Introduction
Throughout history the art of painting and the art of poetry have been developing next to one other in a close relationship. It can be argued that a painter and a poet have much in common in terms of creating art. Both are creating images representing ideas, emotions or personal expression of thoughts and opinions. They use similar devices. A painter uses a brush to convey their message on canvas in the form of a visual image, as well as a poet uses a pen or voice to form words which will produce a literary text.
The interaction between poetry and the visual art has a long history. In almost every culture poetry has reacted to the visual arts, and the visual arts have a long history. There are many ways that poetry can interact with the visual arts. The aim of this dissertation is to examine the work of three artists with reference to eighteenth century concerns surrounding art.
The study shows how much each of these two forms of artistic expression translates into the other medium, how they share each other’s features and how each of those forms can imitate the other. The dissertation does not assume that visual and verbal expressions are identical. Rather, they are comparable in structural, semantic and semiotic function.
Tennyson, Browning or Rosetti work of art represent a relevant example of the theory of ut pictura poesis and the theme of the interconnection between the visual arts and poetry in general. Creating an image and produce the written counterpart of it consequently or producing a picture based on a previously composed poem is concrete application of ut pictura poesis.
The main goal of my thesis is to provide an overview work demonstrating the relationship between the textual and visual arts based on the example of the Pre-Raphaelites and supported by the theory of ut pictura poesis. I want to point out the interconnection of literature (poetry) and visual arts analysing the chosen examples and observe to what extent the Pre-Raphaelites succeeded in following the ut pictura poesis concept. There are three different points of view that are examined. Firstly the double role of an artist as in the case of Dante Gabriel Rossetti; then the influence of poetry on painting and as the last the influence of painting on poetry.
Chapter 1
ART AND POETRY
1.1 The Victorian poetry debate
The word ‘Victorian’, is a term which often “loses any claim to specificity” (Bristow 2). When looking for a definition of the word ‘Victorian’, one cannot but acknowledge that it is inextricably linked to the reign of Queen Victoria. The Online Cambridge Dictionary, for instance, merely defines the term as “belonging to, made in, or living in the time when Queen Victoria was queen of the UK (1837–1901)”. The term ‘Victorian’ is becoming merely a marker for a historical period, without any socio-cultural connotations.
In: Victorian Poetry, Poetics and Politics (1993), Isobel Armstrong claims how wrong it is to conceive of Victorian poetry as merely characterized by belonging to a certain period in history (1). According to her, Victorian poetry was born as a bridge between transitions from Romanticism to modernism (1). Indeed, when looking at history from a different perspective, one could also argue that the early Victorians were late Romantics; Joseph Bristow even classifies certain authors from the Victorian era as “Romantic Victorians” (2) In other words, the transition from Romanticism to ‘Victorianism’ did not happen overnight. However, for the Victorians themselves, the romantic period ended in an abrupt manner. With Keats, Shelley, Byron, Blake and Coleridge dying respectively in 1821, 1822, 1824, 1827 and 1834, Victoria’s crowning in 1837 was considered a turning point (Bristow 4). “Victorian poetry”, as Bristow argues, “began in a vacuum”:
After the successive deaths of the major Romantics (bar Wordsworth, who lived until 1850), the decade that opened the Victorian era boldly declared the loss of the recently pre-eminent art […]. During the 1830’s […] periodical reviewers bemoan the supposedly moribund state of English poetry, looking out all the time for new talents to express the nascent Victorian ‘spirit of the age’. (Bristow 4)
Victorian poetry can be divided in 2 main phases, an early and a late period. In the early Victorian poetry raised poets as : Alfred Tennyson (a Poet Laureate who adopted the conventional religious and social views and values of his age), Robert Browning with a higher reputation as the writer of dramatic monologue, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Gerard Manley Hopkins, who used poetry to express his dissatisfaction with the state of things. The spirit of pessimism and doubt, the spirit of desire for the lost, past and ideal and the thirst for beauty, love and art are some features of Tennysonian poetry. Tennyson was more concerned with the individual in society while Browning was concerned with the individual as an eccentric, and his verse was more abrupt and difficult to follow.
The Victorians realized that they could not be categorized as Romantics any longer (Bristow 3). In order to identify themselves, they had to abandon the values and ideas which they considered to be ‘Romantic’: the value of emotions, the notion of poetry as recreation and the focus on “the authenticity, autonomy and creativity of the poetic mind” (Bristow 2), the use of subjective, autobiographical material to express a lyrical and personal experience of life; the melancholy and sad tone; the cult of simple and primitive, rural life; the description of a wild, gloomy nature, often connected with night and darkness; the choice of cemeteries and ruins. The Victorians attempt to differentiate themselves from Romantics was not a very successful one because of the strong influences the Romantic poets have had on poets (Greenblatt 996). Romantics’ poets appeared to propagate isolation from the society while the Victorians promote the poet’s integration in community (Starzyk 110). According to Hallam and Mill, theorists of the Victorian age, the alienation was a necessary component of being an artist because the society with her negative influences was a threat to the poet’s vision (Starzyk 110).
