Among the genres of Renaissance art, the portrait is perhaps particular in that its painter was praised for achieving a perfect likeness, even while appreciation of art in general may have been moving towards an understanding of art as more than simply literal representation.
1 Lee, Ut Pictura Poesis:, p. 10. “His Picture” and “Elegie” demonstrate Donne’s interest in the idea of “likeness”: the shadow which will be more “like” the sitter when he is dead; the poetic trope that proves to be only “something like a heart”. As the reading of “Elegie” begins to suggest, poems like these test the limits of both pictorial and verbal representation. The idea of “likeness” is also a literary trope, and as we have seen, Puttenham uses portrait painting to contextualise his discussion of similes: “
Icon, or resemblance by imagerie or pourtrait, alluding to the painters terme”.
2 Puttenham, Art of Poesie, p. 204.The poem that plays most with the idea of
likeness, while not staging a portrait as such, is Donne’s elegy “The Comparison”, often considered one of his more misogynistic poems. It alternates many flattering and extremely unflattering similes to describe a female figure, although its conclusion, that “She, and comparisons are odious”, suggests that the misogyny has been at least partly directed towards an examination of the trope of the simile.
3 “Elegy 2. The Comparison”, Stringer et al., eds. Variorum 2: Elegies, p. 53. On the misogyny of “The Comparison”, see Achsah Guibbory, “‘Oh, Let Mee Not Serve So’: The Politics of Love in Donne’s Elegies” ELH 57.4 (1990): 811–833 (pp. 816–818); Elizabeth Bobo, “‘Chaf’d Muscatts Pores’: The Not-So-Good Mistress in Donne’s ‘The Comparison’”, ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews 25:3 (2012): 168–174. A comparable whiff of misogyny surrounds his exploration of likeness in two further poems, the epigram “Phrine” and the longer heroic epistle “Sappho to Philaenis”. Both develop the investigation of the limits of representation that we have seen in “His Picture” and the actual portraits of Donne, but through the depiction of the female body. The poetic convention of blazoning and praising the female form makes it ripe for parody as well as for exploring the limits of “likeness”. There is nonetheless something slightly uncomfortable about the way these two poems pursue this through mocking or belittling constructions of female figures, with “Phrine” mobilising the negative connotations of the “painted” woman, and “Sappho to Philaenis” evoking the banality of lesbian desire.
In the deceptively simple epigram, “Phrine”, Donne plays with the ambivalent connotations of the word “painted”:
Thy flattering picture Phrine, is like thee,
Only in this that yow both painted be.
4 The text of “Phrine” is taken from Gary A. Stringer et al., eds., Variorum 8: Epigrams, p. 11.This is another example of a staging of a material portrait, this time condensed into two lines. Here, as in “His Picture”, Donne shows himself to be fascinated by idea of producing a “likeness”, and the compressed space of the epigram brings the words “picture”, “like”, and “painted” together in an economical interrogation of the possibility of mimetic representation. The basic pun on “painted” here compares the portrait to the painted face of the prostitute, and invokes the general suspicion of face-painting and cosmetics used to “alter or enhance the external body [and] destroy[ing] divine workmanship”.
5 See Farah Karim-Cooper, Cosmetics in Shakespearean and Renaissance Drama (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), p. 40. The epigram is, however, as Norman Farmer observes, “much more than just a cut at prostitutes”.
6 Farmer, Poets and the Visual Arts, p. 24.The poetic convention of the “flattering picture” is generally used either to flatter the sitter – as Claire Pace puts it, “no painted image can approach the perfection of the living model”
7 Pace, “Delineated Lives”, p. 5. – or to praise the painter for the hyper-realism of his imitation of nature, as in Cowley’s “On the Death of Sir Anthony Vandike”: “His pieces so with their live
Objects strive / That both or
Pictures seem, or both
Alive”.8 Abraham Cowley, “On the Death of Sir Anthony Vandike, the Famous Painter”, Poems (London: Humphrey Moseley, 1656), p. 9. quoted in Pace, p. 5. Donne’s “flattering picture” flatters neither sitter nor artist. By insisting that the only likeness between model and artwork lies in their both being painted, he insists on the artificiality of the picture rather than the realism for which portraits were so often praised. In “Phrine”, verisimilitude turns out to be not only illusionary but impossible.
There is another level, however, to Donne’s concise investigation of verisimilitude in this epigram. Phrine is not a random name given to a prostitute but was the name of the Athenian courtesan (
hetaira) used by Apelles in the fourth century
bce as the model for his painting of Aphrodite rising from the waves, and was also the model for Praxiteles’ statues of Aphrodite at Delphi (made of gold) and at Cnidos.
