Introduction

This chapter offers a critical overview of how the Western tradition has compared the visual arts and texts. It outlines two narratives: one focusing on the notion of 'ut pictura poesis', which exhausted itself at the verge of the modern era, and another 'ekphrastic' one which became intertwined with the birth of art history. Whilst acknowledging the impact of research in both cultural and visual studies, the volume proposes to contribute to the recent debate on visuality by distancing itself from these contemporary methodological frameworks in the approach to pre-modernist texts. Many of the articles collected are to a certain extent also indebted to the tradition of iconographical and iconological studies. This traditional art-historical approach, which has been rejected since the 1960s, explores the use and art-historical function of emblems, icons and symbols. The description of art works is not the only debt the novel owes to the visual arts.