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The Imperfect Parallel Betwixt Painting and Poetry

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2009

T. J. B. Spencer
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Extract

In 1695, in the last decade of his literary activity, Dryden borrowed (as he tells us) two months from his Virgil, and published a prose translation of the Latin poem De Arte Graphicâ by the Frenchman, Charles Dufresnoy; and to it he prefixed his well-known essay, ‘A Parallel betwixt Painting and Poetry’. Among Dryden's critical writings, this may justly be regarded as the worst. Here Swift's jibe about the Prefaces seems to be justified—how they were

meerly writ at first for filling,

To raise the Volume's Price, a Shilling.

Type
Research Article
Information
Greece & Rome , Volume 7 , Issue 2 , October 1960 , pp. 173 - 186
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1960

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References

page 174 note 1 Pliny, , H. N. xxxv. 36Google Scholar; and others.

page 175 note 1 Preface to Laokoon.

page 175 note 2 De gloria Athen. 3 (346 f); De aud. poet. 17 f – 18; Quaest. conviv. ix. 15.Google Scholar

page 176 note 1 Jonson, Ben, Works (ed. Herford and Simpson), viii. 609–11Google Scholar; Philostr. Imagines, I, preface.

page 178 note 1 de Chantelou, P. F., Journal du voyage du Cavalier Bernin en France (Paris, 1930), 156.Google Scholar

page 179 note 1 ‘Sed quoniam esempla illa veterum Pictorum phantasia tantum & procujusque captu magis aut minus assequi possumus, vellem equidem eadem diligentia similem quandoque tractatum excudi posse de Picturis Italorum, quorum exemplaria sive prototypa adhuc hodie publice prostant, & digito possunt monstrari & dicier “haec sunt”. Nam illa quae sub sensum cadunt, acrius imprimuntur & haerent, & exactius examen requirunt, atque materiam uberiorem proficiendi studiosis praebent, quam illa quae sola imaginatione tamquam somnia se nobis offerunt, & verbis tantum adumbrala ter frustra comprensa (ut Orpheum Euridices imago) eludunt saepe, & sua quemque spe frustrantur' (prefixed to editions of De Pictura Veterum).

page 179 note 2 Dryden gives the impression that he is here translating from Bellori; but this sentence is one of his interpolations (Le Vite de' Pittori [Rome, 1672], 12).

page 180 note 1 Imagines, i. 6Google Scholar (translated by A. Fairbanks [Loeb Classical Library, 1931], pp. 21–29).

page 182 note 1 Herodotus and Aëtion in The Works of Lucian of Samosata, translated by , H. W. and Fowler, F. G. (Oxford, 1905), ii. 92.Google Scholar

page 186 note 1 Second Characters, ed. Rand, B. (Cambridge, 1914), 141.Google Scholar