9 See Helen Morales, “Fantasising Phryne: The Psychology and Ethics of Ekphrasis”, The Cambridge Classical Journal 57 (2011): 71–104. Phrine is thus known, in the early modern as in the classical period, for being painted in both senses of the word, but not only that – she is famous for providing a model for a representation of Aphrodite. Classical tradition held that Praxiteles’ statue of Aphrodite at Cnidos, in particular, was so “lifelike” that the goddess herself was convinced that Praxiteles must have seen her naked. A tradition of hyperbolic ekphrastic epigrams giving voice to the goddess herself developed this idea.
10 See Morales, “Fantasising Phrine”, pp. 81–85; e.g. “Paphian Cytherea came through the waves to Cnidus, wishing to see her own image, and having viewed it from all sides in its open shrine, she cried, ‘Where did Praxiteles see me naked?” (Plato, Planudean Anthology, p. 160, quoted in Morales 2011, p. 81). While Donne’s epigram as a whole establishes likeness between painting and model based on their similarly painted and deceptive surfaces, the opening of the second line which claims that this is the “onely” likeness between them calls into question the whole issue of verisimilitude and the relationship of art to nature, much debated in the Renaissance as in the classical period. As Rensselaer Lee discusses, two different beliefs concerning the relationship of art to nature co-existed in the sixteenth century: the older notion that art should be “an exact imitation of nature”, and the more Aristotelian concept that art should represent an ideal nature that improves on actual nature.
11 Lee, Ut Pictura Poesis, p. 9. Lee points out that these two incompatible concepts are both represented in Lodovico Dolce’s dialogue
Aretino (1557). Moreover, as an example of how the artist may first imitate, and then improve on nature, Dolce specifically takes the example of Apelles’ use of Phryne as a model for his painting of Aphrodite, recommending that the artist “choose the most perfect form he can, and partly imitate nature”.
12 Ludovico Dolce, Aretin: A Dialogue on Painting. From the Italian of Ludovico Dolce (London: P. Elmsley, 1770), pp. 127–130. There is no evidence that Donne would have had access to Dolce’s treatise, though Liam Semler identifies several of his statements on the visual arts that have parallels in Dolce’s
Aretino or
Dialogue on Painting.
13 Semler, English Mannerist Poets, p. 59; p. 73. Yet it is striking that Dolce tells the Phryne story precisely in the context of the debate on imitating or surpassing nature, which is what Donne manages to condense in his epigram. This complicates his mocking critique of the trope of verisimilitude. The work of art for which Phryne modelled was praised to the skies for its verisimilitude – but a resemblance to its subject Aphrodite rather than to its model. It is a “flattering picture” in that it surpasses the near perfection of the model, Phryne, to represent the perfect beauty of the subject, Aphrodite. To what extent, then, can the picture be said to be “like” Phrine?
Philip McCaffrey, describing the epigram as “a typical Donnean inversion”, holds that “the [painted] medium is found adequate only in its ability to portray (reflect) artifice”. He continues, “By implicit contrast, the medium of poetry claims the authenticity necessary to satirise the artifice of both portrait and subject”.
14 McCaffrey, “Painting the Shadow”, p. 188. This implicit comparison between picture and poetry underlies all of the poems considered so far in this chapter, but it is far from clear that Donne grants poetry any greater claim to authenticity than he does visual art. Indeed, as Donne repeatedly chips away at the layers of the paintings he stages, revealing the mechanisms and devices whereby the surface illusion is created, it seems increasingly clear that this expresses an anxiety about artifice not only in visual art but in all artistic representation.
This is best illustrated in his “Sappho to Philaenis”, which also makes use of the trope of the image in the heart. Donne’s version of Sappho’s address to her lover Philaenis is modelled on Ovid’s
Heroides. While Ovid’s letter in Sappho’s voice is addressed to a male lover, Donne’s Sappho addresses a woman, making it a rare early modern example of a lesbian relationship in poetry, albeit written by a heterosexual man.
15 See James Holstun, “‘Will you Rent our Ancient Love Asunder?’: Lesbian Elegy in Donne, Marvell, and Milton”, ELH 54:4 (1987): 835–867. It is not exactly a celebration of lesbian love, however, as the same-sex address in the poem seems to be primarily to be a device with which to explore the limits of
likeness.
Compared to the picture in the heart in “Witchcraft by a Picture”, which is “from all mallice free”, or the one in “His Picture” which “dwells” with his soul, the picture in “Sappho to Philaenis” is far less securely fixed, far less certain of immortality:
Only thine image, in my heart, doth sit,
But that is waxe, and fires environ it.
