Hostname: page-component-5c6d5d7d68-wpx84 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-08-06T11:15:06.341Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Making Pictures Speak: Renaissance Art, Elizabethan Literature, Modern Scholarship

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Leonard Barkan
Leonard Barkan*
Affiliation:
New York University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Some Often Quoted Lines from Sidney's Apology for Poetry can stand both as a piece of literary history in themselves and as a methodological guide for the study of that history: “Poesy therefore is an art of imitation: for so Aristotle termeth it in the word mimesis, that is to say, a representing, counterfeiting, or figuring forth—to speak metaphorically, a speaking picture.“1 It is one of the most famous of all definitions of poetry, and like many other such definitions—Plato's in the Republic, Horace's in the Ars Poetica2- —it arrives at saliency by drawing an analogy to the visual. More succinctly even than his predecessors, Sidney demonstrates just how difficult it is to unpack the cdncept of mimesis as he ranges through a sequence of functional descriptions ﹛representing, counterfeiting, figuring forth), none of which quite does the trick, until he arrives at a metaphor that names itself as such. One might say that a metaphor is itself a speaking picture and therefore Sidney's memorable phrase is a self-confirming artifact. But let us shy away from such metaformulations and content ourselves with a sense of just how felicitous the expression “speaking picture” turns out to be.

Type
Studies
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 48 , Issue 2 , Summer 1995 , pp. 326 - 351
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1995

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Alberti, Leon Battista. On the Art of Building. Trans. Rykwert, J., Leach, N., and Tavernor, R.. Cambridge, MA, 1988.Google Scholar
Alberti, Leon Battista. On Painting and on Sculpture. Trans. Grayson, C.. London, 1972.Google Scholar
Alpers, Svetlana Leontief. “Ekphrasis and Aesthetic Attitudes in Vasari's Lives.“ Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 23 (1960): 190–215.Google Scholar
Alpers, Svetlana Leontief. The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seuenteenth Century. Chicago, 1983.Google Scholar
Alpers, Svetlana Leontief and Paul Alpers. “Ut Pictura Noesis? Criticism in Literary Studies and Art History.“ New Literary History 3 (1972): 431-58.Google Scholar
Attolini, Giovanni. Teatro e spettacolo nel Rinascimento. Ban, 1988.Google Scholar
Bal, Mieke. Reading “Rembrandt“: Beyond the Word-Image Opposition. The Northrop Frye Lectures in Literary Theory. Cambridge, 1991.Google Scholar
Barkan, Leonard. “Living Sculptures: Ovid, Michelangelo, and The Winter's Tale.“ Journal of English Literary History 48 (1981): 39–67.Google Scholar
Barkan, Leonard. The Gods Made Flesh: Metamorphosis and the Pursuit of Paganism. New Haven, 1986.Google Scholar
Barkan, Leonard. Transuming Passion: Ganymede and the Erotics of Humanism. Stanford, 1991.Google Scholar
Baxandall, Michael. Giotto and the Orators: Humanist Observers of Painting in Italy and the Discovery of Pictorial Composition, 1350-1450. Oxford, 1971.Google Scholar
Baxandall, Michael. Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures. New Haven, 1985.Google Scholar
Bender, John B. Spenser and Literary Pictorialism. Princeton, 1972.Google Scholar
Berger, Harry. Second World and Green World: Studies in Renaissance Fiction- Making. Berkeley, 1988.Google Scholar
