Ut poesis pictura

English summary The main purpose of the essay is to call attention to a change in attitude taking place among some leading painters of the Baroque, all of them closely connected with Rome. Several different considerations would seem relevant to the theme. One concerns the relation between the arts, particularly between painting and poetry. This was a consideration of some urgency from the High Renaissance onwards. In spite of changing attitudes this question remained for quite some time important to the understanding of the pictorial arts and their purpose. It is argued that the idea of painting and poetry as closely related, although not new in itself, took on a different character in the 17th century. Now some painters, not content to borrow their themes from written texts, would appear more like poets, developing their own visual metaphors. They attempted to approach a public directly, with a message of their own, thus becoming free agents in the public space. Guido Reni, Nicolas Poussin, and Salvator ...