“Fra Angelico: Martyrdom of Saints Cosmas and Damian” by Zbigniew Herbert: Strategies of Writing about Art

Abstract

The title of Zbigniew Herbert’s poem “Fra Angelico: Martyrdom of Saints Cosmas and Damian” suggests that the poem is a typical ekphrasis. Such descriptiveness seems to be confirmed by the author's segmentation of the text (and at the same time of the presented world) into the left side, background and the right side of the picture. Such division is characteristic for verbal description of a picture as a work of painting and is used by historians of art. But by reading more attentively it reveals that Herbert's poem should be treated not only as a description of the picture, but its interpretation. Herbert refers not only to the picture, but to external information (hagiology). Division of the world in the poem causes stratification on another levels of the text such as narrators. While “left side of the picture” is presented from external perspective indefinite in details, “right side of the picture” deals with the presented world from the viewpoint of the characters from the described picture. That's why instead of neutral utterance of an external narrator we have utterances of the characters (as in masks lyrics).