Narrative Challenges to Visual, Gendered Boundaries: Mary Shelley and Henry Fuseli

Abstract

The relationship between poetry and painting can be traced as far back as Plato (601a-605b). Simonides' later claim that poetry is a speaking picture and painting a mute poem remained undisputed for centuries and so did Horace's ut pictura poesis. Other classical authors such as Longinus, Quintilian, and Lucian made various remarks on the relation of the arts, but it was not until 1766 that Gotthold Lessing established the limitations of poetry and painting in his seminal Laocoon. Where actions are the true subjects of poetry, Lessing declared, bodies which exist in space with their visible properties are the true subjects of painting (77). Although Lessing's Laocoon has been the subject of controversy since its publication, few critics have disputed his distinction between temporal and spatial arts (Mitchell 96). In the nineteenth century, Romantic poets, rather than maintain the distinction between art and literature, quite often cultivated their intersection. Percy Shelley, for instance, dedicated a poem to a painting of Medusa he saw in the Uffizi gallery: On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vince in the Florentine Gallery. Sir George Beaumont's Peele Castle served as the inspiration for William Wordsworth's Elegiac Stanzas. Later in the century, Victorian poet-painters, such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William Mor-