Corpi, arte e omoerotismo: l’ekphrasis poetica in “Sight and Song” (1892) di Michael Field

In 1892, under the pseudonym of Michael Field, English poets and classicists Katharine Bradley (1846 - 1914) and Edith Cooper (1862 - 1913) published the ekphrastic collection Sight and Song. Using the methodology of Gender Studies, this essay aims to analyse the overtly homoerotic language of which the duo of "poets and lovers" used to "translate" into poetry - as explained by the authors themselves in the Preface to the volume - the scenes composed mainly of female bodies painted by the major artists of the Italian Renaissance. While Sight and Song, partly because of subject affinities, situates itself in continuity with the theories of Renaissance, Walter Pater's 1873 essay on the relationship between art, beauty and literature, Michael Field's collection distances itself from it by offering an alternative theoretical and aesthetic space in which it is the lesbian desire that expresses in the lyrics "the poetry objectively embodied by [painted bodies]."