bodily pleasure and moral and rational reflection, since "allegorical description literally reverses inner and outer reality by giving bodily shape to moral and ethical abstractions associated with the inner being."(FN7)
    Chaucer's Temple of Diana, in this view, has the merit of being less allegorical. It is also the portion of the temple descriptions that makes the most use of the deictic phrases ("I saugh...," "Ther saugh I...") so characteristic of Chaucerian ekphrasis. However, while Hagstrum complains that such verbal gestures claim to show without really showing, Chaucer's generally do not even pretend to point to visual depiction.(FN8) They take as their objects not images but completed actions, and they seem intended to remind readers of entire narrative episodes:
    Far from being tense oppositions of the sensual and the rational, or of the visual and the oral, Chaucer's ekphrastic gestures explicitly point to stories within the story: "Ther saugh I many another wonder storie" (2073). In some cases, they elide into phrases of general comprehension that render the faculty of seeing itself purely metaphorical: "Thus may ye seen that wysdom ne richesse, / Beautee ne sleighte, strengthe ne hardynesse, / Ne may with Venus holde chaparde" (1947-49; emphasis added).
    There is, in contrast, considerable imagistic detail in Chaucer's description of the Temple of Mars -- though what precisely is being described is curiously elusive. Chaucer claims first that Theseus's temple is decorated exactly like the interior of the Temple of Mars in Thrace. But Chaucer first describes a barren landscape, in which is found the Temple of Mars itself, the interior decorations of which Chaucer then elaborates. It would seem, then, not just a description of visual art, but an ekphrasis within an ekphrasis.
    Still, the densely imagistic passage is Chaucer's most effective ekphrastic description, and he succeeds in convincing the reader that the crepuscular and macabre temple is indeed "gastly for to see" (1984). But while the poetry here appeals to the senses, the sense it appeals to is not exclusively or even primarily that of sight. This passage is notable in Chaucer's opus as his most extensive use of alliteration, which is an auditory phenomenon, and its function here is to mimic the sound that is the passage's primary subject, the terrible roar of the wind through the lifeless forest:
    Criticism tends to assume that ekphrasis enacts a poetics of absence and inadequacy, that it reveals the longing of language for the stillness and timelessness of the visual image. But while this passage pretends to translate into verse the power of a lost image, it conveys auditory effects that no picture possibly could.
    All of this suggests that Chaucer's verse does not long for the "other" of visual representation, nor is Chaucer's intention in his ekphrasis to delineate between the effects of poetry and painting. This is less surprising in light of W. J. T. Mitchell's deconstruction of the conventional understanding of ekphrasis, which he reveals to have been based on a false dichotomy of the visual and the verbal. Mitchell's central thesis is "that the interaction of pictures and texts is constitutive of representation as such: all media are mixed media, and all representations are heterogeneous; there are no 'purely' visual or verbal arts, though the impulse to purify media is one of the central Utopian gestures of modernism." The images in ekphrasis, Mitchell notes, are "already narrativized," a description particularly appropriate to Chaucer's descriptions of the temples, which pretend to point to pictorial details but in fact allude to narrative episodes. Mitchell asserts, therefore, that "there is no essential difference between texts and images and thus no gap between the media to be overcome by any special ekphrastic strategies. Language can stand for depiction and depiction can stand for language." The significance of "the verbal representation of visual representation," therefore, is not that it juxtaposes the verbal and the visual, but rather that it is a representation of representation. And its effect is fundamentally social. Mitchell concludes that ekphrasis works "to expose the social structure of representation as an activity and a relationship of power/knowledge/desire -- representation as something done to something, with something, by someone, for someone."(FN9) It is particularly significant, therefore, that the art Chaucer describes in the Knight's Tale is emphatically done for someone. That someone is Theseus.
    The temple descriptions, in addition to being Chaucer's most extensive use of ekphrasis, also represent his most studious alterations to his source text.(FN10) In book 7 of Boccaccio's Teseida, on the day before their battle the Theban princes, Arcita and Palemone, together offer prayers at a number of Athenian temples; Boccaccio does not name the temples, specify where they are located, or describe them in detail. Arcita then returns to the Temple of Mars to offer special sacrifice and to make his prayer for victory. The prayer, personified as female, then travels to the Temple of Mars in Thrace and, quaking with fear, encounters both allegorical figures entering the temple and scenes of Mars's destruction painted on the walls:
    [And the temple was all storied by a clever hand, above and roundabout. The first scenes pictured there were the depredations made day and night on ravished lands. And anyone ever subjected to violence was here in somber garb. Enchained peoples, iron gates, and demolished fortresses could be seen here.](FN11)
    The "sottil mano" responsible for the decoration of this temple belongs to Mulciber, or Vulcan, Mars's unwitting cuckold: "E tal ricetto edificato avea / Mulcifero sottil con la sua arte, / prima che 'l sol gli avesse Citerea / mostrata co' suoi raggi esser con Marte" ["And subtle Mulciber had built that retreat with his skill before the sun had shown him by his rays that Cytherea was with Mars"] (7.38). When the prayer reaches the temple, Mars hears the messenger and grants the appeal.
    Similarly, Palemone makes a special sacrifice at the Temple of Venus and prays to win Emilia. His prayer then flies to Venus's Temple of Cytherea on Mt. Cythaeron, where she too encounters allegorical personifications and painted scenes of Venus's devotees, and where Venus hears and grants the request Finally, Emilia performs elaborate rites in the Temple of Diana before making her prayer for chastity, or at least for betrothal to the one who most desires her. The statue of Diana informs her that the matter has already been settled, so no prayer flies and no Temple of Diana is described.
