“Your Painted Counterfeit”. The paragone between portraits and sonnets in Shakespeare’s work

Abstract

My work analyzes the way in which Shakespeare elaborates upon the traditional association established between painting and poetry, with particular attention to the ambiguous affinity between the art of drawing portraits and that of verbal praising – specifically in the writing of sonnets. In the Sonnets Shakespeare establishes a link between the visual and the literary falsifying “ornament”, while revealing the limits of a poetry that seeks to borrow visual immediacy from a different artistic medium. In the dramatic works, the comparison between painting and poetry is complicated by its interaction with the theatrical medium. In The Merchant of Venice, the mimetic competition between the two arts expressed in Bassanio’s praise of Portia’s miniature, while linking the Petrarchan sonnet and the miniature, is complicated by the fact that the portrait is visualized only through its ekphrastic description. In Love’s Labour’s Lost Shakespeare conveys the anti-petrarchism of the play with a reference to painting, epitomizing the nexus between sonnets and portraits in the image of the “lady walled about with diamonds”.