The study of ekphrasis in España by Théophile Gautier

The concept of ekphrasis, issued from the ancient Greek rhetoric, revived in the nineteenth century by the Romantics and especially by the Parnassians. The restrictions imposed on the meaning of this word during the centuries led to the formation of a diminutive view of the history of descriptive writing. However, the ekphrasis had a special place in poetry and fiction arts of the nineteenth century. The ekphrasis in Théophile Gautier's poetic and romantic works is based on poet’s aesthetics on the search forabsolute beauty in order to idealize the real. The verbal representation of an art work takes a variant forms in the collection of poems España. It plays a key role whose magnitude exceeds a rhetorical objective.