But a painting of an apple is not "an apple once removed." It's not an apple at all, in any sense, and was never meant to be, so it's not an imitation of anything. It's a real piece of canvas having certain dimensions, covered with real pigment, and probably contained on its sides by a frame of some sort made of real wood or real metal or some other not-imaginary substance. The person who responds to it in a poem is responding to that reality--with all the unseen aspects added to it, such as the perception of the painter's brushstrokes and the evidence of his choices and so on, and his choice of subject. The poem is not responding to the depicted apple, but to the depiction of the apple--the artist's act of depiction and its visible result--which is the work of art.
The artist is a depicter, not a counterfeiter. His work is not intended to replace or be taken for the model. My husband's statues, for instance, sit, lie and stand all over this house, but nobody in his right mind would believe that my husband made them to "imitate" people and fool the viewer somehow! They're too small to compete with real live people; they have metallic or painted or otherwise wholly unskinlike finishes; and they never move! No, he makes them because it gives him pleasure and because he finds the human body endlessly interesting, complete with its wrinkles and bulges and signs of bone under the flesh. Somebody responding to one of his pieces would be moved by my husband's take on his model, the version his eye perceived and what his hands did with it in clay and then in plaster, not by the living model, who is not present in my house, and in any case would have looked different to some other sculptor.
As for the danger of pretentiousness that Chris mentions, alas, there's no getting rid of that, any more than the danger of sentimentality, ineptitude...the list is long. Those are human failings, not dangers inherent in ekphrasis itself. The poet who becomes pretentious writing an ekphrastic poem would probably do so if he limited his subject to a single drop of water. If he's determined to write in such a way as to "impress," he will find a way to do it, however modest his subject, because his true theme--his own magnificence--will out.
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