Volume Volume1\The Practice Of Painting
Entry# 653.
Contents: Vol. 1 | Vol. 2
Painting is superior to poetry (653. 654).
THAT PAINTING SURPASSES ALL HUMAN WORKS BY THE SUBTLE CONSIDERATIONS
BELONGING TO IT.
The eye, which is called the window of the soul, is the principal
means by which the central sense can most completely and abundantly
appreciate the infinite works of nature; and the ear is the second,
which acquires dignity by hearing of the things the eye has seen. If
you, historians, or poets, or mathematicians had not seen things
with your eyes you could not report of them in writing. And if you,
0 poet, tell a story with your pen, the painter with his brush can
tell it more easily, with simpler completeness and less tedious to
be understood. And if you call painting dumb poetry, the painter may
call poetry blind painting. Now which is the worse defect? to be
blind or dumb? Though the poet is as free as the painter in the
invention of his fictions they are not so satisfactory to men as
paintings; for, though poetry is able to describe forms, actions and
places in words, the painter deals with the actual similitude of the
forms, in order to represent them. Now tell me which is the nearer
to the actual man: the name of man or the image of the man. The name
of man differs in different countries, but his form is never changed
but by death.
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