”The Painting Literature Analogy” in Colors of

Rhetoric

Wendy Steiner

Simonides of Ceos (c556-468 BC)

1st locus classicusPainting 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 analogyPoem:→ preserves its own symbolic property (6)→ speech emanating from a body→ palpability of the visible medium→ physical presence is attributedPainting: → 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

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 poetryPoetry 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

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