The Venus of Apelles from Schoolroom to Romance

Abstract:This article argues that classical visual art played an important role in mediating the relationship between Elizabethan romance and the humanist schoolroom. I advance this claim by following the wayward itinerary through Elizabethan letters of the Greek painter Apelles and his unfinished painting of Venus rising from the sea. In the work of the educator Roger Ascham, the painting serves as an emblem for the fragmented corpus of classical antiquity; Apelles's lost masterpiece enjoys a second life when appropriated in the next generation by John Lyly as a figure for the estrangement of Elizabethan fiction from earlier humanist claims that poetry's purpose was primarily didactic.