Braider, Christopher. Refiguring the Real: Picture and Modernity in Word and Image, 1400-1700. Princeton, 1993.Google Scholar
Bryson, Norman. Word and Image: French Painting of the Ancien Regime. Cambridge, 1981.Google Scholar
Bryson, Norman. Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze. London, 1983.Google Scholar
Bryson, Norman. “Intertextuality and Visual Poetics.“ Style 22 (1988): 183-93.Google Scholar
Bryson, Norman. “Semiology and Visual Interpretation.“ In Bryson, Holly, and Moxey.Google Scholar
Bryson, Norman. Michael Ann Holly, and Keith P. F. Moxey, ed. Visual Theory: Painting and Interpretation. New York, 1991 Google Scholar
Buxton, John. Sir Philip Sianey and the English Renaissance. Houndsmills, 1954. 3d ed., 1987.Google Scholar
Buxton, John. Elizabethan Taste. London, 1963. 2d ed., 1965.Google Scholar
Caws, Mary Ann. The Art of Interference: Stressed Readings in Verbal and Visual Texts. Princeton, 1989.Google Scholar
Chambers, Douglas. “ ‘A Speaking Picture': Some Ways of Proceeding in Literature and the Fine Arts in the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries.” In Encounters: Essays on Literature and the Visual Arts, ed., Hunt, John Dixon, 28-57. New York, 1971.Google Scholar
Colvin, Sidney. “The Sack of Troy in Shakespeare's Lucrece and in Some Fifteenth-Century Drawings and Tapestries. ” In A Book of Homage to Shakespeare, ed. Gollancz, , 1:88-99. Oxford, 1916.Google Scholar
Cruriani, Fabrizio. and Daniele Seragnoli. Il teatro italiano nel Rinascimento. Bologna, 1987.Google Scholar
Cunnar, Eugene R. “Herbert and the Visual Arts: Ut Pictura Poesis: An Opening in 'The Windows.’ “ In Like Season'd Timber: New Essays on George Herbert, ed., Miller, Edmund and Yanni, Robert Di, 101-38. New York, 1987.Google Scholar
Dessen, Alan. “Recovering Shakespeare's Images.” Word and Image 4 (1988):6l8-25.10.1080/02666286.1988.10436205Google Scholar
Doebler, John. Shakespeare's Speaking Pictures: Studies in Iconic Imagery. Albuquerque, 1974.Google Scholar
Doebler, John. “Bibliography for the Study of Iconography and Renaissance English Literature.“ Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama 22 (1979): 45–55.Google Scholar
Dolders, Arno. “Ut Pictura Poesis: A Selective, Annotated Bibliography of Books and Articles, Published Between 1900 and 1980, on the Interrelation of Literature and Painting from 1400 to 1800.” Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature 32 (1983): 105-24.Google Scholar
Dorangeon, Simone. “Ut Pictura Poesis: Sidney, t£moin de son temps.” Bulletin de la Societi d'Etudes Anglo-Americaines des XVIIe et XVIIIe Siecles 31 (1990): 159-76.10.3406/xvii.1990.1894Google Scholar
Duncan-Jones, Katherine. “Sidney and Titian.” In English Renaissance Studies Presented to Dame Helen Gardner in Honour of her Seventieth Birthday, ed. Carey, John, in . Oxford, 1980.Google Scholar
Dundas, Judith. “The Rhetorical Basis of Spenser's Imagery.” Studies in English Literature, 1500-19008 (1968): 59–75.10.2307/449410Google Scholar
Evett, David. Literature and the Visual Arts in Tudor England. Athens, GA, 1990.Google Scholar
Fairchild, A. H. R. Shakespeare and the Arts of Design: Architecture, Sculpture, and Painting. Columbia, MO, 1937.Google Scholar
Farmer, Norman K. Jr. Poets and the Visual Arts in Renaissance England. Austin, 1984.Google Scholar
Ferretti, Sylvia. Cassirer, Panofsky, and Warburg: Symbol, Art, and History. New Haven, 1989.Google Scholar
Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams. Trans. Strachey, J.. New York, 1955.Google Scholar
Fumerton, Patricia. “ ‘Secret’ Arts: Elizabethan Miniatures and Sonnets.” Representations 15 (1986): 57–97.10.1525/rep.1986.15.1.99p0145iGoogle Scholar
