Der Dichter vor dem Porträt: Dichtung und Malerei um die Sonetti Benedetto Varchis

Benedetto Varchi’s Due Lezzioni not only represent the high point of the debate on the paragone between painting and sculpture, but they also bring up the question of the comparison of painting and poetry. Building his argument on their common foundation in imitation, in the second lecture Varchi advocates the superiority of poetry over painting based on its mimetic capacity. My paper investigates this topic in Varchi’s sonnets, focusing on a rhetorically consistent series of poems addressed to the painter and poet Angolo Bronzino, with whom the poet enjoyed a close friendship, and culminating in a correspondence with the medalist Domenico Poggini. In these poems Varchi renovates the Petrarchan model of Rvf 77–78 by setting up a Neo-platonically based dialectic between dentro as the domain of poetry and fuori as the domain of painting, thereby shifting the comparison from the field of their mimetic capacity to that of their glorifying and immortalizing function.