Plato's Variant. In his early writings Plato was
rather vague in his use of the term “imitation”: he
applied it to music and dance (Laws 798D) or confined
it to painting and sculpture (Republic 597D); at first
he called “imitative” only poetry in which, as in trag-
edy, the heroes speak for themselves (epic poetry de-
scribes and does not imitate, he said). Finally, however,
he accepted Socrates' broad concept which embraced
almost the entire art of painting, sculpture, and poetry.
Later, beginning with Book X of the Republic, his
conception of art as imitating reality grew very ex-
treme: he saw it as a passive and faithful act of copying
the outer world. This particular conception was in-
duced primarily by the then contemporary illusionist
art of painting. Plato's idea was similar to what was
in the nineteenth century advanced under the name
of “naturalism.” His theory was descriptive and not
normative; on the contrary, it disapproved of the imi-
tation of reality by art on the basis that imitation is
not the proper road to truth (Republic 603A, 605A;
Sophist 235D-236C).
