Metaphors and Telescopes: the reception of Emanuele Tesauro’s Il Cannocchiale Aristotelico in Marvell’s poetry

This article argues that Emanuele Tesauro’s treatise on wit, Il Cannocchiale Aristotelico (1654) influenced Andrew Marvell’s Restoration satire ‘The Last Instructions to a Painter’. It highlights a number of close correspondences between the engraved allegorical frontispiece of Tesauro’s treatise and Marvell’s final envoi ‘To the King’, which ironize the poem’s claim that it only satirises the king’s courtiers. There are also affinities between Tesauro’s and Marvell’s development of imagery drawn from a Martial epigram at another pivotal moment in the ‘The Last Instructions to a Painter’, which reveal Marvell’s keen sense of the shifting associations between poetic style, religion and Restoration politics. Marvell found in Il Cannocchiale Aristotelico, the essay argues,a discussion of the acuity of metaphor which meshed excitingly with his own previously developed practice, especially his interest in reflexive and optical imagery. The article canvasses some of the ways in which Il Cannocchiale Aristotelico may have influenced Marvell’s later poetry, particularly in the use of ‘laconic’ wit, as he adapted to the poetic and political coteries of the Restoration. But it argues that ‘The Last Instructions to a Painter’s notoriously baroque tribute to the Scottish Catholic soldier Archibald Douglas identifies Tesauro’s theory of wit with counterreformation aesthetics, and uses parody to negotiate an uncomfortable recognition of how Marvell’s lyric poetry might be interpreted by Restoration readers.