III
The ancient theory of imitation was founded on
typically Greek premisses: that the human mind is
passive and, therefore, able to perceive only what
exists. Secondly, even if it were able to invent some-
thing which does not exist, it would be ill-advised to
use this ability because the existing world is perfect
and nothing more perfect can be conceived.
In the Middle Ages other premisses were advanced,
formulated early by Dionysius the Areopagite and by
Saint Augustine. If art is to imitate, let it concentrate
on the invisible world which is more perfect. And if
art is to limit itself to the visible world, let it search
in that world for traces of eternal beauty. This may
be better achieved by means of symbols than by imi-
tating reality.
Early and radical thinkers like Tertullian went even
so far as to believe that God does not permit any
imitation of this world (omnem similitudinem vetat
fieri; De spectaculis, XXIII); the iconoclasts thought
the same; Scholastics, although free from such extreme
views, believed that only spiritual representations are
important. At the height of the Middle Ages Bonaven-
tura was to say of painters and sculptors that they only
show externally what they have thought internally (III,
Sent. D 37 dub). Painting which faithfully imitates
reality was derisively labelled the “aping of truth”
(simia veri, e.g., Alain of Lille, Anticlaudianus, I, 4).
As the result of such predilections the theory of
imitation was pushed aside in the Middle Ages and
the term imitatio rarely used. However, it did not
disappear completely; it survived in the twelfth-
century humanists, like John of Salisbury. His definition
of painting was the same as that of the ancients: it
is an imitation (imago est cuius generatio per imita-
tionem fit; Metalogicon, III, 8). Above all, Thomas
Aquinas, the great Aristotelian philosopher of the
Middle Ages, repeated the classical definition without
any reservations “art imitates nature” (ars imitatur
naturam; Phys. II, 4).
