Sidney and Junius on Poetry and Painting

"Franciscus Junius the Younger (1590-1677) is famous as virtually the founder of Germanic philology. He also composed an important and influential treatise on the art of painting as it is viewed in ancient literature. This was a commission from the Earl of Arundel - a famous collector of antiquities - whom he served as librarian. It is the relationship between this treatise, The Painting of the Ancients, and his annotations to the works of Sir Philip Sidney that is the focus of this book. Junius's volume containing these works is in the University of Leiden Library; it is copiously annotated, in Latin, in Junius's hand." "Many of the same ancient authors that appear in The Painting of the Ancients (1638), his English translation of his De pictura veterum (1637), also figure in his annotations to Sidney. Like Sidney's Defence of Poesie, Junius was composing a defense of art against attacks by puritans and other iconoclasts. Dundas's book shows how ut pictura poesis, the analogy between poetry and painting, was at the center of both these defenses."--BOOK JACKET.