ABSTRACT
In the visual arts, the scene's intermedial construction, blending musical and aesthetic effects, gives rise to an ekphrastic tension of the same nature, rehearsing the thematic-ideological and symbolical-allegorical conflict inherent in the wide Renaissance iconography of the sleeping virgin. With the intent to lead towards positing a Shakespearean definition of ekphrastic discourse, this chapter explores the role and function of intermediality between visual arts and drama. The examples which follow, occurring in Italian Renaissance portraiture in William T. Mitchell's terminology, of an artistic procedure which finds in the generic contaminatio, widespread in the European Renaissance, an instructive verbal-visual interaction, favoured by the common fusion in both genres of the iconic-symbolical with the allegorical-narrative modes. This methodological approach permits an integral analysis of dramatic discourse, extending the concept of poetic intertextuality to the field of pictorial arts and their socio-cultural resonance.
