Introduction

Plutarch reports that Simonides thought of poetry as silent painting and painting as speaking poetry; the most effective writer is one “who, by a vivid representation of emotions and characters, makes his narration like a painting.”^[1] Plutarch himself calls this an “oft-repeated saying,” and it has only been more so since.^[2] But the rigorous application of Simonides’s principle is limited; Gotthold Lessing says, “It was a sudden fancy—among others that Simonides had—and the truth it contains is so evident that one feels compelled to overlook the indefinite and untrue statements which accompany it.”^[3] Lessing admits in Laocoön that he wants two contrary things about the visuality of poetry both to be true: that poetry creates images in the mind in the same way that the visual arts do, and yet that poetry has its own mimesis—its own means of representation—which is distinct to it and which follows its own structural rules. But the compatibility of these two ideas is imperfect. In this book I will argue that images in poetry (specifically Renaissance poetry) do not necessarily function like pictures, even if we describe them and think of them as images. Though poetry’s capacity to produce images in the reader’s mind is always present, the sheer power of that capacity can cause us to overstate its importance and ubiquity. Poetry, I will suggest, is most itself, most distinctly poetic, when it is not painting in words, even if it is much harder to say, in its nonvisual forms, what it actually is.

Philip Sidney agreed with Simonides, at least in theory (when writing theory). In the thesis paragraph of his Defence of Poetry, he connects the mimetic ability of poetry to its visuality:

Sidney parenthetically glosses mimesis as embodying a broad set of slightly contradictory variations, all of them falling within visual representation. The first of his five translations is “imitation,” drawing on the Romans’ preferred translation of mimesis, imitatio, which was intended to connect writers’ depiction of reality to their imitation of other writers. The philosophical term “representation” little prepares us for the rather charged “counterfeiting,” which recalls Plato’s belief that a representation is always a false promise. “Figuring forth” suggests a three-dimensional, active image, while a picture is two-dimensional and static. The sheer range of his definition acknowledges the breadth of his task: he is, after all, not defining what poetic image or description is, but what poetry is. This idea—that poetry doesn’t merely make use of mimesis but consists of mimesis—is the great obstacle that an examination of nonvisual poetry must overcome. I think that Sidney’s statement, like Simonides’s, is one whose breadth makes it useful but also inaccurate, and that its limitations were knowable to Sidney himself and other poets of his time.

The story of Pygmalion, the artist whose statue so perfectly embodies beauty and love that it comes to life, has long served as an emblem for art’s capacity to create reality.^[5] In Greek culture, however, Galatea’s realization represents the pinnacle of artistic achievement; the Greeks knew that virtually all sculptures would fall far short of that standard. Euripides’s Alcestis, about a wealthy man, Admetus, whose wife agrees to die in his place, acknowledges both the importance and the limits of man-made image. Early in the play, trying to convince his skeptical wife that he will remain faithful to her after her death, Admetus says, “An image of you shaped by the hand of skilled craftsmen shall be laid out in my bed. I shall fall into its arms, and as I embrace it and call your name I shall imagine, though I have her not, that I hold my dear wife in my arms, a cold pleasure, to be sure, but thus I shall lighten my soul’s heaviness.”^[6] What exactly is the “cold pleasure” Admetus anticipates? In comparison to Pygmalion and Galatea it seems, even within Admetus’s fantasy, to be a failure. Whatever power it does have depends on the imagination, in which it is still possible for him to conflate the “image” with Alcestis herself. But his imagination depends in turn on the abilities of the “skilled craftsmen” who will create this thing (the process is described as “δέμας . . . εἰκασθὲν”: they will create a likeness of your shape). Their skill enables the inanimate statue to come to life in the imagination.

Ultimately, however, the statue never gets built, and an entirely different form of reanimation becomes necessary. Heracles presents to Admetus a veiled woman, requesting that he care for her in Heracles’s stead (another of the play’s many substitutions). When Admetus reluctantly agrees, Heracles lifts the veil to reveal Alcestis herself, “Rescu’d from death by force though pale and faint,” as Milton describes her (his allusion to the play is one focus of the final chapter of this book). Admetus uses the same word to describe Alcestis’s bodily form once resurrected that he used for the form of the statue, δέμας.^[7] As a failed alternative to this miraculous resuscitation, the planned statue seems like an inverse Galatea. The veiled figure is a substitute emblem of animation, in this case one clearly marked as heroic transcendence of human capability (and which correspondingly implies that the artist’s claim to animation is hubris). Admetus’s acceptance of the unseen Alcestis is necessary for her to be fully returned to him. What enables the transformation from death to life is the veil.

If Admetus’s statue is indeed a kind of failed prefiguration of the veiled Alcestis, the play’s denouement, replacing the precisely constructed statue with the obscured figure, becomes a remarkable statement about the power of not seeing. Falling within a play, it seems to be a statement also about the limits of mimesis. The efficacy of invisibility suggested by the end of Alcestis is powerful, and I believe it had a surprising appeal in the Renaissance. The claims that Sidney and other writers of the period made for the imitative power of poetic writing were tempered by an awareness of that power’s limitations, an aspect of Renaissance poetic thinking that has been too little acknowledged by modern critics. This book is about description and image in Renaissance poetry, but focuses not on descriptions that present a vivid image to the reader’s mind but on those that seem to avoid doing so. These images of obscurity are emblematic of what mimesis cannot do, but also indicate the possibility of including in poetry what cannot be visually constituted in the imagination. Alcestis’s veil becomes important to Milton, and this and other kinds of veils are among several metaphors that recur in the poems I will discuss: Spenser describes The Faerie Queene as a veiled mirror that shows Elizabeth to herself but does not reveal her to the uninformed reader, and all of the poets I will discuss here are interested in similar mediations in the process of representation. Spenser’s veiled mirror deflects or distorts the image but can be seen through by the right viewer, whereas Alcestis’s is completely opaque: those are two extremes of the interruptions to visuality I am describing.

As in Euripides’s play, these obstacles do not merely cover or block; they interfere with and supplant the very mechanism by which art’s imitation of reality functions. So I am discussing the limits of mimesis but understanding those limits not as shortcomings but as boundaries beyond which other, perhaps unnamed, modes of reference lie. The descriptive evocation of the unseen and unimagined is thus an alternative to mimesis, one that is made necessary by its limitations. Admetus, despite his wealth and his love for his wife, is no Pygmalion, and his failure is why Heracles’s veiled reanimation is necessary. Such failures of mimesis recur frequently in these poems: poets turn to the invisible when visual representation falls short of what they wish to convey.

