In
Iconoclasm and Poetry in the English Reformation, Ernest Gilman wrote that “the making and breaking of images becomes Donne’s figure for registering the deepest conflicts of his imagination”.
1 Ernest Gilman, Iconoclasm and Poetry in the English Reformation: Down Went Dagon (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 135. The tension implied in that statement can be found in just about every reference Donne makes to visual art in his writing. Every “image” that he evokes is made problematic in some way – broken, erased, or otherwise called into question. Donne’s phrase “pictures made, and marrd”, from the poem “Witchcraft by a Picture” (l. 6), sums up for Gilman the way that the visual is both conjured up and withheld in his poetry. The line is an apt description of the way material images are treated in Donne’s work, and well describes the many contradictory impulses to be found in the criticism on the topic. To engage with the question of Donne and visual art is to enter into a convoluted discussion that is reminiscent of the “huge hill” of truth in “Satyre 3”. I originally set out, naïvely and optimistically, to compare John Donne’s religious poetry with visual art. After many turns around the hill, the book has ended up being more about the impossibility of comparing his writing to visual art.
But the path critics have taken in pursuit of Donne and the visual arts is both well-trodden and tortuous. While Annabel Patterson describes Donne’s work as “larded with reference to painting in general and portraits in particular”, Ann Hollinshead Hurley opens her study on Donne and visual culture with the statement that his verse “does not allude directly to specific paintings, pieces of sculpture, or similar artifacts”.
2 Annabel Patterson, “Donne in Shadows: Pictures and Politics”, John Donne Journal 16 (1997): 1–35 (p. 12); Ann Hollinshead Hurley, John Donne’s Poetry and Early Modern Visual Culture (Selinsgrove, Susquehanna University Press, 2005), p. 13. These apparently opposed versions of the relationship between Donne’s writing and the visual arts can serve as bookends for the widely differing ways in which critics have seen some visual influence in his work. The speaker of the Holy Sonnet “What if this present were the world’s last night” imagines “the picture of Christ crucified” projected in his heart, and for R. V. Young this “suggest[s] a Spanish baroque painting”. He goes on to find a contemporary “visual analogue” for the sonnet in Velázquez’s
Christ on the Cross (1599–1600).
3 R. V. Young, Doctrine and Devotion in Seventeenth-century Poetry: Studies in Donne, Herbert, Crashaw, and Vaughan (Cambridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2000), pp. 24–25. Donne’s sonnet sequence “La Corona”, focusing on moments from the life of Christ, has similarly inspired visual parallels: Helen Gardner compares the sequence to a series of stained glass windows while Patterson reads it as an ekphrasis of an identifiable illustrated rosary manual.
4 Helen Gardner, ed., John Donne. The Divine Poems (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952), pp. xxii–xxiii; Annabel Patterson, “Donne’s Re-formed La Corona”, John Donne Journal 23 (2004): 69–93 (p. 85). Without identifying a specific artwork, Louis Martz seems to be responding to a similar quality in Donne’s religious poetry when he describes the “graphically imaged openings” characteristic of his verse, “where the moment of death, or the Passion of Christ, or the Day of Doom is there, now, before the eyes of the writer, brought home to the soul by vivid ‘similitudes’”.
5 Louis Martz, The Poetry of Meditation: A Study in English Religious Literature of the Seventeenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954) (rev. ed. 1962), p. 31. Joseph Lederer, and other critics following him, describes a “correspondence” between Donne’s imagery and the emblem books of his time, with Donne either “lifting” his images directly from an emblematic source or simply using an image with an “emblematic cast”.
6 Josef Lederer, “John Donne and the Emblematic Practice”, The Review of English Studies, 22 (1946): 182–200 (p. 185). See also Mary Cole Sloane, The Visual in Metaphysical Poetry (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1981). Barbara Lewalski too picks up on Donne’s use of the term “emblem” in “Upon the Annunciation and the Passion” and the “Hymne to Christ” as indicative of his “emblematic habit of mind”, and identifies several emblems that may lie behind particular lines in the Holy Sonnets: the adamant heart of “Thou hast made me” and, particularly, the siege of the heart in “Batter my heart”.
7 Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), p. 196; p. 202. This collection of visual responses to Donne’s poetry begins to illustrate the different ways in which verbal-visual parallels can be generated, and the different angles that word-and-image interpretations of his poetry can take.
Norman Farmer categorically states that Donne is not “a pictorialist writer in the sense that Sidney and Spenser are”, while Patterson highlights his “frequent recourse to pictorialism”.
8 Norman K. Farmer, Jr., Poets and the Visual Arts in Renaissance England (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1984), p. 19; Patterson, “Donne in Shadows”, p. 14. These apparently contradictory claims may at least partly be explained by their different understandings of the term. Farmer is sticking closely to Jean H. Hagstrum’s definition of “pictorialism” in
The Sister Arts, where he claims that “in order to be called ‘pictorial’ a description or an image must be, in its essentials, capable of translation into painting or some other visual art … must be imaginable as a painting or a sculpture”.
