[In the following essay, Campo explores Ronsard's conception of the superiority of poetry over painting, as part of an on-going Renaissance debate concerning this matter.]

Critics have paid considerable attention to the Horatian commonplaces, ut pictura poesis and exegi monumentum, in French Renaissance literature over the past forty years. Before the 1980s, however, investigators of the first idea proceeded in very different directions from examiners of the second. As a rule, scholarship on ut pictura poesis focused primarily on the similarities—formal and thematic as well as expressive and functional—between the literary and plastic arts of early modern France. The rationale for this concern was provided by sixteenth- and seventeenth-century French and Italian theorists like Thomas Sebillet, Barthélemy Aneau, Jacques Peletier, Charles du Fresnoy, Lodovico Dolce, and Paolo Lomazzo.¹ These and other authors erroneously interpreted the ut pictura poesis passage in Horace's Ars Poetica (361-65), with its brief reflection on the parallel abilities of some poems and some paintings to provide pleasure however often or closely they are experienced, as either an affirmation of or a demand for the greater “sisterhood” of the verbal and visual arts.² The numerous essays of the 1950s-1970s exploring the mannerist and baroque elements common to all the arts of Renaissance France were consequences of such misreadings.³

The same three decades witnessed a substantially different approach to the sixteenth-century French exegi monumentum topos. This motif, adapted from the thirtieth and final ode of Horace's Carminum liber 3, maintained that monuments in verse are superior to monuments in bronze, stone, and paint for their greater ability to resist the ravages of time.⁴ Critics attending to this topic commonly emphasized purely literary issues. One concern was etiology and influence: the ways in which sixteenth-century French monumental poetry appropriated the reflections on poetic immortality promulgated by antique authors like Horace, Pindar, and Propertius.⁵ Another preoccupation involved thematics and stylistics: the status and articulation of the idea of perpetuation embedded in the recently revived theme of the poet as divine emissary.⁶

Thus, for many years seizièmistes gave little or no serious consideration to the possible theoretical links between the exegi monumentum topos and the concept of ut pictura poesis in French Renaissance literature. Two reasons may account for this neglect. First, there is the relative silence on this relation in the theoretical discourse of the period. Never do the artes poeticae of Thomas Sebillet, Joachim du Bellay, or Jacques Peletier, for instance, draw such a connection explicitly.⁷ Then again, perhaps it derives from the ostensible incompatibility of the two ideas. Whereas the classical exegi monumentum presupposes the fundamental inequality of the verbal and plastic arts, traditional interpretations of ut pictura poesis stress the overall parity of words and pictures.⁸

Be that as it may, the exegi monumentum topos is first a comparison between texts and visual images and thereby shares essential conceptual ground with the ut pictura poesis idea. This truth has undoubtedly informed the more current trend in scholarship on these topics. Over the past decade or so critics such as Margaret McGowan and, most recently, Doranne Fenoaltea have set about charting the boundaries of this common terrain.⁹ Heretofore, however, only one feature has been surveyed in any appreciable detail. Attuned to the emphasis on timeworn temples, tombs, and pyramids of the classical exegi monumentum, these critics have focused on the relations between the monumental poetry and the monumental architecture of Renaissance France—especially on the ways in which the sixteenth-century French exegi monumentum topos articulates what Fenoaltea calls the “ut architectura poesis” principle (a subsidiary concern of the ut pictura poesis concept).¹⁰

As fruitful as this new critical direction has proved to be, I would here like to open the examination of a different though equally important matter: the inscription of painting—the stated priority of ut pictura poesis—in the French Renaissance exegi monumentum. For this purpose, the monumental poetry of Pierre de Ronsard provides an ideal starting point. Nowhere is this inscription clearer and more problematic than in the many poems where the leader of the Pléiade school of poets explicitly addresses the relative ability of verses and pictures to guarantee immortality.¹¹

