Few expressions of aesthetic crit. have led to more comment over a period of several centuries than u. p. p ., “as is painting so is poetry” (Horace, Ars poetica 361). Since Horace mentions the subject thrice (362–65, 1–47, 343–45), we may assume he had some particular interest in it, though investigations of Horadan dicta vis à vis contemporaneous Roman painting mostly still remain to be made. Suggestions of the simlitude of poetry and painting were certainly made before Horace, who almost certainly knew—even if he may not have assumed that his audience would recall—the more explicit earlier statement of Simonides of Keos (first attested in the Auctor ad Herrennium [4.39] and recorded by Plutarch as a commonplace [ De gloria Atheniensium 3.347a] more than a century after Ars poetica ): “poetry is a speaking picture, painting a silent [mute] poetry.”
The views of Aristotle—esp. that poetry and painting as arts of imitation (q.v.) should use the same principal element of composition (structure), namely, plot (q.v.) in tragedy and design (outline) in painting (see Poetics 6.19–21)—furnished additional authority for Ren. and later attempts to measure the degree and the nature of the kinship of the arts (the “parallel” of the arts) and to determine the order of precedence among them (the “paragone” of the arts). Moreover, as Lee observes in his analysis of the humanistic doctrine of painting, for which the Horatian dictum served as a kind of final sanction, “writers on art expected one to read [u. p. p.] ‘as is poetry so is painting.’”
The Horatian simile, however interpreted, asserted the likeness, if not the identity, of painting and poetry; and from so small a kernel came an extensive body of aesthetic speculation and, in particular, an impressive theory of art which prevailed in the 16th, 17th, and most of the 18th c While a few poets assented to the proposition that painting surpasses poetry in imitating human nature in action as well as in showing a Neoplatonic Ideal Beauty above nature, more of them raided the province of painting for the greater glory of poetry and announced that the pre-eminent painters are the poets. Both Cicero ( Tusc. Disp . 5.114) and Lucian (who praises Homer as painter [Eikones 8]) gave ancient authority for that view, which Petrarch and others reinforced. Among the poets described as master-painters have been Theocritus, Virgil, Tasso, Ariosto, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton, not to mention numerous later landscapists in descriptive poetry (q.v.), the Pre-Raphaelites, and the Parnassians (qq.v.). Painter and critic, Reynolds instanced Michelangelo as the prime witness to “the poetical part of our art” of painting ( Discourse 15, 1790). Thus a “poetical” or highly imaginative painter could be compared with the “painting” poets.
U. p. p . offered a formula—the success of which “one can hardly deny”, Wellek has remarked—for analyzing the relationship of poetry and painting (and other arts). However successful, the Hora-tian formula proved useful—at least was used—on many occasions as a precept to guide artistic endeavor, as an incitement to aesthetic argument, and as a basic element in several theories of poetry and the arts. Alone and with many accretions, modifications, and transformations, u. p. p . inspired a number of meaningful comments about the arts and poetry and even contributed to the theory and praxis of several painters, most notably “learned Poussin.” Moreover, like other commonplaces of crit., the Horatian formula stimulated and attracted to itself a variety of views of poetry and painting that are hard to relate to the original statement.
The Horatian simile has of course evoked opposition. Plutarch himself questions its validity ( Mor . 748A). In Plastics (1712), Shaftesbury warned, “Comparisons and parallel [s]… between painting and poetry… [are] almost ever absurd and at best constrained, lame and defective.” The chief counterattack came in Laokoön (1766), where Lessing contended that the theories of art associated with u. p. p . had been the principal, if not the only, begetter of the confusion of the arts which he deplored in the artistic practice and theory of the time. In this he was anticipated by Da Vinci, who raises these issues in his Notebooks (Literary Works, ed. J. P. Richter [1970], 1.48–68, 79–81). Saisselin has shown clearly that the “relations between the sister arts . . . were more complex than a reading of Lessing might lead one to believe.” Since then similar charges have been raised by other critics, e.g. Babbitt.
On the other hand, since the late 19th c. the kinship of poetry and painting has appeared in a more favorable light in connection with the arts of the East—particularly in generalizations about the “poetic feeling” of Oriental painting and the pictorial characteristics of Chinese and Japanese poetry (qq.v.) and, with the ever-increasing knowledge of Eastern art, in historical and critical studies setting forth the close relationships between Oriental poetry and painting. In China, poets were often painters; and critics, particularly in the 11th and 12th cs., stated the parallelism of poetry and painting in lang. close to that of Simonides and Horace. According to Chou Sun, “Painting and writing are one and the same art.” Writing implied calligraphy, which linked painting with poetry. Thus, a poet might “paint poetry” and a painter write “soundless poems.” These Eastern views led a number of Occidental poets to follow Japanese rules for poems and Chinese canons of painting in their poems—“images” directly presented to the eye, “free” impressions in a few strokes of syllables and lines, evocations of mood, lyrical epigrams, and abstractionist representations Still, these poems reflecting the Eastern tendency to regard poetry and painting as “two sides of the same thing” were experimental and specialized works tapping but a few of the resources of the two arts. Moreover, the critical analysis of “the same thing”, with its “two sides” remains at least as difficult as the explanation of the Horatian observation, “as is painting so is poetry.”
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