Quintilian and Visual Art

Visual art provides a rich seam of analogy for Quintilian, offering parallels for both the art of rhetoric and the art of training orators. Most famous is his catalogue of artists in Book 12, a list of eleven Greek painters and ten Greek sculptors from the sixth to fourth centuries ce. These he uses to demonstrate variations in personal ‘style’, comparing them with a selection of Roman and Greek orators. At first glance, the passage is not especially novel: this kind of artist–orator analogy, his choice of artists, and many of his comments on their merits all have parallels in other authors. But on closer inspection, we can discern two features which are distinctive of Quintilian the educator: the first is his teacherly appreciation of artists and orators who combine talent with hard work; the second is his method of teaching-by-doing. His catalogue of artists is itself a textbook example of the rhetorical skill he demands of his students: a sustained manipulation of the listener’s opinion, elevated by (just enough) specialist detail to appear authoritative.