    While part 3 of the Knight's Tale is based on book 7 of the Teseida, Chaucer alters the details in revealing ways. The three temples that Chaucer describes in the Knight's Tale are built on Theseus's orders into the walls of his lists at compass points: Venus's in the east; Mars's in the west; Diana's in the north. Chaucer puts a painting of Mt. Cithaeron on the walls of Venus's temple (1936-39), and he says that the Temple of Mars is painted like the god's temple in cold and desolate Thrace (1970-74), but his poem does not leave Athens. Instead, Chaucer describes, over almost two hundred lines of verse, the elaborate decorations of the three Athenian temples. Only then do Palamon, then Emily, and then Arcite offer their prayers to their gods at the hours governed by the respective planets. Each receives a sign that his or her prayer has been heard. Thereafter, Venus and Mars squabble over the seemingly contradictory promises that they have made to Palamon and Arcite. (Diana, like Emily, is forgotten.) Jupiter appears briefly only to demonstrate his fecklessness; it is his father Saturn who must step in to resolve the dispute.
    These alterations to Boccaccio's plot have of course been noted before.(FN12) They have generally been explained as Chaucer's effort to render the pagan gods as abstractions or as planetary influences, and to keep the events of the poem limited to the mortal and terrestrial realm. To some readers, he does this in order to emphasize the tragically limited insight of pre-Christian pagans; to others, in contrast, Chaucer means to allow the philosophical speculations and existential dilemmas of the non-Christian characters to be taken seriously on their own terms.(FN13)
    One of the most significant effects of Chaucer's alterations to these portions of the Teseida, however, is to turn the temples from remote, divinely created constructions into local works of human artifice. Chaucer goes out of his way to call attention to the artificiality of the temples, emphasizing their architectural integration into the battle amphitheater as well as the bureaucratic and commercial arrangements for their decorations. Theseus, as if initiating a Works Projects Administration for ancient Greece, gathers all the engineers and architects, painters and sculptors in the land, pays them, and boards them, all for the construction of his lists:
    The battle-theater is a testament to Theseus's ability to raise and maintain an army of artisans, Chaucer is careful to include the "portreyour" and the "kervere of ymages" in his catalogue of craftsmen. In Chaucer, the temples are fashioned by human artists who work for "mete and wages." If any god has a hand in their construction, it is not Mulciber but Mammon.
    Such attention to the material processes of human creation is unusual in the ekphrastic tradidon. In general, poets encounter an art object of unknown or mystical origins, inviolable in its perfect completion. As Krieger emphasizes at the very start of his study, Homer's shield of Achilles is forged by the god Hephaestus and therefore permanently beyond the capacides of human duplication.(FN14) Keats's Grecian urn is chilly remote, ineffably perfect, the mysterious creation of an anonymous artificer. In Chaucer's telling, however, Theseus's temples are emphatically not of divine origin but instead are created on earth by mortal hands, and the art that they contain is the work of human craftsmen in a specific social and political context. Chaucer's translation of the temples to Athens itself and his attention to the social conditions of their construction seem intended to shift the significance of the ekphrasis from the semiotic to the political. Ekphrasis is still a meta-text, but it functions here to reveal art as a social construction. Chaucer is at pains to demystify the process of artistic production by detailing the social process and the political intendons of artistic production. In reading the passages, we must ask how art functions in a social context,
    Chaucer describes the Temple of Venus first. Her conventional allegorical companions arc there, from "Plesaunce and Hope" (1925) to "Despense, Bisynesse, and Jalousye" (1928) and there is some brief mention of festivity (1931-35), but the scenes are dominated by the sorrows of love, "The firy strokes of the desirynge / That loves ser-vantz in this lyf enduren" (1922-23). When Chaucer refers rather el-liptically to the legendary lovers whose narratives are depicted in the temple -- Narcissus, Solomon, Hercules, Medea, Turnus, Croesus -- he manages to evoke only folly and tragedy.(FN15)
    Things are worse in the Temple of Mars. This is to be expected of the god of war, but while some of the agony and destruction depicted here is mythic and Ovidian, much is quotidian and arbitrary and not at all martial. In that eerie, wind-blasted forest, we see almost no scenes of battle, but instead Felony, Ire, Dread, Outrage, and Conquest, emperors betrayed and slain as well as suicide and insanity and stupid, brutal misfortune. There are horrors on the walls of Boccaccio's Temple of Mars, but they are at least delimited to the horrors of war:
    [She also saw warlike ships there, and empty wagons and ravaged countenances, and weeping arid unhappy wretches and all Coercions, each with arrogant mien. Every wound was visible there, and blood, mixed with clay. And turbulent, haughty Mars with his proud bearing appeared everywhere.]
    From this, Chaucer produces snapshots of random, chaotic violence, some of the images unforgettably horrific:
    Where Boccaccio mentions wagons emptied by wartime pillaging, Chaucer depicts a carter accidentally run over by his own cart. What is more, the painting captures the carter when he is trapped under the wheel. Chaucer seems to be striving for extravagant grisliness devoid of martial sublimity, Cyrand Guignol without the grandeur: the surreal nightmare of a sow eating an infant in its cradle is coupled to a cook burning his hand because his ladle is too short. This is a senseless universe of violence, culminating in the final image Chaucer places at the base of the statue of Mars: "A wolf ther stood biforn hym at his feet / With eyen rede, and of a man he eet" (2047-48).
