‘Love’s Use’ in Campaspe

Lyly’s Campaspe explores the roles of creative instruments—easel and canvas, pigments and words—in the erotic relationship between the painter Apelles and his model Campaspe. Like any object placed between two bodies in some kind of dynamic relation, these erotic instruments invariably generate friction and heat between Lyly’s lovers. Chapter 5 traces the medium and metaphor of painting, which shapes Apelles and Campaspe’s interactions according to particular artistic features. This chapter considers the erotic qualities of Campaspe’s portrait via classical and early modern psychological accounts of the “phantasm,” a pneumatic image of a beloved that can take on a life of its own. Lyly’s euphuistic language is an erotic instrument in its own right. Providing the lovers with more than a vocabulary, it affords them a structure, a conceptual system, which gives their experience of erotic desire its shape, its medium, and its meaning.