That I refer to the failure of mimesis does not mean I am arguing against the accomplishments of these poets; on the contrary, I see this study as in part a defense of poetry against such verisimilar art forms as painting and drama (and, ultimately, the novel). I am exploring these limitations to mimesis because I think they show the importance of the techniques and mechanisms of poetry—poetics, in a nutshell—to the process of formation and the meaning of Renaissance poetry, and thus to literary history. I will rely in part on discussions of poetics in the Renaissance itself, although I think those discussions can sometimes mislead readers about the meanings available to a given mode of poetry. As Thomas M. Sloan has said, theorists of the period, including those who wrote poetry, did not feel the need to acknowledge everything they are doing; though much Renaissance poetry “depends upon persons, voices . . . , images,” and other concrete things, “[n]owhere in the rhetorical theory of the time is there the slightest acknowledgment of this necessity.”^[8] Perhaps because of that circumstance, criticism has had trouble making sense of the role of image in poetry of the period, and the split between theory and practice tends to foster confusion. When Sidney turns in his Defence of Poetry from poetic didacticism to seduction, Catherine Bates (whose interest is in Sidney’s treatment of gender) complains that he “seems momentarily to forget everything he has said hitherto about the goal of all poetry being virtuous learning,” as if he were descending into some lower form based on emotion and sheer effectiveness; she considers it “a sudden and unaccountable shift of position.”^[9] But in the Renaissance, as Sloan says, the force of an individual poem does not necessarily have to fit within theories of rhetoric; what seems like a shift of position is merely an acknowledgment of an aspect of poetry that falls outside of the scope of the Defence’s primary argument.^[10]

The sheer variability of Renaissance mimesis, then, will be one of my principal themes, along with the capacity such diversity has to prevent a consistent understanding of the way mimesis functions within a particular work. This observation runs counter to many twentieth-century theories of mimesis, which tend to debate the ubiquity or escapability of mimesis but assume its basic homogeneity in either instance.^[11] Part of the problem is that Erich Auerbach, the chief modern proponent of the importance of mimesis, is not necessarily invested in defining its nature. On the contrary, Auerbach seems, particularly in his Renaissance examples, to be interested in the most provisional manifestations of mimesis, frequently writing of representations that are somehow suggested without being fully present. So he says of Montaigne that the “peculiar equilibrium of his being prevents the tragic, the possibility of which is inherent in his image of man, from coming to expression in his work.”^[12] Auerbach is well aware that the word “image” is necessarily associated, through Renaissance and classical ideas of mirroring, with mimesis itself; he is reading Montaigne as mimetically representing an aspect of man that is not directly expressed, a reading that requires a capacious sense of mimesis indeed. Similarly, in his reading of Shakespeare Auerbach means to praise the plays when he says that the action they portray is “only erratically and sporadically realistic and often shows a tendency to break through into the realm of the fairy tale, of playful fancy, or of the supernatural and demonic.”^[13] This partial representation, always subject to an abrupt swerve into an entirely different mode, is simply part of the way Auerbach’s mimesis works. It is not surprising, then, that recent responses to Auerbach tend to focus on his complexities as a reader and writer rather than his contribution to literary theory.^[14]

Like Auerbach, many recent critics have thought about the problem of Renaissance mimesis in relation to Shakespeare. A. D. Nuttall has argued that Shakespeare presents a “new mimesis,” based on a new way of understanding the world itself that Shakespeare developed over the course of his career. Nuttall describes the shift through a reading of the history plays: “When Shakespeare exchanged the gardeners’ allegory of Richard II for the Gloucestershire scenes of 2 Henry IV, he moved from a mode in which form is emphatically patterned and asserted to a mode in which form is broken. It seems to me entirely appropriate to say that with this fracturing of the more obtrusive symmetries comes an intuition of reality.”^[15] Nuttall is thinking of mimesis in its broad sense as the representation of reality in general, but Shakespeare’s interest in specifically visual representation has garnered interest as well. Hamlet has often been seen as the site of Shakespeare’s furthest exploration of the possibilities and problems of the visual; Jonathan Baldo says succinctly, “Hamlet translates the rivalry of the two kings and brother Claudius and Old Hamlet into a parallel rivalry between eye and ear.”^[16]

Part of that interest, though, has to do with Shakespeare’s commitment to the distinctive possibilities of the stage. In his view, the stage adds a new mimetic layer beyond poetry. In the player scene in Hamlet, Shakespeare delineates that layer by showing what happens when the vivid description of the death of Priam moves from poetry (the Aeneid) to drama. Hamlet’s soliloquy focuses on the way the face and voice reflect what is simultaneously happening within the soul in relation to the verse lines. How could it be, he asks, that

The player’s “whole function” relates to “his conceit” through form—a kind of bodily figuration of the story itself. The actor brings this representation to fruition. In this scene, depicting a professional actor entering a role, the point is about acting itself. But in general the actor’s version of mimesis merges into character.^[18] This attribute of actors seems comparable to that of the imagination of the audience, whom the Chorus in Henry V asks to “Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts” (Prologue 23); here the limitations of mimesis are resolved by the imagination. Shakespeare, though, seems to think of poetry as more self-contained: “Mine eye hath played the painter,” he says in sonnet 24 (line 1), and in sonnet 23, even though he asks the young man to “learn to read what silent love hath writ” (line 13), that reading seems to be merely to “let my books be then the eloquence / And dumb presagers of my speaking breast” (lines 9–10). For Shakespeare, poetry transfers ideas from the author’s mind to the reader; drama does it much better.^[19]

That Shakespeare and drama have been principal sites for the exploration of mimesis in recent years makes it all the more necessary to examine the distinctiveness of poetry. Shakespeare’s supreme confidence in the representative capacities of drama and its ability to connect a playwright’s imagination with that of an audience member in a kind of grand collaboration is not shared by some of the poets of the period (even those, like Milton, who admired him). From the Elizabethan period until the closing of the theaters, the stage’s importance in the cultural imagination grew enormously. As it did, its contrast with the privacy, intimacy, and indeed the obscurity of poetry became more noticeable. Contrary to inclusive characterizations, including Auerbach’s, I believe that mimesis must be understood within the context of genre.

I am aware that much of what I am reading as alternatives to or limits of mimesis Auerbach would regard simply as examples of its endless variation. It may well be that the image withheld is itself a kind of representation. But modern definitions of mimesis have a tendency to become so inclusive as to be no longer useful, and for that reason I am relying on Sidney’s definition of mimesis as a “figuring forth.”^[20] That sense of three-dimensionality is what characterizes mimesis for Renaissance writers, and such fullness is often unexpectedly absent. In this sense, Renaissance treatises on literary history and poetry writing can sometimes be deceiving. The Brazilian theorist Luiz Costa Lima argues that post-Aristotelian writers on poetics have deliberately constrained the definition of mimesis, falsely equating it with the Latin idea of imitatio, in order to restrict the possibilities of imagination. In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century treatises on poetry, Costa Lima says, “Poetry does not possess truth; at most it approaches it, through verisimilitude. Its savage core is feigned and mendacious, and only beautiful composition vouchsafes it the right to exist at all.”^[21] He gives himself the task of rediscovering that “savage core,” a project he sees as “shocking.”^[22] Costa Lima’s thesis is deliberately provocative, but the idea that poetry in the Renaissance was dangerous (in a way that theory seeks to contain) is worth taking seriously. Two aspects of his thinking in particular are necessary interventions against current work on Renaissance theories of representation: the idea that the ultimate goal of mimesis lies in the reader’s imagination rather than in the text, and the possibility that Renaissance poetics is acknowledged as a narrow account of what Renaissance poetry can actually do.