Although inspired by the monumental poems of the Ancients, Ronsard's exegi monumentum pieces go well beyond their Latin and Greek antecedents. Some accomplish this by insisting on the eternalizing equivalence of the poetic and graphic arts—in line, as it were, with the popular (mis)understanding of ut pictura poesis. Other poems, however, engage the more problematic issue of artistic expressivity and, above all, the subject of the superiority of poetry over visual images in the expression of the celestial world, the highest order of truths in Neoplatonic metaphysics. Thus I would propose that, in addition to effecting significant variations in the traditional exegi monumentum, Ronsard takes advantage of this ancient topos to highlight fundamental, contemporary concerns about the expressive disparities between the verbal and pictorial arts. Further, I would suggest that, in so doing, the poet bespeaks his familiarity with—and engagement in—the ongoing paragone debate between poets and painters. This age-old polemic (revived in the Italian art treatises of the fifteenth century) underscored the inequalities of the various artistic media and thereby stood as the antithetical corollary to the parity-centered ut pictura poesis principle.

.....

Evidence of Ronsard's disposition to explore variations in the traditional exegi monumentum first appears in an ode written in 1546,¹² his “Epitaphe de François de Bourbon, Conte d'Anguian” (Odes 2.20).¹³ In the opening four quatrains of this encomium to the celebrated victor of Cérisoles, the poet makes two exceptional assertions. Initially, he insists that poetry and the visual arts enjoy an equal ability to grant immortality:¹⁴

D'Homere grec la tant fameuse plume,
Ou de Timante un tant fameus tableau,
Durant leurs jours avoient une coutume
D'arracher vifs les hommes du tumbeau.
Je vous di ceus qui leur plaisoit encores
Resusciter en depit de leur nuit
Oblivieuse, ores par l'encre, & ores
Par la couleur, eternisant leur bruit.

(The all-famous quill of Homer the Greek, or an all-famous picture of Timanthes, had a custom, in their days, of resting men alive from their tombs. I tell you of those whom it pleased to return to life, despite their oblivious night, sometimes by ink and sometimes by color, eternalizing their fame.)

(1:234, vv. 1-8: emphasis added)

As common as it was for authors since antiquity to match a timeless bard like Homer with a legendary artist like Timanthes (the famous Greek portraitist of the fourth century b.c. praised by Pliny in the Natural History¹⁵) when citing examples of the finest practitioners of poetry and painting, Ronsard breaks fundamental ties with tradition by characterizing the verbal and visual arts as equals in rescuing men from the “nuit Oblivieuse” (oblivious night) of death. At no time do Horace, Pindar, or their followers concede that the painter is a match for the poet in this domain.

The two quatrains that follow are equally extraordinary. However, now the emphasis shifts to the inherent immortality of virtue alone:

Mais telles gens devoient leur second vivre,
L'un au papier, l'autre à la toile, & non
A la vertu, qui sans l'aide du livre,
Ou d'un tableau, consacre son renom.
Ta vertu donc, seule te sert de tumbe,
Sans mandier ne plume, ni oustils,
Car tout cela qui par la mort ne tumbe,
Vit par desus cent vivans inutils.

(But such people owed their second life either to paper, or to canvas, and not to virtue, which, without the aid of the book, or a picture, hallows one's renown. Therefore your virtue alone serves as your tomb, without beseeching quill or tools, for all that does not fall by death lives more than a hundred that are alive but useless.)

(1:235, vv. 9-16: emphasis added)

Once again the poet takes a significant step away from the conventional exegi monumentum. In lines reminiscent of contemporary love lyrics and emblem epigrams,¹⁶ Ronsard raises the possibility that, in certain rare instances, eternal fame may transcend both quill and brush: exceptional individuals like François de Bourbon may rely on virtue alone for a “second vivre” (second life).¹⁷

It has been suggested that the unorthodoxy of the “Epitaphe” deserves little serious consideration. Relating this piece to the many Ronsardian exegi monumentum poems that present a more conventional view of preeminent power of poetry over death, Isidore Silver has dismissed one and the other deviation as “rhetorical flourishes” designed merely “to expedite the overture of an ode or to flatter its recipient.”¹⁸ Conclusions like these fall short, however, because they ignore the broader conceptual consequences of the poet's brazen literary iconoclasm. As real as the structural and encomiastic effects identified by Silver may be, their accomplishment alone would appear hardly able to justify a dissent that calls inevitably into question a mainstay among the age-old claims of poetry to supremacy over the plastic arts. Such trivial purposes would seem inherently inconsistent with such profound results.

