ABSTRACT
W.B. Yeats was not alone in noting Spenser’s ‘genius’ for the ‘pictorial’.1 The charge of having written ‘painted forgery’ which Spenser theatrically levels against himself in the Proem to Book II (and then denies in the Proem to Book IV) is one for which his Romantic readers commend him: he is a ‘court-painter’ (James Russell Lowell), a ‘painter of abstractions’, reminding Hazlitt of Rubens.2 Later critics have noted Spenser’s use of visual techniques (focus, ‘scanning’) in his narrative, the significance he attaches to acts of vision, poetic values shared with visual art forms and so on, but these studies give necessarily piecemeal accounts of Spenser’s visual practices. These fragmented approaches answer the range of Spenser’s interests in the visual: comprehensive but not programmatic, and always subordinated to the didactic imperative of the poem.