If we turn from mimesis—an aspect of poetics—to description—an aspect of rhetoric but one that clearly depends on mimesis—this narrowing effect of Renaissance literary theory becomes evident. Critics within the period wrote slightingly of description. The seventeenth-century French critic René le Bossu, who was translated into English in the late seventeenth century and widely read, finds

Bossu’s comment on lyric suggests that image itself is lacking in historical weight, unless it is, as he says, allegorical or effects some realization of character. With that idea in mind, he is quick to explain the purposes of those descriptions that occur in the classical epics:

Similarly, Bossu accounts for the description of Chloreus’s armor in Aeneid 11: “The Judicious Reader might perhaps have been disgusted at this Beauty so carefully described in the very heat of Battle,” but as Bossu reads it is “not design’d so much for them as for Camilla”—to explain the motivation of her subsequent actions.^[25] Description, then, serves essentially the same role as allegory and fiction: to illustrate human actions, while keeping the illustrations from overwhelming the thrust of the historical narrative.^[26]

That these critics were concerned about description exceeding its role suggests that it has a tendency to do so. Modern critics have shown the same concern, even in the vastly different context that description has obtained in modern literary theory, influenced by the novel. There has never been agreement about what description is, or whether it is anything—whether it is possible to separate description from the narrative in which it is embedded. Henry James said, “I cannot . . . conceive, in any novel worth discussing at all, of a passage of description that is not in its intention narrative.”^[27] But as James anticipated, the distinction he cannot make has been essential. Philippe Hamon, the most vocal proponent of description studies as a distinct field of inquiry, has declared that description must always be subordinate and “at the service of” something else, whether something “external to the discourse” or internal; that subordination gives it its meaning—saves it from being digressive.^[28] Hamon’s work has been influential but is limited, as José Manuel Lopes points out, by its interest in description as “background material”; Lopes argues that, particularly in twentieth-century prose, description frequently functions as foreground, using images to move the story forward.^[29] In other words, Hamon’s effort to focus on description by defining it as what is not the focus of narrative seems to other critics to limit it—to define it as description only when it does not grab too much of a reader’s attention. Though this critical quandary is clearly focused on the novel, it demonstrates the problem that literary images pose in general: we can define image as illustration, but if we look too closely at it, it ceases to be illustrative and becomes thematic.

Michael Riffaterre, the most dedicated student of poetic description as distinct from prose, has gone so far as to argue that poetry (particularly in its modern forms, which is to say in the era when poetry is thought of as essentially identical to lyric^[30] ) is removed from mimesis entirely. Riffaterre believes that poetic image constitutes a threat to mimesis through the referential structures he calls “hypograms,” which always connect to each other from text to text rather than to represented reality; according to this model lyric description has essentially the opposite effect of prose description. His chief aim is to identify the ways in which in poetry, “the unity of significance is the text.”^[31] He has been accused of preferring the modes of figuration that make his rather extreme theory work at the expense of those that do not; Paul de Man criticizes one of Riffaterre’s readings as responding to the powers of poetry “only by a figural evasion which, in this case, takes the subtly effective form of evading the figural.”^[32] The simplicity and consistency of the theory, de Man argues, depends on never making a distinction between description and trope; neither is referential in Riffaterre’s model, but both somehow end up with the same overall relationship to reference.^[33] But the most valuable aspect of the theory is its sensitivity to the extent to which the imagination of readers is at the mercy of poetry in ways that are specifically not mimetic. Lyric description has the power to summon images other than those it represents, a process Riffaterre calls “expansion,” which “integrates the sign-producing actualizations of hypograms.”^[34] In his sense of description as the point at which poetic form, encumbered as it is with the associations of literary history, meets the imaginative object, his work is surprisingly compatible with that of Costa Lima.

I will be as precise as I can in my terminology, but the inherent variety of the poetry I am discussing requires somewhat overlapping the use of terms, particularly “image” and “description.” The importance of descriptio to rhetorical theory separates them to some extent, but they are dependent on each other, and Renaissance writers themselves did not always distinguish them. In modern usage, image has become associated with poetry and description with prose fiction, but it would be anachronistic to try to apply that distinction to the Renaissance. It would be equally so to apply to these works the modern usage of the term “fiction,” which, before the end of the seventeenth century, referred often to the invented material within a poem that overall was intended to represent historical or subjective reality accurately. The alternatives to mimesis I am describing bear a relationship to fiction but are distinct from it. For Renaissance writers, fiction is a necessary component of mimesis. Indeed, Sidney sees fiction as what sets poetry apart from other art forms.^[35] The poet, “lifted up with the vigour of his own invention, doth grow in effect another nature, in making things either better than nature bringeth forth, or, quite anew, for such as never were in nature,” but this invention is in response to the fallenness of nature, reintroducing its lost perfection; it does not change what poetry has in common with all of the arts, which have nature as their “principal object . . . as they become actors and players, as it were, or what nature will have set forth.”^[36] So, though the poet may create fictions, they are never the point—they serve an end which is ultimately mimetic.

The same is true of figuration and of allegory. Tasso jokes in response to overly rigid conceptions of poetry:

The point is to avoid constricting thought too narrowly—not just of poetry but of the world, since it turns out that Homer and Vergil wrote of those things only to reflect human actions (poetry, Tasso says more than once, must be defined as “an imitation of human actions”). But the joke suggests something slippery about mimesis, which Tasso here is translating as imitatio. Tasso is using the poets’ descriptions of frogs, mice, and bees to show simultaneously that poetry is allowed to describe lower things and that those things can stand in for human things after all.

In the Renaissance, critics set forth an ideal that poets ought to aspire to and were less concerned than modern theorists about whether their observations were consistently true. Even those who set out the rules were happy to disobey them. As I’ve already suggested, Sidney’s work in particular demonstrates a divergence between theory and practice: the simplicity of his own account of mimesis in the Defence is not borne out by his poetry. I do not think this is the result of intellectual sloppiness on his part; there is simply a difference in purpose between the various genres in which he wrote. Despite (or consistent with) my criticism of the thesis of the Defence, I find that many of the themes I am investigating are reflected in Sidney’s poems—particularly Astrophil and Stella. The following sections survey some of those basic themes, establishing Sidney as a nuanced thinker about mimesis in theory and practice, whose concerns are further developed by the other poets I will examine. Many of the theoretical problems that emerge in his sonnets, moreover, anticipate debates in recent criticism of Renaissance poetry as well as poetics in general: however historically determined and limited his solution is, his understanding of the problems of mimesis has ongoing relevance.

Thing

The third sonnet of Astrophil and Stella promises that the sonnet sequence will be different from other love poetry:

The sonnet can sound like a plea for plainness: the “strange things” preferred by “daintie wits” are opposed to the simplicity of Stella’s face. That “strange” appears twice—similes are as suspect as described things—would support that reading as well. But that dichotomy of strangeness would seem to lead to the conclusion that Stella’s face is itself a thing, and that the distinction here is between two categories of the objects of description: weird foreign things and beloved familiar things. The last three lines, whose halting introductory question highlights their difference from what has come before, undermine this reading. What Astrophil reads in Stella’s face is universals, not particulars—nature has not written into the face a description of the face, but rather evocations of abstractions external to the face.

