Abstract
An important factor in the cultural vitality of the Renaissance was the close relationship that existed between the verbal and the visual arts. This affinity was encouraged by the interest in rhetoric which was such an important aspect of the revival of classical civilisation. Both arts, the visual and the verbal, were seen as didactic and persuasive. Their joint aim was to create images which might, in Sidney's words, ‘inhabit both the memory and the judgement’. From Alberti to Franciscus Junius apologists for painting turned instinctively to the rhetorical tradition represented by Cicero and Quintilian to find support for their claims, and it seems reasonable to suggest that the status enjoyed by the sister arts in the Renaissance was substantially due to that recognition of subjectivity which is endemic to that tradition. Cicero's insistence in the De Oratore on the irrational factors which shape moral choice provided a psychological base for the persuasive role of the arts in enticing the will towards...
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