...indulge his ravished sight: "Sometimes my eyes would lay themselves open to receive all the darts she did throw, sometimes close up with admiration, as if, with a contrary fancy, they would preserve the riches of that sight they had gotten, or cast my lids as curtains over the image of beauty her presence had painted in them." (1) The beam or dart shot from Philoclea's face penetrates her lover through the eyes. It then travels downwards to imprint within Pyrocles "the image of [her] beauty." (2) This was good Platonic doctrine. It was also Petrarchan convention. Yet Pyrocles' passion notably fails to transcend its dependence on sight, remaining "painted" in the eyes rather than in the heart. (3) This erotic, material, Platonically superficial desire is suggested by the onanistic way in which Pyrocles opens and closes his eyes, repeatedly hiding and then uncovering the physical object of his love. But if Pyrocles has made a fetish of Philoclea, he has also made her a god, and this would have caused many Elizabethan readers far more apprehension. His eyelids become the curtains to a shrine, drawn back to reveal not simply "image" as painting but "image" as idol. While it is true that profane love had long been described in terms of religious worship, the instinctual and compulsive idolatry with which Sidney's lovers respond to one another in both texts of the Arcadia is striking, particularly as it escapes censure by the narrator or punishment by the plot. How are we to reconcile this with the notion of Sidney as a militant Protestant in an England where, after a brief hiatus under Mary I, iconoclasm was once again official state policy? (4) Where, by 1577, William Harrison could record that "all images, shrines, tabernacles, rood lofts, and monuments of idolatry [had been] removed, taken down, and defaced"? (5) There are at least two possible answers to this question, based on differing perceptions of Sidney's response to images.

Revisionist historiography has challenged our assumptions about Elizabethan Protestantism, problematizing the notion of a "Calvinist consensus" to acknowledge a range of Protestantisms including the Calvinist, anti-Presbyterian, and proto-Arminian. (6) Throughout his life, Sidney seems to have adopted various Protestant identities. His early education was notably Calvinist, (7) and he was capable of virulent anti-Catholic sentiments not only in his private correspondence with Hubert Languet but also in the "Letter ... to Queen Elizabeth, Touching Her Marriage to Monsieur" (1580). (8) Yet, in his literary career, Sidney seems much more inclined to Lutheranism. (9) Robert E. Stillman has urged critics to abandon "the failed paradigm of Calvinist piety for interpreting Sidneian poetics" in favor of Philippism, inspired by the work and influence of Philip Melanchthon: "With its distinctive humanist program to ally the secular and the sacred, its conspicuous cultivation of moderation in religious matters, and its considerably more optimistic account of human agency ... the Philippism of Languet and his network of Melanchthonian enthusiasts supplies a more conducive and more persuasive context in which to reopen questions about the character of Sidney's piety." (10) Particularly relevant here is Melanchthon's defense of man's emotional response to the sacraments, which stresses the value of his visual sense (and adapts Pyrocles' model of erotic devotion): "[s]imultaneously through the Word and the rite God moves the heart to believe and take hold of faith ... As the Word enters the ears to strike the heart [ut feriat corda], so the rite itself enters through the eyes to move the heart [ut moveat corda]." (11) Images are not condemned but are argued to be "adiaphora," that is, indifferent in themselves and prohibited only in the abuse. (12)

And yet the abuse of art is dangerously easy in Sidney's poetry, inspiring a kind of self-censorship that reflects a more Calvinist approach to the poet as image maker. Ernest B. Gilman has demonstrated how the "phenomenon of iconoclasm itself and the body of controversy it provoked are sharply etched in the literature of the period ... pos[ing] a crucial dilemma for the literary imagination of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries." (13) Gilman sees Sidney as one of those poets standing "at the crossroads where a lively tradition of image-making confronts a militantly logocentric theology." (14)

The locus classicus for this dilemma in Sidney's work is Astrophil and Stella (1583). In sonnet 11, Astrophil berates Cupid for being distracted by Stella's beauty,

like a child, that some fair book doth find, With gilded leaves or coloured vellum plays, Or at the most, on some fine picture stays, But never heeds the fruit of writer's mind. (15)

Although its subject matter is profane, the poem subtly alludes here, I believe, to the Catholic defense of images as biblia pauperum or books for the layman. (16) Like a good Protestant Reformer, Astrophil invokes this doctrine only to refute it. (17) Similarly, in sonnet 5, the impulse to worship, as prompted by visual beauty, inspires not Lutheran or Philippan justifications but Calvinist self-castigation:

It is most true, what we call Cupid's dart, An image is, which for ourselves we carve; And, fools, adore in temple of our heart. (p. 154, lines 5-7)

