Why do painters sometimes wish they were poets–and why do poets sometimes wish they were painters? What happens when Rembrandt spells out Hebrew in the sky or Poussin spells out Latin on a tombstone? What happens when Virgil, Ovid, or Shakespeare suspend their plots to describe a fictitious painting? In Mute Poetry, Speaking Pictures, Leonard Barkan explores such questions as he examines the deliciously ambiguous history of the relationship between words and pictures, focusing on the period from antiquity to the Renaissance but offering insights that also have much to say about modern art and literature.

Join Leonard Barkan and his colleague Thomas Hare at Labyrinth Books, Tuesday, December 4th, 2012 at 6pm, for a conversation about words and images.

This event is free and open to the public.

Labyrinth Books

122 Nassau Street
Princeton, NJ 08542

Leonard Barkan is Professor and Chair of the Department of Comparative Literature at Princeton. Among his books are The Gods Made Flesh: Metamorphosis and the Pursuit of Paganism, Transuming Passion:  Ganymede and the Erotics of Humanism, and Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture, as well as Satyr Square, which is an account of art, literature, food, wine, Italy, and himself. Thomas Hare also is Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton. His books include ReMembering Osiris and Zeami: Performance Notes.