Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting that speaks.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the deep connection between visual art and poetry, suggesting that both forms express profound emotions and ideas.
Plutarch's quote highlights the interrelationship between painting and poetry, implying that while painting conveys emotion through visuals, poetry transmits feelings through language. The comparison suggests that both art forms share the ability to express complex thoughts and evoke feelings, with painting being a form of poetry that communicates without words and poetry being a visual representation of thought through the art of language.
In practice
In a lecture about the significance of art in culture, you could use this quote to introduce the conversation.
Sometimes small incidents, rather than glorious exploits, give us the best evidence of character. So, as portrait painters are more exact in doing the face, where the character is revealed, than the rest of the body, I must be allowed to give my more particular attention to the marks of the souls of men.
It were better to have no opinion of God at all than such a one as is unworthy of him; for the one is only belief - the other contempt.
Come back with your shield - or on it
The richest soil, if uncultivated, produces the rankest weeds.
For the correct analogy for the mind is not a vessel that needs filling, but wood that needs igniting.
Our senses through ignorance of Reality, falsely tell us that what appears to be, is. FEAR = False Evidence Appearing Real
When you grow up in the church, the only translation in that insular world that people understand is preaching. You're supposed to be a minister. So I was going down that path, and then I saw the Tonys.
When I paint a person, his enemies always find the portrait a good likeness.
I'll never get bored of seeing flawed women on the screen.
Creating is living doubly. The groping, anxious quest of a Proust, his meticulous collecting of flowers, of wallpapers, and of anxieties, signifies nothing else.
Beautiful things spoil nothing.
A picture is nothing but a bridge between the soul of the artist and that of the spectator.
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