Elizabeth Bishop wrote with an awareness of developments in the visual arts at the beginning of the twentieth century, often seen as spearheading the Modernist movement in all the arts. As well as being a profoundly visual poet and sharing an interest in detailed description with her mentor Marianne Moore, Bishop also questioned the idea of a settled point of view and embraced both uncertainty and multiplicity in relation to seeing. Temperamentally she found an affinity with the idea of the Baroque in seventeenth-century writing and in the parallels with twentieth-century art drawn in art theory. Her early attraction to Surrealism also had to do with the disorientating effects of seeing and the uncertain boundary between inner and outer worlds. A writer who also painted herself, though in a small way, Bishop was always alert to issues of spatial representation, and how art and writing traced a similar process of their own emergence.

The profoundly theoretical approach to language on the part of the modistae resulted in the “speculative grammar” that is reflected in Dante’s representation of a deep structure of language. At this level, language is “one in all” (“una in tutti”), yet this underlying condition of unity is not as such articulable. Dante envisages ultimately a unity beyond language altogether. Dante cannot represent God as such, but he can imitate God’s art by a total artifice that absorbs matter into its own creation of form. This hyper-artificiality of Dante’s writing makes images revelations not of anything that is as such but of an unlimited indeterminate power of creation that performs in the image of God. It works on a necessarily negative logic. God is “seen” negatively, or is understood (by Dante in heaven) through the invisible divinity’s being manifest analogically in an infinite process of mediation that then dissolves and so points back to its invisible source. This is allowed to occur by Dante’s making the linguistic, and specifically written, medium itself his object of contemplation – in effect, the visio Dei. God can be given to experience only through mediations, specifically through their infinity, and Dante’s vision of divinity in the mediations of language says as much. In some sense, Dante suggests, his vision of the medium (writing) gives rise to an immediate vision of the divine. This paradox is explored and illuminated through the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty and through art theory and the anthropology of images. Contemporary art historians and theorists have meditated deeply on the role of images in making absence present. Through emphasizing the writtenness of his vision of God in Paradise, Dante is already bringing out into the open what particularly Didi-Huberman and Jean-Claude Schmitt, as well as Hans Belting, emphasize about images as making absence present. They glimpse the unlimitedness of this absence, moreover, sometimes even in its theological implications and connotations. This realization of absence can become a kind of enactment of divinity, an incarnation in mental experience, and even in an aesthetic medium, of God. Metaphysical reality is thus made to appear through the image. A theologization of the presencing of absence through the image can surely be discerned in Dante’s “scenography” in the Heaven of Jove.

Driven above all by the desire to reconcile aesthetic and moral value, Scottish philosophers, poets and artists made essential contributions to eighteenth-century aesthetics and art theory. This essay examines some of the key moments in the history of Scottish aesthetics from the 1720s to the early years of the nineteenth century. In particular, it surveys the ways in which Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, George Turnbull, Allan Ramsay, Lord Kames, William Duff, Alexander Gerard, Thomas Reid, Archibald Alison and Dugald Stewart debated the respective roles of the senses, reason and the imagination in the appreciation of beauty; asked whether beauty is in the object or the subject; pondered the relationship between virtue, wealth and aesthetic judgement; and considered the existence of a universal standard of taste.