Chapter 2 considers the desire to escape impressionism which shaped Yeats’s early writings. Yeats’s formative visual interests are usually discussed in terms of the tastes he inherited from his Pre-Raphaelite father, but in his early verse and criticism he would often also express hatred for, and a desire to escape, French art of the later nineteenth century. In his writings of the 1890s and 1900s, it is the paintings of Édouard Manet which most disturb Yeats, appearing repeatedly to threaten his early theories of symbolism. Time and again, Yeats strove to counter them with the art of Titian, which came to serve as a paradigm for his own evolving poetics. The present chapter considers the antagonism in Yeats’s thought between modern French painting and the art of the Renaissance, as well as the cognate binaries (of hard outline against glimmering colour, unity against disunity) this came to encompass, before exploring their formative influence on the symbolist poetics he was developing at the turn of the century.

Chapter 7 examines representations of the afterlife: the heavens and purgatory. Venetian artists created some of the most spectacular visions of paradise of the century, works that pulse with vibrancy and life, deploying a series of artistic devices to insist on the veracity of the supernatural. Venice was also home to one of the earliest and most comprehensive purgatorial cycles in Italy, a theme that became an ever more popular one as the seventeenth century progressed.

This chapter studies the painted representation of mirror reflections and the female nude in High Renaissance art, from Giorgione’s bella donna at her toilet to the Rokeby Venus. Situating this imagery within the cultural contexts of betrothal and marriage, it highlights the allegorical relationship between the female nude and the mirror reflection as the conjoined pictorial emblems of Renaissance art’s beauty.

This letter comments on the affinities between prudence and moderation. It starts from the definition of prudence given by the sixteenth-century Spanish writer Baltasar Gracián in his classic book, The Pocket Oracle and the Art of Prudence (1647), and then examines the different faces of prudence as illustrated by Titian’s famous Allegory of Prudence.