Pierre de Ronsard Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Roberto E. Campo

Critical Essay by Roberto E. Campo

SOURCE: “Pictorial Concerns in the Ronsardian Exegi Monumentum,” in Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. XXIV, No. 3, Fall, 1993, pp. 671-83.

In the following essay, Campo explores Ronsard's conception of the superiority of poetry over painting, as part of an on-going Renaissance debate concerning this matter.

Critics have paid considerable attention to the Horatian commonplaces, ut pictura poesis and exegi monumentum, in French Renaissance literature over the past forty years. Before the 1980s, however, investigators of the first idea proceeded in very different directions from examiners of the second. As a rule, scholarship on ut pictura poesis focused primarily on the similarities—formal and thematic as well as expressive and functional—between the literary and plastic arts of early modern France. The rationale for this concern was provided by sixteenth- and seventeenth-century French and Italian theorists like Thomas Sebillet, Barthélemy Aneau, Jacques Peletier, Charles du Fresnoy, Lodovico Dolce, and Paolo Lomazzo.¹ These and...
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