ABSTRACT
In this essay, which will take into account several sonnet sequences, including some less-known collections such as the anonymous Zepheria, Griffin’s Fidessa, Fletcher’s Licia and Tofte’s Laura and Alba, I will analyze the way in which Elizabethan poets elaborated the traditional association established between painting and poetry, particularly between portraits and sonnets, revealing a variety of approaches to the visual element. In those texts treating the portrait as an actual picture, the image is mostly used as a means to play with the Petrarchan topoi, though its employment often reveals traces of the iconoclastic anxiety of the period. On the other hand, when the poet uses the language of painting to denote his own attempt to represent the beloved, the reference to the art of portraiture becomes an occasion to reflect on the paragone between the arts, and especially on the poietic and mimetic power of poetry.