The early poetry of both Tennyson and Browning was instilled with the spirit of romanticism but it was romanticism with distinction. Tennyson admitted the affinity with Byron and Keats and Browning with Shelly but their works no longer express an attitude of revolt against conventional modes.
Tennyson’s poems seems to be echoes of Victorian life: “For nearly half a century Tennyson was not only a man and a poet, he was a voice, the voice of a whole people expressing in exquisite melody their doubts and their faith, griefs and their triumphs. As a poet, therefore, who expresses not so much a personal as a national spirit, he is probably the most representative literary man of the Victorian era” (Long ).
Robert Browning is the only poet of that time who can be placed beside Tennyson, and it is only in respect of greatness that the two can be conjoined; for in the great features of his poetry Browning stands apart, not only from Tennyson, but from all contemporary writers.
The late Victorian poetry it is known as Pre-Raphaelite . The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood founded in 1849 was leaded by the painter poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti who tried to revive the natural values and techniques of medieval life, Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais, later followed by William Morris and Algeron Charles Swinburne. The love of nature, sensuous descriptions and attention to detail, subjective psychological states are the main characteristics of their art inspired by Ruskin’s ideas.
The poetry of the Pre-Raphaelite poets was a revolt and reaction against the conventionality of poetry represented by Tennyson which concentrated on the social, religious and political life of the age.
Rossetti concentrated on the visualization of the life of The Middle Ages , to the progress of art and adoration of beauty.
In his works Rossetti celebrates feminity and women in general combining physical passion with spiritual love. As a model for the most of his paintings of drawing he captured Elizabeth Siddall, his muse and wife, whose death meant a tragic turnabout for the depressed Rossetti. He stopped writing poetry and gradually abandoned painting as well. Dante Gabriel Rossetti died of a combination of drug addiction, alcoholism and a mental disease in 1882.
John Ruskin and ut pictura poesis in the ninetheenth century
John Ruskin (1819-1900) was a British painter, writer, scientist, poet, philosopher and art critic and is consider being the most significant supporter of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
The rebirth of the link between the painting and poetry, the so-called sister arts, formed a key component of the Pre-Raphaelite project. Pre-Raphaelite painters and poets used two different ways of integrating their two arts: the complementary approach and the digressive approach. A work of art, either poetry or painting, acted as a complement to the other work or served as the point of departure for a different work. Both approaches were practicably and help us to see the evolution of Pre-Raphaelitism. They came to imitate on art by means of the other or they could create imitative works whose values did not depend on closeness to their sources.
Ut pictura poesis − "as is painting, so is poetry" − has served to pull together the visual and verbal arts. Poetry should follow painting's ability to imitate nature. By 1856 the ut pictura poesis analogy had lost much of his vitality, but John Ruskin revived them in order to formulate his own theory of the coalition of the sister arts. In volume three of Modern Painters, Ruskin identified both painting and poetry as forms of artistic expression: "Painting is properly to be opposed to speaking or writing, but not to poetry. Both painting and speaking are means of expression. Poetry is the employment of either for the noblest purposes" (qtd. in Landow 80). Painting and poetry are linked art because they both imitate reality. According to Ruskin, the connection between visual and text provides a better understanding of the artist’s intention. Ruskin describes art as expression: "Great art is produced by men who feel acutely and nobly; and it is in some sort an expression of this personal feeling"( qtd in Landow 43)
Ruskin's attempt to improve the public's perception of painting is done by analogy with poetry. He makes a favorable comparison between poetry and painting trying to put them on the same level to attract the middle classes, who were unaware of the art of painting (Landow). In Renaissance Italy, in eighteenth century England, and in the England of 1843 painting was the younger sister of poetry, trying to have a position in society.
John Ruskin’s early writings focused on the role of the paintings besides the poem. In his opinion the paintings were to be admired for their beauty while poems were to be analyzed for their didactic content. His theory ignores the effect of painting upon society.
Four principles are manifest in all his work: (1) that the object of art, as of every other human endeavor, is to find and to express the truth; (2) that art, in order to be true, must break away from conventionalities and copy nature; (3) that morality is closely allied with art, and that a careful study of any art reveals the moral strength or weakness of the people that produced it; (4) that the main purpose of art is not to delight a few cultured people but to serve the daily uses of common life. (Long)
In his later writings, Ruskin discredits the view that art is merely a form of innocent recreation, rather than an activity familiarly associated with the major preoccupation of life.