“Love” in line 11 is as much his love as hers, and “Beauty” can be as well. To a courtly way of thinking, beauty is external, as Castiglione notes (here in Thomas Hoby’s 1561 translation):

Proportion, color, highlights, and lines are all properties of the face, but beauty itself is external to it, only entering it after those properties are already present. Sidney actually takes this idea further, because it is not that beauty has entered the face, but that nature writes in the face what beauty is, so that Astrophil’s philosophizing on the nature of beauty has already been started for him within the face itself. That visibility of theory enables the sonnet’s objection to things. Though the copying of nature certainly suggests mimesis, the opposition in this poem is not between two categories of description but between description of things and another kind of representation that cannot take the form of description.

In other poems, however, Sidney seems to do exactly what he accuses the “daintie wits” of doing, to the point of reducing Stella’s face itself to “strange things,” as in sonnet 9:

So any alternatives Sidney may perceive to the description of things does not interfere with his making use of that form of description. To some extent, this seeming confusion of poetic purpose is simply part of the way Astrophil’s own troubled consciousness is represented within the poems. Sidney’s depiction of that conflicted mind leads Anne Ferry to argue that the exhortation in the first poem to “look in thy heart and write” cannot possibly be definitive:

Ferry’s interest is in the possibility of recovering that “inward state” despite the explicit impossibility of representing it in verse.^[41] But her point about the image is right, I think: Astrophil often asserts that the image of Stella’s face is a kind of miraculous solution to the problems of writing, bridging by its sheer beauty the gap between lived experience and written expression. But Sidney knows that the face as it appears in the poems is just another poetic mask.

In this sense, the opposition between Stella’s face and “strange things” in the third sonnet questions the extent to which Stella’s face can be a thing, not because it is beautiful or loved, but because it is written about using techniques that are not strictly representational. As in Tasso’s explanation of Vergil’s bees, Sidney accounts for his inward orientation by claiming that it is itself a truer form of mimesis: copying what nature has written. It is not immediately clear what to do with this. The possibility of an inward mimesis might make sense in anticipation of a later Renaissance interest in the imaginary as a kind of version of reality. Lisa T. Sarasohn says that Margaret Cavendish sees “no ontological distinction between real and imaginary beings. For Cavendish, every imaginary object is subjectively true when it is generated by the movement of the mind.”^[42] Whether this fluidity between the real and fanciful makes sense for materialist thinkers of Cavendish’s mold is a topic for another day, but I do not think it solves our problem with Sidney; if I am right that he does not wish to think of the face as a thing, then thinking of it as an imaginary thing doesn’t help. The mimesis of things is equally questioned whether those things are real or imaginary. Sidney’s inconsistency about things only reinforces the sense that thing relates to image as a possible or putative reference that can always be displaced by abstraction.

Sidney’s resistance to things is particularly apropos in the current critical era, in which things (not, as in Tasso, actions) are understood to be the objects of representation. Now, when literary criticism is frequently in the service of materialist cultural history, description often loses its rhetorical agency altogether and becomes merely a portal (whether reliable or not) to the physical reality of a previous era. Cynthia Wall’s book on description in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is subtitled Transformations of Description, but despite that titular concern, her working model of description is rather rigid and the things it represents fluid; in order to focus on the cultural constructions of material things, she considers description “as a cultural phenomenon of making things visible,” which can reveal the way a particular culture imagines both visibility and visible things.^[43] Wall is specifically avoiding imagining description as rhetorical; the result, of course, is that description becomes essentially controlled by the culture rather than the author—that is, by moving the emphasis from the mind’s eye to the thing itself, Wall robs description of its independence from the represented object.

In such a materialist context, poetic descriptions are generally understood in relation to visual things—paintings and painted objects. The static images in miniature that seem to occupy the brief lyrics of Robert Herrick and similar poets are compared to paintings or to decorative collectibles.^[44] Julian Yates, writing on Sidney (and specifically about descriptions of people), has drawn connections to the portrait miniature—a style that is extremely intricate but whose details don’t reveal identifiable facial features. Yates argues that miniatures explain something elusive about description in the period; he quotes descriptions of pro-Catholic activists used by “priest-hunters,” which are full of details about the turn of the nose and mouth but do not offer a comprehensible image in total, and that lack of a cohesive whole makes it hard for Yates to believe that someone “could possibly have identified [a priest] from these descriptions.”^[45] Thus, he can only make sense of such images in comparison to the technique of miniature as practiced by limners like Nicholas Hilliard: “the incremental process of making the face present by inventorying details, in these descriptions, accords well with the techniques Hilliard used in the studio for capturing the likeness of his sitters.”^[46]

Description, to Yates, speaks of the power of the face in its absence—he compares it to relics, which serve primarily to signify the absence of the body. In a sense his approach, in which description speaks to the impossibility of grasping the thing it represents, is the converse of Wall’s, in which description serves only to represent the thing, but both have in common the assumption that the thing, in its imaginability or unimaginability, its presence or absence, is what matters. This thingly sense of description threatens to reduce the act of describing something to the question of visibility itself. Thing theory is already coming to terms with this limitation, which is partially behind Jonathan Goldberg’s turn from things themselves to “the seeds of things”: the ways in which Renaissance thinkers and poets’ “engagement with materialism necessarily implicates gender and sexuality.”^[47] To do so, however, requires an expansion of the principles of materialism beyond things; one of Goldberg’s chief examples is the armor of the Red Crosse Knight in The Faerie Queene, and in that case the duality that interests him is not between the real and the imaginary, as in Sarasohn’s Cavendish, but between the real and the metaphorical: “The armor is, on the one hand, treated as utterly real in the poem. It is, on the other hand, a figure for a state of exercise, the combat (self against self) by which one puts on the body of faith.”^[48] To examine the sexuality of matter is to allow Renaissance poetry its capacity to collapse the verisimilitude of the represented thing into its versatility as figure, which Auerbach might allow to fall within the general area of mimesis but which many modern theorists would not.^[49]

In any case, the status of images of things becomes less clear the more we investigate them, and as a result a kind of countermaterialism emerges here, most explicitly in my discussions of Spenser in chapters 1 and 2. Deceptive description, the subject of chapter 2, is revisited in Milton’s Paradise Regained in chapter 4. The emblem of these images for modern critics has long been Donne’s things—the urns of “The Canonization” most of all—which have stood for the height of poets’ ability to create images; I will argue in chapter 3, against a long critical tradition, that they function as much to question that ability. The context for that debate is the inconsistent discovery of the thing in the period as a whole; contrary to Cynthia Wall’s thinking, later particularism does not evolve gradually out of Renaissance concerns but is instead a shift away from an earlier attitude: these poets share the desire not to be defined by their capacity or lack thereof to make things seem real.

