The Gallery, 1620

The Gallery is an homage to ekphrasis. At turns lauding and competing with his objects of description, Giambattista Marino asks readers to consider one of the most central debates in art history: the relationship between literature, namely poetry, and the visual arts; and, by extension, that between the poet and painter or sculptor. As described in Francesco Manolesso’s 1620 preface to a second edition of the Gallery: “The author of this work wished to paint and sculpt with pen that which painters and sculptors, imitating and competing with nature, paint and sculpt with brush and chisel.” [1] 

For Marino, poetry is an act of image-making. Throughout The Gallery, he explores the relation between viewer and viewed. His nearly five-hundred poems both describe and produce embodied experiences of perception. Indeed, Marino’s readers become observers. Encountering the works in Marino’s museum, they are also asked to muse upon perennial, if quintessentially Baroque, themes: creativity and violence, beauty and horror, fixity and mutability. 

Marino was praised for his virtuosic use of metaphor across a range of poetic forms, at its height within The Gallery. This translation seeks to capture the visual splendor and stylistic freedom of Marino’s poetics. We hope it reflects, in turn, the works which inspired Marino when he first took up his pen.

Read a selection of Marino’s poems, in translation, here.

[1] “L’autore dell’opera ha voluto dipingere, e scolpire con la penna [...] quello, che e pittori, e scultori, col penello, e con lo scarpello imita[n]do, e gareggiando con la natura dipinsero, e scolpirono[.]” Marino, La Galeria del Cavalier Marino, Distinta in Pitture e Sculture (Ancona, 1620), 6. There were multiple (often, pirated) editions of Marino’s text, including the Ancona imprint for which Manolesso wrote.