Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t7fkt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-02T18:08:41.930Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

15 - The rhetoric of presence: art, literature, and illusion

from III - Rhetorical poetics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

By
François Rigolot
Edited by
Glyn P. Norton
Glyn P. Norton
Affiliation:
Williams College, Massachusetts
Get access

Summary

Fascination with the idea of illusionist representation pervades the history of Renaissance culture. Great artists were generally convinced that they had been endowed with a power to instil a supernatural degree of life into their artefacts. The Pygmalion fantasy can be seen as emblematic of this faith in the illusionist qualities of art. The famous Greek myth exemplifies the belief in the power of art to give life rather than to represent it. In Ovid's version of the story Pygmalion is a sculptor who falls in love with the statue he has fashioned, and the gods answer his prayers by turning the cold marble into living flesh (Metamorphoses, x). This myth naturally captivated the imagination of many artists and writers from Donatello to Michel de Montaigne and William Shakespeare. The triumph of representational skill is traditionally associated with the power of art to arouse passions. This was still common theoretical currency in the Renaissance.

The painter could so subdue the minds of men that they would fall in love with a painting that did not represent a real woman. In his Treatise on painting Leonardo tells the following anecdote: ‘I made a religious painting which was bought by one who so loved it that he wanted to remove the sacred representations so as to be able to kiss it without suspicion. Finally his conscience prevailed over his sighs and lust, but he had to remove the picture from his house.’ If for today's critics illusionist virtuosity is suspect at best as a criterion of artistic worth, it was indeed highly praised by classical authority.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism , pp. 161 - 167
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1999

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 painting, trans. Spencer, J. R., New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966.Google Scholar
Bergmann, Emilie L.Art inscribed: essays on ekphrasis in Spanish Golden Age poetry, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979.Google Scholar
Burton, Robert, The anatomy of melancholy, Oxford: Lichfield, J. and Short, J. for Cripps, H., 1624. [ed. Dell, F. and Jordan-Smith, P., New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1927].Google Scholar
Cave, Terence, ‘Enargeia: Erasmus and the rhetoric of presence in the sixteenth century’, L'esprit créateur 16, 4 (Winter 1976).Google Scholar
d'Etaples, Lefèvre, Commentarii initiatorii in Quatuor Evangelia (1522). The prefatory epistles of Jacques Lefèvre d'Etaples and related texts, ed. Rice, E. F. (New York:, Columbia University Press 1972).Google Scholar
Du Bellay, Joachim, La deffence et illustration de la langue françoyse, ed. Chamard, H., Paris: Didier, 1948.Google Scholar
Erasmus, Desiderius, Opera omnia, Basle: Froben, 1540, 9 vols.Google Scholar
Ficino, Marsilio, Theologia Platonica sive de immortalitate animorum, ed. and trans. Marcel, R., Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1964–70, 3 vols.Google Scholar
Galand-Hallyn, Perrine, Le reflet des fleurs: description et métalangage poétique d'Homère à la Renaissance, Geneva: Droz, 1994.Google Scholar
Gent, Lucy, Picture and poetry 1560–1620: relations between literature and the visual arts in the English Renaissance, Leamington Spa: J. Hall, 1981.Google Scholar
Gombrich, Ernst Hans, Art and illusion, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961.Google Scholar
Hagstrum, Jean H.The sister arts: the tradition of literary pictorialism and English poetry from Dryden to Gray, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958.Google Scholar
Jeanneret, Michel, A feast of words: banquets and table talk in the Renaissance, trans. Whiteley, J. andHughes, E.(Chicago, University of Chicago Press 1991).Google Scholar
Krieger, Murray, Ekphrasis: the illusion of the natural sign, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.Google Scholar
Lausberg, Heinrich, Handbuch der literarischen Rhetorik, Munich: M. Hüber, 1960.Google Scholar
Leonardo da Vinci, , Treatise on painting, ed. McMahon, A. P., Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1956.Google Scholar
Montaigne, Michel, The complete works of Montaigne: Essays, Travel Journal, Letters, trans. Frame, D. M., Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1967.Google Scholar
Ong, Walter J.The presence of the word, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967.Google Scholar
Panofsky, Erwin, Idea: a concept in art theory, trans. Peake, J., Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1968.Google Scholar
Plett, H. F.Rhetorik der A ffekte. Englische Wirkungsästhetik im Zeitalter der Renaissance, Tübingen: M. Niemeyer, 1975.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Poems of George Chapman ed., Bartlett, P., New York, Modern Language Association of America; London: Oxford University Press 1941).Google Scholar
Poliziano, Angelo, Opera omnia, Lyons: Gryphius, 1546.Google Scholar
Scaliger, Julius Caesar, Poetices libri septem; 1561; facs. reprint Stuttgart and Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1987, ed. Buck, A..Google Scholar
Spenser, Edmund, The shepheardes calender, in Poetical works, ed. Smith, J. C. and Sélincourt, E., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1912.Google Scholar
Wind, Edgar, Pagan mysteries in the Renaissance, rev. edn, New York: Norton, 1968.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×