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The Paragone and the Formation of the Artist-Genius-Myth Andrew Burroughs
The aftermath of arguments presented in the paragone forged dominant artistic conceptions still present to modern society. Renaissance Italy was the stage for a great upheaval in scholarship. Practitioners of all art forms sought to utilize the malleable public consciousness to have their practice recognized among the seven humanities which represented the pinnacle of human inquiry. The paragone was a debate that compared the arts, as all art forms vied for a place among the seven humanities.1 Artists composed pieces in writing and in their respective artistic mediums to demonstrate the validity of their craft. These historic arguments were persuasive enough that they led to a reformation of the artists’ role in society. The arguments in the paragone ranged from dissemination of fame, to fostering imaginative processes, to claiming the sheer inimitability of their form of art. A survey of the scholarship and paintings which remain from the paragone can demonstrate how certain contributions helped form what is referred to as the, ‘artist-genius-myth.’ The artist genius myth vaguely portrays the artist as a genius in solitude, who creates from pure inspiration. This essay will posit that the painter’s contributions to the paragone instilled and constructed the artist-genius-myth by emphasizing painting’s ability to create inimitable representations of natural phenomena that mimicked the divine act of creation. This essay will place emphasis on Titian and Bronzino’s works, which portray the reproducibility of poetry as evidence of its inferiority. Before assessing the role of specific paragone arguments it is necessary to characterize the artist genius myth. The first chapter of Catherine M. Sousloff’s book The Absolute Artist: The Historiography of