My fires have driven, thine have drawne it hence;
And I am robbed of
Picture,
Heart,
and
Sense. (ll. 9–12)
16 Quotations from “Sappho to Philaenis” are from Stringer et al., eds., Variorum 8: Elegies, pp. 409–410.Made of wax, and encroached upon by the fires of passion, this is another “picture made and marred”, simultaneously created in the heart and threatened with destruction. The pun on the word “drawne” in line 11 suggests the designing of the image, the magnetic force of physical attraction and the fanning of the destructive flames, all at the same time. It is clear from the opening lines of the poem, however, that the tension between creation and destruction is being evoked primarily in the context of poetry: it is Sappho’s “poetique fire” (5) that is under threat:
Where is that holy fire which verse is said
To haue, is that enchantinge forces decayd?
Verse, that drawes Natures woorkes from natures law
Thee her best work, to her work cannot draw. (ll. 1–4)
This association of fire and creation opens the poem, and it is clear that the question of artistic creation and imitation of nature is being addressed specifically in the context of verbal art. The pun on “draws” is already in place here, setting up once more the question of whether art can ever imitate nature and also perhaps implying a comparison between verbal and visual art, as
verse is said to
draw. These very words, though, are employed to illustrate the “decay” of Sappho’s “holy fire”. They are part of a pattern of plodding repetition that emphasises the failure of her verse. While Gardner argues that the “repetitive” and “monotonous” quality of the poem, and its “metrical dullness … matched by the poverty of its vocabulary” suggest that the poem was unlikely to have been written by Donne,
17 Gardner, ed., Elegies, p. xlvi. more recent critics have read this flatness of style as deliberate, a dramatised poetic failure. As James Holstun puts it, the “poem’s lyric shortcomings are its dramatic successes”. For Holstun, in these opening lines, “Sappho’s reiterated words are so close in meaning to their originals that they fall flat”.
18 Holstun, “Lesbian Elegy”, p. 837; p. 838. The words that are repeated in these lines, “verse”, “nature”, “work” and “draw”, concentrate our attention on the failure of art to imitate nature.
Donne is once again exploring the issue of representation and the very possibility of creating a “likeness”. Appropriating the voice of Sappho, he takes apart one of her most famous similes, the opening of fragment 31 that was later adapted by Catullus: “he seems to me to be equal to the gods”.
19 On Donne’s knowledge of and reference to Sappho see Don Cameron Allen, “Donne’s ‘Sapho to Philaenis,’” English Language Notes 1 (1964): 188–191. In the hands of Donne’s Sappho this comparison is drawn out to the point of redundancy and ridicule:
Thou art soe faire
As Gods, when gods to thee I doe compaire,
Are grast thereby; and to make blynde men see
What thinges Gods are, I say they are like to thee… (ll. 15–18)
Not only does the heavy-handed repetition again emphasise poetic failure, but the simile itself fails in its self-reflexivity: Philaenis may be compared to gods because gods can be compared to Philaenis. A similar tautology governs Donne’s Sappho’s next attempt to represent her lover, which is through a poetic blazon. Sappho might almost have Puttenham’s
Art of Poesie open at the page dealing with “Icon”, as these two attempts at comparison in the poem cover the two kinds of “Icon, … or resemblance by imagerie or portrait” that Puttenham outlines. If the comparison to the gods corresponds to the instruction to “liken a humane person to another in countenance … or other qualitie”, Donne’s Sappho then proceeds “to resemble every part of her body
to some naturall thing of excellent perfection in his kind, as of her forehead, browes, and haire”.
20 Puttenham, Art of Poesie, p. 204. But this attempt too produces only tautology. In a swift rejection of the Petrarchan blazon, the natural comparison fails, as Philaenis can only be compared to herself:
Thou art not softe, and cleere, and strait, and faire
As Downe as Starrs Cedars and lillies are
But thy right hand, and cheeke, and eye onlye
Are like thy other hand, and cheeke and Eie. (ll. 21–24).
Everything else in nature is inadequate to represent by comparison nature’s own “best work”. Sappho’s poetic invention is unable to draw on nature in order to generate the required comparisons.
This has been described as a “crisis of signification … a regression to self-referential collapse and signifying failure”.
21 Barbara Correll, “Symbolic Economies and Zero-Sum Erotics: Donne’s ‘Sapho to Philaenis’”, ELH 62.3 (1995): 487–507 (p. 495; p. 499). It is certainly a breakdown of poetry, and more specifically, it is a breakdown of Icon. The verbal portrait cannot be “drawn” because nature and/or poetic inspiration is inadequate, so it ends up being nothing but a self-perpetuating reflection, perfectly symmetrical but poetically empty. Twenty lines later, the self-referential blazon is re-doubled, as Sappho compares her own features to those of her lover Philaenis, concluding:
My two lips, Eyes, thighes differ from thy two
But soe as thine from one another doe
And oh noe more; The likenes being such
Why should they not alike in all parts touch?
