Pictorial Description Example

The pictorial description is a literary form in which a person remains motionless in front of a scene, which also describes it it is his static aspect, that is to say, that by means of the descriptive text he is forming a mental picture of what happens in front of his eyes.

This type of description is widely used both for the description of places, as well as people and animals.

One of the most famous pictorial descriptions is the one that Don Miguel de Cervantes made of himself:

“…This one you see here, with an aquiline face, brown hair, a smooth and unprepared forehead, happy eyes and a crooked nose, although well proportioned; silver beards, which have not been gold for twenty years, large mustaches, small mouth, teeth neither small nor grown, because he has only six, and those poorly conditioned and worse off, because they do not correspond with the others; the body between two extremes, neither big nor small, the bright color, before white than brown, somewhat heavy on the back, and not very light on the feet. This I say, that it is the face of the author of La Galatea and Don Quixote de la Mancha, and of the one who made the Voyage of Parnassus,... He is commonly called Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra... "

The pictorial description has three variants:

Plastically pictorial description: in which the sensitive details of even the most common objects are enhanced; Aspects such as color, textures, smells are highlighted:

And there I was in front of her: feeling her warm gaze, her ebony silk hands holding between mine, rough and coarse, that rosary of crystalline and green beads, set with gilded and brilliant links and finished off with a silver cross with a gilded Christ, to whom he paid little attention, almost ignored, because Those delicate, soft and white, and her green eyes fixed on me until then, dull gaze, ignited in me thousands of sublime and unspeakable.

Comparatively pictorial description: In this case the description is made through comparisons with elements known or common to the reader, which also enriches the mental images of the description:

And the day of my return, I entered my house alone like the desert, but in which, nevertheless, I felt the hubbub of the party, from the song to break the piñata, just at the entering the dusty kitchen, the greedy sensation of the smell of ham, and in the patio the memory of moonlit nights with the singing of frogs that shone like emeralds.

Pictorial description through antithesis: It is the description of the elements by comparing or contrasting with opposing or opposing elements. It can also be used in the description of a place or person, contrasting it with another:

And when I arrived in the City, I felt my soul inside my body again. The bustlingly noisy streets gave me back the peace of mind that in the town that was only anguish in the midst of the deathly silence that even flooded the main avenues.

In a pictorial description it is quite common for the three variants mentioned to be mixed, which greatly enriches the expression.

Pictorial description example

My Godmother

My godmother was not an old woman. On the contrary, she was very young, I would say that she was 24 or 25 years old. And I was a boy of 8. He saw her green eyes, her hands that, although small and delicate, had a lot of strength, a strength that he used to weave baskets, sew dresses and delicately lift small children; and so delicate, that despite the calluses that the work made, they knew how to give soft and tender caresses. Always dressed in a serious gray skirt and a light colored blouse, the severity of her dress contrasted with her joy, which she always showed to everyone. But alone, every now and then, a tear would roll and a sigh would escape. And when hidden he saw that furtive tear on his face and that fugitive sigh, he saw how they suddenly disappeared when someone touched or called him. Until a long time later, I knew that that tear and that sigh were called Rodrigo, his love that had disappeared five years before, when I still had no memory.

My old school.

It's amazing how time passes. I am on the street from my school and everything is different. The school is still there. The open gates through which we entered when it was late, are now cold, almost impregnable walls. Paty's stationery store, where we used to buy sodas and stationery, is now just a dusty, daubed curtain. Dona Chona's house is now an apartment building. The other stationery is still there, but the old woman who sold me the pens is no longer taking care of it, now there is a young woman who seems to be his granddaughter. From the tree where we used to sit to talk and have refreshments, now there is only the trunk that serves as a bench for an old man who also looks nostalgic at the old school. Taking a good look at that old man, he's the one who was my math teacher, the one who punished me for leaving a beetle on her desk, but despite that, he gave me high marks for helping my classmates. He also looks at the few remains that remain of our memories; perhaps in nostalgia for him, he remembers much more and sees much less than what I can long for.