    In his own glosses to the Teseida, which at this point in the poem expand and crowd out the text, Boccaccio explains the suffering depicted in the temples by way of moral allegory. There is jusi war and virtuous love, he explains, but there arc also "irascible and concupiscible appetites," and these are what are revealed in the Temples.(FN16) In a characteristically exhaustive and enlightening portion of Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative, V. A. Kolve links the images of pain and destruction in the temples of Mars and Venus to a conventional iconography of planetary influence,(FN17) Boccaccio, however, does not describe a temple of Diana, nor is there an iconographic tradition of suffering children of chastity, so neither Boccaccio's moral allegory nor Kolve's art history fully accounts for the fact that Chaucer's Temple of Diana is another chamber of horrors, in some ways even more disturbing than that of Mars.(FN18) The stories on the walls are mosdy myths of the victims of Diana's wrath; several, as James Heffernan points out, are stories of rape.(FN19) The goddess sits on a hart above a waxing and waning moon, symbolic of her inconstancy. Her eyes, Chancer says, "caste she ful lowe adoun," We are invited to assume that Diana's glance is cast downward in the conventional gesture of humility. But no, Chaucer informs us, she is looking towards Hell: "Ther Pluto hath his derke regioun" (2081, 2082). At her feet, a woman labors in fruitless childbirth:
    In the temple and in Chaucer's description of it, she writhes eternally unaided; by comparison, the man-devouring wolf of Mars comes to seem less horrifying.
    What are we to make of these galleries of terrors? To Kolve, the moral is "that an ordered system can contain disorder, without falsifying or fundamentally altering it."(FN20) These images of divine injusdee, caprice, and violence, however, can fail to falsify Theseus's system only if one accepts the duke's claims of authority. Later, Theseus claims to derive his authority from Jupiter, though the reader has already been shown that Jupiter barely holds a place in a pantheon ruled by a brutal Saturn, Kolve himself demonstrates that Theseus's claim makes no sense even in the astrological terms established in the poem itself. After all, Jupiter is not the outermost planet in Ptolemaic cosmology; rather, Saturn is, a fact that Chaucer's Saturn proudly points to (2454-55). But Kolve is of a generation of critics who, for what seem clearly to be reasons of cultural history, were inclined to see order as an end in itself, and to see art as a benevolent and harmonizing force in a chaotic universe.(FN21) This tradition can marshal much evidence to its defense, including the ubiquitous medieval discourse of passion and self-governance, of which Boccaccio's glosses on the temples are a prime example. "Though it makes nonsense of astrology," Kolve writes, it "allowed Chaucer to suggest that some portion of the Christian truth could be glimpsed, however obscurely, from within the philosophical and religious ideas of Theseus's culture. They offer a distinct prospect of the truth."(FN22) At very nearly the same time, David Aers was speaking for a generation more skeptical of power and claims of authority, and more solicitous of the desires of the ruled: "Contrary to much academic wisdom, which seems to have enlightened our sixth forms, the Knighl's Tale is not an unequivocal celebration of Theseus as the principle of law and order we are to worship. It is a critical, often highly ironic, exploration of secular rule, its forms of power and its uses of language."(FN23)
    More significant than the shifting critical reception of Theseus's governance, however, is the fact that Theseus himself does not justify his own authority on the grounds most often used to defend him. He does not, that is, assert that he can and should suppress dangerous passions and maintain order. Instead, Theseus consistently asserts that his authority derives from and mirrors the order of the cosmos, that his governance is in natural accordance with the benevolent organization of the universe. It is not only in his speech on "the faire cheyne of love" (2987-3074) that he propounds this apology.(FN24) What, after all, are his motivations for building the battle-theater? It cannot be merely to maintain control, to organize the passions of two lusty princes. That would not require an audience. Besides, what protocol of rational governance turns two knights fighting in a grove into two hundred and two knights fighting in a stadium?
    What Theseus is doing is demonstrating his control, and what he is making with the lists and the temples is a model of the universe.(FN25) The vast circle, a mile around, suggests the orbits of the spheres. The temples embedded in the walls stand for the planets. The positioning of Diana's temple between those of Mars and Venus embodies the earthly conflict of the two lovers striving for the one desired, and it points to the parallel contest in the heaven between the gods of love and war. Unbuilt, unstated, but clearly implied is the position of the ruler. Theseus has no temple of his own, but the system itself stands for his role, overseeing, organizing, resolving, commanding all else. The amphitheater analogizes Theseus's earthly rule to the rule of the king of the gods. Who is that ruler? Theseus claims, naturally, that it is Jupiter, and that his own benevolent rule is a natural extension of happy Jove's:
    Palamon, in a dark moment, suspects that someone more malevolent is in charge -- "But I moot been in prisoun thurgh Saturne" (1328) -- and at the end of part 3 he is proved right by Saturn himself, who uses the language and the imagery of Chaucer's descriptions of the temple decorations:
    In book 9 of the Teseida, the conflict arising from the apparently contradictory prayers of Arcita and Palamone is settled amicably by Venus and Mars:
    ["You have answered Arcites' prayer well, for as you see, he is victorious; now it rests with me to fulfill Palaemon's, since, as you observe, he is sad because he has lost." Mars, become gentle, said to her, "What you say is true, dear; now do whatever gives you perfect pleasure."]
