Who said his mistress' eyes were like the sun?

    "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun." So begins Shakespeare's famous Sonnet 130, a satire of traditional love poetry which idealized the woman through various comparisons, usually of her body to a beauty of nature. But who ever said that his mistress' eyes were like the sun? This tradition of idolatry in love poetry, sometimes referred to as the genre of blasons, dates back (recognizably) to the 14th Century in Italy.

    Petrarch, the poet and "father of humanism" for whom the Petrarchan sonnet is named, wrote a collection of love poetry for a woman named Laura. Petrarch composed his poems in the mid-14th Century, although Il Canzoniere––a collection of those poems––was not published until the mid-15th Century. Below is a translation of his poem 90, 'Erano i capei d'oro a l'aura sparsi.'

She let her gold hair scatter in the breeze

that twined it in a thousand sweet knots,

and wavering light, beyond measure, would burn

in those beautiful eyes, which are now so dim:

and it seemed to me her face wore the colour

of pity, I do not know whether false or true:

I who had the lure of love in my breast,

what wonder if I suddenly caught fire?

Her way of moving was no mortal thing,

but of angelic form: and her speech

rang higher than a mere human voice.

A celestial spirit, a living sun

was what I saw: and if she is not such now,

the wound’s not healed, although the bow is slack.

    Shakespeare's Sonnet 130 responds and refutes some of these comparisons. The annotations above correspond in color to Shakespeare's lines.

• "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;" (1)
• "If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head." (4)
• "That music hath a far more pleasing sound;" (10)
• "My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground." (12)

    In 1444, Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini (who became Pope Pius II), wrote The Tale of Two Lovers. Written in Latin, the epistolary novel tells the story of the love between Lucretia, a married woman, and Euryalus, a subordinate to the Duke of Austria, in Italy. Below is a translation of the first description of Lucretia.

    This lady was taller than the others. Her hair was long, the colour of beaten gold, and she wore it not hanging down her back, as maidens do, but bound up with gold and precious stones. Her lofty forehead, of good proportions, was without a wrinkle, and her arched eyebrows were dark and slender, with a due space between. Such was the splendour of her eyes that, like the sun, they dazzled all who looked on them; with such eyes she could kill whom she chose and, when she would, restore the dead to life. Her nose was straight in contour, evenly dividing her rosy cheeks, while nothing could be sweeter, nothing more pleasant to see than those cheeks which, when she laughed, broke in a little dimple on either side. And all who saw those dimples longed to kiss them. A small and well-shaped mouth, coral lips made to be bitten, straight little teeth, that shone like crystal, and between them, running to and fro, a tremulous tongue that uttered not speech, but sweetest harmonies. And how can I describe the beauty of her mind, the whiteness of her breast?

    Shakespeare's Sonnet 130 mocks those very comparisons, which appear below in order of Shakespeare's sonnet and color-coded with the Shakespearean lines.

• "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;" (1)
• "Coral is far more read than her lips' red;" (2)
• "If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;" (3)
• "But no such roses see I in her cheeks;" (6)
• "That music hath a far more pleasing sound;" (10)

    Shakespeare was not alone in finding these Petrarchan hyperbolic comparisons to be ridiculous. This engraving depicts "La Belle Charité," a 'beautiful' character in the French novel Le Berger Extravagant (The Extravagant Shepherd). Dated in 1627, the engraving illustrates the same satire of blasons as Shakespeare's Sonnet 130. Here, the mistress' eyes are not simply like the sun. Rather, they are the sun. The result of over-idolization is not beautiful at all––in fact, it's quite horrifying.