Linear Perspective and the Renaissance Lyric

• DOI: 10.1632/pmla.2019.134.2.280
• Publication Date: 2019-05-13T18:13:52Z
• Authors: Kimberly Johnson
• Keywords: 0602 languages and literature; 06 humanities and the arts

As recent art historical scholarship has demonstrated, the techniques of linear perspective displace narrative (the artwork's content) in favor relations between aesthetic objects form). In this regard, perspectival performs a rhetorical transaction analogous to that its “sister art,” lyric poetry. The formal features and poetic strategies parallel geometric effects art: both practices differentiate surface from transparentizing demands narrative. Each form stages interaction irreconcilable terms— content —and documents dynamic incommensurable relation semantic meaning meaninglessness. Lyric's dominance Renaissance, exemplified here by sonnets Sidney Shakespeare, reflects wider cultural valorization experiential materializing priorities aesthetic, an affirmation objective, apprehensible elements whose significance is unyoked obligation