One reading clearly obviates this objection. It is suggested by the priority accorded to the discussion about the relative durability of the arts in the linear deployment of the “Epitaphe”—by the sequential positioning of this discussion (vv. 1-16) before the review of François de Bourbon's military feats (vv. 17-36). That is, contrary to theories like Silver's, perhaps this poem is first an announcement of Ronsard's willingness to reappraise the traditional exegi monumentum and only secondarily an encomium to the hero of Cérisoles. Furthermore, given the syntactic primacy of the poetry-painting equation in particular, perhaps it is above all a reevaluation of the links between the exegi monumentum topos and the ut pictura poesis idea. Indeed, in this instance, it may even reflect an attempt to project the first idea through the homologizing lens of the second. This explanation would account not only for the larger implications of the innovations we have detected in the present work, but also for the problems that arise in Ronsard's most untraditional exegi monumentum poems.

A case in point is the ode “A Bouju Angevin” (Odes 4.2). This exegi monumentum piece from the fall of 1549¹⁹ concerns and addresses Jacques Bouju, Ronsard's friend and advocate in the entourage of Henri II's sister, Marguerite de France. As before, the poet flouts convention in his reassessment of the relative perpetuating powers of poems and pictures. Despite the unmistakable echo of Horace's CL 3.30 throughout the second half of the poem (where we learn that Bouju needs no borrowed artistic favors to attain immortality since his own poetic achievements are already more lasting than the Colossus of Rhodes, Mausolos' tomb and the Pyramids of Egypt: 2:88-89, vv. 17-36),²⁰ Ronsard clearly accepts—indeed insists (witness the imperative)—that poetry and painting enjoy equal abilities to satisfy the seeker of everlasting life:

Que celui qui s'estudie
D'estre pour jamais vivant,
La main d'un peintre mandie
Ou l'encre d'un ecrivant!

(Let him who endeavors to live forever beseech the hand of a painter or the ink of a writer!)

(2:88, vv. 13-16)

Heretofore, this declaration has prompted the same reaction as the innovations in the “Epitaphe”: critics have dismissed it as a convenient and fundamentally meaningless rhetorical ploy.²¹ This estimation must again be questioned, however, but not only because it ignores the implications outlined previously. It also overlooks, or at best underestimates, what the poem consistently says about the verbal and pictorial arts. Unlike the “Epitaphe”, in which virtue finally replaces ink and paint as the best source of immortality, this ode to Bouju resists all opportunities to challenge the preeminent perpetuating powers of the artist's brush and the poet's pen (even when the emphasis subsequently shifts to the Angevin's personal poetic prowess²²). Thus this piece may be said to reflect not merely a willingness to reconsider the exegi monumentum topos in terms of the ut pictura poesis analogy, but a virtual commitment to do so.²³

Such a commitment is similarly inscribed in the many exegi monumentum poems that would otherwise privilege poetic verses according to the traditional Horatian hierarchy of artistic permanence. In these cases, however, the novelty emerges in Ronsard's specific set of complaints against pictorial monuments.

The ode “A René d'Urvoi” (Odes 4.17), written between 1545 and 1549,²⁴ provides an illustration. In the middle of this sixty-four-verse tribute to Ronsard's former companion at the Collège de Coqueret, the flavor is unmistakably Horatian:

Les vers sans plus t'ejouissent,
Mes vers donq je t'ofrirai,
Les vers seulement jouissent
Du droit que je te dirai.
Les Colonnes elevées,
Ne les marbres imprimés
De grosses lettres gravées,
Ne les cuivres animés,
Ne font que les hommes vivent
En images contrefais,
Comme les vers qui les suivent
Pour témoins de leurs beaus fais.

(Verses alone give you joy; therefore I shall offer you my verses—only verses enjoy the power of which I shall tell you. Neither elevated columns, nor marble imprinted with great engraved letters, nor animated bronzes, make men live imitated in images as do verses that follow them as witnesses to their great deeds.)

(2:150, vv. 29-40)

Hence, like Horace, Ronsard insists that poetry is better able to immortalize its subjects than any plastic (including pictorial) “images.”

