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’s aesthetics (of theatre, music, and the fine arts) is extensive. The most prominent surveys of Diderot’s development of a theory of painting and the aesthetic beholder are Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality. Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1980), Hubertus Kohle, Ut Pictura Poesis non erit: Denis Diderots Kunstbegriff (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1989) and Jean Starobinski, Diderot dans l’espace des peintres, suivi de le sacrifice en rêve (Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1991) and, most recently
. 481: ut pictura poesis (see page 359); cf. M. Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge, 1990), p. 230. For painting as living writing or living narrative, see Bede, De Templo, trans. S. Connolly, On the Temple (Liverpool, 1995), II, p. 91. According to Gregory the Great, pictures were placed in churches so that those who could not read might at least read by seeing on the walls what they were unable to read in books: Gregory the Great, Letters, trans. J.R.C. Martyn (Toronto, 2004), Ep.XI.10. pp. 745–6, cf. Ep.IX.209, p. 674
to abstraction, because an audience is moved more sharply by seeing action with their own eyes than by simply hearing a narrative.36 It is this visual quality which makes poetry comparable to painting and sculpture (ut pictura poesis). The social and political utility of poetry should therefore not be underestimated. According to Horace, in fact, it tames wild men, inscribes laws, instils virtue and sets out the path of life (via vitae).37 The impact of such claims 34 Institutio Oratoria, X.5.4, p. 115. 35 Horace, Ars Poetica, trans. H.R. Fairclough (Loeb, 1929