    The universe of the Teseida is guided by divine concord and justice, albeit a justice painfully indifferent to the failings and limited comprehension of men, Saturn does not appear in Boccaccio's poem. He is Chaucer's addition, and his grandly anarchic speech reveals the ultimate power of the universe to be brutal, capricious, violent, and devoted not to justice or concord but simply to wielding power and asserting authority; most readers of the Book of Judges have understood Samson to have been the agent in his own destruction, but in the Knight's Tale (2466) Saturn gleefully takes responsibility for having killed him. Chaucer's interpolation of Saturn leaves only two options for the model of governance that Theseus has constructed. Either it corresponds to the cosmological pattern, in which case The-seus's position is analogous to that of Saturn, the Great Anarch. Or, it pretends to conform to a cosmic pattern, but does not. In either case, Theseus's claims to derive his authority from a beneficent, universal order are false, and the reality is that his rule is rooted ultimately in power and the potential to exercise it through raw violence.
    Herein lies the significance of Chaucer's removal of the temple scenes to the earthly constructs of Theseus's lists. The paintings and sculptures are part of the duke's aesthetic justification of his own authority. Like the theater itself, the temples celebrate temporal power both by spectacularly embodying its resources and by linking it to divine authority. The negativity of their vision, revived and brought to a climax in Saturn's speech at the end of part 3, makes clear that the power they celebrate, be it planetary or political (in this poem, they are the same thing), is grounded not injustice but in violence.
    In the art, furthermore, as in the lists as a whole, the revelation of the ultimate hollowness of the claims for just rule does nothing to diminish its effectiveness. Chaucer drives this home with a pair of grandly ironic ekphrastic punchlines, the most explicit references to artistic production in the poem. At the end of the description of the Temple of Mars, with the revelation of the man-eating wolf, Chaucer writes: "With soutil pencel was depeynted this storie / In redoutynge of Mars and of his glorie" (2049-50). The "sottil mano" (1.36.2) of Boccaccio's "Mulcifero sottil" (7,38.2) becomes in the Knight's Tale the "soutil pence!" of the professional painter. After the horrors of Mars, Chaucer comments coolly on the painterly skill of the craftsman. In fact, since "soutil" qualifies neither the painter nor his hand but rather the "pencel," a small brush or straw used for painting, it may be used here in the sense of slender or delicate, as it is used elsewhere in the same portion of the Knight's Tale ("Saugh I Conquest, sittynge in greet honour, / With the sharpe swerd over his heed / Hangynge by a soutil twynes threed" [2028-30]).(FN26) Chaucer's observation, then, is only about the slenderness of the painting implement and the fineness of the resulting brushstrokes. The grim depiction of Mars and his "glorie" elicits from the narrator a purely formal and stylistic comment.
    Similarly, at the climax of the description of the Temple of Diana, with the mother writhing in relendess parturition at Lucyna's feet, Chaucer comments, "Wel koude he peynten lifly that it wroghte; / With many a floryn he the hewes boghte" (2087-88). Here another remark on the artist's skill is coupled to a comment on the apparent costliness of the commission. The narrator's attention is drawn to the striking colors of the painting, and like any informed fourteenth-century observer he is aware of the relative preciousness of the pigments used. The outlay for the purchasing of pigments constitutes a large portion of the surviving accounts for the production of late-medieval and early Renaissance paintings; certain hues, like the ultramarine made from lapis lazuli, were especially expensive, and were therefore especially prized for use in conspicuous places.(FN27) (Thus the viewer's eye is often drawn to the striking blue of the Virgin's gown.) In the surviving accounts of Jacopo di Ci one's San Pier Maggiore Altarpiece, painted in Florence in 1370-1371, the purchase of ultramarine is the most expensive single item, at 12 fefor 3 oz.; since a florin, the largest unit of currency, equaled at the time a little more than three lire, this hue was indeed bought "with many a floryn."(FN28) Such expensive pigments also served as clear advertisements of the patron's wealth -- and it is with precisely this mercenary observation Chaucer concludes his most extensive ekphrasis. These couplets pointedly emphasize the artist's skill and professionalism, as if they are divorced from the content of his work. In pointing also to the wealthy patronage that underwrites the artistic production, Chaucer calls attention to the complicity of the professional artist in maintaining power structures by glorifying the temporal powers that support him. In fact, the Knight's Tak itself may be a product and a representation of just such an instance of cultural production. As clerk of the king's works, Chaucer himself was responsible for providing the scaffolding for the Smithfield Tournament of 1390 -- like Theseus's lists, a purpose-built tournament arena designed to showcase a sportive public display of a monarch's civic authority.(FN29) As bureaucratic functionary, Chaucer was involved in creating the physical artifact that modeled in spectacular fashion the ideology of Richard II; as artist, he is equally implicated in rendering a poetic analogue to the tournament and its structures in the Knight's Tale. When the poem's ekphrasis comments meta-textually on the social role of the artist, Chaucer is writing about himself.
    As significant as the role of the artist in the tale is the role of the viewer. Whatever the poetic powers or deficiencies of the ekphrastic tick of repeating variations on the phrase "Ther saugh I," it has been frequently noted that this formula violates the fiction of the Knight's oral performance of the tale. Whether or not, as has been much debated, Kittredge's "dramatic principle" is applicable to this tale, the pretense of personal observation also has the effect of conflating the perspectives of the poet and of the reader into that of the viewer. We might legitimately ask, who is this who "sees" the art? There is no need to elevate this imagined personage to the status of a persona; it is more readily understood as a rhetorical gesture, an ironized voice of the poet. As such, this spectatorial perspective is interested in the art as art; it is aesthetically discerning but it is also morally neutral, remarking on the quality of the execution of the art but not on its content. Chaucer promises "to devyse / The noble kervyng and the portreitures, / The shap, the contenaunce, and the figures / That weren in thise oratories thre" (1914-17). The terms of praise it uses -- "noble," "soutil," "lifly" -- constitute a vocabulary of connoisseurship.
