Ut pictura poesis

Abstract

The comparative notion of ut pictura poesis, “as is painting so is poetry” (Horace), although originally referred to literature, was extensively taken up in writings on visual arts and provided one of the core concepts of poetics and art theories from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century. As a full theory of painting was not inherited from antiquity, the foundations of Renaissance art theory are largely based on terms and concepts derived from the classical rhetorical tradition and Aristotle’s Poetics. The analogy between painting and poetry was either used instrumentally, in order to legitimize and consolidate the status of artists, or explored from a more sophisticated theoretical standpoint, against the backdrop of a dispute upon the relative superiority of the arts (paragone) through which the analogy was extended to sculpture. The concepts of imitation, idea, art, and beauty were the object of continuous redefinition in discussions pivoting on ut pictura poesis, fuelled by the established rhetorical practices of ekphrasis and enargeia. Despite the instauration of the modern system of the arts in the eighteenth century and the fundamental distinction between spatial and temporal arts (Lessing), ut pictura poesis continued to nourish the thought of artists, critics, and philosophers, culminating in trans-medial aesthetic experiences in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The influential methodological legacy of the “Sister-Arts” model, especially the assumed neutrality of a comparative approach to the study of art and literature, has been the object of profound revision and critique in the theoretical reflection of Visual Studies.