Model

Whether we include it in within mimesis or not, figure has obvious importance to the Renaissance sense of representation and particularly image. In the period, the logic of figuration can actually work within sensation, as an example from Sidney demonstrates. Astrophil admits to Stella that in the course of their troubled relationship he has been interested in other women, but in sonnet 91 he explains his wandering eye as a tribute to his beloved:

The whole poem is a gradually evolving play on the phrase “light of my life” in the second line. In the shadow of Stella’s absence, her light is represented as the light of the sun is in a candlelit room. It is not, then, the light of the candle viewed directly that Astrophil is thinking of, but the gleams the candle casts in the room, which are visible in a way they never would be in daylight. In the same way that the candle creates miniature, distorted, and diminished versions of sunlight on the surfaces of the objects surrounding it, so Stella’s beauty turns up, here and there, in refracted and reduced images of the original. In medieval thinking, models, figures, types, shadows, and reflections had been versions of the same thing, and that fluidity is still available as an idea in the Renaissance; the great exposition of this logic of repeating forms is Auerbach’s essay “Figura.”^[50] Sidney brings this set of ideas together with his wooden star globes. By proportionally representing the placement of the stars, the globes serve not just as images of the skies but as miniatures of them, and the reference to the “glistring” light of the stars suggests that the models, through the accuracy of their proportions, might actually contain reflected versions of the light that allows the stars to be seen at all. Of course, the stars’ positions can only be mapped onto the globes at night, when such subtle reflections, like those of the candle, become visible.

The logic of the whole conceit, then, is quite effective. But does that mean we are to take the poem seriously as a representation of reality? No matter how well the analogies work, after all, it is hard to imagine Stella being convinced by the logic. To a Renaissance lover, this is a playful metaphor for the way the features of a stranger can both attract in themselves and remind of one’s beloved. It functions, then, as a mimesis of the imagination—a representation of the kinds of things the mind can do with visual input. But the conceit still marks a relationship between the poem and the world—not, perhaps, the world of love, but that of art. The idea that Stella’s beauty is visible in pieces cast through the world is reminiscent of artistic creation. Several of the myths that define how art is made involve a similar kind of division and scattering, such as the dismemberment—sparagmos—of Orpheus, but the sonnet might also remind us of the rending of Osiris, whose dismembered body must be located and pieced together by Isis as an act of love. While Orpheus’s end (his disembodied head still singing) has always been a warning to ambitious poets, Milton thinks of the reassembly of Osiris as a metaphor for the challenge of finding truth as it is scattered through the world.^[51]

In a more direct way, though, these pieces of beauty might remind us of one of the stories of the painter Zeuxis: in order to approximate the beauty of Helen for a public painting in Girgenti, Pliny reports, Zeuxis “held an inspection of maidens of the place paraded naked and chose five, for the purpose of reproducing in the picture the most admirable points in the form of each.”^[52] The story was well known in the Renaissance; Franciscus Junius, in a book on painting, cites it as evidence that “Nature would never bestow upon one particular bodie all the perfections of beautie; seeing that nothing is so neatly shaped by Nature, but there will alwayes in one or other part thereof some notable disproportion be found; as if nothing more should be left her to distribute unto others, if she had once conferred upon one all what is truely beautifull.”^[53]

Elizabeth C. Mansfield, an art historian, suggests that the recurrence of the Zeuxis story in postclassical art “records and perpetuates a persistent cultural anxiety about the use of mimesis in visual representation.”^[54] This anxiety seems to be centered on the tendency of mimetic techniques to undermine the unity of the subject, at least from the artist’s point of view; Mansfield quotes Vasari on manner, whose goal is to observe many beautiful instances and then “from those most beautiful hands and heads and bodies and legs to join together and make a figure of as many beauties as possible, and to put it into all one’s works and in each figure.”^[55] In Mansfield’s analysis, though, it is never quite clear what the relationship is between these particulars and the unified whole that is supposed to result. Certainly that relationship itself can be a source of anxiety, as Mansfield finds in The Winter’s Tale, from which she quotes Paulina’s statement of Hermione’s perfection, that if Leontes, “from the all that are, took something good / To make a perfect woman,” Hermione would still be superior to this composite ideal.^[56] Shakespeare, then, seems to be arguing against the Zeuxis myth as a way of understanding mimesis—at any rate, for Paulina the composite approach falls short. But to me the Vasari quotation about bodies and legs suggests something a bit different. He appears to be using “figure” in two different ways: the “figure of as many beauties as possible” is the formal pattern to be derived from types, while “each figure” is the painted figure on the canvas.^[57]

This kind of modeling in pieces is also reminiscent of another kind inherent to poetry: the imitation of rhetorical models (present in Astrophil 91 through a generalized version of English Petrarchism). Such imitation is the subject of Thomas N. Greene’s The Light in Troy, which emphasizes the importance of rhetorical imitation but does address such a sense of fragmentation: “The art of poetry finds its materials everywhere, materials bearing with them the aura of their original contexts, charged with an evocative power implanted by the poet or the convention from which they are taken.”^[58] Greene himself presents this vision of a historically integrated poetry as a rebuttal of deconstruction. But it functions as well as a challenge to mimesis, because it suggests that poetry can evoke a literary context distinct from its intended representation. This challenge, however, is hopelessly tangled in the history of mimesis itself, not least because the Latin term for this kind of literary borrowing is the same as the preferred Latin translation of μίμησις—imitatio.^[59]

But imitation is often understood as unifying; to make sense of it in the context of the model-by-dismemberment we need Vasari’s word, figura. In some ways, the chief accomplishment of Auerbach’s “Figura” is suggested in its opening pages, in which he notes that the earliest use of the word meant “plastic form” but that it evolved, by the Augustan period, to be a stand-in for “schema,” which is the shape of something in a more abstracted sense. “Thus side by side with the original plastic signification and overshadowing it, there appeared a far more general concept of grammatical, rhetorical, logical, mathematical—and later even of musical and choreographic—form.”^[60] How that multiplicity ties together, eventually, into a coherently structured and persistent way of thinking is Auerbach’s overall concern, but he acknowledges right away that, “To be sure, the original plastic sense was not entirely lost.”^[61] So figuration persists across periods as a kind of abstract modeling that can retain the physical sense of form. In the visual arts, the physicality of the imitation of earlier work is clear enough; in poetry, it needs the connection of represented image to express the physicality that is still latent within it. We will see a version of this modeling in chapter 1 in Spenser’s attempt (which he acknowledges must be partial) to capture and reanimate the abilities of Chaucer—Spenser uses the image of the stream to illustrate that attempt, but with the qualification that his streams never seem to reach their intended outlets. I find a quite different version, in chapter 3, in Donne’s alternate tributes to and skepticism of mapmaking and other physical models as well as in his abiding but qualified interest in Platonic Form. Those “wood-globes” of the stars to which Sidney compares lesser beauties, inside-out models of the sky as it appears from underneath, are stunning examples of the newly invigorated Renaissance capacity of image making, but their simplicity makes them candidates to be improved upon by poetry.

