For both Praz and Sypher, the serpentine line
becomes a particularly apt motif for the mannerist tension they identify in Donne’s poetry.
1 Praz, Mnemosyne, pp. 79–105 (see p. 92); Sypher, Four Stages, pp. 156–159. Sypher quotes, suggestively, in the opening pages of his chapter on Mannerism, the passage from Donne’s “First Anniversary: An Anatomy of the World”, in which “new Philosophy calls all in doubt”, and where Donne uses the word “serpentine” to describe the assumed elliptical path of the sun, “cousening” or deceptive in more ways than one:
… nor can the Sunne
Perfit a Circle, or maintaine his way
One inche direct; but where he rose to day
He comes no more, but with a cousening line,
Steales by that point, and so is Serpentine
(The First Anniversary: An Anatomy of the World, ll. 268–272)
2 Sypher, p. 101. “The First Anniversary: An Anatomy of the World”, Stringer et al., eds., Variorum 6, Anniversaries p. 13.The “cousening line” and disfigured proportion of this passage chime thematically with Mannerism’s experimentation with techniques of disproportion and disturbed balance. Donne’s use of the very word “serpentine” at one level seems to invite precisely this kind of parallel with the visual arts. Curiously though, despite both Sypher and Praz’s focus on the serpentine line in their discussion of Donne, neither of them cites the sermon in which Donne uses the term “serpentine” in an undeniably painterly sense. In this sermon preached on the Penitential Psalms in the early 1620s Donne elaborates on a sinner’s supplication to God:
…it is a religious insinuation, and a circumvention that God loves, when a sinner husbands his graces so well, as to grow rich under him, and to make his thanks for one blessing, a reason, and an occasion of another; so to gather upon God by a rolling Trench, and by a winding staire, as
Abraham gained upon God, in the behalfe of Sodome; for this is an act of the wisedome of the Serpent, which our Saviour recommends unto us, in such a Serpentine line, (as the Artists call it) to get up to God, and get into God by such degrees, as
David does here… (5: 347)
3 George R. Potter and Evelyn M. Simpson, eds., The Sermons of John Donne 10 vols. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1952–1963). Hereafter cited in the text as Sermons.As Liam Semler comments in his
The English Mannerist Poets and the Visual Arts, Donne here “is undoubtedly referring to the
linea serpentinata of mannerist art theory. He plainly acknowledges that it is a current technical term”, as his parenthetical comment “(as the Artists call it)” makes clear. Semler speculates that the source of Donne’s knowledge of the term may be Richard Haydocke’s 1598 English translation of Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo’s 1584
Trattato dell’arte della pittura.
4 L. E. Semler, The English Mannerist Poets and the Visual Arts (Madison and Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press and London: Associated University Press, 1998), p. 51.What is interesting here when considered against the interart comparison proposed by Sypher and Praz, is that this occurrence of the serpentine line in Donne’s writing is not the product of an indeterminate collective
Zeitgeist but rather a deliberate and signalled reference to the technical vocabulary of a field of the visual arts, which explicitly invokes the metaphors offered by interart comparison. Alastair Fowler observes, commenting on the application of art historical terminology to literature, “every interart comparison, even between two visual arts, involves a metaphor … This is far from invalidating it, however, so long as the metaphor is sound”.
5 Fowler, “Periodization”, p. 499. Semler’s attempts to outline a “mannerist poetic”, unlike those of his predecessors, are grounded in a discussion of his subjects’ demonstrable knowledge of visual art, establishing Donne’s participation in a culture that was actively interested in and influenced by visual art.
6 Semler, English Mannerist Poets, pp. 46–55. Besides Donne, Semler’s book discusses Robert Herrick, Thomas Carew, Richard Lovelace and Andrew Marvell.In many ways, Semler’s chapter sets the scene for the most extensive study of this kind to date, Hurley’s
John Donne’s Poetry and Early Modern Visual Culture (2005). Declaring it essential to take into account the influence of visual culture on literary production, Hurley describes Donne as a particularly “intriguing instance of a poet operating under the influence of the visual aspects of his culture, and one who was quite sophisticated in both his awareness and in his responses, even modifications, of that influence”.
7 Hurley, John Donne’s Poetry, p. 13. Both Semler and Hurley are keen to establish what works Donne may have read and seen and to trace his known personal relationships to painters and their associates, suggesting for example that he was probably familiar with recent treatises on art, such as Haydocke’s translation of Lomazzo’s 1598 treatise, and Nicholas Hilliard’s
The Art of Limning (1598–1603).
8 Hurley, John Donne’s Poetry, p. 30; Semler, p. 47. For both Semler and Hurley, some of Donne’s comments on visual art, particularly in the sermons, are reminiscent of these contemporary treatises, even though he cites neither of them directly.
9 Semler, English Mannerist Poets, pp. 48–49; Hurley, John Donne’s Poetry, pp. 174–6. As Semler points out, Donne’s passing reference to “Durers rules” to describe the symmetry of the body in Satyre 4 (l. 204) suggests at least an awareness of some of Albrecht Dürer’s writings on geometry and human proportion.
10 Semler, English Mannerist Poets, p. 47. Albrecht Dürer, Elementa geometrica (Paris, 1532); De symmetria partium humanorum corporum (Nuremberg, 1528); Quatuor libri geometriae … De symmetria (Paris, 1535). See Lucy Gent, Picture and Poetry 1560–1620 (Leamington Spa: James Hall, 1981), p. 83 and n. on known copies of Dürer’s writings in English collections. The most compelling reference to the world of visual art in his poetry, though, must be his mention of Nicholas Hilliard in the opening lines of the verse letter “The Storme”, to Christopher Brooke:
a hand, or eye
By Hilliard drawne, is worth an historie
By a worse painter made; And without pride,
When by thy iudgment they are dignified,
My lines are such; (ll. 3–7)
11 Jeffrey S. Johnson et al., eds., The Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne. Volume 5: The Verse Letters (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2019), p. 5.The direct reference to Hilliard shows, at the very least, that Donne was aware of the work of a contemporary artist; it is one of the key moments often cited to establish Donne’s credentials in matters of visual art.
