Introduction

“A society suffering from severe visual anorexia”. This statement by Patrick Collinson, who sought to reassess Holtgen’s theory on the impact of iconoclasm on Elizabethan culture, paved the way to a form of iconoclasm among scholars undertaking the complex and broad subject of the interrelations between visual arts and literature in early modern England. As regards the supposed poverty of English visual culture and production, this is also a debatable assumption. The wealth and diversity of the approaches to pictures destroyed or produced, admired or looked on with suspicion, bear witness to the liveliness of the debate on the visual culture of early modern England. The creation of “speaking pictures” in early modern literature has given rise to an impressive number of studies and critical theories over the past decades. In particular, ekphrasis has been studied through two main viewpoints: the iconoclastic context and the paragone between the visual and the verbal.