ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the ways in which visual art acted as a springboard for the Romantic production of literature. Italian art was essential to the production of Romantic-period writing, which was multifaceted and informed by knowledge of the artist's biography, his historical circumstances, by the known or imagined personality of the painter's subject and by the writer's own mood or temperament. This interest in biography and an increasing focus on the genius of the individual artist also worked to minimize the distinction between visual and written works of art, as did the new insistence that ideal beauty express itself through the particular. The growing stress on the sensuality of the experience of art gave rise to an increasing separation of female and male discourses, as demonstrated by the new tendency of male viewers in particular to abandon the Venus de' Medici in favour of Raphael's Fornarina.
