“Paintings would transform into poems, poems into music […]”. Poetry as Intersemiotic Translation in Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder and August Wilhelm Schlegel

This article examines W.H. Wackenroder’s Descriptions of Two Paintings and A.W. Schlegel’s Geistliche Gemählde. These texts are linked not only by their use of poetry to describe pictorial artworks, but also by their placement within collaborative projects shaped by shared authorship and genre hybridization. Although only a few years separate their publication — and despite Schlegel’s near-citational reuse of Wackenroder’s verses — their respective projects attest to a profound divergence. While converging in their shared focus on Italian Renaissance sacred art, the two authors hold fundamentally different conceptions of poetic language. These divergences, grounded in distinct views of the relationship between the arts, are ultimately illustrated through each writer’s specific use of poetic description.