The Victorian visual imagination and an art-historical introduction
Carol T. Christ and John O. Jordan first used the term in 1995 in their book Victorian literature and the Victorian Visual Imagination and Kate Flint re-used it five years later in her book The Victorians and the Visual Imagination. Christ and Jordan explain that aesthetic theorists in nineteenth-century Britain regarded the eye as the “pre-eminent organ of truth” and that poetic theory of the nineteenth century hailed the “inward eye” and the poet's power of “painting a picture to the inward eye”, thus creating a word painting (xxii – xxiii). The painting of pictures in one’s mind’s eye is seen in the poetry of Alfred Lord Tennyson where his extensive descriptions of Nature are used to produce what Henry James called “the illusion of life” (Christ and Jordan xx).
Kate Flint‟s The Victorians and the Visual Imagination also emphasizes the role of sight in Victorian culture. Flint states that “the Victorians were fascinated with the act of seeing, with the question of reliability – or otherwise – of the human eye, and of the problems of interpreting what they saw” (1). For Flint “in each case, the act of seeing was something performed by individuals, each with their own particular subjectivities and ocular physiology” (1).
The relation between the art produced in the nineteenth century and the sociological climate is inextricably linked. Isobel Armstrong describes Victorian modernism as:
Belonging to a condition of crisis which has emerged directly from economic and cultural change. In fact, Victorian poetics begins to conceptualize the idea of culture as a category and includes itself within the definition… [T]o be „new‟ or „modern‟…was to confront and self-consciously to conceptualize as new elements that are still perceived as the constitutive forms of our own conditions (Poetry, Poetics and Politics 8).
This condition of crisis in society defined the new modern era in England. The concept of the “Victorian visual imagination” acts as a broad umbrella term that encompasses Victorian sentimentalism and what Edward Berry Burgum in 1928 called “Victorianism”. Burgum described “Victorianism” as epitomizing the sentimentalism so transparently seen in the art and literature of the period, and regarded this as a result of the industrial revolution. Burgum discusses the consequences of the industrial revolution with regards to the shifting of classes at the time. The nineteenth century, he says:
“brought into social prominence and political control a new class, whose prosperity was recent and came from ownership not of land but of factories…Afterwards, persons chiefly of this class took advantage of the centralization of industry in their towns and became prosperous within a generation through the cheap and rapid production of goods by machine instead of hand labor. Within less than a century their numbers had bloated into bourgeoisie, and they faced the task of reconciling old habits to new circumstances” (Burgum 273-291).
The visual imagination, then, in nineteenth-century British literature and art represented a movement away from industrialization into the sentimental, nostalgic and romanticized.
The prominence of visual detail in Victorian poetry reflects the importance on the accounts of perception. Both objective and subjective accounts of perception in Victorian poetics anchor themselves in the visual. Ruskin’s conviction was that the poet’s responsibility is to provide a true account of the appearances of things.
At mid-century,Tennyson and Browning had evolved a distinct poetics from their Romantic roots: representation of a singular subjectivity in a dramatic context that allows ironic distance and implication; use of visual detail to mediate between subjective and objective ideas of perception; experiments with perspectivism to generate large poetic forms with ambition of social and philosophical statement; and an embrace of elaboration Ruskin’s assertion that accurate, honest visual representation would be sufficient to penetrate nature’s ‘meaning’, in style.
Visual, Painting and Poetry
The shift from visibility to visuality makes it easy to understand the way the British culture redefine itself during the 1800. Lindsay Smith’s Victorian Photography, Painting and Poetry (1995) explicitly consider how such technologies may have shaped the kind of visual perceptions relayed by Victorian poetry. The collection Victorian Literature and the Victorian Visual Imagination (1995), edited by Christ and John O. Jordan, and Kate Flint’s more recent The Victorians and the Visual Imagination (2000) examine a variety of relationships between literary texts and different kinds of spectacle, illustration or visual technology.
Visuality, as defined by Nancy Armstrong, is a way of thinking about a composition – painting, poem – from a detached point of view. Visual data are objectified, symbolic. Poetry extended the reader’s own imagination while the paintings, visual images, are invested with meaning and can have different functions. Images are able to convey messages more successfully than can words.
In a lecture at Indiana State University on 14 April 1995, Armstrong point that the written word was the primary means by which people understand their world. Armstrong’s point is that Victorian society placed its accent on the written text as the primary vehicle to convey meaning around 1850. Armstrong speculates that the discovery of photogravure processes and his reasonably price in the early nineteenth century make possible the shift from a literature-centered culture to an icon-centered one based on visual details for meaning. (City Things 16). The shift to visual became meaning-bearing to the end of the 19th century.