Literature and the Visual Arts in Ancient Greece and Rome

Book excerpt: Does art merely imitate reality, or does it also create reality? Where does imagination come into the creative process? How do the arts portray movement through time and space? In Literature and the Visual Arts in Ancient Greece and Rome, D. Thomas Benediktson looks to the ancient Greek and Roman worlds to see how these and other questions were formulated and answered. As scholars have sought a unified doctrine for comparing written and visual arts, they have given the mimetic doctrines of Plato and Aristotle the most attention. By tracing ancient comparisons between the two art forms, Benediktson shows that there was no dominant theory of ut pictura poesis, or "as painting, poetry". Rather, as the ancient Mediterranean world moved from an oral to a written culture, literature became increasingly distinct from the visual arts, compelling the ancients to grapple with a variety of theoretical issues.