Framing Lives as Paintings

This article builds on the most recent work done on ekphrasis in contemporary fiction and explores its capacities to blur the boundary between visual art and life writing. Since ekphrasis can contest the border of the work of art, this article also draws from Derrida's notion of the parergon (1987). Ekphrasis is most commonly understood as the ‘verbal representation of a visual representation’ (Heffernan 1993), while the parergon captures the ambiguous, ‘ornamental’ frame that separates the artwork from the world beyond it. By focusing on Amy Sackville's Painter to the King (2018) and Laura Cumming's The Vanishing Man (2016), two books that use Diego Velázquez's painting Las Meninas (1656) to frame their life narratives, this article shows how ekphrasis can act as a discursive parergon that challenges the borders between art and life, fact and fiction, literature and painting, and inside and outside. These empathetic life narratives—of a Spanish painter and a Victorian bookseller respectively—emulate Velázquez's visual techniques and implicate the reader, who is turned into a quasi-eyewitness through ekphrasis, within their meaning-making structures. In both instances, the enchanting spell of Velázquez's painting is used to push these life narratives into the realm of the imagination.