Ut pictura poesis
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
Illustration: Laocoön and His Sons ("Clamores horrendos" detail), photo by Marie-Lan Nguyen.
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Ut pictura poesis is Latin, literally "As is painting so is poetry." The statement (often repeated) occurs most famously in Horace's Ars Poetica, near the end:
- Poetry resembles painting. Some works will captivate you when you stand very close to them and others if you are at a greater distance. This one prefers a darker vantage point, that one wants to be seen in the light since it feels no terror before the penetrating judgment of the critic. This pleases only once, that will give pleasure even if we go back to it ten times over. (Unidentified English translation])
- A poem is like a picture : one strikes your fancy more, the nearer you stand ; another, the farther away. This courts the shade, that will wish to be seen in the light, and dreads not the critic insight of the judge. This pleased but once ; that, though ten times called for, will always please.
Horace meant that poetry (in its widest sense, "imaginative texts") merited the same careful interpretation that was, in Horace's day, reserved for painting. Horace's formula, equating the "sister arts," has proved more often a stimulus for dissent than for any useful theorizing on the resemblance between images and texts.
Lessing opens the Laocoön (1766) by observing that "the first who compared painting with poetry [Simonides] was a man of fine feeling," though, Lessing makes it clear, not a critic or philosopher. Lessing argues that painting is a synchronic, visual phenomenon, one of space that is immediately in its entirety understood and appreciated, while poetry (again, in its widest sense) is a diachronic art of the ear, one that depends on time to unfold itself for the reader's appreciation. He recommends that poetry and painting should not be confused, and that they are best practiced and appreciated “as two equitable and friendly neighbors.”
W. J. T. Mitchell trenchantly observed that "We tend to think that to compare poetry with painting is to make a metaphor, while to differentiate poetry from painting is to state a literal truth."
List of writings
- Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et sur la peinture by Jean-Baptiste Du Bos
- Lettre sur les sourds et les muets by Denis Diderot
- Three Treatises by James Harris
See also
