Troubled Resemblances: Portrait and Poetics in Breitinger’s Critische Dichtkunst, Wieland’s Don Sylvio, Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry and Radcliffe’s Castle of Udolpho

[...]the reproduction presented here has no model (the woman is unknown to the observer); instead, it is the "afterimage" itself that aspires—to use the words of Bodmer in his Betrachtungen über die poetischen Gemälden der Dichter (Observations on the Poetic Paintings of Writers, 1741)—to take "the place of the original" (Bodmer 43, qtd. in Brandes 49). [...]the novel shows that free-floating resemblance leads to false matches. [...]encountering the portraits does not block rumor, but instead proves productive—and the same holds for visual images throughout Radcliffe's and Wieland's works. For this very reason, ancient teachers of art called it […] evidentia" (Breitinger 66). [...]demonstrative pronouns drawing attention to facial features seek to place the image before our inner eye; words addressed directly to the picture, endowing it with the ability to see and speak, make it into a living presence; the antithetical oscillation between questions and statements, between either and or, sets the whole poem into motion.