“ For a single thing, as I have said. Homer has commonly but a single epithet...
A ship is to him at one time the black ship, at another the hollow ship, and again the swift ship. At most it is the well- manned black ship. Further painting of the ship he does not attempt. But of the ship's sailing, its departure and arrival, he makes so detailed a picture, that the artist would have to paint five or six, to put the whole upon his canvas. — Lessing, Laocoon, 93
Both, he perceived, represent absent things as present, give us the appearance as the reality. Both produce illusion, and the illusion of both is pleasing. (vii)
[…] that in regard to the latter, therefore, poetry can come to the aid of painting; in regard to the former, painting to the aid of poetry, by illustration and example. (vii-viii)
the arts themselves differ both in the objects and in the methods of their imitation (ix)
I
Among the lost works of Sophocles was a Laocoon. If fate had but spared it to us! From the slight references to the piece in some of the old grammarians, we cannot determine how the poet treated his subject. (6)
II
Rage and despair disfigured none of their works. I venture to maintain that they never represented a fury. Wrath they tempered into severity. In poetry we have the wrathful Jupiter, who hurls the thunderbolt; in art he is simply the austere (12)
III
Since the artist can use but a single moment of ever-changing nature, and the painter must further confine his study of this one moment to a single point of view, while their works are made not simply to be looked at, but to be contemplated long and often, evidently the most fruitful moment and the most fruitful aspect of that moment must be chosen. Now that only is fruitful which allows free play to the imagination. The more we see the more we must be able to imagine; and the more we imagine, the more we must think we see. (16-7)
Again, since this single moment receives from art an unchanging duration, it should express nothing essentially transitory. (17)
La Mettrie, who had himself painted and engraved as a second Democritus, laughs only the first time we look at him. Looked at again, the philosopher becomes a buffoon, and his laugh a grimace. (18)
[Timomachus had] rare skill in selecting that point which leads the observer to imagine the crisis without actually showing it […] We anticipate the result and tremble at the idea of soon seeing Medea in her unmitigated ferocity, our imagination far outstripping any thing the painter could have shown us of that terrible moment. (18)
This wisdom on the part of Timomachus won for him great and frequent praise, and raised him far above another artist unknown, who was foolish enough to paint Medea at the height of her madness, thus giving to this transient access of passion a duration that outrages nature. The poet censures him for this, and says very justly, apostrophizing the picture, " Art thou then for ever thirsting for the blood of thy children? Is there always a new Jason and a new Creusa to inflame thy rage? To the devil with the very picture of thee!” he adds angrily. (19)
V
Different versions of Laocoon described on pages 33-5.
In poetry a robe is no robe. It conceals nothing. Our imagination sees through it in every part. (40)
VI
[The artist] followed the poet without suffering him in the smallest particular to mislead them. A model was set them, but the task of transferring it from one art into another gave them abundant opportunity for independent thought. The originality manifested in their deviations from the model proves them to have been no less great in their art than the poet was in his. (42)
VII
I acknowledge that when Juvenal compares an idle patrician to a Hermes-column, we should hardly perceive the point of the comparison unless we had seen such a column and knew it to be a poorly cut pillar, bearing the head, or at most the trunk, of the god, and, owing to the want of hands and feet, suggesting the idea of inactivity. (52-3)
VIII
To the artist they are personified abstractions which must always be characterized in the same way, or we fail to recognize them. In poetry, on the contrary, they are real beings, acting and working, and possessing, besides their general character, qualities and passions which may upon occasion take precedence. (58) // My painting is like this. It takes an image out to use to depict a certain thing (keywords) but abstracts it slightly so that this identification can not be made.
“the poet alone possesses the art of so combining negative with positive traits as to unite two appearances in one.” (60)
X
When a poet personifies abstractions he sufficiently indicates their character by their name and employment.
These means are wanting to the artist, who must therefore give to his personified abstractions certain symbols by which they may be recognized. These symbols, because they are something else and mean something else, constitute them allegorical figures.” (68)
They should not regard the limitations of painting as beauties in their own art, nor consider the expedients which painting has invented in order to keep pace with poetry, as graces which they have any reason to envy her. By the use of symbols the artist exalts a mere figure into a being of a higher order. Should the poet employ the same artistic machinery he would convert a superior being into a doll. (69)
XI
We weigh invention and execution in opposite scales, and are inclined to require from the master as much less of one as he has given us more of the other.” (72)
condemnation of mimicry on page 73
XII
This invisibility [of the gods in the battle of Troy] leaves the imagination free play to enlarge the scene at will, and picture the gods and their movements on a scale far grander than the measure of common humanity. But painting must accept a visible theatre, whose various fixed parts become a scale of measurement for the persons acting upon it. This scale is always before the eye, and the disproportionate size of any superhuman figures makes beings that were grand in the poem monstrous on canvas. (78)
Its chief superiority [that of the poetical picture] is that it leads us through a whole gallery of pictures up to the point depicted by the artist. (85)
XVI
I argue thus. If it be true that painting employs wholly different signs or means of imitation from poetry, — the one using forms and colors in space, the other articulate sounds in time, — and if signs must unquestionably stand in convenient relation with the thing signified, then signs arranged side by side can represent only objects existing side by side, or whose parts so exist, while consecutive signs can express only objects which succeed each other, or whose parts succeed each other, in time. (91) // words can be both; they’re side by side and (usually) consecutive
Objects which succeed each other, or whose parts succeed each other in time, are actions. (91) // reading is an action