Paint

Much of Sidney’s sequence consists of Astrophil looking at Stella or thinking about her when she’s not there. But occasionally she looks at him, which allows Sidney, in sonnet 45, to contrast facial and linguistic expression:

The emotional effectiveness of mimetic representation, it appears, is aided by the distance of fiction. This is part of the complicated mechanism by which poetry moves its readers, of which Sidney writes in the Defence. As an example of the power of narratives to move, Sidney recounts the story in which Nathan, called by God to remonstrate David for murder, does so “by telling of a man whose beloved lamb was ungratefully taken from his bosom: that application most divinely true, but the discourse itself feigned; which made David (I speak of the second and instrumental cause) as in a glass see his own filthiness.”^[62] “As in a glass”—mirroring often figures the most direct kind of mimesis, here achieved through a fictional story. But if Sidney thinks of fiction as an aspect of mimetic mirroring, it is surprising that in sonnet 45 he contrasts it with painting. “The verie face of wo”—the true face—is painted on Astrophil’s face. It is that truth which necessitates the paradoxical last line; it would not be enough for Astrophil to, say, make up a story about himself, because his fiction must counter the true suffering of his own face.

The contrast in the sonnet between painting and fiction is placed as much in reception as it is in form. Stella cannot “skill to pitie” Astrophil’s sadness—the usage is a curious one. The examples given by the OED for this sense of skill—to comprehend—include simple forms of mastery such as the skilling of a language or an impostor’s cunning.^[63] What Stella lacks seems different: a kind of interpretive imagination. This possibility heightens the ambiguities of the sestet, in which the passive voice leaves open two completely different meanings. “Fancy drawne by imag’d things” breeds grace: the grace is in the listener, in this case Stella. But is the fancy hers or his? Image, after all, can mean either creating an image or imagining one. The “free scope” with which fancy operates can work either way, too: the freedom fiction has from strict truth (in the Defence Sidney contrasts the poet to the historian, who is “captived to the truth of a foolish world”^[64] ), or the freedom the reader’s imagination has from the fiction presented to it (no matter how detailed a description is, no two readers will picture it the same way).

I will return to the ambiguity of the fancy. But either way, the contrast is entirely counterintuitive: fiction, which works with free scope, reliably raises an image in the mind that evokes sympathy, while painting requires a particular kind of knowledge in its viewer to do the same, a knowledge that Stella—through cruel will more than through incapacity, it seems—lacks. One question that needs to be answered about this sonnet is what that skill is—or what the difference is between the response to literature and the response to visual art. I am not certain that the Renaissance view of the relationship between poetry and painting is as straightforward as the simple Horatian dictum “ut pictura poesis,” which was then and still is frequently quoted as a three-word phrase implying a direct correspondence.^[65] But Sidney, who paraphrases Horace frequently in the Defence, would be familiar with the context of that phrase, which is a bit more complex:

Horace’s explication of his own statement suggests more heterogeneity than does the statement itself. His emphasis, furthermore, is not on the form of the artwork—poetry does not resemble painting inherently—but on its reception.

Pliny praises the painter Apelles for applying to his paintings a varnish whose dark color is “only visible to anyone who looked at it close up” but collaborates with lighting “so that the brilliance of the colours should not offend the sight when people looked at them as if through muscovy-glass and so that the same device from a distance might invisibly give sombreness to colours that were too brilliant.”^[67] A painting whose representations are more pleasing from a distance, it seems, is better. What would be the equivalent for a poem? The kind of poetry Herbert denigrates (ironically) as making its reader catch “the sense at two removes” comes to mind, but so does the “free scope” of fancy in Sidney’s sonnet about the face of woe, particularly if we see that fancy as belonging to the hearer.^[68] To read a poem at a distance is to be given the freedom by the poet to imagine the events it describes on our own terms.

Pliny tells another story about Apelles and his rivalry with Protogenes. Apelles pays a visit when his rival is away and declines to leave his name:

Protogenes then concedes and puts the panel on display. The story is a little mysterious, since as usually understood it doesn’t seem that impressive to draw a thinner line (and how thin can they be, again thinking of Apelles’s reputation for paintings that look good at a distance, if the paintings end up being displayed?). In his essay “The Heritage of Apelles,” Ernst Gombrich attempts to solve this mystery by connecting the story to a rule of artistic technique, attributed to Philoponos, that has to do with the relationship between highlight and depth:

At close range, of course, these illusionist effects will not work because the detail of texture and color will overwhelm the effects of combination: they depend on distance. This effect is, Gombrich thinks, what Apelles achieves that so impresses Protogenes. On Apelles’s return to the studio he finds his own thin line with another in a brighter color on top of it:

Gombrich argues that this perfection of the technique of luster has profoundly influenced painting through the centuries. But his thesis points also to the specificity of representational technique and the role of technique both in making paintings and in viewing them.

The discipline of art history will not predominate in this book, for it has its own debates about the nature of representation that are informed not just by the particular challenges and forms of visual art, but (as Gombrich would stress) by its cultural uses, quite different from those of literature. But Gombrich does seem to me, in a remote way, a sympathetic figure; his work is devoted to the idea that, as a reviewer sums it up with admitted simplification, “the origin of the making of images is other images, not reality.”^[72] Gombrich is art history’s great proponent of the idea that technique, learned by artists from other artists, has content and influence and history that can complement, reframe, and even overwhelm that of subject matter. I make no such sweeping claim here, since I am interested in the heterogeneity of literary representation and the impossibility of explaining all of its instantiations (even solely within poetry and within one historical period) by a single theory. It is significant to me that Gombrich’s reading of Pliny depends on a bit of philology: when he says that his preferred rendering of effugientes provides a “bonus,” he means that it allows for a more literal, more etymologically coherent understanding of the word. By saying so he raises a deeper question about the way language represents painting. Our sense of painting, it turns out, depends on reading—the ability to read technique in a painting and to read descriptions of paintings that demonstrate technique. That dependence seems to me to suggest a reading of Horace’s ut pictura poesis that is at odds with the usual understanding of the line. It is not mimesis per se, nor the qualities of the represented object, that causes one painting to look better up close and another at a distance: it is the technique with which the painting is made and the viewer’s ability to discern that technique. As painting, so poetry: poems differ from one another by their evocation of the ways we have learned to read poems by reading other poems. Sidney acknowledges that dependence on technique in sonnet 45: fiction affects Stella more than the visual representation of emotions in the face because her skill of interpretation corresponds in a specific way with Astrophil’s skill of creation.

The role of poetic technique in mimesis is raised in different ways in the various poems I discuss in this book. In Spenser’s early poetry (chapter 1) it is a skill he is proud to have mastered, though he wishes he were even better at it; in The Faerie Queene (chapter 2) it is even more prominent, even though there the deceptiveness that skilled mimetic technique enables can seem dangerous. Donne (chapter 3), so often praised as one of the great technicians of poetry, is often skeptical about technique himself (I will discuss “The Comparison,” in which he mocks it openly, alongside poems that question it more subtly). Milton in Paradise Regained (chapter 4) provides perhaps the sternest remonstrance yet of poetic technique, particularly as learned through imitation of classical models, but is well aware that no one is better at it than he. Milton is also, finally, my chief skeptic of visual representation, as I argue in chapter 5 in a reading of his last sonnet, “Methought I saw my late espoused saint.” I do not mean to suggest, however, a historical progression in which an acceptance of the painterliness of poetry writing gradually gives way to a rejection. The ways in which ut pictura poesis needs to be qualified are as evident to Sidney and Spenser as they are to Milton; they differ in the ends their techniques serve. I will ultimately argue that Milton presents the starkest and most urgently needed alternative to image in his epics and later lyrics, but I see that alternative as coming out of the dynamics of his own work, not the concerns of his later generation. Indeed, this anti-image poetics is always very particular: as is readily apparent in Dryden, Pope, or Keats, it is possible to be heavily under Milton’s influence while embracing much more than he does the creative potential of poetic image. The efficacy of invisibility is itself condemned to a state of obscurity; only within limits can the limits of imitation be realized.

