2ģIn the eighteenth century the German critic Gotthold Lessing took issue with Horace and the subsequent generations of critics, poets, and artists who had agreed with him, a consensus that had led poetry and painting to be called “the sister arts.” 3 In Laocoon: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry (1766), Lessing contended that the comparisons were fundamentally misguided, since literature unfolds in time and painting in space. This pleases only once, that will give pleasure even if we go back to it ten times over. 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. Some works will captivate you when you stand very close to them and others if you are at a greater distance.
For example, Horace is a poet, but he seems to give priority to visual judgment when he compares how both poetry and painting act on an audience: The contest is often uneven, as one form of presentation is temporarily favored over another. Word and ImageĢPoems spell out ideas and emotions that pictures can only show from the outside, but pictures show explicitly a visual world that poems can only lay before the eye of the mind. 1 On the one hand the Greeks created forms of sculpture and painting that have shaped our ways of seeing for millennia, while on the other hand their literature found a way to encompass that achievement through descriptive masterpieces such as Homer’s account of the shield of Achilles in Book 18 of the Iliad. The popular saying that a picture is worth a thousand words meets its match in the ancient concept of ekphrasis, the verbal representation of visual representation, wherein a whole gallery of pictures can be evoked in a few stanzas of poetic imagery. Today the phrase from Horace’s Ars Poetica is better known: Ut pictura poesis: "As is painting so is poetry." Both writers suggest an equivalence between the two arts, but audiences and critics have also seen the comparison as a sort of tug-of-war between forms of representation, wherein each strives to outdo the other by accomplishing what its rival cannot. 556–468 BC), who first said, according to Plutarch, that “poetry is a speaking picture, while painting is silent poetry.” (" Poema pictura loquens, pictura poema silens"). It was the Greek lyric poet Simonides of Keos (c. 1 The idea that we can compare poetry and painting has its roots in antiquity.
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