e proportion one to another, will be understood in the same way
as if they spoke.

15.

Painting is mute poetry, and poetry is blind painting. Therefore these
two forms of poetry, or rather these two forms of painting, have
exchanged the senses through which they should reach the intellect.
Because if they are both of them painting, they must reach the brain by
the noblest sense, namely, the eye; if they are both of them poetry,
they must reach the brain by the less noble sense, that is, the
hearing. Therefore we will appoint the man born deaf to be judge of
painting, and the man born blind to be judge of poetry; and if in the
painting the movements are appropriate {70} to the mental attributes of
the figures which is are engaged in any kind of action, there is no
doubt that the deaf man will understand the action and intentions of
the figures, but the blind man will never understand what the poet
shows, and what constitutes the glory of the poetry; since one of the
noblest functions of its art is to describe the deeds and the subjects
of stories, and adorned and delectable places with transparent waters
in which the green recesses of their course can be seen as the waves
disport themselves over meadows and fine pebbles, and the plants which
are mingled with them, and the gliding fishes, and similar
descriptions, which might just as well be made to a stone as to a man
born blind, since he has never seen that which composes the beauty of
the world, that is, light, darkness, colour, body, shape, place,
distance, propinquity, motion and rest, which are the ten ornaments of
nature.

But the deaf man, lacking the less noble sense, although he has at the
same time lost the gift of speech, since never having heard words
spoken he never has been able to learn any language, will nevertheless
perfectly understand every attribute of the human body better than a
man who can speak and hear; and likewise he will know the works of
painters and what is represented in them, and the action which is
appropriate to such figures.

{71}

[Sidenote: Painting is Mute Poetry]

16.

Painting is mute poetry, and poetry is blind painting, and both imitate
nature to the best of their powers, and both can demonstrate moral
principles, as Apelles did in his Calumny. And since painting
ministers to the most noble of the senses, the eye, a harmonious
proportion ensues from it, that is to say, that just as from the
concord of many divers