Notes

^{1. Plutarch’s Moralia, trans. Frank Cole Babbitt (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1927–1948),
4:501 (346F). Babbitt’s translation has “inarticulate” and “articulate” where my paraphrase
has “silent” and “speaking.”}

^{2. Moralia, 1:93 (17F).}

^{3. Lessing, Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry, trans. Edward Allen McCormick (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984),
4.}

^{4. Sidney, A Defence of Poetry, ed. Jan Van Dorsten (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), 25.}

^{5. Jean-Léon Gérôme’s painting of Galatea, embracing Pygmalion from the waist while her
lower legs are still marble, decorates the cover of Barbara Johnson’s book Persons and Things (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008) as an effective summation of Johnson’s
argument for a discursively fluid relationship between the two categories of her title.
In the painting, the living sculpture (according to the title card of another version
of it at the Smart Museum of Art in Chicago) is surrounded by the furnishings of Gérôme’s
studio. Melissa Valiska Gregory pointed out to me that its representational confidence
seems to be undermined by its three competing versions, but where does that leave
it as a statement about the artist? Is it a wishful fantasy, or is Gérôme claiming
that his power to create is equivalent to Pygmalion’s?}

^{6. Euripides, Alcestis, in Cyclops, Alcestis, Medea, trans. David Kovacs (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 195, lines
348–52.}

^{7. Euripides, Alcestis, 276, line 1133.}

^{8. Sloan, “The Crossing of Rhetoric and Poetry in the English Renaissance,” in The Rhetoric of Renaissance Poetry from Wyatt to Milton, ed. Thomas M. Sloan and Raymond B. Waddington (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1974), 225.}

^{9. Bates, Masculinity, Gender and Identity in the English Renaissance Lyric (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 30.}

^{10. On the other hand, Noam Reisner argues that the logical inconsistency of the Defence is a philosophical strength, enabling Sidney to take “daring intellectual risks”
in playing the great philosophers against each other. Reisner, “The Paradox of Mimesis
in Sidney’s Defence of Poesie and Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus,” Cambridge Quarterly 39 (2010), 336.}

^{11. As Françoise Meltzer observes, the broadening of the concept of mimesis until arguments
about its ubiquity become tautological reaches its apex in the work of Jacques Derrida,
for whom “mimesis is necessary to memory” and thus “perhaps mimesis is necessary to
thought itself,” which leads to a kind of thinking in which “everything becomes, finally
mimetic” (Meltzer, Salome and the Dance of Writing: Portraits of Mimesis in Literature [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987], 10). This overall philosophical trend,
as Meltzer points out, diminishes the impact of arguments like those of M. H. Abrams,
who saw mimesis as a particular and oppressive mode that needed to be escaped (ibid.,
5).}

^{12. Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), 311.}

^{13. Auerbach, Mimesis, 328.}

^{14. Particularly notable among these responses is Kader Konus’s East West Mimesis: Auerbach in Turkey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), which argues that many aspects of the
Auerbach biography critics have taken for granted (particularly his isolation while
writing Mimesis in Turkey) are false. Though its emphasis is biographical, the book’s arguments are
effectively literary rather than theoretical: they don’t evaluate Auerbach’s theories
but seek the unacknowledged subtext of the work. Similarly, Robert Doran considers
Auerbach’s realism to be defined not by a consistently applied theory but by a recurring
pattern of mixed styles. Doran, “Literary History and the Sublime in Erich Auerbach’s
Mimesis,” New Literary History 38 (2007), 354.}

^{15. Nuttall, A New Mimesis: Shakespeare and the Representation of Reality (London: Methuen, 1983), 173.}

^{16. Baldo, The Unmasking of Drama: Contested Representation in Shakespeare’s Tragedies (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1996), 136.}

^{17. Quotations from Shakespeare are drawn from The Norton Shakespeare, 2nd ed., ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. (New York: Norton, 2008).}

^{18. Mimesis in Shakespeare is often bound up with discussions of character; indeed, Lorna
Hutson argues that Shakespeare was singularly responsible for moving mimetically straightforward
forms of Renaissance rhetoric “in the direction of creating an illusion of inwardness,
or what the eighteenth century called ‘character.’” Hutson, The Invention of Suspicion: Law and Mimesis in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 218.}

^{19. In fact, drama effects that transfer so well as to create whole new anxieties based
on its capacity to present too immediate a representation, anxieties Matthew Wikander details in his Fangs of Malice: Hypocrisy, Sincerity, and Acting (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2002); see in particular 195–96.}

^{20. For Derrida in particular, the idea that mimesis has boundaries or alternatives within
literature would not make much sense; in “The Double Session” he describes the interpretation
of mimesis as necessarily a history of literature in its entirety. Derrida, Dissemination, trans. Barbara Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 183.}

^{21. Costa Lima, Control of the Imaginary: Reason and Imagination in Modern Times, trans. Ronald W. Sousa (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 34.}

^{22. Ibid.}

^{23. Bossu, Monsieur Bossu’s Treatise of the Epick Poem, trans. W. J. (London: Printed for Thomas Bennet, 1695), 148.}

^{24. Ibid., 240.}

^{25. Ibid., 242.}

^{26. For more examples of the handling of description by Renaissance critics, see chapter
4.}

^{27. From Henry James, The Art of Fiction, quoted in Jeffrey Kittay, “Descriptive Limits,” Yale French Studies 61 (1981), 225n.}

^{28. Hamon, “Rhetorical Status of the Descriptive,” Yale French Studies 61 (1981), 13. For Hamon’s fuller work on description, including the French version
of the YFS essay, see Introduction à l’analyse du descriptif (Paris: Hachette, 1981).}

^{29. Lopes, Foregrounded Description in Prose Fiction: Five Cross-Literary Studies (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995), 15.}

^{30. Gerard Genette comments that after Poe and Baudelaire, “our implicit concept of poetry
does indeed merge with the old concept of lyric poetry.” Genette, The Architext: An Introduction, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 59–60.}

^{31. The words are italicized for emphasis in the original. Riffaterre, Semiotics of Poetry (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), 6.}

^{32. De Man, “Hypogram and Inscription,” in The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1986), 51. The “case” he refers to is Riffaterre’s
reading of Hugo’s “Ecrit sur la vitre d’une fenêtre flamande.”}