    But this Chaucerian observer's critical assessment makes no explicit references to the beauty of the art. In fact, his surprising presence as a mediator of the artistic experience makes the narrator's point of view subjective but completely without affect. The narrator takes no more notice of the pleasure of the apprehension of the works than he does of their moral content. He looks at a depiction of a woman writhing in eternal agony and expresses only admiration at the skill of the artist to paint "lifly" and appreciation of the dearness of the paint. The ekphrasis, therefore, does not lend itself to the Augustinian dichotomy between the body and the mind, the suspicion of beauty on the grounds that it is pleasurable rather than reasonable. Indeed, the ironic responses point to the inadequacy of reading ekphrasis itself as purely semiotic, of taking the interplay of word and image as significant aside from content or context. Its function, rather, is that of the arbiter of social value. The voice of the Chaucerian viewer simultaneously emphasizes the material production of the work -- the wealth, paint, instruments, training, and labor required to create it -- and produces the cultural value of the work based exclusively on internal and formal qualities, These are not the flaws of an imagined character, but an illustration of what Pierre Bourdieu calls "consecration," the process by which figures of cultural authority declare certain works or objects to have symbolic value.(FN30) Bourdieu is primarily interested in "anti-economic sub-universes," like the artistic avant-garde, in which economic interests are consciously abjured or ostensibly inverted, so that the underlying economic structure of the market must be "euphemized" through elaborate, obfuscatory games of aestheticizadon.(FN31) Since the world of the Knight's Tak is fourteenth-century court culture, not nineteenth-century Paris, the economic underpinnings of artistic production are celebrated rather than obscured. But for economic and political (and mardal) power to be translated into symbolic power, artistic creadon must still be consecrated by a social arbiter as embodying qualities of aesdietic value. The viewer-narrator in Chaucer's ekphrasis performs this rote. Thus Chaucer invests the paintings with symbolic capital ("Wel coude he peynten lifly that it wroghte" [2087] ) and remarks the economic capital at work in the production of the temples ("With many a floryn he the hewes boghte" [2088]), but he seems to ignore the political and physical violence that underlies the overall creadon, even as it is figured graphically in the images, and in the text that renders them.
    Bourdieu also has a key term for this kind of social work: "symbolic violence." "Symbolic violence" Bourdieu explains, "is that form of domination which, transcending the opposition usually drawn between sense relations and power relations, communication and domination, is only exerted through the communication in which it is disguised."(FN32) The decorations of Theseus's temples constitute a gargantuan act of symbolic violence. They do so because they are generated by a political audiority whose power and wealth derive ultimately from his ability to exercise raw power, and because the art renders the violent and arbitrary power of the patron in conventional symbols. But they constitute "symbolic violence" also because the perspective and the vocabulary of connoisseurship and aesthetic appreciation present the artistic values as if they are distinct from the political power that commissions them. And by misrepresenting the role of violent power in the cultural production, it assists in legitimizing the symbolic social role of the authoritarian ruler as well as that the roles of the critic, connoisseur, and aesthete.(FN33) The temple decorations and the poetic ekphrasis work in tandem to reveal the processes of symbolic violence in action: the art renders the violence into symbolic form; the poetic voice of the ekphrastic spectator gains a symbolic profit by denying the violence is there.
    But, then, the Knight's Tale is sown through with this kind of symbolic violence. From one perspective, the tale dramatizes from beginning to end the efforts of Theseus, having first "conquered al the regne of Femenye" (866) and then destroyed Thebes, to translate his bloody militaristic puissance into political legitimacy and symbolic authority via the euphemisms of chivalry and noblesse oblige. Its ultimate gesture is Theseus's grandiloquent justification of the marriage of Palamon and Emily. We are told in the most explicit terms that this marriage is proposed out of immediate political needs:
    Nonetheless, Theseus's ensuing speech, brilliant and beautiful (and quite successful, judging not just from its results in the tale but also from the tale's critical history), obscures its actual motivation and translates his political and military power into the magic of cosmology, conjuring a universe ruled by a benevolentjupiter and bound by a "faire cheyne of love" (2988) -- a vision that is, on the evidence of the preceding narrative, wholly fraudulent. The temple decorations are a piece of this process. The unique quality of the ekphrasis of the temples is that, by representing representation, it makes explicit the processes at work implicitly throughout. It reveals culture itself "as something done to something, with something, by someone, for someone." It would be all the more mistaken, therefore, if we were to assume that ekphrastic poetry like this passage were limited in its significance to semiotic or aesthetic questions of verbal and visual representation. We would, in fact, like the ironic Chaucerian observer, be complicit in the talc's symbolic violence, observing and appreciating the formal and stylistic qualities of the cultural product, gaining symbolic profit from denying the violence before our eyes.
ADDED MATERIAL
    ROBERT EPSTEIN
    Fairfield University

