After a four-year journey, the Polos were heartily welcomed at the court of Kublai Khan—especially the young Marco, who kept the khan spellbound with his stories.
Socrates goes further and defines rhetoric as a techne psychagogia, an art of leading or directing the soul, a kind of bewitchment that holds the listener's soul spellbound (261a).
When they were first shown in Manhattan in the 1950s, these big, spellbinding paintings were immediately recognised as a body of work that made the case for American painting in an utterly new way.