Gash, Anthony. “Shakespeare's Comedies of Shadow and Substance: Word and Image in Henry IV and Twelfth Night.” Word and Image 4 (1988): 626-62.Google Scholar
Gent, Lucy. Picture and Poetry 1560-1620: Relations between Literature and the Visual Arts in the English Renaissance. Leamington Spa, 1981.Google Scholar
Gent, Lucy. Renaissance Bodies: The Human Figure in English Culture c. 1540-1660. London, 1990.Google Scholar
Gilbert, Creighton. Poets Seeing Artists' Work: Instances in the Italian Renaissance. Florence, 1991.Google Scholar
Gilman, Ernest B. The Curious Perspective: Literary and Pictorial Wit in the Seventeenth Century. New Haven, 1978.Google Scholar
Gilman, Ernest B. Iconoclasm and Poetry in the English Reformation: Down went Dagon. Chicago, 1986.Google Scholar
Gombrich, E. H. Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation. New York, 1960. 4th ed., 1972.Google Scholar
Gombrich, E. H. Meditations on a Hobby Horse and Other Essays on the Theory of Art. London, 1963.Google Scholar
Gombrich, E. H. Norm and Form: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance. London, 1966. 2d ed., 1971.Google Scholar
Gombrich, E. H. Symbolic Images: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance. Chicago, 1972.Google Scholar
Gombrich, E. H. Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography. London, 1970; 2d ed. 1986.Google Scholar
Goodman, Nelson. The Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols. Indianapolis, 1968.Google Scholar
Gordon, D.J. The Renaissance Imagination: Essays and Lectures. Ed. Orgel, Stephen. Berkeley, 1975.Google Scholar
Guillén, Claudio. “On the Concept and Metaphor of Perspective. “In Comparatists at Work: Studies in Comparative Literature ed., Nichols, Stephen G. and Vowles, Richard, 28–90. Waltham, MA, 1968.Google Scholar
Hageman, Elizabeth H. “In Praise of Poet's Wit: Spenser and the Sister Arts. “ Spenser at Kalamazoo. Cleveland State University, 1977. Microfiche.Google Scholar
Hagstrum, Jean H. The Sister Arts: The Tradition of Literary Pictorialism and English Poetry from Dryden to Gray. Chicago, 1958.Google Scholar
Hauser, Arnold. Mannerism: The Crisis of the Renaissance and the Origin of Modern Art. London, 1965.Google Scholar
Heckscher, W. S. “Shakespeare in His Relationship to the Visual Arts: A Study in Paradox.” Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama 13-4 (1970-71): 5–71.Google Scholar
Heninger, S. K. Jr. “ ‘Metaphor’ and Sidney's Defence of Poesie.” fohn Donne Journal 1 (1982): 117-49.Google Scholar
Heninger, S. K. Jr. “Sidney's Speaking Pictures and the Theater.” Style 23 (1989): 395–404.Google Scholar
Hogan, Patrick G. Jr. “Sidney and Titian: Painting in the Arcadia and the Defence.“ South Central Bulletin 27.4 (1967): 9–15.Google Scholar
Hollanda, Francisco de. Four Dialogues on Painting. Trans. A. F. G. Bell. London, 1928.Google Scholar
Holly, Michael Ann. Panofsky and the Foundations of Art History. Ithaca, 1984.Google Scholar
Huddleston, Eugene L. The Relation of Painting and Literature: A Guide to Information Sources. Detroit, 1978.Google Scholar
Hulse, Clark. Metamorphic Verse: The Elizabethan Minor Epic. Princeton, 1981.Google Scholar
Hulse, Clark. “Recent Studies of Literature and Painting in the English Renaissance.“ Journal of English Literary History 15 (1985): 122-40.Google Scholar
Hulse, Clark. The Rule of Art: Literature and Painting in the Renaissance. Chicago, 1990.Google Scholar
Kernodle, George R. From Art to Theatre: Form and Convention in the Renaissance. Chicago, 1944.Google Scholar
