| "Right
now, when art historians are looking anew at the tradition of their
discipline, nothing could be more timely than this far reaching study
of the literary structures of Renaissance art writing. With great
sensitivity to detail, Norman Land writes with beautiful clarity about
a subject he obviously loves. The synthesis presented in the volume,
rich in its implications for the analysis of art writing in other
periods, will be of great interest to historians, critics, and other
lovers of Renaissance art."—David Carrier, Carnegie Mellon University
In The Viewer as Poet, Norman Land provides the first comprehensive
survey of ekphrasis in literature and art criticism from antiquity
through the Renaissance. Land demonstrates, more fully than anyone
has so far, that Renaissance art criticism assimilated the poetic
tradition of ekphrasis while maintaining its function of analyzing
works of art. Broadly speaking, the book shows that purely literary
descriptions of art in poetry and prose contain a response like
that found in art-critical ekphrasis. This is true in both antiquity
and the Renaissance. The response to art in the elder Philostatus' Imagines, for example, is like that found in the descriptions
of Apuleius and Lucian. Later Dante, Boccaccio, and Poliziano, among
others, respond to imaginary works of art in their poetry in much
the same way that Lorenzo Ghiberti, Aretino, and Vasari respond
to real works in their writings.
Land offers for the first time a synthetic description of the Renaissance
response to, or experience of, art as embodied in literature, including
art criticism. This book will form the basis for a deeper understanding
of Renaissance art than we have now, for it provides not only a
tool for viewing works of art as they were originally seen and experienced—that
is, from a historical perspective—but also an outline of the
tradition out of which modern writings about art grew. |
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