Fronti Fides / Martini Scribleri Vera Effigies
by Herman Van Kruys
1729
Courtesy of the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto
Frontispiece to Pope Alexander's Supremacy and Infallibility Examin'd (1729), a pamphlet written by George Duckett and John Dennis in response to Pope's Dunciad Variorum (1729). The image clearly evokes Kneller's portrait of 1722, but emphasizes the poet's lean, drawn face and furrowed brow rather than the thoughtful, serene, and handsome repose of the poetic genius depicted by Kneller. The hunchback that Kneller effaces is clearly delineated here, to emphasize Pope's deformity: the engraving shows Pope as an ape, perhaps in reference to his name as abbreviated by his enemies, A.P—E, but also likely to suggest that he merely mimics the true authorial genius in his translations of Homer. The column on which Pope perches recalls the illustration facing the first page of Book II in the Dunciad Variorum, which shows an owl perched on a column fashioned partly from books. To the right of the column is an ass with an ink pot hanging from its ear, an allusion to the ass featured on the title page of Pope's Variorum.
—by Allison Muri, March 2014
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