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I shall only beg pardon for such a profusion of Latin quotations; which I should not have made use of, but that I feared my own judgment would have looked too singular on such a subject, had not I supported it by the practice and authority of Virgil. Animum pictura pascit inani. VIRG., AEn. i. 464. And with the shadowy picture feeds his mind.
Wonderful indeed! yet not at all distracting is the variety of excellence that one contemplates here; such matters! and such scholars! The sweetly playful pencil of Albano, I would compare to Waller among our English poets; Domenichino to Otway, and Guido Rheni to Rowe; if such liberties might be permitted on the old notion of ut pictura poesis.
But having already touched upon the chief points of this tradition, and exceeded the measure of my paper, I shall not give any further account of it. First Paper. Ut pictura poesis erit HOR., Ars Poet. 361. Poems like pictures are. Nothing is so much admired, and so little understood, as wit. No author that I know of has written professedly upon it.
The change of person pleasantly puts 'Tory' for 'Whig, and avoids party heat by implying a suggestion that excesses are not all on one side. Sacheverell had been a College friend of Addison's. No. 58. Monday, May 7, 1711. Addison. Ut pictura poesis erit ... Hor. Nothing is so much admired, and so little understood, as Wit.
A word or two, now, about the repainting by which this pictura extincta has been revived to meet existing taste. The sky is entirely daubed over with fresh blue; yet it leaves with unusual care the original outline of the descending angel, and of the white clouds about his body.
Showed him all he knew: talked with him of many things he felt himself unable to paint: made him a workman and a gentleman, above all, a Christian, yet left him a shepherd. And Heaven had made him such a painter, that, at his height, the words of his epitaph are in nowise overwrought: "Ille ego sum, per quem pictura extincta revixit."
If, as I believe, emotional thought rather than imagery is the essence of poetry, then the modern school of imagists and their French forbears among the "Parnassiens" are mistaken. Their effort comes in the end to a revival of the old thesis ut pictura poesis, the attempt to make poetry a vision of nature rather than an expression of the inner life.
This he does in what he says was a common phrase that "poetry is vocal painting, and painting, silent poetry." The false analogy, "ut pictura poesis," establishing, as it does, a sanction in criticism for the static in drama, flourished until Lessing exposed it in his Laocoon.
And the law of painting says: in ipsa legunt qui literas nesciunt, and further on says: pro lectione pictura est.
But although SICUT PICTURA POESIS is an ancient and undisputed axiom although poetry and painting both address themselves to the same object of exciting the human imagination, by presenting to it pleasing or sublime images of ideal scenes yet the one conveying itself through the ears to the understanding, and the other applying itself only to the eyes, the subjects which are best suited to the bard or tale-teller are often totally unfit for painting, where the artist must present in a single glance all that his art has power to tell us.
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