The statue of Venus, glorious for to se,
Was naked, fletynge in the large see,
And fro the navele doun at covered was
With wawes grene, and brighte as any glas.
A citole in hir right hand hadde she,
And on hir heed, ful sernely for to se,
A rose geiland, fressh and wel smellynge;
Above hir heed hir dowves flikervnge.(FN6)
                      (1955-62)

Plesaunce and Hope, Desir, Foolhardynesse,
Beautee and Youthe, Banderie, Richesse,
Charmes and Force, Lesynges, Flaterye,
Despense, Bisynesse, and Jalousye,
That wered of yelewe gooldes a gerland,
And a cokkow sittvnge on hir hand...
                      (1925-30)

Ther saugh I how woful Calisiopee,
Whan that Diane agreyed was with here,
Was turned from a womman til a here,
And after was she maad the loode-sterre.
Thus was it peynted; I kan sey vow no ferre.
Hir sone is eek a sterre, as men may see.
Ther saugh I Dane, yturned til a tree

Ther saugh I Attheon an hert ymaked,
For vengeatmce that he saugh Diane al naked;
I saugh how that his houndes have hym caught
And freeten hym, for that they knewe hym naught.
Yet peynted was a litel forther moor
How Atthalante hunted the wilde boor,
And Meleagre, and many another mo,
For which Dyane wroghte hym care and wo.
                      (2056-72)