Klein, Robert. and Henri Zerner. “Vitruve et le théâtre de la Renaissance.” In R. Klein, Laforme de I'intelligible. Paris, 1970.Google Scholar
Krieger, Murray. Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign. Baltimore, 1992.Google Scholar
Lee, Rensselaer W. Ut Pictura Poesis: The Humanistic Theory of Painting. New York, 1940.Google Scholar
Leonardo da Vinci, , Leonardo on Painting. Trans. M. Kemp and M. Walter. New Haven, 1969.Google Scholar
Leslie, Michael. “The Dialogue Between Bodies and Souls: Pictures and Poetry in the English Renaissance.” Word and Image 1 (1985): 16–30.10.1080/02666286.1985.10435665Google Scholar
Marek, Michaela J. Ekphrasis und Herrscherallegorie: Antike Bildbeschreibungen bei Tizian und Leonardo. Worms, 1985.Google Scholar
Markiewicz, Henryk. “Ut Pictura Poesis … A History of the Topos and the Problem.” New Literary History 18 (1987): 535-58.Google Scholar
Martz, Louis M. From Renaissance to Baroque: Essays on Literature and Art. Columbia, MO, 1991.Google Scholar
Merchant, W. Moelwyn. Shakespeare and the Artists. London, 1959.Google Scholar
Mirollo, James V. “The Mannered and the Mannerist in Late Renaissance Literature. “ In The Meaning of Mannerism, ed., F. W. Robinson and S. G. Nichols, Jr., 7-24. Hanover, 1972.Google Scholar
Mitchell, W.J. T. Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. Chicago, 1986.10.7208/chicago/9780226148052.001.0001Google Scholar
Mitchell, W.J. T. Picture Theory. Chicago, 1994.Google Scholar
Ong, Walter J. “Commonplace Rhapsody: Ravisius Textor, Zwinger, and Shakespeare.“ In Classical Influences on European Culture: A.D. 1500-1700, ed. R. R. Bolgar, 91-126. Cambridge, 1976.Google Scholar
Orgel, Stephen. The Illusion of Power: Political Theater in the English Renaissance. Berkeley, 1975.Google Scholar
Pace, Clara. “ ‘Delineated Lives': Themes and Variations in Seventeenth-Century Poems about Portraits.” Word and Image 2 (1986): 1–17.10.1080/02666286.1986.10435953Google Scholar
Pächt, Otto. “Art Historians and Art Critics: Alois Riegl.” Burlington Magazine 105 (1963): 108-93.Google Scholar
Panofsky, Erwin. Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance. New York, 1939.Google Scholar
Panofsky, Erwin. Idea: A Concept in Art Theory. Trans. Peake, Joseph J. S.. Columbia, SC, 1968.Google Scholar
Paulson, Ronald. Book and Painting: Shakespeare, Milton, and the Bible: Literary Texts and the Emergence of English Painting. Knoxville, 1982.Google Scholar
Philostratus and Callistratus. Imagines. Trans. Fairbanks, A.. Cambridge, MA, 1979.Google Scholar
Pickard-Cambridge, Arthur. The Dramatic Festivals of Athens. 2d. ed. Oxford, 1968.Google Scholar
Pliny the Elder, . Histoirenaturelle. Trans J. M. Croisille. Paris, 1985.Google Scholar
Praz, Mario. Mnemosyne: The Parallel between Literature and the Visual Arts. Princeton, 1970.Google Scholar
Riegl, Alois. Late Roman Art Industry. Rome, 198.Google Scholar
Roach, Joseph. The Player's Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting. 2d ed. Ann Arbor, 1993.Google Scholar
Rosand, David. “ ‘Troyes Painted Woes': Shakespeare and the Pictorial Imagination.“ Hebrew University Studies in Literature and the Arts 8 (1980): 77–97.Google Scholar
Roskill, Mark. Dolce's Aretino and Venetian Art Theory of the Cinquecento. New York, 1968.Google Scholar
Roston, Murray. Renaissance Perspectives in Literature and the Visual Arts. Princeton, 1987.Google Scholar
Roston, Murray. Changing Perspectives in Literature and the Visual Arts, 1650-1820. Princeton, 1990.Google Scholar
Saxl, Fritz. Lectures. 2 vols. London, 1957. Scaliger, Julius Caesar. Poetkes libri septem. Heidelberg, 1617.Google Scholar
