ity]

9.

The imagination is to the effect as the shadow to the opaque body which
causes the shadow, and the proportion is the same between poetry and
painting. Because poetry produces its results in the {66} imagination
of the reader, and painting produces them in a concrete reality outside
the eye, so that the eye receives its images just as if they were the
works of nature; and poetry produces its results without images, and
they do not pass to the brain through the channel of the visual
faculty, as in painting.

10.

Painting represents to the brain the works of nature with greater truth
and accuracy than speech or writing, but letters represent words with
greater truth, which painting does not do. But we say that the science
which represents the works of nature is more wonderful than that which
represents the works of the artificer, that is to say, the works of
man, which consist of words--such as poetry and the like--which issue
from the tongue of man.

[Sidenote: The Painter goes to Nature]

11.

Painting ministers to a nobler sense than poetry, depicts the forms of
the works of nature with greater truth than poetry; and the works of
nature are nobler than the words which are the works of man, because
there is the same proportion between the works of man and those of
nature as there is between man and God. Therefore it is a more worthy
thing to imitate the works of nature, which are the true images
embodied in reality, than to imitate the actions and the words of men.

{67}

And if thou, O poet, wishest to describe the works of nature by thine
unaided art, and dost represent various places and the forms of diverse
objects, the painter surpasses thee by an infinite degree of power; but
if thou wishest to have recourse to the aid of other sciences, apart
from poetry, they are not thy own; for instance, astrology, rhetoric,
theology, philosophy, geometry, arithmetic and the like. Thou art not
then a poet any longer. Thou transformest thyself, and art no longer
that of which we are speaking. Now seest thou not that if thou wishest
to go to nature, thou reachest her by the means of science, deduced by
others from the effects of nature? And the painter, through himself
alone, without the aid of aught appertaining to the various sciences,
or by any other means, achieves directly the imitation of the things of
nature. By painting, lovers are attracted to the images of the beloved
to converse with