^{33. The possibility of tropes that do not conform to Riffaterre’s model frequently makes
critics wonder about its limits; thus Jonathan Culler, responding to Riffaterre’s
reading of Rimbaud’s “Fêtes de la faim,” acknowledges the power of the hypogram to
explain the experience of reading the poem but wonders whether the poem, as one that
“resists mimetic interpretation,” might be “a very special case” (Culler, “Riffaterre
and the Semiotics of Poetry,” in The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981], 87). Riffaterre’s theory of mimesis can
never (as Culler argues) have a satisfactory relationship to its individual examples
because each functions in a specific way that hardly seems universal.}

^{34. Riffaterre, Semiotics of Poetry, 47.}

^{35. Sidney, Defence, 25.}

^{36. Ibid., 23.}

^{37. Tasso, Discourses on the Heroic Poem, trans. Mariella Cavalchini and Irene Samuel (Oxford: Clarendon, 1973), 7.}

^{38. Sidney, Astrophil and Stella, in The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. William A. Ringler Jr. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1962).}

^{39. Castiglione, The Courtier, trans. Thomas Hoby, in Elizabethan Prose Translation, ed. James Winny (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960), 3.}

^{40. Ferry, The “Inward” Language: Sonnets of Wyatt, Sidney, Shakespeare, Donne (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 130.}

^{41. The representation of inwardness, though it bears on my first chapter, will not be
as central to this study as the representation of the external world. However, I do
hope that my sense of these poets’ sophistication about the mechanics of representation
will help to assuage the critical anxiety that Renaissance inwardness is somewhat
illusory. In the face of the argument of some New Historicists that the self is a
kind of unintended by-product of discourse, critics who address inwardness find themselves
employing the tortured rhetoric Wendy Olmsted uses in describing her book on emotion
and rhetoric as arguing that, in sympathy with a similar argument by Katharine Eisaman
Maus, “conditions produced by multiple, sometimes contradictory, emotional frameworks
led to an interiority also not prior to its social context” (Olmsted, The Imperfect Friend: Emotion and Rhetoric in Sidney, Milton, and Their Contexts [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008], 13). By maintaining the priority of
both the social context and the emotional framework over the interiority itself, Olmsted
avoids having to say whether the interiority is represented in the poetry.}

^{42. Sarasohn, The Natural Philosophy of Margaret Cavendish: Reason and Fancy during the Scientific
Revolution (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010), 93. Sarasohn seems to see this
view of imagination as preceding organically from a physical definition of imagination
that Cavendish explored in her youth, citing the contemporary notion that “female
imagination was supposed to affect the appearance of the child,” and thus could not
be separated either from the body or the world (34).}

^{43. Wall, The Prose of Things: Transformations of Description in the Eighteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 14.}

^{44. See L. E. Semler, The English Mannerist Poets and the Visual Arts (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1998), 95–134. Marjorie Swann,
too, thinks of Herrick’s little poems in connection to little things, and compares
Hesperides to a curiosity cabinet (Swann, Curiosities and Texts: The Culture of Collecting in Early Modern England [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001], 181–93). This trend in which
Herrick is imagined in visual terms is directly contrary to an earlier one that thought
of him as motivated chiefly by sound and poetic form; see in particular Gordon Braden,
The Classics and English Renaissance Poetry: Three Case Studies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), 154–254.}

^{45. Yates, Error, Misuse, Failure: Object Lessons from the English Renaissance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 56–57.}

^{46. Ibid.}

^{47. Goldberg, The Seeds of Things: Theorizing Sexuality and Materiality in Renaissance Representations (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009), 3.}

^{48. Ibid., 74.}

^{49. Arne Melberg has accused Auerbach of ignoring the distinction between mimesis and
figuration: “his most interesting observations on the mimetic play of similarity and
difference,” Melberg says, are actually about figure. Melberg, Theories of Mimesis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 2.}

^{50. Auerbach, “Figura,” trans. Ralph Manheim, in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 11–78.}

^{51. Milton, Areopagitica, in Complete Prose Works, ed. Don M. Wolfe, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953–1980), 2:549.}

^{52. Pliny, Natural History, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1952), 309, 35.36.64.}

^{53. Junius, The Paintings of the Ancients (London: Richard Hodgkinsonne, 1638), 7, sig. B4.}

^{54. Mansfield, Too Beautiful to Picture: Zeuxis, Myth, and Mimesis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), xv.}

^{55. Quoted in Mansfield, Too Beautiful, 44.}

^{56. Ibid., 52.}

^{57. The original of the key part of the sentence is “fare una figura di tutte quelle bellezze
che più si poteva, e metterla in uso in ogni opera per tutte le figure.” Quoted in
Robert Williams, Art, Theory, and Culture in Sixteenth-Century Italy: From Techne to Metatechne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 64n47 (the translation above, also
quoted by Mansfield, is Williams’s).}

^{58. Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 39.}

^{59. Françoise Meltzer suggests that we should think of them as one and the same; she reads
Quintillian’s criticism of rhetorical imitation as a response to Aristotle’s theory
that imitation is natural, and finally regards all of the terms these discussions
rely on as inextricable from each other: “Representation must always imitate; mimesis
always represents—not necessarily an object, but also an idea, a politics, an ideology,
an illusion” (Meltzer, Salome, 8, 216). Michel Beaujour argues that, even more narrowly, by the end of the Renaissance
there was “a mutation in mimesis, which came to mean, above all, imitation of the ancients” (Beaujour’s emphasis). Beaujour, Poetics of the Literary Self-Portrait, trans. Yara Milos (New York: New York University Press, 1991), 175.}

^{60. Auerbach, “Figura,” 15.}

^{61. Ibid.}

^{62. Sidney, Defence, 42.}

^{63. OED, s.v. “skill, v.1,” sense 4 (see 4a, 1632 quotation for the skilling of cunning).}

^{64. Sidney, Defence, 37–38.}

^{65. Meltzer considers ut pictura poesis to be a “recasting” of the idea ascribed to Simonides “that poetry is vocal painting,
painting silent poetry” (Salome, 9, 2), a reading that becomes more difficult, I think, if we consider the context
of Horace’s statement. As for its influence in Renaissance England, it is certainly
quoted frequently but not, I think, considered definitive; Sidney, after all, quotes
the Ars Poetica several times without mentioning it.}

^{66. Epistula ad Pisones (“Ars Poetica”), lines 361–365; Horace Epistles, Book 2, ed. Niall Rudd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Consonantal
‘u’ is changed to ‘v’; the translation is my own.}

^{67. Pliny, Natural History, 333, 35.36.97.}

^{68. Herbert asks, “Must all be vail’d, while he that reades, divines, / Catching the sense
at two removes?” Herbert, “Jordan (I),” in The Works of George Herbert, ed. F. E. Hutchinson (Oxford: Clarendon, 1941), 9–10.}

^{69. Pliny, Natural History, 321–23, 35.36.82–83.}

^{70. Quoted in Gombrich, The Heritage of Apelles, reprinted as Gombrich on the Renaissance, vol. 3 (London: Phaidon, 1976), 5.}

^{71. Ibid., 15.}

^{72. F. David Martin, review of The Heritage of Apelles, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 35 (1977), 378.}