The Long Conversation between Painting and Poetry
through the centuries
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21st |
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Simonides |
"Painting is silent poetry, and poetry painting that speaks." Attributed to Simonides by Plutarch in his De Gloria Atheniensium, III, 346. ^ |
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Plato |
For Plato, poets and painters are both imitators and their work a third-generation removed from the truth. "Therefore it would at last be just for us to seize him [the imitative poet] and set him beside the painter as his antistrophe. For he is like the painter in making things that are ordinary by the standard of truth; and he is also similar in keeping company with a part of the soul that is on the same level and not with the best part. And thus we should at last be justified in not admitting him into a city that is going to be under good laws, because he awakens this part of the soul and nourishes it, and, by making it strong, destroys the calculating part…" (The Republic 605a-c). ^ |
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~335 B.C. |
Aristotle |
"The poet being an imitator just like the painter or other maker of likenesses, he must necessarily in all instances represent things in one or other of three aspects, either as they were or are, or as they are said or thought to be or to have been, or as they ought to be." (Poetics 1460b:25) ^ |
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Horace |
"Ut pictura poesis," Horace writes, "As is painting so is poetry." He continues in his epistle to the sons of Piso (Ars Poetica): "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." ^ |
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Lu Chi |
"Everything in the world
exists within the tip of a brush." (Essay on
Literature) ^ |
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Wang Wei |
Wang
Wei was a renowned poet, musician, and painter. Sung Dynasty poet Shu Shih later praised
him saying:
"In his poetry there is painting and in his painting there is poetry."
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The image of falling leaves |
By the 2nd century in Chinese poetry the image of falling
leaves had become a symbol for "troubled times and great talent being
cast aside. Admittedly hyperbolic, the allusion became popular in exile
poetry before it appeared as a painting theme in the eleventh century.
Paintings of falling leaves are sometimes accompanied by poems that empathize
with unjust political punishment." (Alfreda J.
Murck, |
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The |
In the 11th century Chinese
scholars said that "'Poetry is painting without form, and painting is
poetry with form.' It was at this time that paintings became known as
'soundless poems.' Not surprisingly, the 11th-century landscape painter Kuo
Hsi felt that an artist who captures the essence of a poem will naturally be
able to convey it through a visual image. Under 12th century
Emperor Hui-tsung (r. 1101-1125), lines of poetry were even frequently used
to test painters at court. In illustrating the line, 'Scattered peaks conceal
an ancient temple,' for example, most painters showed the tip of a pagoda, a
roof, or even an entire building. The top candidate, however, depicted only a
banner peaking out from the mountains, suggesting a temple concealed within
the vast landscape. Hence, allusion is ideal for conveying the infinite
possibilities of a poetic line. As scholar art became the mainstream of
Chinese painting, artists not only described the natural world but also
turned to art to express their feelings and ideas. Lines of poetry and
writing provided an ideal vehicle for expression and illustration by artists,
and 'Painting is in poetry and poetry is in painting' became a distinctive
feature of Chinese art." ( |
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Ma Yuan and Emperor Song
Ningzong |
Ma Yuan, one of the most famous artists of the Southern Song Dynasty (1126-1276), collaborated with the Emperor Song Ningzong on the Album of Poetry and Painting. ^ |
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Persian Miniatures |
Persian painters created beautiful illustrations for the national epic poem, the Shahnama, written by Abu'l Qasim Firdausi in 1010. The historical exploits recounted in that great poem become essential themes for the tradition of Persian miniature paintings. ^ |
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Leonardo da Vinci |
In his treatise on painting, Leonardo defends the primacy
of painting against poets who have haughtily ranked painting as a mechanical
art: "And if you call painting dumb poetry, the painter may call poetry
blind painting. Now which is the worse defect? to be blind or dumb? Though
the poet is as free as the painter in the invention of his fictions they are
not so satisfactory to men as paintings; for, though poetry is able to
describe forms, actions and places in words, the painter deals with the
actual similitude of the forms, in order to represent them…. And if the poet
gratifies the sense by means of the ear, the painter does so by the eye—the
worthier sense; but I will say no more of this but that, if a good painter
represents the fury of a battle, and if a poet describes one, and they are
both together put before the public, you will see where most of the
spectators will stop, to which they will pay the most attention, on which
they will bestow most praise, and which will satisfy the best. Undoubtedly
painting being by a long way the more intelligible and beautiful, will please
most." (From page 16 a-b of a fragment of Leonardo's Libro di
Pittura, in the Library of Lord Ashburnham. The Notebooks of Leonardo
da Vinci, Vol. I edited by Jean Paul Richter, Sections 653-654. ) ^ |
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1533 |
Michelangelo |
At the age of sixty, Michelangelo starts to write poetry seriously, beginning with love sonnets, and becomes the first great painter-poet in the European tradition. ^ |
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Ragamala paintings |
Indian ragamala
paintings "illustrate poetry dealing with musical forms and actually
help to instruct the musicians on the mood of the piece and the notes they
should use to play it." ^ |
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3rd Earl of
Shaftesbury |
"Comparisons and parallel[s] … between painting and poetry … [are] almost ever absurd and at best constrained, lame and defective." Plastics ^ |
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1766 |
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing |
In his book Laokoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry Lessing attacks the tradition of ut pictura poesis as having caused great misunderstandings about the true nature of painting and poetry. ^ |
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1789 |
William Blake |
Blake writes, engraves, and prints his first illuminated
book of poems, Songs of Innocence, combining great poetry with vibrant
images. ^ |
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1856 |
"Painting is properly to be opposed to speaking or writing,
but not to poetry. Both painting and speaking are methods of expression.
Poetry is the employment of either for the noblest purposes" Modern
Painters, Volume 3 (5.31) ^ |
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1940 |
W. H. Auden |
Auden's poem "Musée des Beaux Arts" is a brilliant exposition on a major theme of the great European painters, with a special focus on Breughel's painting Icarus: "About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters: how well they understood Its human position; how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;" ^ |
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1951 |
Wallace Stevens |
Stevens devotes a whole chapter in his book on poetics, The Necessary Angel, to the "The Relations Between Poetry and Painting," where he writes, "No poet can have failed to recognize how often a detail, a propos or remark, in respect to painting, applies also to poetry. The truth is that there seems to exist a corpus of remarks in respect to painting, most often the remarks of painters themselves, which are as significant to poets as to painters. All of these details, to the extent that they have meaning for poets as well as for painters, are specific instances of relations between poetry and painting. I suppose, therefore, that it would be possible to study poetry by studying painting, or that one could become a painter after one had become a poet, not to speak of carrying on in both métiers at once, with the economy of genius, as Blake did. Let me illustrate this point of the double value (and one might well call it the multifold value) of sayings for painters that mean as much for poets because they are, after all, sayings about art. Does not the saying of Picasso that a picture is a horde of destructions also say that a poem is a horde of destructions?" ^ |
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1962 |
William Carlos Williams |
In his poem "The Dance" Williams writes a rollicking song for another Breughel painting: "In Breughel's great picture, The Kermess, the dancers go round, they go round and around, the squeal and the blare and the tweedle of bagpipes, a bugle and fiddles …" ^ |
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1977 |
Robert Lowell |
"The painter's vision is not a lens, it trembles
to caress the light," |
Please join this long conversation between poetry and painting by emailing your thoughts or research. If you're a poet or painter, how has that other art affected your work? If you are a student, critic, or lover of the arts what conjunctions or disjunctions between poetry and painting have you experienced?
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