Sonnets on female portraits from Renaissance North Italy

Abstract

Abstract Although sonnets on the subject of contemporary portraits were common in Renaissance Italy, the genre as a whole has been neglected by art historians. Individual examples have been briefly alluded to, or used as an aid to dating, but rarely have the poems been examined for what they reveal about Renaissance attitudes to portraiture.1 Literary historians have been equally dismissive: Colasanti, for example, in his fundamental article on Renaissance poems on works of art, condemns the writers for their lack of sincerity and their unoriginal repetition of similar motifs, such as the artist in contest with Nature;2 and more recently Hagstrom has described the sixteenthcentury sonnets, with their heavy dependence on Petrarchan models, as ‘of interest only on grounds of historical continuity’.3 This study, while not attempting a general defence of the poems' aesthetic merits, will argue that they can amount to more than banal re-shuffiings of stale motifs from an enclosed literary tradition. If looked ...