Invocation of the Visual Image: Ekphrasis in "Lucrece" and Beyond

• Published in: Shakespeare quarterly Vol. 63; no. 2; pp. 175 - 198
• Main Author: Belsey, Catherine
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Oxford The Johns Hopkins University Press 01.07.2012; Oxford University Press
• Subjects: Art exhibitions; British & Irish literature; Chaucer, Geoffrey (1340?-1400); Early Renaissance art; English literature; Essays; Graphics; Inflection (Morphology); Literary criticism; Narrative poetry; Pictorial representation; Poetry; Reading; Renaissance art; Shakespeare, William (1564-1616); Visual arts
• ISSN: 0037-3222; 1538-3555; 1538-3555
• DOI: 10.1353/shq.2012.0029

Is there more at stake for us in sharing this prevailing sadness than a ready sympathy with a Roman heroine and her Trojan predecessors, both, if they once existed at all, rendered fictional in Shakespeare's elegiac account of their respective woes? I suggest that, if those remote and doleful eyes elicit a momentary sense of corresponding bereavement in the reader, it is ultimately presence we mourn for. On the one hand, Reformation iconophobia is brought in to generate suspicion of the painting Lucrece constructs at such length; on the other, the contest between words and images, and its specific inflection in the Renaissance paragone, drives the belief that the poem sets out to establish its superiority over the art work.