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
I wasn't put on this earth to amass money or personal wealth. I was put on this earth to play guitar and write songs.
I use poetry to help me work through what I donβt understand, but I show up to each new poem with a backpack full of everywhere else that Iβve been.
I didn't have a philosophical understanding of music until I came to New York. I didn't understand how it applied to my kind and my generation. I thought it was just old people talking.
I believe entertainment can aspire to be art, and can become art, but if you set out to make art you're an idiot.
I gave my life to the Group Theatre, because in it I'm building something for myself. What I build, I am.
My drawings inspire, and are not to be defined. They place us, as does music, in the ambiguous realm of the undetermined.
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