Visual art is most often introduced into the creative writing classroom as an occasion for ekphrastic writing or as a source of aphorisms and insights into the creative process more generally. But it can also be used to demonstrate concrete techniques that both writers and artists deploy. As an example, the art historian Michael Fried, in his book The Moment of Caravaggio, offers a lengthy exploration of the role of ellipsis in the late 16th century paintings of Annibale Carracci, his “device of indicating more in his paintings than is actually seen in them.” This is done visually not just through selective inclusion of details, but through omissions, such as bristling half-spears at the right-hand side of a battle scene to indicate more soldiers just outside the frame. A pair of feet, not an entire body, suggests many more supine dead beyond the picture’s edge. Ellipsis is a technique of both inclusion and exclusion: Carracci paints half-spears where he could have painted no spears; he paints half-spears where he could have painted whole spears. But a countable number of whole spears would have communicated to the viewer that the number of soldiers carrying them is finite, artificial, tidily tucked inside a frame. Ellipsis, “the use of deliberate omission to evoke what is not actually shown,” convinces us that the picture continues off the page.
This idea is familiar to fiction writers who labor to invent the “telling detail” that will convince a reader of the plausibility of a character who doesn’t exist, a situation that never occurred. In nonfiction, when the details and moments are real, when the picture does, in fact, extend well beyond the canvas, compositional ellipsis is still a powerful idea. Where does the text successfully indicate the world beyond the frame, where are the omissions false or misleading, and how does a writer tell the difference? What to cut and what to include is never easy to answer—partly, of course, because there are no firm rules—so each story or essay is a new puzzle.
As we guide students through the close reading of pieces that might serve as models and solutions to writerly problems, it is worth introducing them to close reading of visuals for a vivid and easily graspable example of a shared technique. In addition to Carracci’s work, I love using the painting The Lute Player by Orazio Gentileschi, which shows a woman turned away from the viewer, bent privately over her instrument, the strings of the lute and the movement of her hands hidden from view. Yet she’s a more plausible lutist than Saint Cecilia in Artemisia Gentileschi’s painting of that name, who stands facing front, her whole body visible but the posture posed, the face strangely blank. We see more, but we believe less. There’s a clear and vivid lesson here for writers at all levels.
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Caitlin Horrocks is the author of the novel The Vexations (Little, Brown, 2019) and the story collection This Is Not Your City (Sarabande Books, 2011). She teaches at Grand Valley State University and in the M.F.A. Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.