9 Jean H. Hagstrum, The Sister Arts: The Tradition of Literary Pictorialism and English Poetry from Dryden to Gray (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1958), pp. xxi–xii. Patterson seems rather to use the term to indicate any reference to a picture, without insisting on the descriptive quality or visualising function. These two different understandings of the term underlie much of the tension in the critical understanding of Donne as a “visual poet”. A poet – notably Donne – may display great interest in pictures as objects, or in the function of painting, without engaging in the “pictorial” in Hagstrum’s sense of the word, which would involve some sort of potential translation of literary content into visual art, or vice versa. While Donne’s interest in and knowledge about works of visual art as material objects can be demonstrated fairly conclusively through biographical evidence and his own writing, attempts to read his poems as ekphrastic or “pictorial” tend to become over-general or far-fetched. While there are parallels to be made, Donne’s engagement with the question of visual representation in these poems is much more complex, more intellectual and more problematising. “Seeing” for Donne is seldom simple, and his poems often resist “pictorial” visualisation in the manner of Hagstrum. This distance between Donne’s demonstrable interest in visual art and how it filters into his poetry produces these divergent interpretations, and reflects, I would argue, Donne’s own anxiety about the possibility of representation in both visual and verbal art. Yet at the moments where Donne’s subject matter overlaps with a subject widely treated in visual art, the search for a “visual analogue” is sparked.
“Visual analogue” is a broad category, of course, and a useful catch-all for a number of kinds of comparison between literary texts and artworks. While literary ekphrasis is a recognised genre it is hard, despite the claims of some critics, to go very far in identifying any ekphrases of actual works of art, direct or indirect, in Donne’s work.
10 For a comprehensive discussion of literary ekphrasis see James A. W. Heffernan, The Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2004). Donne makes no explicit references to known paintings in his poetry, though his more general or “notional” ekphrases demonstrate a knowledge of the field.
11 The phrase “notional ekphrasis” to describe literary representations of imagined works of visual art was coined by John Hollander, “A Poetics of Ekphrasis”, Word and Image 4:1 (1988): 209–219 (p. 209). But “visual analogues” may be based on a comparable use of subject matter, as in Young’s comparison of Donne’s “picture of Christ crucified” and Velázquez’s painting cited above, or on a perceived structural parallel between literary or artistic techniques.
One of the most critically influential examples of this kind of attempt to find structural and stylistic parallels between Donne and the visual arts – though it extends well beyond Donne’s poetry alone – is the approach found in Wylie Sypher’s 1955
Four Stages of Renaissance Style and the work of Mario Praz, particularly his
Mnemosyne.
12 Wylie Sypher, Four Stages of Renaissance Style: Transformations in Art and Literature 1400–1700 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1955); Mario Praz, Mnemosyne: The Parallel Between Literature and the Visual Arts (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970). See also A. D. Cousins, “The Coming of Mannerism: The Later Ralegh and the Early Donne”, English Literary Renaissance 9.1 (1979): 86–107. The interart approach shared by Sypher and Praz relies on the notion of the
Zeitgeist, proposing a direct parallel between visual and verbal art of approximately the same period, and applying art history terminology as a basis for describing and interpreting literary texts. According to this logic Donne’s poetry can be described as “mannerist” because of an “instability” in his style and his subject matter, a “troubled” sensibility that is also to be identified in Shakespeare’s
Troilus and Cressida, Hamlet and
Measure for Measure, and which may be compared to the “skeletal forms” of Tintoretto and El Greco, and the “nervous complexity” and “opposing movements” of Parmigianino’s “strange art”.
13 Sypher, Four Stages, pp. 101–104; pp. 110–111. Such “disquieting arrangements in literature and the visual arts” are a result of the “reversal of classical usage” typical of mannerist aesthetics.
14 Praz, Mnemosyne, pp. 90–91.The trouble with this kind of analogy, as various critics have pointed out, is not only its subjectivity but the way it necessarily remains on the level of casual observations of general similarities.
15 Alastair Fowler, “Periodization and Interart Analogies”, NLH 3:3, Literary and Art History (Spring, 1972): 487–509. Such interpretations can only provide partial readings of the poems because they are unable to get too close and see the moment that the visual analogy breaks down. As David Evett cautions, such an approach “needs to be careful of easy analogies”.
16 David Evett, Literature and the Visual Arts in Tudor England (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1990), p. 250. Attempts to move closer in for sustained analysis of literary passages inevitably founder and end up sounding either ridiculous or banal, like Praz’s comparison of the cupola, “the crowning feature of a church” with the “crowning effect of the tercets” in an Italian sonnet.
17 Praz, Mnemosyne, p. 87. With reference to Donne’s poetry particularly, Sypher finds in Parmigianino’s
Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1524) a “device for self-contemplation [that] is dramatically immediate, but preposterously contrived, like some of the self-regarding poems of Donne”. Mario Praz, meanwhile, identifying the
linea serpentinata as the “recurrent pattern of so much mannerist art”, finds “Donne’s tortuous line of reasoning [which] frequently takes the form of a statement, reversed at a given point by a ‘but’ at the beginning of a line” to be iconically paralleled by the “twisted motions” of a painting such as Salviati’s
Bathsheba Betaking Herself to David (1552–1554).
18 Sypher, Four Stages, p. 112; Praz, Mnemosyne, p. 97; pp. 92–93.