Introduction: Visual and verbal art
To adore, or scorn an image, or protest,
May all be bad; doubt wisely; in strange way
To stand inquiring right, is not to stray;
To sleep, or run wrong, is. On a huge hill,
Cragged and steep, Truth stands, and he that will
Reach her, about must and about must go,
And what the hill’s suddenness resists, win so.
John Donne, “Satyre 3”, ll. 76–82
1 “Satyre 3”, Gary Stringer et al., eds., The Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne. Volume 3: The Satyres (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2016), pp. 91–93 (p. 92).This book proposes a new approach to the visual arts in the work of John Donne. While many other discussions of Donne and the visual arts concentrate on his knowledge of painting and the material visual culture of his time, this study argues that even Donne’s explicit references to pictures are metaphorical and conceptual rather than material. Although his interest in and knowledge of visual art is clearly reflected in his writing, and the currents of Reformation iconoclasm feed into his expressed unease regarding images, Donne seldom if ever treats the visual artwork as an object in itself. Rather, the artwork is a metaphor, a way of approaching the immaterial or ineffable, a tool with which to test the limits of representation and particularly the representation of the divine. Donne’s use of visual art goes beyond the reformers’ debates about images in worship and can be traced to pre-Reformation theological treatises where the metaphor of a painting or a sculpture is employed to illustrate the nature of God or the relationship between human and divine.