Ekphrasis and prompt engineering. A comparison in the era of generative AI

In this work I try to show that there is a common thread between ekphrasis and prompt engineering, in spite of the temporal distance of almost thirty centuries between their respective earliest known instances, and despite the blatant dispar- ity in technological tools supporting them. An investigation of the characteristics of such thread can shed light on a number of aspects of our experience of textual and visual works, including the role of our imagination, that of our emotions, and what happens when human agency within these imaginative and emotive pro- cesses is substituted by the artificial agency of an AI system.