Hypotyposis

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Hypotyposis /ˌhaɪpətaɪˈpoʊsɪs/ (from the ancient Greek ὑποτύπωσις/hupotúpôsis, "sketch, model") is a figure of speech consisting of a realistic, animated, and striking description of the scene of which one wants to give an imagined representation and as if experienced at the moment of its expression. The speech of the nurse in the Prologue of Euripides' Medea, Racine's "dream of Athalie" in the play of the same name, Cicero's portrait of Clodius in his Pro Milone, or Émile Zola's description of the alembic in his novel L'Assommoir are examples of hypotyposes. It can take the form of an enumeration of concrete details to such an extent that one can say that it crosses the conditions of form proper to a figure of speech. Indeed, the figure can easily go beyond the framework of the sentence to develop over several sentences or even several pages. For the Latin orator Quintilian, hypotyposis is "the image of things, so well represented by the word that the listener believes he sees it rather than hears it". It allows the composition of vast poetic tableaux "giving to see" a scene as if the limits of the sentence no longer existed. A figure based on the image, it has been, since the beginning of rhetoric, the preferred method for animating descriptions and striking the imagination of the interlocutor. It has several variants, depending on the object described. It is often confused with ekphrasis, which is a realistic and precise description of a work of art.