Sidney and Visual Culture

Abstract

Sidney’s interest in visual representation—a central episteme throughout his writings—is attested by Nicholas Hilliard’s anecdote about Sidney’s fascination with visual scale and distortion; by the portraits made of Sidney; and by the handling of mimēsis in his Defence. In his literary works, painting and the visual imagination hold irresistible sway over his fictional personages. Throughout, this chapter contends, the verbal becomes visual for Sidney. Likening poesy to a ‘speaking picture’, Sidney dwells on the ingenuity of representation (going beyond rules, beyond limits of verisimilitude) required in ‘feigning notable images’: poesy paints a compelling image of an otherwise imperceptible idea, and forcefully (with energeia) leaves an impress on what Sidney calls the ‘eyes of the mind’. To assuage Platonic and Protestant anxieties about visual art, Sidney recuperates key painterly terms (‘counterfeiting’, ‘feigning’, ‘eikastikē’). And to compensate for the limits of verbal eloquence, Sidney exploits the visual eloquence of mise-en-page.