Poetry on Portraiture and the Function of the Image

Poetry on portraiture constitutes a major intersection between the visual arts and the written word in the Italian Renaissance. This genre brought together word and image, promoting not only competition but mutual reflection; it also provided an opportunity for cultural and sentimental correspondence in verse within a landscape in which Petrarchism had progressively become a form of self-definition and communication, not just a poetic language. A favourite subject was, of course, the portrait of the poet's beloved, inspired by Petrarch's Rvf 77 and 78, the sonnets dedicated to the portrait of Laura painted by Simone Martini. These sonnets are among the first—and probably most influential—examples in the vernacular tradition of lyric poetry engaging with an external (and material) image; they initiated a genre that came to be widely practised in the Renaissance.

Across the whole genre, however, female voices seem to be, if not entirely absent, certainly very rare. Although literature by female authors was, by and large, favourably received in the sixteenth century, there are very few poems on portraits attributed to women, particularly on the subject of the portrait of the beloved. This raises some interesting questions about the suitability of the genre for the emerging female voices in the Renaissance period.