“Take this picture which I heere present thee": The Art of Portraiture in the Elizabethan Sonnet Sequences

In this essay, which takes into account several sonnet sequences, including some less-known works such as the anonymous Zepheria, Griffin’s Fidessa, Fletcher’s Licia and Tofte’s Laura and Alba, I analyse the way in which Elizabethan poets elaborated the traditional association established between painting and poetry, and particularly between portraits and sonnets, revealing a variety of approaches to the visual element and their connection to a series of elements characterizing the sixteenth-century, including the flourishing of the Petrarchan tradition and the evolution and diffusion of the art of portraiture, as well as the iconoclastic anxiety brought forth by the Reformation. In those texts treating the portrait as an actual picture, the image is mostly used as a means to play with the Petrarchan topoi, though its employment often reveals traces of the iconoclastic anxiety of the period. On the other hand, when the poet uses the language of painting to denote his own attempt to represent the beloved, the reference to the art of portraiture becomes an occasion to reflect on the paragone between the arts, and especially on the poietic and mimetic power of poetry. Eager to highlight their role as creators, poets found in the idiom of painting, and especially of limning, a means to stress the verisimilitude of their representational effort while lending visual and material substance to their artistic act – an act that, despite all difficulties, emerges as ultimately capable of bestowing immortal life on the beloved’s perfect image.