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A Picture is Not a Poem: The Case of Botticelli's Primavera

2016; Boston University; Volume: 24; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/arn.2016.0010

2327-6436

Paul Barolsky,

Renaissance and Early Modern Studies

A Picture is Not a Poem: The Case of Botticelli’s Primavera PAUL BAROLSKY Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought as doth eternity. —John Keats Art historians conventionally speak of paintings as “narratives,” sometimes as “continuous narratives.” Using the word “narrative” to describe both image and text, however, one can too easily dilute the meaning of the word and obscure fundamental differences, since reading a text and grasping a wordless image are such diverse activities. Ovid writes in his calendar poem Fasti that the wind god Zephyr, having “caught sight” of Chloris, “pursued” the nymph, who then “fled” only to be raped before she was transformed into Flora. When Botticelli pictures Zephyr pursuing Chloris, who is being transformed into Flora in the Primavera , his image is necessarily very dissimilar from the verbal account in Ovid’s Fasti that is presumed to have influenced him (Fig.1). One might say that whereas the poet presents us with a story that we must imagine in our mind’s eye, the painter uses his imagination in order to present us with a visually explicit image based on that story or narrative. Botticelli renders an image that prompts the viewer of his picture to remember the story, told however briefly by Ovid, and thus helps him to identify what the beholder sees in the three figures. To say that a picture such as Botticelli’s “narrates” or tells a story is a figure of speech that too easily obscures the difference between what one is given to see in a pictorial imarion 24.3 winter 2017 a picture is not a poem 20 Fig. 1. Botticelli, Primavera. Scala / Art Resource, N.Y. age and what one is given to imagine as one reads. And as I have observed, the use of the word, “narrates,” to describe text and image can too easily cloud our understanding of the differences between reading and looking. Despite the distinction between words and images, much interpretation of pictorial art depends on fundamental comparisons between images and words. According to a very wellknown classical adage, “ut pictura poesis,” “as in painting, so in poetry,” a saying that also suggests the more familiar phrase, “as in poetry, so in painting.” In classical antiquity, painting was said to be mute poetry, poetry was called a speaking picture . The association of text and image in the Renaissance stands behind the understanding of some paintings as poesie. Painting and poetry are in Plato’s terms both forms of poesis , things that are “made,” but they are different kinds of poesis. Given similarities between the two, we must never lose sight of the differences. Even when art historians establish persuasive, instructive and compelling connections between text and image, they must be careful not to overlook differences that are by no means insignificant or trivial. It is my contention that, incredible as it might seem, what we see in the Primavera, remains radically under-interpreted. Art historians have simply not paid sufficient attention to the formal aspects of the picture that make it the enthralling work that it is. In a distinguished tradition that extends from Warburg to Gombrich, Wind, and beyond, art historians dwell on the texts that might have influenced Botticelli at the expense of the painter’s pictorial imagination. There are so many texts to which the Primavera is conceivably , indeed plausibly, related that it is difficult to determine which are most pertinent to Botticelli’s picture and to what degree. Commentators have written in suggestive ways, for example, about the links of the Primavera to poetry: Horace, Virgil, Lucretius, Catullus, and Ovid, among ancient poets, Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Lorenzo de’ Medici, and Poliziano among the moderns. But even if there is no consensus as to which texts matter and which matter Paul Barolsky 21 most, there is general agreement and, reasonably so, that Botticelli’s picture has deep roots in ancient Latin poetry, especially that of Ovid, and in modern vernacular poetry, above all, that of Angelo Poliziano, the scholar and poet whose Stanze is plausibly thought to have played a particularly important role in determining aspects of the imagery in the Primavera. In short, we have a rich...