Making Pictures Speak: Renaissance Art, Elizabethan Literature, Modern Scholarship

Some Often Quoted Lines from Sidney's Apology for Poetry can stand both as a piece of literary history in themselves and as a methodological guide for the study of that history: “Poesy therefore is an art of imitation: for so Aristotle termeth it in the word mimesis, that is to say, a representing, counterfeiting, or figuring forth—to speak metaphorically, a speaking picture.“1 It is one of the most famous of all definitions of poetry, and like many other such definitions—Plato's in the Republic, Horace's in the Ars Poetica2- —it arrives at saliency by drawing an analogy to the visual. More succinctly even than his predecessors, Sidney demonstrates just how difficult it is to unpack the cdncept of mimesis as he ranges through a sequence of functional descriptions ﹛representing, counterfeiting, figuring forth), none of which quite does the trick, until he arrives at a metaphor that names itself as such. One might say that a metaphor is itself a speaking picture and therefore Sidney's memorable phrase is a self-confirming artifact. But let us shy away from such metaformulations and content ourselves with a sense of just how felicitous the expression “speaking picture” turns out to be.