12 Hurley, John Donne’s Poetry, 15; Martin Elsky, “John Donne’s La Corona: Spatiality and Mannerist Painting”. Modern Language Studies 13.2 (1983): 3–11 (p. 11 n.2). It has been somewhat tenuously proposed that the earliest known portrait of Donne himself, the engraving by William Marshall dated 1591 that appears as a frontispiece to the revised 1635 edition of Donne’s
Poems, was based on an original portrait miniature by Nicholas Hilliard, and the poem is often cited in conjunction with this claim, despite the fact that very little evidence supports it.
13 This theory seems to have originated with the poet and art historian Laurence Binyon, is mentioned by Grierson in The Poems of John Donne (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1912, vol. 2, 134), and has developed into a bit of a biographical commonplace: see John Bryson, “Lost Portrait of Donne”, The Times. (London) October 13, 1959: p. 15; Helen Gardner, ed., The Elegies and The Songs and Sonnets (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), p. 143; p. 266. If Donne had sat for Hilliard, Semler argues, this strengthens the assumption that he might have had access to treatises such as Haydocke’s translation of Lomazzo.
14 Semler, English Mannerist Poets, p. 49. But even without the tantalising possibility of a Hilliard portrait of him, in these lines Donne seems, in Hurley’s words, to be “explicitly thinking about portraiture as opposed to historical painting”, suggesting a certain knowledge about hierarchies of painting.
15 Hurley, John Donne’s Poetry, p. 36. Peter De Sa Wiggins suggests that the lines may imply that Donne is aware of the hierarchy of painting outlined in Alberti’s De Pittura (1441). Peter De Sa Wiggins, “Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo’s Trattato dell’Arte Della Pittura, Scultura et Architettura and John Donne’s Poetics : ‘The Flea’ and ‘Aire and Angels’ as Portrait Miniatures in the Style of Nicholas Hilliard”, Studies in Iconography 7–8 (1981–1982): 269–288 (p. 270). Cited by Semler, English Mannerist Poets, p. 56. All of this reinforces the impression that Donne was aware of contemporary practice and theory in visual art, but most interestingly these lines show him comparing his own “lines” to the “hand or eye” drawn by Hilliard.
Donne’s Hilliard comparison, in fact, is in harmony with the Renaissance celebration of Horace’s simile
ut pictura poesis from his
Ars Poetica, but more on the side of theory than of practice.
16 On the doctrine of ut pictura poesis, see Rensselaer W. Lee, Ut Pictura Poesis: The Humanistic Theory of Painting (New York: Norton, 1967). Rather than writing poems that enact the principle of poetry resembling painting, Donne participates rhetorically in the dissemination of the idea, just as Sidney does in his
Apology for Poetry when he describes poetry as “a speaking picture”.
17 Philip Sidney, The Defence of Poesy, in Sidney’s ‘The Defence of Poesy’ and Selected Renaissance Literary Criticism, ed. by Gavin Alexander (London: Penguin, 2004), p. 16. As with his reference to the “serpentine line (as the Artists call it)”, Donne deliberately invokes visual art – and particularly, the action of the painter – as a metaphor. He seems less interested in the finished artwork itself than in the process of its production, an idea supported by another painterly metaphor in the love elegy “The Expostulation”, where the speaker compares the process of courting a woman to “Painters that doe take / Delight, not in made worke, but whiles they make.”
18 “Elegy 16: The Expostulation”, ll. 57–58. Stringer et al., eds., Variorum 2 Elegies, p. 370. As Hurley also observes, “in his sermons, his letters, his poetry, Donne refers to painting atypically for his time, that is with attention to the craft of the artist or to the handling of painting’s material properties, in a fashion that sets him apart …. it is not an end in itself”.
19 Hurley, John Donne’s Poetry, p. 163.The serpentine line and the Hilliard hand or eye are two of Donne’s most explicit allusions to visual art, and yet they are far from what Hagstrum would term “pictorial” – the description that is “imaginable as a painting”. While “pictorial” may be the wrong word, Donne’s references here could perhaps be described as “painterly”, because his metaphor relies on a detail that acknowledges the craft and the skill of the painter. Hagstrum himself indeed goes on to observe that Donne himself “very seldom uses images from painting or sculpture… Donne appears less interested in portraits as works of art than in the way they appear to stare at you from wherever you stand.”
20 Hagstrum, Sister Arts, p. 113; citing Milton Alan Rugoff, Donne’s Imagery (New York: Russell and Russell, 1962), p. 109. This recurrent image from the
Sermons of a “a well-made, and well-plac’d picture, [which] looks alwayes upon him that looks upon it”
21 Sermons, 2: 237; Cf. Sermons 4: 130; 5: 299; 9: 368. will be discussed in detail in Chapter 2; it does indeed seem to have “caught Donne’s fancy”
22 Rugoff, Donne’s Imagery, p. 109. although it does not originate with him. Hagstrum’s observation pinpoints the fact that when Donne refers explicitly to visual art, he does so by referring to how the work of art is made, and/or how it functions when it is seen; he tends not to describe its subject matter. While there are very few actual descriptions of paintings in Donne’s poetry or sermons, references to the frames and functions of visual art are more common.