On the reason why this should be so, however, Horace and Ronsard differ significantly. Whereas the Roman author follows Pindar in ascribing the perishability of plastic portraits to the mutability of physical materials,²⁵ Ronsard presents a more theoretical explanation, evoking Simonides of Ceos' famous poesia pictura loquens—“Painting is mute Poetry: Poetry a speaking Painting”²⁶—and a subtle dose of Neoplatonic metaphysics to criticize the muteness of the visual arts in respect to the metaphysical and incorruptible, celestial world of pure forms and moral truths.²⁷ This direction is established in the first three quatrains:

Je n'ai pas les mains apprises
Au métier muet de ceus,
Qui font une image assise
Sus des piliers paresseus.
Ma painture n'est pas mue
Mais vive, & par l'univers
Guindée en l'air se remue
De sus l'engin de mes vers.
Aujourdui faut que j'ataigne
Au parfait de mon art beau,
Urvoi m'a dit que je paigne
Ses vertus en ce tableau.

(I lack the hands experienced in the mute profession of those who make an image seated upon loitering pedestals. My painting is not mute, but alive, and through the universe lifted into the air [it] moves upon the instrument of my verses. Today I must attain the perfection of my beautiful art; Urvoi told me to paint his virtues in this picture.)

(2:148-49, vv. 1-12)

For Ronsard, then, the painted portrait is perishable because it is “mue,” or, as Laumonier explains, mute.²⁸ By mute, though, the author means more than merely nonverbal—i.e., more than just physical or, in the spirit of Pindar's ode for Pytheas of Aegina (Nemea 5), immobile.²⁹ He also means inexpressive or, more properly, unable to represent moral attributes like virtue and honor: qualities that belong, in the Neoplatonic universe, to the highest order of existence, the celestial realm of eternal forms and truths perceptible to the intellect. This notion is raised implicitly in the contrary characterization of the poem as a “peinture” that “n'est pas mue.” Not only are verses nonphysical, i.e., unfettered by materiality, but they are metaphysical, in the sense that their expressive ability reaches beyond the world of corporeal experience. This, we are led to infer, is why Urvoi has entrusted his “vertus” to a verbal portrait rather than to a visual one: he knows that Ronsard can achieve artistic perfection and, thus, an accurate representation of his metaphysical inner essence.

The link between the impermanence of pictures and their expressive limitations reappears, though with no further reference to muteness, in the ode “Au Roy Henri II” (1555 Odes 3.1), an exegi monumentum poem written in 1554³⁰ which solicits the king's moral and financial support for Ronsard's Franciade project.³¹ The penultimate stanza is particularly revealing:

Donques pour engarder que la Parque cruelle
Sans nom t'ensevelisse en la nuit éternelle,
Toujours ne faut avoir à gage des maçons
Pour transformer par art une roche en maisons,
Et toujours n'acheter avecques la main pleine
Ou la medale morte, ou la peinture vaine.
Mais il faut par bienfaits & par caresse d'yeus
Tirer en ta maison les ministres des Dieus,
Les Poëtes sacrés, qui par leur écriture
Te rendront plus vivant que maison ni peinture.

(Thus to keep the cruel Fate from burying you, nameless, in the eternal night, you need not always hire masons to transform by art a rock into a house, nor always buy with [money-]filled hand either the dead medallion or the vain painting. But you must by favors and caressing eyes draw to your home the ministers of the Gods, the sacred Poets, who through their writing will render you more living than [can] house or painting.)

(7:32, vv. 137-46)

The implications of the adjective “vaine” (vain) at the rhyme of verse 142 are critical. More than connote empty, by its opposition to the adjective “pleine” (filled) at the rhyme of verse 141, or lifeless, by its parallel with the adjective “morte” (dead) at the caesura six syllables earlier, “vaine” must be understood in terms of both of these ideas. Accordingly, with respect to the meaning of the noun it modifies, “la peinture” (the painting), this adjective allows for two possible and significantly different readings. On the one hand, painting may be empty, or worthless, because it is subject to physical decay, or death. This interpretation would wholly concur with the exegi monumentum topos in the Horatian, Pindaric, and Propertian traditions, yet it would have no direct bearing on the matter of expressive potentials. On the other hand, a painting may be “morte,” or lifeless, because it is empty, or unable to express metaphysical, essential qualities like personal virtue: properties which inherently pertain to the celestial world (in the Neoplatonic sense) and constitute the sine qua non of the portrait that is truly alive.

