Chapter 1
Shadows
Others at the Porches and entries of their Buildings sett their Armes, I, my Picture; if any Colours can deliver a Minde soe plaine, and flatt, and through light as mine. (John Donne, Epistle,
Metempsychosis)
1 Stringer et al., eds., Variorum 3: Satyres, p. 249. The opening of Donne’s Epistle prefacing his
Metempsychosis, in the epigraph above, both declares an interest in portraits and expresses some doubts about what they can “deliver”. The “picture” he is accustomed to set at the entrance to his “buildings”, seems to refer to the convention of the portrait frontispiece of a printed book.
2 On the portrait frontispiece, see Steven Rendall, “The Portrait of the Author”, French Forum 13.2 (1998): 143–151. The Epistle was placed first in the 1633 edition of his
Poems, even though that edition had no frontispiece, and in 1635 it faces the Marshall engraving of the poet – oddly, in this case, separated from the rest of
Metempsychosis and functioning as a preface to the whole collection. Just as a heraldic coat of arms provides an emblematic key to identity so the function of a frontispiece “picture” is to “deliver a Minde”, and Donne may be referring here to Cicero’s “
imago animi vultus est” (the face is the image of the mind).
3 Cicero, De Oratore, trans, and ed. by E. W. Sutton and H. Rackham, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1948) III, lix, p. 221. Cited in Rendall, p. 144. But there is some doubt about whether the “Colours” will be able to “deliver” a likeness of their subject’s inner self, although Donne inverts expectations by saying that his
mind is too plain and flat to be captured on the painter’s cloth. This doubt about the ability of portraits to deliver a representation is explored in Donne’s poems dealing with different kind of portraits, and also forms an intriguing subtext to the actual portraits of Donne that we know of.
There are five known portraits of John Donne at different stages of his life, a surprisingly large number for a non-aristocratic subject, rare for a poet of his time.
4 A full iconography is provided by Geoffrey Keynes, A Bibliography of Dr John Donne, Dean of St Paul’s. Fourth edition (Oxford: Clarendon, 1973), pp. 372–376. This in itself provides material evidence of Donne’s interest in painting. One of the earlier likenesses, the “Lothian portrait” now in the National Portrait Gallery in London (fig. 1), is apparently the earliest existing oil portrait of an Elizabethan poet.
5 Tarnya Cooper, Citizen Portrait: Portrait Painting and the Urban Elite of Tudor and Jacobean England and Wales (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2012), p. 177. See also David Piper, The Image of the Poet: British Poets and their Portraits (Oxford: Clarendon, 1982), p. 28. These multiple portraits might suggest an egotistical desire to preserve and record his identity, to imprint an image of the self on the world, but studying them closely reveals something quite different. Despite providing such a rich and complete iconography of their subject, and frequently being invoked to support biographical claims, the pictures provoke questions about how they should be understood. Interpreting Donne’s portraits is complicated by the way so many of them are mediated by texts, whether mottos, companion pieces, or intertextual references. While they certainly provide information about him at different periods of his life, we should be cautious about assuming that they “deliver” his mind. They self-consciously stage a fluid and shadowy figure, suggesting, if anything, the unreliability of self-representation.
This concern with the difficulty of pinning down the self and the unreliability of representation is paralleled in his poetry. “Elegy. His Picture” is his only poem to give an extended depiction of a portrait, and, largely because of this, it has often been read as autobiographical. I argue, however, that just as the paintings of Donne resist a fixed meaning, “His Picture” and his other poems referencing paintings themselves call into question the possibility of ever achieving a faithful “likeness”. When a portrait is described as “like me” or “like thee” in the poetry, the comparison is never innocent. In poems such as “The Legacie” and “Sappho to Philaenis”, he employs established conventions of love poetry such as the lover’s gift of a portrait and the image imprinted in the heart, only to take them apart and use them to question the limits of representation. In doing so he calls into question not only the representational function of the artwork but also the possibility of any knowledge of the self. In both the secular poems and the divine poems, his knowledge of the forms and techniques of visual art serves as a source of metaphors for our imperfect knowledge of the human condition.