"Ekphrasis is a description — which is to say, a reading — of a particular object or event so as to 'bring it to sight,' to make it visible. It is therefore a reading that is also a viewing….To hear an ekphrasis is also to see what is described, and to write an ekphrasis is to make the description visible." It is in this fashion that Ovid introduces visual imagery. One can make an ekphrasis out of a "real" image or work of art, but, as in Hermogenes' passage, what the writer describes is a picture that he creates with his "mind's eyes." Even if one were describing a real, external, and tangible picture (say the images in the Ara Pacis Augustae), in the process of transforming image into text through description the author is always working on his own mental image of the work of art.