Although Ronsard avoids any explicit commentary privileging one of these readings above the other, his concluding remarks to Henri II on the inevitable merits of his proposed Franciade lend strong support to the second interpretation:

Pour toi seul, je mettrai devant les yeus la poudre
A tous mes devanciers, s'il plaist à ta grandeur …
Qu'un jour me commander (d'un seul clin) que je face
Ma Franciade tienne, où la Troïenne race
De Francus ton ancestre, où les faits glorieus
De tant de vaillans Roys qui furent tes aïeus,
Où mesmes tes vertus y luiront évidantes,
Comme luisent au ciel les étoilles ardantes
Sortant de l'Ocean.

(For you alone, I will put dust in the eyes of all my predecessors, if it pleases your greatness … that one day you will command me (a wink will suffice) to make my Franciade yours, where the Trojan race of Francus, your ancestor, where the glorious deeds of so many valiant kings who were your forebears, where especially your virtues will shine conspicuous, as the burning stars shine in the sky when rising from the Ocean.)

(7:33, vv. 154-63)

Thus here, as in numerous other exegi monumentum poems,³² Ronsard invests poetry with a special, if not unique, ability to represent personal inner virtues and, hence, to express concepts that, like the shining stars in heaven, belong to the highest order of existence in the Neoplatonic cosmos.

.....

It is clear, then, that Ronsard's exegi monumentum poems reach well beyong their classical antecedents in their concern for the relations between monuments in words and monuments in paint (indeed, memorials in all of the plastic media). Some pieces emphasize the eternalizing equality of the poetic and pictorial arts; other works privilege poetry for its superior ability to express inner virtues, the metaphysical, essential qualities typically associated with the celestial realm in the Neoplatonic universe. In the former instances, we encounter a certain deference to the notion of artistic parity at the heart of the Renaissance ut pictura poesis principle; in the latter cases, we discover a virtual defiance of that principle. In fact, in the second group of poems, we detect signs of Ronsard's engagement, on the side of poetry, in the paragone debate between the poets and painters of his day.

The paragone was the polemical counterpart to the ut pictura poesis concept that focused on the unequal abilities of the various arts—most prominently, poetry and painting, but also sculpture, architecture, and music. Inspired by the Ancients' reflections on the hierarchy of human artistic endeavors, this dispute received its clearest expression in the art-theoretical treatises of quattrocento and cinquecento Italy (hence the term paragone: “comparison” in Italian).³³ However, on the specific issue of the relative durability of poetry and painting, the Trattato della pittura of Leonardo da Vinci unquestionably presents one of the most memorable statements. In trattato 19 not only does the great Florentine painter vehemently dispute peremptory poetic claims to superior permanence, but he also rejects the attempts to base such claims on the expressive preeminence of poetry. For as the picture of Calumny by the legendary ancient portraitist, Apelles, demonstrates,³⁴ painting is as able to represent abstract ideals as poetry.

… potrà dire un poeta: io farò una fintione che significava cose grande; questo medesimo farà il pittore, come fece Apelle la calunnia. se uoi dicesti, la poesia è più eterna, per questo dirò essere piu eterne l'opere dun calderaio. chel tempo piu le conserva che le vostre o' nostre opere, niente dimeno è di poca fantasia; e la pittura si può, depingendo sopra rame con colori di vetro, farla molto piu etterna. noi per arte possiamo esser detti nipoti à dio. s'ella poesia s'estende in filosofia morale, e questa in filosofia naturale; se quella descrive l'operationi della mente, che considera quella, se la mente opera nei movimenti.

(… if a poet should say: I will write a story which signifies great things, the painter can do likewise, for even so Apelles painted the Calumny. If you were to say that poetry is more lasting, I say the works of a coppersmith are more lasting still, for time preserves them longer than your works or ours; nevertheless they display little imagination. And a picture can be made more enduring by painting upon copper in enamel colours. We by our art may be called the grandchildren of God. If poetry treats of moral philosophy, painting has to do with natural philosophy. If poetry describes the working of the mind, painting considers the working of the mind as reflected in … movements. …)³⁵

