Ut Pictura Poesis: The Humanistic Theory of Painting

Abstract

Treatises on art and literature written between the middle of the sixteenth and middle of the eighteenth century nearly always remark on the close relationship between painting and poetry.1 The sister arts as they were generally called—and Lomazzo observes that they arrived at a single birth2—differed, it was acknowledged, in means and manner of expression, but were considered almost identical in fundamental nature, in content, and in purpose.3 The saying attributed by Plutarch to Simonides that painting is mute poetry, poetry a speaking picture, was quoted frequently and with enthusiasm; and Horace's famous simile ut pictura poesis—as is painting so is poetry4—which the writers on art expected one to read “as is poetry so is painting,”6 was invoked more and more as final sanction for a much closer relationship between the sister arts than Horace himself would probably have approved. So deeply rooted, in fact, was the association of painting with poetry that it is not unusual to find the critics referring in a way that startles the modern reader to poets as painters; and if they do not with equal bluntness call painters poets, at least they are almost unanimous in asserting that painting merits serious consideration as a liberal art only by virtue of its likeness to poetry. In the middle of the sixteenth century Ludovico Dolce is rather more inclusive than the average when he declares that not only poets, but all writers, are painters; that poetry, history, and in short, every composition of learned men (qualunque componimento de'dotti) is painting.6

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