ABSTRACT

Discussing the three arguably most ubiquitous Latin words in literary criticism, ut pictura poesis, Shaftesbury puts them to short shrift and contends that “[c]omparisons and parallels” that “run between painting and poetry because of the pictoribus atque poesis etc. and the ut pictura poesis” are “almost ever absurd and at best constrained, lame, or defective”.1 We can only wonder what Shaftesbury would have thought of a serendipitous instance where history itself nearly makes the case for simultaneity between the very best of painting and of literature: the near perfect overlap between the careers of Caravaggio and Shakespeare from c. 1592 to 1610 (the year Caravaggio died). Such a staggering synchronicity was not limited to chronology: Michael Fried noted a common trait in their sceptical doubt over the possibility of knowing the thoughts of another person’s mind.2 Recent studies have further underlined Caravaggio’s dislocation of the sense of history and the salience of doubt in interpretation,3 to the beneficial detriment of the twentiethcentury appropriation of Caravaggio as a transgressive codebreaker. I wish to prove that the comparison with Caravaggio casts, by contrast, new light (and shadow) on Shakespeare.