It has yet to be shown, of course, that Ronsard ever laid eyes on this or any other paragone-related passage in the Trattato della pittura. In fact, although Luca Pacioli attests to the existence of the Trattato (initially a mere collection of disparate notes) as early as 1498, a published version would not appear before the middle of the seventeenth century.³⁶ Nevertheless, the attacks against painting in the ode “A René d'Urvoi” and the 1555 ode “Au Roy” bear an unmistakable resemblance to the rebuttal against poetry in trattato 19. Their particular artistic biases aside, Ronsard and Leonardo are in striking agreement on the notion that the durability of an artform is intimately linked to its expressive strength. Presumably, then, ideas like Leonardo's were already on the minds of French literati by the mid-sixteenth century. What is more, they were already a central concern in the exegi monumentum poems of the foremost poet of Renaissance France.

But what would move Ronsard to address such ideas in the first place? Moreover, why would he propound a reductive characterization of painting that directly contradicts prevailing views on the representational and, especially, symbolic versatility of the pictorial arts?³⁷ Clearly Ronsard feels it necessary to adopt such a posture in defense of poetry. But why?

A lack of space prevents a full resolution of these queries here. Yet Fenoaltea is probably correct to insist that the “système du mécenat” (patronage system) of the period did much to incite Ronsard's commentaries on the relations between poetry and the other arts.³⁸ Competing for finite financial resources with visual artists whose plastic monuments could glorify a patron far more immediately and tangibly than any poet's verbal memorial, Ronsard was compelled to take the stand we have identified. However, whereas Fenoaltea has maintained that Renaissance poets sought primarily to produce images that were more “vivantes” (alive) than the painters' (i.e., to emulate above all the physicality of pictorial simulacra),³⁹ it is clear from the preceding analysis that Ronsard took this rivalry well into the domain of metaphysical expression.

Notes

1. See T. Sebillet, Art poétique françoys, ed. Félix Gaiffe (Paris: Droz, 1932), 169; B. Aneau, L'Imagination poétique, (Lyons, 1552), 4; J. Peletier, L'Art poétique, ed. André Boulanger (Paris: Belles Lettres, 1930), 80; C. du Fresnoy De arte graphica (Paris, 1667), vv. 1-8; L. Dolce, Dialogo della pittura intitolato l'Aretino (Florence, 1735), 116; and P. Lomazzo, Trattato dell'arte della pittura, scoltura, et architettura (Milan, 1585), esp. 6.65.486. For more on these and other contemporary theorists of poetry and painting, see Rensselaer Lee, Ut Pictura Poesis: The Humanistic Theory of Painting (New York: Norton, 1967).

2. For an excellent analysis of the nuances of Horace's comments and an overview of the misunderstandings they have generated, see Wesley Trimpi, “The Meaning of Horace's `Ut Pictura Poesis',” Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 36 (1973): 1-34. See also Jean H. Hagstrum, The Sister Arts: The Tradition of Literary Pictorialism and English Poetry from Dryden to Gray (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 57-92, esp. 60-61.

3. Cf. Marcel Raymond, Baroque et renaissance poétique (Paris: Corti, 1955) and the introduction to his La Poésie française et le maniérisme: 1546-1610 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1972); Jean Rousset, La Littérature de l'age baroque en France, Circé et le Paon (Paris: Corti, 1953); Richard A. Sayce, “Ronsard and Mannerism: The Elégie à Janet,” L'Esprit Créateur 6 (1966): 234-47; Lance K. Donaldson-Evans, “Two Stages of Renaissance Style: Mannerism and Baroque in French Poetry,” French Forum 7 (Sept. 1982): 210-23. It should be noted that, to date, such period-style criticism has been most copiously applied to Montaigne and his Essais. Pierre Bonnet presents a useful review of this material in his “Montaigne, le maniérisme et le baroque,” BSAM 7-8 (July-Dec. 1973): 45-58.

4. The first eight verses are especially memorable:

   Exegi monumentum aere perennius
   regalique situ pyramidum altius,
   quod non imber edax, non Aquilo impotens
   possit diruere aut innumerabilis
   annorum series et fuga temporum.
   non omnis moriar multaque pars mei
   vitabit Libitinam: usque ego postera
   crescam laude recens.

