ABSTRACT
Scholarship to date on the early modern Sidneys and the visual arts has focused overwhelmingly-and not without some justification-on Sir Philip Sidney and painting. Broadly speaking, such work may be divided into two strands. One, which has attracted contributions from art historians as well as literary critics, has sought to recover-if not Paolo Veronese’s lost portrait of Sidney itself (1574)—then as much information as possible about the painting and its fate in the more than four hundred years since it was commissioned by Sidney and presented to Hubert Languet as a gift. The other, dominated almost exclusively by literary critics, has explored what might be called the painterly qualities of Sidney’s writings, in particular the Defence of Poetry, Astrophil and Stella, and the Old and New Arcadias. This chapter surveys these, and other, strands of research on the Sidneys and the visual arts c. 1500-c. 1700, and concludes by suggesting some new directions for future scholarship on this rich topic.1
