Full Description
The volume presents a wide-ranging investigation of the ways in which Petrarch's legacy informed the relationship between visual and literary portraits in sixteenth-century Italy. Petrarch's vast literary production influenced the intellectual framework in which new models of representation and self-representation developed during the Renaissance. His two sonnets on Laura's portrait by Simone Martini and his ambivalent fascination with the illusionary power of portraiture in his Latin texts — such as the Secretum, the Familiares and De remediis utriusque fortune — constituted the theoretical reference for artists and writers alike. In a century dominated by the rhetorical comparison between art and literature (ut pictura poësis) and by the paragone debate, the interplay between Petrarch's oeuvre, Petrarchism and portraiture shaped the discourse on the relationship between the sitters' physical image and their inner life. The volume brings together diverse interdisciplinary contributions that explore the subject through a rich body of literary and visual sources.
Contents
1. Introduction, 2. Widows, Poetry, and Portraits. Livia Spinola and Francesca Turina on the Portraits of their Dead Husbands, 3. In Medusa's Eyes. Petrification and Marble Portraits in Late Sixteenth-Century Poetry, 4. The Portrait of the Ideal Woman. Petrarch in Conduct Literature Texts for and about, 5. Anti-Petrarchist Portraiture or a Different Petrarchist Portraiture? A Literary Outlook on Some Non-Idealised Female Sitters in Renaissance Art, 6. The Shadow of Petrarch. Benedetto Varchi and Agnolo Bronzino on Portraiture, 7. Double Portraits of Petrarch and Laura in Print (c. 1544-1600), 8. Double Portraits and Sonnet Diptychs. Figurative Allusions in the Encomiastic Poetry of the Sixteenth Century, 9. Images of Women from Subject to Frame in Printed Portrait Books, Index
