‘Visibile parlare’: The spoken word in fourteenth-century central Italian painting

Abstract

In the article ‘Poesia e arte figurativa nel Trecento’, published in 1938, the philologist and art-historian Julius von Schlosser initiated a discussion of the interaction of painting and poetry in Italy from the time of Giotto to the end of the fourteenth century.1 The subject is interesting on general and specific levels. On a general level, the idea that there was a common source of inspiration or, 'creative fantasy', as von Schlosser calls it, for both arts has its roots in the critical terminology of antiquity and was given its most familiar expression in the phrase, 'ut pictura poesis', used by Horace in the Ars poetic a.2 On a specific level, the subject is of interest for the relationships that have been assumed between painters and poets in the fourteenth century; Giotto's putative friendship with Dante and Simone Martini's probable one with Petrarch being the most well known.3 Similarly, the evidence we have for poets practising painting and painters writing poems underlines the connection between the two forms of expression. Here we have Dante who, in the Vita Nuova, describes how, on the anniversary of her death, thinking of Beatrice in Heaven, he was drawing an angel on a small panel, and we have Giotto to whom a poem on the iniquities of poverty has been ascribed.4 It has also been recently argued that Boccaccio added his own drawings to an early manuscript of the Decameron.5 According to Vasari and other sixteenth-century writers, Andrea Orcagna wrote poems and composed verses actually used in his paintings, and, also according to Vasari, Buonamico Buffalmacco appended a sonnet by way of explanation to his painting of the Creation in the Camposanto at Pisa.6 These last two examples introduce an even more detailed aspect of the relationship of painting and poetry — the way words were actually used in pictures — and it is this aspect of the relationship that I should like to discuss in this article.