What is it about art that we find intellectually so elusive? Is it because it takes the form of colour, shape, and pattern in two or three dimensions, rather than words, themselves the instruments of reflection and analysis? Why is it that Keats is so right to say of his Grecian urn that it can ‘express / A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme’1: to suggest that art is a sweeter medium than literature? Is it because paintings make such an (apparently) immediate impact on our senses, in a rush and in one go, whereas literature is condemned to operate at one remove from the throne of truth by the ploddingly sequential and syntactic medium it exploits (that it ‘pours ideas into our minds’, as Jonathan Richardson wrote in his The Theory of Painting in 1715, whereas ‘words only drop them. The whole scene opens at one view, whereas the other way lifts up the curtain by little and little’2)? What are the varying relations between form and content in the two forms of creative communication? Perhaps an amateur of genius, like Lord Byron, can shed some light on these perplexing questions.

Byron's indifference to painting is well attested to, not least by himself. Three examples are representative. On 6 March 1814, he wrote to Thomas Phillips, who had painted no fewer than three portraits of the poet in recent months:

In the same year, John Knowles recorded a conversation between Byron and the Swiss artist, Henry Fuseli: