In recent years, much research has been done on the theme of portraiture in literature and the visual arts, focusing primarily on the relationship between poetry and painting. Literary criticism has paid less attention—indeed, less than the poets themselves—to the intersection of poetry and sculpture. There are a number of potential approaches that could be adopted to explore this theme; the purpose of the current study, however, is to briefly outline the literary ‘representations’ of marble portraits in the late sixteenth century, in order to shed light on the evolution of a theme that was important to Petrarch and to the whole of the Renaissance, but was destined to undergo significant changes. If we limit our perspective to lyrics concerning portraits in stone, we can identify four main trends: (i) at the beginning of the sixteenth century almost all the poems dedicated to a portrait in stone are strongly influenced by Petrarch (Rvf 77–78) and describe a lover who really existed; afterwards, they are almost all madrigals dedicated to an unidentified female portrait, probably entirely fictional; (ii) towards the end of the sixteenth century, we find increasingly bizarre poems whose formal and thematic features bear no relationship to the ekphrastic description of a bust based on the Petrarchan model; (iii) as the sixteenth century progresses, the poetic point of view shifts from being solely that of the poet-observer (as in Petrarch) to that of the talking statue telling its own story; (iv) by the end of the sixteenth century, we find an increasing number of madrigals dedicated to stone portraits of characters from classical mythology, especially Medusa, which depart decidedly from Petrarch's model.