Raphael's Poetics: Art and Poetry in High Renaissance Rome

 In Raphael’s Poetics, David Rijser applies the strategies of close reading and interpretation usually reserved for studying poetry to Raphael’s most famous works, including the Stanza della Segnatura. The book develops a visual grammar to decode the symbols within Raphael’s paintings and parse the meaning they would have had for a sixteenth-century audience. A masterful piece of art criticism that brings a wholly new perspective to the scholarly discussion, Raphael’s Poetics is a book of singular importance in the study of High Renaissance art and poetry.