No artform is an island. The cliché may urge a weary sigh for seeming gratuitous, but it neatly summarises some of the principal ideas explored in this volume: the arts do not germinate, evolve and exist in isolation but are inherently interconnected. The eighteenth century witnessed a complex set of circumstances in which this core principle found expression, for reasons we will outline here. But, of course, the notion that one artform somehow ‘speaks’ to another has deeper, older roots. Philip Sidney created perhaps the most memorable formula summarising a defining feature of early modern approaches to interartistic discourse in England:

The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries offer multiple manifestations of theories about and expressions of this approach, in poetry, drama, painting, architecture and more. Sidney, too, drew on it, but in order to reformulate long-standing ideas about these conversations across artforms, going back to Simonides, rerouted through Plutarch and Horace. Simonides’s concepts of painting as ‘silent poetry’ and poetry as ‘speaking painting’ (as related by Plutarch), as well as Horace’s even more famous dictum, ut pictura poesis (as is painting so is poetry), have served as a running thread throughout discussions of what have been called the ‘Sister Arts’, encapsulating the shared, if distinctive, languages of communication between artforms.

The classical roots of the flourishing interartistic discourse of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are significant to the period covered in this volume, the so-called ‘long’ eighteenth century, stretching from the latter end of the Restoration to the early nineteenth century.