Preface
When he described the making of the shield of Achilles in the Iliad during the eighth century BC, Homer was probably unaware that his description would give rise to a genre known as ekphrastic poetry.1 The Homeric rendition of the well-wrought scenes on the shield has provided for later poets not only a prototype of interartistic analogy but also a model of cross-cultural comparison.2
A comparable literary novelty emerged in China about four centuries later, when the banished poet-statesman Qu Yuan (340?–278 BC) wrote poems on the walls of the temples where ancient kings were apotheosized and the ancestral shrines of the nobility. He did so based on inspiration from the myths and legends portrayed in the murals at those places, and his poems were later collected under the title Tian wen (Heaven questioned).3 Like Homer, Qu Yuan was most likely unaware that his impromptu poetic ranting would foreshadow the creation of the genre of tihuashi (literally, poetry written about painting)—which figures largely in both Chinese poetry and painting—providingan interartistic vantage point whereby the poetry-painting relationship in classical