First on the wal was peynted a forest,
In which ther dwelleth neither man ne best,
With knotty, knarry, bareyne trees olde,
Of stubbes sharps and hidotise to biholfie,
In which ther ran a rumbel in a swough,
As though a storm sholde bresten every bough.
                      (1975-80)

E era il tempio tutto isturiato
da sottil raano e di sopra e dinttirno;
e ciò the pria vi vide disegnato
eran le prede, di notte c di giorno
tolte alle terre; e trualunque sforzato
fu, era quivi in abito musorno;
vedeanvisi le genti inratenate,
porti di ferro e fortezze spewate.
                      (7.36)

And shortly to concluden, swich a place
Was noon in erthe, as in so litel space;
For in the lond ther was no crafty man
That geometrie or ars-metrike kan,
Ne portreyour, ne kervere of ymages,
That Theseus ne yaf him mete and wages
The theatre for to maken and devyse.
                      (1895-1901)

Videvi ancor le navi bellatrici,
i voti carri e li volti guastati,
e i miseri pianti e infelici,
e ogni forza con gli aspelli elati;
ogni fedita an cor si vedea lici,
e' sangui con le terre mescolati;
e in ogni luogo con aspetto fiero
si vedea Marte torbido e altiero.
                      (7.37)

Yet saugh I brent the shippes hoppesteres;
The hunte strangled with the wilde beres;
The sowe freten the child right in the cradel;
The cook yscalded, tor al his longe ladel.
Noght was foryeten by the infortune of Marte:
The cartere overryden with his carte -
Under the wheel fill lowe he lay adoun.
                      (2017-23)

A womman travaillynge was hire biforn;
But for hir child so longe was unborn,
Ful pitously Lucyna gan she calle
And sevde, "Help, for thou mayst best of alle!"
                      (2083-86)

What maketh this but Juppiter, the kyng,
That is prince and cause of alle thyng,
Converrynge al unto his propre welle
From which it is dirryved, sooth to telle?
                      (3035-38)

My cours, that hath so wyde for to turne,
Hat moore power than woot any man.
Myn is the drenchyng in the see so wan;
Myn is the prison in the derke cote;
Myn is the stranglyng and hangyng by the throte,
The murmure and the cheries rebellyng,
The groynynge, and the pryvee empoysonyng;
I do vengeance and pleyn correccioun,
Whil I dwelle in the signe of the leoun.
                      (2454-62)

Bene hai d'Arcita piena l'orazione,
che, come vedi, va vittorioso;
or resta a me quella di Palemone,
il qual perdente vedi star dogliosn,
a mio poter mandare a secuzione. -
A la qual Marte, fatto grazioso,
- Arnica -- disse, -- ciò che di' è 'l vero;
fa oramai il tuo piacere intero. -
                      (9.3)

Thanne semed me ther was a parlement
At Atthenes, upon certein pointz and caas;
Among the whiche pointz yspoken was,
To have widi certein contrees alliaunce,
And have fully of Thebans obeisaunce.
For which this noble Theseus anon
Leet sended after gentil Palamon...
                      (2970-76)

    A version of this essay was presented at the International Congress on Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo, MI; I am grateful to the organizer of the panel, Lianna Farber, for her comments and support. My thanks also to Jesús Escobar and Maurice Rose of Fairfield University's Art History Department for their advice and insight.

