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This chapter considers Jonathan Richardson’s critical ‘Dissertation’ on Poussin’s painting Tancred and Erminia (c. 1633) as both analysis and ekphrastic representation. It focuses on Richardson’s keen interest in the artist’s visual interpretations of, and additions to, Tasso’s great Italian epic poem, Gerusalemme liberata (1581). It becomes clear that both the French painter and the English critic know the Italian poem well; it is far less certain, however, whether the intended English readership would have shared similar first-hand knowledge of either the picture or its literary source. Richardson’s paragone of the two forms is intended to emphasise Poussin’s ability ‘to make use of the Advantages This Art has over that of his Competitor’; problematically, however, the pre-eminence of the visual medium in this specific example can only be attested to by means of a sustained verbal comparison of the painting and its poetic source, which ultimately seems to imply a more complex, symbiotic relationship in the encounter between the visual and literary arts than Richardson initially admits.

The third chapter investigates the impact in England of visual depictions of scenes from Tasso’s romantic episodes, featuring both Rinaldo and Armida and the Tancredi and Erminia. Although no native English tradition of pictorial representation of Tasso’s poem ever developed, there is still evidence of a keen interest in such pictures: in the late 1620s Anthony Van Dyck received a commission for Charles I to produce a depiction of the Rinaldo and Armida episode, focused on a less familiar moment from canto 14, which he executed so successfully that it was instrumental in bringing the painter into the service of the king for the final decade of his career. The early eighteenth century witnessed the arrival in England of the first work by the French painter Nicolas Poussin, who repeatedly depicted scenes from a number of Tasso episodes during the 1620s and 1630s: his second version of the Tancredi and Erminia episode in canto 19 was brought to England by the collector Sir James Thornhill, and it soon inspired a detailed evaluation in relation to its literary source by the artist-critic Jonathan Richardson, which is also examined closely.

Jonathan Richardson’s reading of Milton prepared him to be the first author to write a theory of the sublime in the fine arts. Conversely, his preoccupations as a collector and connoisseur not only armed him to defend the authority of the first edition of Paradise Lost, they made both father and son acutely alive to the visual qualities of Milton’s verse. Yet because the Richardsons took Milton seriously as a pictorial poet and graphic artist, they were acutely aware of the indeterminate manner of Milton’s most sublime imagery. This insight was consequential to the history of aesthetic thought. For the Richardsons ensured that Milton would become a crucial point of reference in the eighteenth century’s disputes about the limits of poetry and painting, the characteristics of ancient and modern art, and the nature of the sublime.

The conclusion calls for a new approach to the history of the empirical sciences in the 17th and 18th centuries. For a long time, the practices associated with the cultivation of taste—whether understood as the kind of taste associated with food or that linked to aesthetic judgment—have been excluded from the history of empiricism. This exclusion has taken place because of a failure to recognize that today’s distinctions between the domain of taste—seen as an attempt to produce intersubjective agreement—and the domain of objectivity did not hold true in the 17th and early 18th centuries. The conclusion therefore proposes that paying more attention to the embodied practices concerned with the cultivation of taste may enable us to rethink the role of taste and aesthetics in the history of the empirical sciences. Finally, the conclusion discusses the hitherto unacknowledged role of nervous pathology in Jonathan Richardson’s Two Discourses on connoisseurship, an influential work of art criticism published in 1719. This example suggests that medical concerns about the body's responses to sensory experience may have had a far more important role in 18th-century aesthetics and art criticism than has yet been understood.

Chapter 3 discusses the writings Winckelmann published from Rome and Florence before his Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums in order to demonstrate the importance to them of eighteenth-century discourses of connoisseurship. The close relation that obtained between the activities of eighteenth-century connoisseurs and antiquarians is explored, and Winckelmann’s works, including his descriptions of Philipp von Stosch’s collection of engraved gems and of the Torso Belvedere, are analysed in detail in order to show how his approach to the periodization and visual analysis of artefacts was influenced by connoisseurial methods developed by Jonathan Richardson, Caylus, and Mariette, among others. The chapter closes with a discussion of Winckelmann’s role in making public the antiquities newly discovered at Pompeii and Herculaneum.