Ut Pictura Poesis and the Rhetoric of Perspective

Abstract

Reading As You Like It through the lens of Alberti’s pioneering treatise on painting and the interest in copious invention it shares with Shakespeare’s comedy has shown us that language has the capacity to function as a mode of seeing, that rhetorical devices embody and produce a particular viewpoint on the world. But precisely how may language be said to constitute a potential analogue or substitute for visual perspective? The answer to this problem must be sought in the commonalities forged between the verbal and visual arts by the venerable doctrine of ut pictura poesis. Ingeniously spun from Pliny’s anecdotes regarding famous artists of antiquity and some incidental remarks in Aristotle, Horace, Quintilian and Plutarch likening poetry to painting, this discourse evolved in the sixteenth century into a formalized body of commonplaces to which both writers and artists might resort. Its deepest roots, however, lay in the rhetorical system itself. By developing a critical terminology and a set of descriptive categories that were readily applicable to all the arts, classical rhetoricians and their humanist heirs created the conditions in which the modus operandi of poetry and painting — their subject matter, aims and techniques — could be treated as analogous, even interchangeable. The easy commerce between verbal and visual modes of expression we encounter everywhere in the work of Shakespeare and his contemporaries is, in a very real sense, a product of comparative habits of mind implanted by this discursive tradition.¹