Ut pictura poesis
For more than two decades, the season when the five senses are exalted by the awakening of nature has been celebrating poetry. Printemps des Poètes reminds us that nature is a work of art, that poetry is a work of art, and that art is poetic, that is, creative.
From Michelangelo to Michaux, poetry sometimes meets painting in the figures of the painter-poet or the poet-painter. It embodies a Western aesthetic ideal marked by the adage Ut pictura poesis, "Poetry is like painting" (1). By evoking distance and light, Horace places comparison in a sensory dimension, beyond the creative dimension. A poem is to be looked at, like a painting. Many centuries later, Leonardo da Vinci wrote: "Painting is poetry that can be seen, and poetry is painting that can be heard rather than seen". Hearing is thus involved in this relationship. The conjugation of the poetic and pictorial arts becomes a conjunction of the senses, where each sense is an open door to all the others. Tenfold, synesthesia... The gaze becomes tactile, and we taste the velvety texture of a fabric. The pictorial material delivers a sonority, and we hear the perfume of a few recited verses.
(1) Horace Ars poetica, v. 361-365 (1st c. BC)
(2) Leonardo da Vinci, Codex Urbinas Latinus, 1270
Clara Pagnussatt
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