quote · Source-linked selection
The imagination is to the effect as the shadow to the opaque body which causes the shadow, and the proportion is the same between poetry and painting. Because poetry produces its results in the imagination of the reader, and painting produces them in a concrete reality outside the eye, so that the eye receives its images just as if they were the works of nature; and poetry produces its results without images, and they do not pass to the brain through the channel of the visual faculty, as in painting.
The imagination is to the effect as the shadow to the opaque body which causes the shadow, and the proportion is the same between poetry and painting. Because poetry produces its results in the imagination of the reader, and painting produces them in a concrete reality outside the eye, so that the eye receives its images just as if they were the works of nature; and poetry produces its results without images, and they do not pass to the brain through the channel of the visual faculty, as in painting.
Approximate author period: c. 1486 AD · medieval
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Begin with source-checked readings and explanations ↗Attribution & collection notes
- Author or tradition
- Leonardo da Vinci
Attribution: attributed - Country attributed
- Not established
A country attribution does not establish the earliest origin. - Historical period
- Approximate author period: c. 1486 AD · medieval
author lifetime midpoint (1452–1519); not quotation composition date
An author lifetime, approximate period or collection date is not necessarily the date when these words were first written or spoken. - Recorded source
- Thoughts on Art and Life (1906 English edition) (1906 AD)
Thoughts on Art, complete printed unit 9; Maurice Baring translation; Boston: The Merrymount Press,1906
A collection's publication date can be later than the words it records.
The voice behind the words.
Represented by the complete source-numbered selections in Thoughts on Art and Life, Maurice Baring’s1906English translation, edited by Lewis Einstein. The catalogue records1452–1519; the historical collection is a selection from notebooks, not a continuous book composed by Leonardo or independent authentication of every attributed passage.
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