Sonnets on female portraits from Renaissance North Italyстатья из журнала
Аннотация: Abstract Although sonnets on the subject of contemporary portraits were common in Renaissance Italy, the genre as a whole has been neglected by art historians. Individual examples have been briefly alluded to, or used as an aid to dating, but rarely have the poems been examined for what they reveal about Renaissance attitudes to portraiture.1 Literary historians have been equally dismissive: Colasanti, for example, in his fundamental article on Renaissance poems on works of art, condemns the writers for their lack of sincerity and their unoriginal repetition of similar motifs, such as the artist in contest with Nature;2 and more recently Hagstrom has described the sixteenthcentury sonnets, with their heavy dependence on Petrarchan models, as ‘of interest only on grounds of historical continuity’.3 This study, while not attempting a general defence of the poems' aesthetic merits, will argue that they can amount to more than banal re-shuffiings of stale motifs from an enclosed literary tradition. If looked at in the context of Renaissance practice and theory of portraiture, it can be seen that some, at least, of the sonnets do show intelligent responses to the variety of vividly naturalistic and articulate likenesses produced by Renaissance artists. Some of them touch on issues that would be discussed more fully in the aesthetic theory of the day, such as the powers of painting as opposed to writing. And the group as a whole throws into relief the difference in spectators' expectations of, and reactions to, female as opposed to male likenesses. Ten sonnets have been chosen as examples; written in North Italy, mainly Venice, from around 1485-1550, they are selected because their authors were, as far as possible, both distinguished in literary terms, and knowledgeable about art and artists. These poems are given in the appendix together with their important precursors, Petrarch's sonnets on Simone Martini's lost portrait of Laura.4
Год издания: 1986
Авторы: Mary Rogers
Издательство: Taylor & Francis
Источник: Word & Image
Ключевые слова: Renaissance and Early Modern Studies, Historical Art and Culture Studies, Historical Influence and Diplomacy
Открытый доступ: closed
Том: 2
Выпуск: 4
Страницы: 291–305