In line 7, we hear St. Paul's warning to the Corinthians: "And what agremente hathe the Temple of God with idoles? for ye are the Temple of the Living God," while the echoes of Deuteronomy offer a prognostication for Astrophil's future: "Cursed be ye man yt shal make anie carved or molten image, which is an abominacion unto ye Lord." (18) Both passages recur frequently in anti-idolatry tracts such as An Homily against Peril of Idolatry (1563) and A Treatise of the Worship of Images, both attributed to Nicholas Ridley (ca. 1560). For Gilman, this sonnet also casts "a sharply Calvinist irony" back onto the opening of the sequence, "since it will evidently do little good to cast aside 'others' leaves' and 'looke in thy heart and write' (Sonnet 1) when thy heart has become a temple of idolatry." (19)

However, this essay will argue that neither vision of Sidney--as tolerant Philippist or anxious, self-censoring poet--can fully explain the liberties that are taken with idolatry and iconoclasm in the Arcadia. Crucial to this question is an understanding of the figure Astrophil uses to justify, criticize, and distance himself from the impulse to idolatry, namely Cupid.

Cupid was well-known in early modern England not only as a pagan but also as a Roman Catholic. He was erotic and thus identifiable as the object of Protestant polemic that likened idols to whores and the pleasures of idolatry to those of promiscuity. He was fictional--another link with the supposed artifice of both pagan and Catholic faiths. But above all, for Sidney, Cupid seems to have been associated with the power of the visual: he exploits the "love-open sight" of his victims and uses their subsequent acts of submission to prove his own supremacy (OA, p. 51). He is dazzlingly affective and thus adored. This essay begins by considering Sidney's debt to the visual arts in his conception of Cupid, a god whose ability to wield beauty as a weapon is central to his function in Sidney's work. We will then move on to consider Cupid as idol, and as both victim and avenger of iconoclasm, in the Arcadia.

I

Sidney's experience of Cupid as a subject of art distinguishes him from the majority of his contemporaries. Where Thomas Watson, Shakespeare, and Edmund Spenser were reliant on literary, often ekphrastic, descriptions of Cupid, in conjunction with some visual resources (tapestries, emblem books, printed illustrations), Sidney had gazed upon the Cupid of Italian Renaissance art "in the flesh." During his travels in Italy in the early 1570s, he would have seen firsthand the taste for Cupids in painting, sculpture, and architecture. (20) He may even have visited Titian's (Tiziano Vecellio) studio and seen some examples of the master's work there. (21)

More unusually, on returning to London, Sidney might have continued this acquaintance via one of the finest art collections in England, that of his uncle, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester. An inventory that survives from Leicester House, taken on 22 December 1588, reveals a dazzling (and highly unusual) mixture of historical and contemporary portraits, religious paintings, and mythological works. Among these we find no fewer than three Cupid paintings, described as "One of Venus and Cupid," "Another Picture of Venus and Cupid," and "A Picture of a Naked Lady Sleeping and Cupid Menaicing Hir with his Darte." (22) The identity of all three remains a matter of conjecture. Yet, the last suggests a specifically Venetian influence upon Sidney's Cupid. (23)

Giorgione's (Giorgio Barbarelli da Castelfranco) Sleeping Venus in a Landscape (Dresden, Staatliche Gemaldegalerie, 1507-08), retouched by Titian circa 1510, is credited with establishing a tradition that became popular across Europe. (24) Bruce Cole ascribes the painting's impact to the unusual size of the nude, her posture, and the tactility of oil paint: "[s]uch corporeal depictions would become increasingly common in Venetian painting and they helped to further the city's reputation for sensual pleasures." (25) But the goddess did not sleep alone. Contemporary descriptions of the painting, restoration work, and more recent x-rays all point to the presence of Cupid, sitting by Venus's left foot, holding an arrow in one hand and a bird in the other, as in the reconstruction by Hans Posse. (26) More recently, Marlies Giebe has refuted the presence of a bird, leaving Cupid absorbed in directing his arrow, much as we find him in Titian's Cupid in a Loggia (Vienna, Akademie de Bildenden Kunste, ca. 1520). (27) Only a fragment of this painting remains, but here, too, Cupid seems to be sitting beside the recumbent, naked figure of Venus (the outline of her leg can just be seen), aiming an arrow toward her. (28)

It is highly likely that Sidney saw a copy or imitation of this theme during his stay in Venice or that he exported one back to England to add to his uncle's collection, for the painting (or a visual memory of it) seems to find its way into the New Arcadia when Pamela and Philoclea retire...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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