   (I have finished a monument more lasting than bronze and loftier than the Pyramids' royal pile, one that no wasting rain, no furious north wind can destroy, or the countless chain of years and the ages' fight. I shall not altogether die, but a mighty part of me shall escape the death-goddess. On and on shall I grow, ever fresh with the glory of after time.)

   Horace: The Odes and Epodes, tr. Charles E. Bennett (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968), 278-79

5. Cf. Horace, Carminum Liber, 3.30, 4.8-9; Pindar, Pythia 1 and 3; Isthmia 2 and 6; Nemea 4, 5, 7, 8, 9; and Propertius, Carmina, 3.2. For more on the history of this theme and its permutations during antiquity and the Middle Ages, see Ernst Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, tr. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), 476-77.

6. Both lines of inquiry are clearly represented in Paul Laumonier, Ronsard poéte lyrique (Paris: Hachette, 1923), 346-77; Henri Chamard, Histoire de la Pléiade, 4 vols. (Paris: Didier, 10939-40), esp. 1:291-93, 356-58, 2:274-75; Robert J. Clements, Critical Theory and Practice of the Pléiade, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1942), 45-47, 79-83; Isidore Silver, The Intellectual Evolution of Ronsard, 2 vols. (St. Louis: Washington University, 1969-73), esp. 2:402-45.

7. In addition to the locations identified above (n. 1), see Sebillet, Art poétique français, 12-13; du Bellay, La Deffence et illustration de la langue francoyse, ed. Henri Chamard (Paris: Didier, 1970), 103-07, 181-82; and Peletier, L'Art poétique, 68. This is not to say, of course, that affinities are never assumed obliquely. Cf. du Bellay's comments on the contrasting durability of the linguistic (literary) and architectural (plastic) achievements of Ancient Rome: Deffence, 127-36, 183-84.

8. Cf. Lee, Ut Pictura Poesis, 3-9.

9. Margaret M. McGowan, Ideal Forms in the Age of Ronsard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), esp. 51-88, 121-28; Doranne Fenoaltea, Du palais au jardin: L'architecture des Odes de Ronsard, Etudes Ronsardiennes, no. 3 (Geneva: Droz, 1990), 13-29.

10. Fenoaltea, Du palais, 16.

11. It is true, of course, that the majority of Ronsardian exegi monumentum poems focus only on the immortalizing power of poetry and make no explicit allusion to the plastic arts (cf. Silver, Intellectual Evolution 2:433-45). For obvious reasons, these pieces will be excluded from consideration in the present essay.

12. Laumonier, Ronsard, 40.

13. Unless otherwise stated, all references to the Odes are to the 1550 edition.

14. All citations of Ronsard's works are from the Oeuvres complètes, ed. Paul Laumonier, Isidore Silver, Raymond Lebègue, 20 vols. (Paris: Hachette, 1914-75). Henceforth they will be noted parenthetically, as appropriate, with references to volume, page and verse in this edition. All English translations of Ronsard's poetry are my own.

15. Pliny, Natural History, 35.36.73-74.

16. Cf. dizains 23, 227: Maurice Scève, Délie, object de plus haulte vertu, ed. Eugène Parturier (Paris: Didier, 1961), 21, 158. See also, Alciati's emblem, “Ex litterarum studiis immortalitatem acquiri” (Immortality is achieved by literary studies), Emblematum Libillus (Paris: Christianus Wechelus, 1534), 45. Strictly speaking, however, none of these pieces evokes the exegi monumentum topos. In Scève's case, for example, the focus is the overall ineffability of the beloved's deific beauty and grace in the tradition of Ariosto, Britonio, and Tebaldeo. Similarly, Alciati's concern is the immortality of noble deeds and not the relative durability of the arts.

17. Cf. the judgment of virtue's immortality in verses 16-17 of the ode Au Reverendissime Cardinal de Guise (Odes 1.4; Laumonier, Oeuvres 1:80).

18. Silver, Intellectual Evolution 2:434.

19. Laumonier, Ronsard, 65.

20. For more on the fate of Bouju's poetry, see ibid., n. 7.

21. Cf. Silver, Intellectual Evolution 2:434.

22. It must again be emphasized that, for Ronsard, the important distinction lies between the durability of Bouju's poetry and that of all other artworks, whether pictures by a painter or verses by another poet (cf. 2:88, vv. 17-24). Hence, despite the subsequent Horatianesque attack upon plastic monuments alone (2:89, vv. 25-32), the poet never abandons his initial position on the immortalizing parity of the verbal and visual arts.

