Ut Pictura Poesis

Sofonisba Anguissola, Selfportrait, 1556
(Selfportrait at the easel, painting a devotional scene)
Łańcut Castle
no copyright infringement intended
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Self-portrait_at_the_Easel_Painting_a_Devotional_Panel_by_Sofonisba_Anguissola.jpg)

Ut pictura poesis; erit quae, si propius stes,
te capiat magis, et quaedam, si longius abstes;
haec amat obscurum, uolet haec sub luce uideri,
iudicis argutum quae non formidat acumen;
haec placuit semel, haec deciens repetita placebit.

(http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/horace/arspoet.shtml)

I came to the Horatian stanzas while reading a book by Pamuk: The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist. I bought the book last Sunday and I started reading it, leaving aside other books. It puts Horatian stanzas in paradox.

Pamuk used in his book the English rendering of Ars Poetica given by D.A.Russell. I'll give you here the version of A.S.Kline:

Poetry’s like painting: there are pictures that attract
You more nearer to, and others from further away.
This needs the shadows, that to be seen in the light,
Not fearing the critic’s sharp eye: this pleased once,
That, though examined ten thousand times, still pleases.

Is literature a painting made of words? Ut Pictura Poesis: Pamuk follows here Lessing who says in Laocoön that painting is a synchronic art operating with space while poetry is diachronic and operates on time.

W.J.T.Mitchell says it bluntly, we tend to think that to compare poetry with painting is to make a metaphor, while to differentiate poetry from painting is to state a literal truth.

Then what about music? I think we should be very careful, each artwork creates a universe: an illusory world in which time and space are ultimately equivalent, because of the relations, among places in space, among moments in time, that's what matters, and these relations are of the same nature.

Here is a Romanian rendering of the Horatian stanza:

Ca si pictura-i poema; te-atrage vreuna de-aproape,
Alta te-ncanta mai mult daca stai s-o privesti de departe;
Una prefera intuneric; alta voieste lumina,
Ne-nspaimantata deloc de parerea acerbului critic;
Una odata-a placut, insa alta mereu o sa placa.

(trad de Ionel Marinescu, Ed. Univers, Bucuresti, 1970)

(Horace)

(Pamuk)