ABSTRACT
English poems about identifiable works of art first emerged in the Romantic period because it was during this time, as Heffernan (1993: 138) reminds us, that public museums began to make paintings available for personal contemplation. But the museum is not a neutral presentation space; it is an institution of cultural memory and canonization located in the political arena and constructed by assumptions that bear on the experience and understanding of the artworks exhibited. To see a painting in the gallery means to engage with a series of preceding social acts – curatorial choices and material possessions, cultural validation and historical inheritance – which, first of all, make it accessible to the beholder and, potentially, privilege particular interpretations. ‘Synecdochically, the museum signifies all the institutions that select, circulate, reproduce, display, and explain works of visual art, all the institutions that inform and regulate our experience of it – largely by putting it into words’ (Heffernan 1993: 139). The museum space itself is shaped by the paragone of the visual-verbal tradition.
