St. John’s Summer Academy (Santa Fe): Thinking about Paintings and Poetry

What can a poem accomplish that no painting can achieve, no matter how great the painting—and vice versa? Both forms of art can profoundly affect our minds and emotions, but in different ways, because each form or genre has its own peculiar possibilities and limits. Our project will be to study painting and poetry by comparing them, both experientially and philosophically. For experience, we will encounter and interpret particular poems (by poets such as Homer, Shakespeare, and Wordsworth) and paintings (by painters such as Rembrandt and Bruegel). For philosophical insight, we will read a classic text on painting and poetry, Laocoon by Lessing. One strand of our inquiry will be to compare several works on the same theme: for example, Ovid’s poetic description of The Fall of Icarus, a painting by Bruegel inspired by Ovid’s description, and then a poem by Auden that comments on Bruegel’s painting.