Hand to strange hand, lip, to lip none dennies
Why should they brest to brest or thighs to things?
Likeness begets such strange selfe flatterie,
That touching my selfe all seems done to thee. (ll. 44–52)
Here the tautological blazon of lines 21–24 is transferred onto the spectacle of Sappho’s body mirrored in the body of Philaenis, their physical “likenes” represented verbally in the doubled blazon of body parts: “hand to strange hand, lip to lip … brest to brest … thighs to thighs”. Almost immediately, though this doubling turns out to be an actual mirror: “myne owne hands I kiss … Mee in my glasse I call thee” (53–55). This slippage from lesbian love to “masturbatory consolation”, as Barbara Correll puts it, does seem dismissive of same-sex love, as “lesbian erotics are represented as simple self-pleasuring, not as a union of two distinct lovers”.
22 Correll, “Symbolic Economies”, p. 499. More than this, however, the “likeness” of this imagined lesbian encounter meditates on the impossibility of artistic imitation. Sappho’s self-love seems almost to be generated by the failure of the simile, the icon, the verbal portrait.
“Sappho and Philaenis” is a poem about what would happen if the iconic system broke down. If a portrait (or a poem) could represent nature exactly, this is what it would be like: repetitive, doubling, banal, “narcissistically sterile”.
23 Elizabeth D. Harvey, “Ventriloquizing Sappho: Ovid, Donne, and the Erotics of the Feminine Voice”, Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts 31:2 (1989): 115–38 (p. 131). In the real Sappho fragment 31 the speaker is also made speechless by the presence of the beloved, but this is a temporary speechlessness due to the fires of passion. Ovid, and following him, Donne, develops this into a trope of poetic failure. The threatened wax image in the heart, however, seems to be Donne’s own, an almost incidental reference to visual art in this illustration of failed verbal representation. But that picture in the heart makes this elegy part of the network of poems discussed above, with which it shares an undermining of Petrarchan conventions and a questioning of the relationship of art to nature. The fragile waxen image in the heart is the illustration of the failed verbal portrait, encapsulating both the hope of capturing the lover’s “likeness” and its impossibility.
In his
Life, Walton quotes Henry Wotton’s comment on Donne’s funeral effigy: “it seems to breathe faintly, and posterity shall look upon it as a kind of artificial miracle”.
24 Walton, Lives, p. 77. It seems an appropriately ambiguous counterpart to this final likeness of John Donne, highlighting both the artifice and the impossible aspiration of the image. It is a strange paradox that the portraits are so often considered to deliver some kind of biographical truth about Donne, and that “His Picture” is repeatedly claimed to be one of the most autobiographical of his poems. In fact, we see quite the contrary. All of the portraits and poems considered in this chapter demonstrate Donne’s fascination, throughout his life, with the processes of visual and verbal representation, and the artifice involved in producing a true likeness. The Donne of the 1590s, who staged himself visually in the Marshall engraving with its curious motto, shows himself to be deeply interested in conventions of self-representation in both painting and poetry. But beyond this it is hard to draw on the engraving for very much information about Donne himself, as it plays with the very idea of faithful representation. The portraits present us with an artificial self, and thwart any attempt to read beyond their staged surfaces. The elegy’s verbal representation of a visual representation proves doubly unreliable. In “His Picture”, in “Phrine”, in “Sappho to Philaenis”, the word “like” sparks a profound questioning of what artistic reproduction implies, not only in the abstract terms of Classical or Renaissance discussions of mimesis, but also through a reflection on the technical processes that lie behind a “likeness”, whether these involve canvas, primer and pigments or paper, words and tropes.
The chapters that follow consider what happens when Donne pursues these considerations in the context of religious art. The fundamental issues at stake remain the same, and his fascination with the painter’s craft and the limits of representation are just as evident in his sermons and divine poems. When Donne calls mimetic representation into question in his love poems and undoes the possibility of knowing the subject through the picture, he is tapping into the essential paradox of the Christian image highlighted by Joseph Koerner. As Koerner puts it, every Christian image can be seen as essentially iconoclastic, “meant to train our eyes to see beyond the image, to cross it out without having to … actually [destroy] it”.
25 Koerner, Reformation of the Image, p. 12. Margaret Aston comments, “On this view, all art inherently clashes with reality; a portrait as much as an icon is to be ‘crossed out’ of the viewer’s receiving mind because (like any crucifix) it seemingly makes present a person we cannot see, an unseen presence.”
26 Aston, Broken Idols, p. 3. Donne’s playful and paradoxical treatment of likeness and representation in his secular poetry engages with this inherent tension in the image and sets the scene for his exploration of the representation of the divine and the “picture” as a vehicle for understanding the incomprehensible relationship between the individual and God.