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Linear Perspective and the Renaissance Lyric

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Kimberly Johnson
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Abstract

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As recent art historical scholarship has demonstrated, the techniques of linear perspective displace narrative (the artwork's content) in favor of the relations between aesthetic objects (the artwork's form). In this regard, perspectival art performs a rhetorical transaction analogous to that of its “sister art,” lyric poetry. The formal features and poetic strategies of lyric parallel the geometric effects of perspectival art: both practices differentiate the aesthetic surface from the transparentizing demands of narrative. Each art form stages the interaction of irreconcilable terms—content and form—and documents the dynamic and incommensurable relation between semantic meaning and meaninglessness. Lyric's dominance in the Renaissance, exemplified here by sonnets of Sidney and Shakespeare, reflects a wider cultural valorization of the experiential and materializing priorities of the aesthetic, an affirmation of objective, apprehensible elements whose significance is unyoked from the obligation to narrative.

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Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 134 , Issue 2 , March 2019 , pp. 280 - 297
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2019

References

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