1. ”The Painting Literature Analogy” in Colors of Rhetoric Wendy Steiner

2. Simonides of Ceos (c556-468 BC) 1st locus classicus Painting is mute poetry. (5) Poetry is a speaking picture. anthropomorphic ~ personified implicated hierarchy → poetry is considered to be superior to painting boundary is broken between art and life, sign and thing, writing and dialogue → artist as a rival of God (!) asymmetrical gaining out of the analogy Poem: → preserves its own symbolic property (6) → speech emanating from a body → palpability of the visible medium → physical presence is attributed Painting: → poetic without voice Leonardo’s objection: (6) if painting is mute poetry then poetry is blind painting → painting speaking a universal (?) language, hence it does not need a voice

3. Horace (65-8 BC) Ut pictura poesis (in Ars Poetica 18 BC) 2nd locus classicus Horace’s reality principle: relationship between the subject matter and what actually exists—correspondence to reality is crucial (8) Ut pictura poesis ~ as is painting, so is poetry Poetry is like painting: → both have their subjects existent in reality → both are limited in their mimetic adequacy (8) → a poem gains the immediacy of an actual object by making us think of physical objects (12) → STATIC/VISUAL/SPATIAL/SIMULTANEOUS → a painting gains the lifelike property of motion by making us see bodies in action → DYNAMIC/LINEAR/TEMPORAL/SUCCESSIVE

4. Lessing (1729-1781) (in Laokoon, An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry) ( 1766) 3rd locus classicus Painting is not like poetry since it does not represent the same reality. (13) Painting is to bodies as poetry is to actions. Lessing distinguishes the difference of poetry and painting. Subject matter should fit their expressive means. → poetry as articulated sounds in time → ACTIONS/DIACHRONIC art (13) → painting as form and colour in space → BODIES/SYNCHRONIC art