FOOTNOTES
1 The concise and convenient definition is that of James A. W. Heffernan, Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery (U, of Chicago Press, 1993), 3. The Greek word ekphrash means "description," and the poetic trope is sometimes defined broadly to include any extended and highly elaborate description. See, for instance, Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature in the Latin Middle Ages, trans, Willard R, Trask (Princeton U. Press, 1953), 193-200. As a figure of classical rhetoric, it was sometimes seen as retarding the progress of argumentation, See Stephen G. Nichols, "Ekphrasis, Iconoclasm, and Desire," Rethinking The Romance of the Rose: Text, Image, Inception, ed. Kevin Brownlee and Sylvia Huot (U. of Pennsylvania Press, 1992), 133-66.
2 In classical thought, ekphrasis allows poetry to mediate between, or alternatively to dwell on, the dichotomy of rational argumentation and the bodily pleasure of art. See Nichols, "Ekphrasis, Iconoclasm, and Desire," In glossing the several prominent instances of ekphrasis in the Aerteid, commentators from Fulgentius to Bernard Silvestris emphasized the contrast between the visual and the verbal, or between the superlunary and eternal on one hand and the temporal and terrestrial on the other. See John Watkins, "'Neither of Idle Shewes, Nor of False Charmes Aghast': Transformations of Virgilian Ekphrasis in Chaucer and Spenser," Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 23 (1993): 345-63. Ekphrasis has fascinated modern critics since Gotthold Lessing decried "this lifeless description of material objects." Laoeoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry, trans, by Edward Allen McCormick (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1962), 91, More recently, Murray Krieger, in Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign (Johns Hopkins U. Press, 1992), elevated the trope to the ideal of poetics in genera) as an emblem of the desire for a natural or transcendent signifier. Krieger's work, W.J. T Mitchell has observed, "has without question been the single most influential statement on ekphrasis in American criticism." Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representations (U. of Chicago Press, 1994), 153 n. 8.
3 Jean H. Hagstrum, The Sister Arts: The Tradition of Literary Pictorialism and English Poetry from Dryden to Cray (.11. of Chicago Press, 1958; repr. 1987), 42-43.
4 Margaret Bridges, "The Picture in the Text: Ecphrasis as Self-reflexivity in Chaucer's Parliament of Eowles, Book of the Duchess and House of Fame," Word & Image 5 (1989): 153.
5 Heffcnian, Mweum of Words, 62. Heffernan admits, though, that "the least pictorial section of the whole passage on the temples" -- the catalogue of victims of chastity in the temple of Diana -- "reveals the most."
6 All citations of Chaucer refer to The Riverside Chaucer, 3d edition, ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 19S7). Hagstrum claims that the parallel passage in Home of Fame "anticipates Botticelli and takes us to trecento Tuscany" (43-44) but the Knight's ToZepassage is actually even more painterly and evocatively imagistic.
7 Nichols, "Ekphrasis, Iconoclasm, and Desire," 152.
8 Hagstrum, 42. Lessing holds particular scorn for such rhetorical obstacles. When Venus provides Aeneas with his shield in book 8 of the Aennd, "the description or picture of the shield... grows so cold and tedious from the constantly recurring 'here is,' and 'there is,' and 'near by stands,' and 'not far from there is seen, that all Virgil's poetic grace is needed to prevent it from becoming intolerable'" (Faocoön, 116). See Mitchell, Picture Theory, 179.
9 Mitchell, Picture Theory, 6, 178, 160, 180.
10 Chaucer's uses and adaptations of book 7 of the Teseida are laid out in great detail in Picro Boitani, Chaucer and Boccaccio (Oxford: Society for the Study of Mediaeval Languages and Literature, 1977), 76-102.
11 Quotations of the Teseida are cited from Giovanni Boccaccio, Teseida delle Nozze d'Emilia, a cura di Alberto Limentani (Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, 1992). Translations, unless otherwise noted, are from The Book of Theseus, trans. Bernadette Marie McCoy (New York: Medieval Text Association, 1974).
12 See in particular Elizabeth Salter, Fourteenth-Century English Poetry: Contexts and Readings (Oxford: Clarendon, 1983), 141-81.
13 See for instance Paul G. Ruggiers, The Art of the Canterbury Tales (U. of Wisconsin Press, 1965), 157; John Frankis, "Paganism and Pagan Love in Troilus and Criseyde," Essays on Troilus and Criseyde, ed. Mary Salu (Cambridge: D, S. Brewer, 1979), 67-70; Derek Pearsall, The Canterbury Tales (London; George Allen & Unwin, 1985), 115-38.
14 See Krieger, "Foreword; Of Shields," Ekphrasis, xiii-xvii. In the classical tradition, perhaps Virgil comes closest to Chaucer's attention to social context when Aeneas sees the story of Troy carved on the Carthaginian temple: "namque sub ingenti lustrat dum singula templo/reginam opperiens, dum quae fortuna sit urbi/artificumque manus inter se operumque laborem/miratur..." Aeneid, Books I-VI, ed. R. Deryck Williams (London: Bristol Classical Press, 1996). "For while he waited for the queen, he studied / everything in that huge sanctuary, / marveling at a city rich enough / for such a temple, at the handiwork / of rival artists, at their skillful tasks." The Aeneid of Virgil, trans. Allen Mandelbaum (New York: Bantam, 1971), 1:642-46.
15 Chaucer makes more extensive use of Boccaccio's description of the Temple of Venus in the Parliament of Fowls. See Piero Boitani, "Style, Iconography and Narrative: The Lesson of the Teseida," Chaucer and the Italian Trecento, ed. Piero Boitani (Cambridge U. Press, 1983), 191-93.
16 "Ad intelligenzia delia quai cosa è da sapere che in ciascuno uomo sono due principal] appetiti, de' quali l'uno si chiama appedto concupiscibile, per lo quale l'uomo disidera e si rallegra d'avere le chose che, sccondo il suo giudido, o ragionevole o corrotto ch'egli sia, sono dilettevoli e piacevoli; l'altro si chiama appetitoirascibile, per lo quale l'uomo si turba ochegli sieno toile oimpedite le cose dilettevoli, o perché quelle avere non si possano" (7.30.n.). "For an understanding of this it should be remarked that in every man there are two principal appetites. One of these is called the concupiscible appetite, whereby man desires and rejoices to have the things which, according to his judgment -- whether it be rational or corrupt -- are delightful and pleasing. The other is called the irascible appetite, whereby a man is troubled if delightful things are taken away or impeded, or when they cannot be had." The good kinds of appetites, though, are conspicuously absent from Boccaccio's poem: "Ad evidenzia della quale cosa è da sapere che corne di sopra, dicendo Marie consistere nello appetito irasribile, cosi Venere net concupiscibile. La quale Venere è doppia, perdu che l'una si può e dee intendere per ciascuno onesto e licito disiderio, si come è disiderare d avere ntoglie per avere fighuoh, e simili a questo; e di questa Venere non si parla qui. La seconda Venere è quclla per la quale ogni lascivia è disiderata, e che volgarmente è chiamata dea d'amore; e di questa disegna quil'autore il tempio e l'altre cose circustanti ad esso, some nel testo appare" (7.50.n.). "To clarify this mailer it must be realized that just as Mars, as was said above, consists in the irascible appetite, so Venus consists in the concupiscible. This Venus is twofold, since one can be understood as every chaste and licit desire, as is the desire to have a wife in order to have children, and such like. This Venus is not discussed here. The second Venus is that through which all lewdness is desired, commonly called the goddess of love. Here the author describes the temple of this goddess, and other things that belong to it, as appears in the text."
17 V A. Kolve, Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative: The First Five Canterbury Tales (Stanford U. Press, 1984), 105-32.
18 Boitani, Chaucer and Boccaccio, 95, notes that some elements of Boccaccio's Temple of Venus, such as the images of Callisto and Atalanta, are imported by Chaucer into his Temple of Diana.
19 Heffernan, Museum of Words, 62-66. To Heffernan, the images of the rapes of Callisto and Daphne prefigure the "painfully coerced surrender" of Emily (66).
20 Kolve, Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative, 122,
21 See, for instance, Robert W. Hanning, "The Struggle between Noble Designs and Chaos': The Literary Tradition of the Knight's Tale," Literary Review 23 (1980): 519-41. Hanning takes his title from another parallel example, Charles Muscatine's Chaucer and the French Tradition: A Study in Style and Meaning (U. of California Press, 1969).
22 Kolve, Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative, 126n.
23 David Aers, Chaucer (Atlantic Heights, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1986), 24. On the conflicting critical traditions of the Knight's Tale, see Lee Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History (Madison: U. of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 165-67.
24 On Theseus's self-justifying exploitation of language, see Aers, Chaucer, 26-32.
25 Sylvia Tomasch argues that Theseus's lists resemble medieval world maps, and also sees them as designed for social control. See "Mappae Mundiand 'The Knight's Tale': The Geography of Power, the Technology of Control," Literature and Technology, cd. Mark L. Green berg (Bethlehem PA Lehigh U. Press, 1992), 66-98.
26 Cf. the Middle English Dictionary, "soul" (adj., 4,a); "penrel" (n.2).
27 See Jonathan J. G. Alexander, Medieval Illuminators and Their Methods of Work (Yale U. Press, 1992), 41. For a medieval artisan's perspective, see Cennino d'Andrea Cennini, II Libra dell'Arte (The Craftsman's Handbook), trans. Daniel V. Thompson, Jr. (Yale U. Press, 1933), 36-39.
28 David Bomford, Jill Dunkerton, Dillian Gordon, and Ashok Roy, Art in the Making: Italian Painting Before 1400 (London: National Gallery Publications, 1989; repr. 1990), 197-206.
29 See Sheila Lindenbaum, "The Smifhfield Tournament of 1390," Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 20 (1990): 1-20, and Margaret Hallissy, "Writing a Building: Chaucer's Knowledge of the Construction Industry and the Language of the Knight's Take," Chaucer Review 32 (1998): 239-59.
30 See Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, ed. Randall Johnson (Columbia U. Press, 1993), 76-77.
31 Pierre Bourdieu, Practical Reason (Stanford U. Press, 1998), 113.
32 Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge U. Press, 1977), 237 n. 47.
33 See Randal John son's explanation of the canon as a form of "symbolic violence" in his introduction to The Field of Cultural Production: "The establishment of a canon in the guise of a universally valued cultural inheritance or patrimony constitutes an act of 'symbolic violence,' as Bourdieu defines it, in that it gains legitimacy by misrecognizing the underlying power relations which serve, in part, to guarantee the continued reproduction of the legitimacy of those who produce or defend the canon" (20).