ABSTRACT
The paragone of the arts has a distinctive and illustrious past, having engaged artists, writers, and composers from Leonardo, Alberti, and Michelangelo to Lessing, Goethe, Wagner, and Greenberg. Paragone texts that address music and the visual arts often draw support for what is perceived as the close correspondence between the two arts in terms of their structural innovations and expressive intentions. Exchange between the arts commonly serves as a way of mediating qualities that are hard to describe, and in the modernist period in particular, critics, artists, and publics faced with the unexpected frequently resorted to metaphorical comparison.
