SOURCE: “The Arts in Conflict in Ronsard's Des peintures contenues dedans un tableau,” in Romance Quarterly, Vol. 39, No. 4, November, 1992, pp. 411-24.

In the following essay, Campo asserts that Ronsard's poem “Des peintures contenues dedans un tableau” can be interpreted “as an attack on the expressive weakness of painting” when compared to poetry.

Jean Plattard once suggested that, like all the major French poets of the midsixteenth century, Pierre de Ronsard overwhelmingly preferred the narrative-type,¹ historical and mythological painting produced at the Château de Fontainebleau by artists such as Il Rosso and Primaticcio to the concurrent genre of courtly portraiture practiced by painters such as François Clouet and Corneille de Lyon: “Les poètes donnaient naturellement à ces peintures historiques et mythologiques la préférence sur les portraits.”² The appeal, Plattard believed, was two-fold. On the one hand, there was “l'ampleur de la conception” (p. 492) of narrative...