From Ut Pictura Poesis to the Painted Poem in the Age of Romanticism.
The practice of linking visual art and literature has its origins in Horace’s term which means “as is painting, so is poetry.”
“Poetry resembles painting. 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.”
This famous saying meant that the same attention paid to poetry should also be devoted to literature. Note the emphasis on distance and proximity; this concept was bound up with the relationship of the viewer and the work of art. The “ut pictura poesis” idea was further developed in the eighteenth-century by the German theorist Gottfried Lessing in his essay “Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry” (1766). Lessing drew on another ancient writer Simonides, who wrote "poema pictura locguens, pictura poema silens" (poetry is a speaking picture, painting a silent [mute]. Lessing is also significant to Romanticism since he turned against French neo-classicism and encouraged his fellow countrymen, to read the English poets and Shakespeare as well as German authors like Goethe (above) and Schiller.[1]
[1] Wakefield, The French Romantics, 20.
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