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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 May 2006
“The pen,” Jonson wrote in his commonplace book Timber, or, Discoveries, “is more noble than the pencil; for that can speak to the understanding, the other, but to the sense” (1528-30). The invidious comparison here is between the written word and pictorial art; but the synecdoche itself shades the two into each other: Inigo Jones did his drawings in pen and ink, while the books that survive from Jonson's library include many with marginalia in pencil - the instrument of Jones' invention was the pen, that of Jonson's understanding the pencil. In fact, the passage, Poesis et pictura, goes on to praise picture more highly than poetry. It is “the invention of heaven: the most ancient, and most akin to nature.” The two arts, moreover, are indissolubly linked, just as sense and understanding are; and “whosoever loves not picture is injurious to truth, and all the wisdom of poetry” (1536-8).
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