This session explores: 1) the ability of late antique and medieval authors to create images throughout their written words, blurring the borders between visual and literary arts; 2) investigate how the written and oral dissemination of textual imagery interacted with the conception, production, and perception of visual arts in the same period. Using their stylus as a painting brush, late antique and medieval authors transformed words in literary images/icons, making them part of a wider visual culture. Works of art described or evoked might have existed, but, most of the time, textual imagery remained ‘literary works of art’ in a poetic space of creation, a fiction of shapes and colors, depicted or shaped under the readers’ eyes.