Seznec, Jean. The Survival of the Pagan Cods: The Mythological Tradition and Its Place in Renaissance Humanism and Art. Trans. Barbara F. Sessions. New York, 1953.Google Scholar
Shakespeare, William. The Complete Signet Classic Shakespeare. Ed. Barnet, S.. New York, 1972.Google Scholar
Shearman, John. Mannerism. Harmondsworth, 1967.Google Scholar
Sidney, Sir Philip. An Apology for Poetry. Ed. Robinson, F.. Indianapolis, 1970.Google Scholar
Sidney, Sir Philip. The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia. Ed. M. Evans. Harmondsworth, 1977.Google Scholar
Slater, Niall W. “The Idea of the Actor.“ In Nothing to do with Dionysos?, ed., Winkler, J. J., Zeitlin, F.. Princeton, 1990.Google Scholar
Smith, Logan Pearsall. The Life and Letters of Sir Henry Wotton. Oxford, 1907. Reprint, 1966.Google Scholar
Sousloff, Catherine M. “Lives of poets and painters in the Renaissance.” Word and Image 6 (1990): 154-62.Google Scholar
Spenser, Edmund. Poetical Works. Ed. J. C. Smith and E. De Selincourt. London, 1912.Google Scholar
Steiner, Wendy. Pictures of Romance: Form against Context in Painting and Literature. Chicago, 1988.Google Scholar
Strong, Roy. The Elizabethan Image: Painting in England, 1540-1620. London, 1069.Google Scholar
Strong, Roy. “Painting and Poetry. ‘ In The English Icon: Elizabethan andfacobean Portraiture. London, 1969.Google Scholar
Studing, Richard and Elizabeth Kruz. Mannerism in Art, Literature, and Music: A Bibliography. San Antonio, 1979.Google Scholar
Summers, David. Michelangelo and the Language of Art. Princeton, 1981.Google Scholar
Summers, David. “Real Metaphor: Towards a Redefinition of the ‘Conceptual’ Image.” In Bryson, Holly and Moxey, 1991.Google Scholar
Sypher, Wylie. Four Stages of Renaissance Style: Transformations in Art and Literature 1400-1700. Garden City, NY, 1955.Google Scholar
Tuve, Rosemond. Allegorical Imagery: Some Medieval Books and their Posterity. Princeton, 1966.Google Scholar
Vitruvius. The Ten Books on Architecture. Trans. Morris Hicky Morgan. New York, 1960.Google Scholar
Waage, Frederick O. “Be Stone No More: Italian Cinquecento Art and Shakespeare's Last Plays.” Bucknell Review 25 (1980): 56–90.Google Scholar
Wellek, René. “The Parallelism between Literature and the Arts. “ English Institute Annual, 1941 (1942): 29–63.Google Scholar
Wellek, René. “The Concept of Baroque in Literary Scholarship. “Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 5 (1946): 77-109. Reprint in Concepts of Criticism, ed., Nichols, Stephen G. Jr. , 69-127. New Haven, 1963.Google Scholar
White, John. Birth and Rebirth of Pictorial Space. Cambridge, MA, 1957. 3d ed., 1987.Google Scholar
Wind, Edgar. Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance. New Haven, 1958. Rev. ed., 1968.Google Scholar
Wittreich, Joseph. “Spenser's Pictoriahsm: Its Theoretical Underpinnings.” Spenser at Kalamazoo. Cleveland State University, 1979. Microfiche.Google Scholar
Wollheim, Richard. Art and its Objects. Harmondsworth, 1970.Google Scholar
Wollheim, Richard. Painting as an Art. Princeton, 1987.Google Scholar
Wollheim, Richard. “What the Spectator Sees.” In Bryson, Holly, and Moxey, 1991.Google Scholar
Word and Image 3.1 (1987). Special issue on Renaissance Art and Literature. Google Scholar
Worthen, William. The Idea of the Actor: Drama and the Ethics of“Performance. Princeton, 1984.Google Scholar
Wotton, Sir Henry. The Elements of Architecture. London, 1624. Reprint, Charlottesville, 1968.Google Scholar
Yates, Frances. The Art of Memory. Chicago, 1966.Google Scholar
Yates, Frances. The Theatre of the World. London, 1969.Google Scholar