This interactive seminar will explore ‘materiale Textkulturen’ in relation to Graeco-Roman antiquity’s most ingenious – and most conspicuously overlooked – ‘picture-poet’: Publilius Optatianus Porfyrius. Writing in the first decades of the fourth century A.D., and in Latin poems addressed to the emperor Constantine, Optatian probed the latent iconic potential of writing, and in the most dazzlingly sophisticated ways.

After a brief introduction to Optatian and his œuvre, the seminar will concentrate on just one particular case study: a Gitternetzgedichte that whimsically promises to craft within its verses the materialized face of Constantine (fingere… uultus Augusti), and in such a way as to outstrip antiquity’s most celebrated painter (uincere Apelleas audebit pagina ceras).

In this gridded poem, or carmen cancellatum, the individual letters of Optatian’s words purport to visualize the countenance of the emperor: we come face-to-face with a portrait that lends itself to (literally!) literal ‘reading’. But how should we make sense of the schematic form of Optatian’s image? What does the poem reveal about contemporary notions of portraiture? And how should we make sense of Optatian’s abiding fascination with the respective limits of ‘seeing’ and ‘reading’?