Ut pictura poesis?

Is poetry like painting? Is a poem like a painting?

Horace originated this phrase:

As painting, so is poesy. Some man's hand   Ut pictura poesis: erit quae, si proprius stes,
Will take you more, the nearer that you stand;   te capiat magis, et quaedam, si longius abstes.
As some the farther off: this loves the dark;   haec amat obscurum, volet haec sub luce videri,
This, fearing not the subtlest judge's mark,   iudicis, argutum quae non formidat acumen;
Will in the light be viewed: this, once the sight   haec placuit semelo, haec deciencs repetitat placebit.
Doth please: this, ten times over will delight.    
     

Ben Johnson's translation

  

Horace, Ars Poetica ll. 361-65

Historically

As Hollander says, poetry first likens itself to painting, not the other way around.(6) Ut pictura poesis came to stand for more than "as painting, so is poesy," for instance the apothegm attributed to Simonides Ceos, used in Plutach: "painting is mute poetry and poetry speaking picture."

Leonardo da Vinci in Paragone claims painting is unlike poetry in that painting is nobler and more powerful in effect and approaches through the preferred sense of sight.

Gotthold Lessing in Laocoön claims that poetry is unlike painting in that poetry includes time passing and can present the invisible and the imaginable.

Both of these views are complicated by the visual epistemology of Plato, whose philosophy disapproved the mirroring of mirroring. For instance the picturing of a bed is but the representation of the view of a mere bed, and several removes from the instance of true bedness.

John Hollander comments on these views:

"...the power of Art depends upon the power of those degrees of fictiveness: a thrice-removed painting can get at true Bedness better than a bed can and, Art would argue, better even than Plato's privileged mental faculty which alone can grasp the true form of Bedness." (7)

Harold Bloom's review takes on Hollander's stance on Plato.

Murray Krieger reviews the phrase:

"...ut pictura poesis serves as an injunction to guide a poetic art that, in spite of its resistant verbal resource, seeks to emulate the spatial and visual arts - the arts of the natural sign - to which the visible world is immediately accessible. As is generally acknowledged, that key Horatian phrase was able to serve this way only because it was utterly misread, or was lifted out of context in order to be misread - and misread in a way that violates the easy, informal, and unsystematic tone of the Epistle in which it appears." (78)

Much has been written on the punctuation of the sentence in which the phrase occurs, with the placement of the comma crucial to the strength of the injunction that later scholars read into it. (80)

  1. Ut pictura poesis, the usual meaning, as with the picture, so with poetry.
  2. Ut pictura poesis erit, ("it will be"), poetry will be like a picture, used to justify pictorialist insistence on reference to the natural sign.
  3. Ut pictura poesis? The title of this paper intends to question ekphrastic attempts in general as a poetic practice.

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Send questions or comments to jjacobs1@d.umn.edu . Last modified: 09/12/97