Re: bodies “They continue, and, at any moment of their continuance, may assume a different appear- ance and stand in different relations. Every one of these momentary appearances and groupings was the result of a preceding, may become the cause of a following, and is therefore the centre of a present, action. // this is the image component of the my painting]
“Actions, on the other hand, cannot exist independently, but must always be joined to certain agents. In so far as those agents are bodies or are regarded as such, poetry describes also bodies, but only indirectly through actions.” (91-2)
By countless devices [Homer] presents this single object in a series of moments, in every one of which it assumes a different form. Only in the final one can the painter seize it, and show us ready made [my emphasis; cf. Duchamp] what the artist has been showing us in the making. If Homer, for instance, wants us to see the chariot of Juno, Hebe must put it together piece by piece before our eyes. We see the wheels, the axle, the seat, the pole, the traces and straps, not already in place, but as they come together under Hebe's hands. the wheels are the only part on which the poet bestows more than a single epithet”. (93–4) // strategy for abstraction
Similarly, “But what does Homer care how far he outstrips the painter ? Instead of a copy, he gives us the history of the sceptre. First we see it in the workshop of Vulcan ; then it shines in the hands of Jupiter; now it betokens the dignity of Mercury; now it is the baton of warlike Pelops ; and again the shepherd's staff of peace-loving Atreus.” (96)
“Not only when Homer's descriptions have these higher aims in view, but even when his sole object is the picture, he will yet break this up into a sort of history of the object in order that the various parts, which we see side by side in nature [as bodies], may just as naturally follow each other [as actions] in his picture, and, as it were, keep pace with the flow of the narrative.” (99)
“And thus, as I have said, the poet shows us in the process of creation, what the painter can only show us as already existing.” (100)
XVII
“the signs employed in poetry not only follow each other, but are also arbitrary; and, as arbitrary signs, they are certainly capable of expressing things as they exist in space (101)
How do we obtain a clear ideta of a thing in space ? First we observe its separate parts, then the union of these parts, and finally the whole. Our senses perform these various operations with such amazing rapidity as to make them seem but one. This rapid- ity is absolutely essential to our obtaining an idea of the whole, which is nothing more than the result of the conception of the parts and of their connection with each other. Suppose now that the poet should lead us in proper order from one part of the object to the other ; suppose he should succeed in making the connection of these parts perfectly clear to us ; how much time will he have consumed ? The details, which the eye takes in at a glance, he enumerates slowly one by one, and it often happens that, by the time he has brought us to the last, we have forgotten the first. Yet from these details we are to form a picture. (102)
Once more, then, I do not deny that language has the power of describing a corporeal whole according to its parts. It certainly has, because its signs, although consecutive, are nevertheless arbitrary. (105)
XVIII
The rule is this, that succession in time is the province of the poet, co-existence in space that of the artist. (109)
To bring together into one and the same picture two points of time necessarily remote, […] is an encroachment of the painter on the domain of the poet, which good taste can never sanction. (109) // sorry, Lessing, haha
Painting and poetry should be like two just and friendly neighbours, neither of whom indeed is allowed to take unseemly liberties in the heart of the other's domain, but who exercise mutual forbearance on the borders, and effect a peaceful settlement for all the petty encroachments which circumstances may compel either to make in haste on the rights of the other. (110) // haha
Re: Rapheal’s drapery and time: “There is a reason for all his folds, either in the weight of the material or the tension of the limbs. We can often infer from their present condition what they had been previously. Raphael indeed aimed at giving them significance in this way. We can judge from the folds whether, previously to the present posture, a leg or an arm had been more in front or more behind, whether a limb had been bent and is now straightening itself, or whether it had been out- stretched and is now bending." (110-11)
Re: translation, “The Greek joins the subject with the first predicate and lets the others follow. He says, " round wheels, brazen, eight-spoked." Thus we know at once of what he is speaking, and learn first the thing and then Its accidents, which is the natural order of our thoughts. (113)
Re: Homer, wanting to descibre Achilles’ shield in a way proper to Poetry, he describes its creation, making “use of the happy device of substituting progression for coexistence, and thus converted the tiresome description of an object into a graphic picture of an action (114)
XIX
This single moment he makes as pregnant as possible, and reproduces it with all that power of illusion which in the presentation of visible objects art possesses above poetry. (120)
But what is not actually in the picture is there virtually, and the only true way of representing an actual picture in words is to combine what virtually exists in it with what is absolutely visible. The poet who allows himself to be bound by the limits of art may furnish data for a picture, out can never create one of his own. (121) // cf. Barthes, Camera Lucida
When I read [Constantinus Manasses’s wordy description of Helen’s beauty] it is like seeing stones rolled up a mountain, on whose summit they are to be built into a gorgeous edifice; but which all roll down of themselves on the other side. What picture does this crowd of words leave behind? (128-9) // cf. absurdism
XX
Thus Lucian, to give an idea of the beauty of Panthea, points to the most beautiful female statues by the old sculptors. What is this but a confession that here language of itself is powerless ; that poetry stammers, and eloquence grows dumb, unless art serve as interpreter. (135)
XXII
Zeuxis painted a Helen, and had the courage to write beneath his picture those famous lines of Homer wherein the elders express their admiration of her beauty. Never did painting and poetry engage in closer rivalry. Victory remained undecided, and both deserved to be crowned. (140)
XXIII
But a misshapen body and a beautiful soul are like oil and vinegar, which, however much they may be stirred together, will always remain distinct to the taste. They give rise to no third. Each one produces its own effect — the body distaste, the soul delight. (149)
