The Viewer as Poet: The Renaissance Response to Art

In The Viewer as Poet, Norman Land provides the first comprehensive survey of ekphrasis in literature and art criticism from antiquity through the Renaissance. Land demonstrates, more fully than anyone has so far, that Renaissance art criticism assimilated the poetic tradition of ekphrasis while maintaining its function of analyzing works of art.

Broadly speaking, the book shows that purely literary descriptions of art in poetry and prose contain a response like that found in art-critical e...