23. A similar conclusion may be drawn from the author's later comments on poetry and painting in the ode Au Conte d'Alsinois (Odes 5.11), written between 1551 and early 1552 (Laumonier, Ronsard, 85). Here Ronsard is particulary intrigued (perhaps even troubled) by the fortune of his good friend Nicolas Denisot du Mans, whose exceptional talents for both pen and brush are expected to render him doubly impervious to the oblivion of death (see Laumonier, Oeuvres 3:177-83, esp. 180-81, vv. 73-80).

24. Laumonier, Ronsard, 56; Silver, Intellectual Evolution 2:434.

25. Cf. Horace, CL 3.30, vv. 3-5, and Pindar, Pythia 6, vv. 6-14. The same notion is echoed by Propertius (3.2, vv. 17-27).

26. See Plutarch, De Gloria Atheniensium, 3.346f-347c.

27. In Neoplatonic thought, the celestial world typically contrasts with the realm of Nature, the inferior, terrestrial zone of corruptible form and matter. For a synopsis of this cosmology as articulated in the Theologia Platonica of the famous Renaissance Neoplatonist, Marsilio Ficino, see Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1939; New York: Harper and Row, 1972), 131-33.

28. Laumonier, Oeuvres 2:148-49, n. 3.

29. See vv. 1-5: “No sculptor am I, that I should carve statues doomed to linger only on the pedestal where they stand. No! I would bid my sweet song speed from Aegina, in every argosy, and in every skiff, spreading abroad the tidings that the stalwart Pytheas, son of Lampon, hath won the crown for the pancratium at the Nemean games. … The Odes of Pindar, Including the Principal Fragments, tr. John Sandys (Cambridge: Harvard University Press), 359.

30. Laumonier, Ronsard, 149.

31. This is the epic poem featuring Francus, the son of the Trojan hero, Hector, and the legendary founder of the kingdom of France. The first and only four “chants” of this ill-fated, twenty-four-book project were published in 1572, seventeen years after the present ode.

32. Cf. A René d'Urvoi as well as the ode Au Reverendissime Cardinal de Guise (Odes 1.4; Laumonier, Oeuvres 1:79-82) and the ode A Charles de Pisseleu (Odes 2.18; Laumonier, Oeuvres 1:226-28, esp. vv. 21-44).

33. For more on the history of this debate, from antiquity through the Renaissance, see Jean Paul Richter, The Literary Works of Leonardo da Vinci, 3d ed., vol. 1 (New York: Phaidon, 1970), 13-22, 41-68.

34. The story of Apelles' Calumny was first recorded by Lucian in his De Calumnia, 5, though credit for its revival during the Renaissance goes to Leone Battista Alberti. See Della pittura, ed. Luigi Mallè (Florence: Sansoni, 1950), 103-05. On the significance of the Calumny anecdote for Renaissance Neoplatonists, see Panofsky, Iconology, 157-58.

35. Richter, Literary Works 1: 58.

36. Pacioli's testimony appears in a letter to Duke Lodovico Sforza dated 9 February 1498. For more on this letter and the complex history of Leonardo's document, see Richter, Literary Works 1:5-11.

37. It is well known that Renaissance Neoplatonists like Ficino and Pico della Mirandola attributed special symbolic and allegorical powers to visual images and the pictorial arts. Cf. E. H. Gombrich, “Icones Symbolicae: The Visual Image in Neo-Platonic Thought,” Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 11 (1948): 163-92.

38. Fenoaltea, Du palais, 16. The same point is made by McGowan, Ideal Forms, 57. For more on the patronage system of sixteenth-century France, see Henri Weber, La Création poétique au XVIe siècle en France, de Maurice Scève à Agrippa d'Aubigné (Paris: Librairie Nizet, 1955), 63-106.

39. Fenoaltea, Du palais, 25.

An initial version of this essay was first presented in Chicago on December 27, 1990, at the annual convention of the Modern Language Association. I am indebted to the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and the University Research Council, whose generous support during my first year and summer at UNCG greatly facilitated the completion of this project.