Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2002. Vol. 8. Eger Journal of American Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 28)

Studies - Judit Borbély: The Writer's Paintings and the Painter's Scenes

particular angle but you want to avoid ending up with a hopelessly complicated mass of encyclopaedic information. After much thinking I decided to set up three aspects on the basis of which I am going to compare scenes and pictorial works of art, three different types of ekphrasis, types, of course, by my personal judgement. The first one is the physical appearance of a concrete painting in the novel; in the second one a living scene can be suspected to have been inspired by a painting which is then either explicitly named or can be detected; whereas in the third type I would like to introduce a scene in which James does not 'use' an existing painting but he himself creates one, giving a beautiful example of a literary painting. I think, the best-known painting actually appearing in a Henry James novel is the Bronzino in The Wings of The Dove, which Milly Theale, the central heroine comes face to face with in the great historic house of Matcham. The mysterious Bronzino has been identified as the portrait of Lucrezia Panciatichi by the Florentine painter, Bronzino (Agnolo di Torri), who painted several portraits of the Florentine aristocracy of the time before he became the court painter of the Medicis. The portrait is a wonderful piece of 16thcentury Italian Mannerism, a painting that Giorgio Vasari, the contemporary art historian, praised for its 'bella maniera'. Mannerism, as the word suggests, aimed to achieve some ideal manner, i.e. the perfect style, for the sake of which mannerist artists used stylised forms by ignoring rules of perspective, proportions and symmetry. Their figures, which usually have long limbs and a small head, are mostly depicted in an unnaturally sophisticated or rigid posture, as we can see in Lucrezia Panciatichi's portrait as well. But Bronzino managed to combine these typically mannerist formal elements with intense emotions: there is some concealed tension and sadness on the lady's face, in her slightly strained left hand and in her somewhat uncomfortable way of sitting, which are in a strong contrast with the bright red of her dress. Let us see now how the painting is described by James, communicated through his heroine's perception: [...] the face of a young woman, all magnificently drawn, down to the hands, and magnificently dressed; a face almost livid in hue, yet handsome in sadness and crowned with a mass of hair rolled back and high, that must, before fading with time, have had a family resemblance to her own. The lady in question, at all events, with her 126