V
The idea of imitation having been thoroughly dis-
cussed and analyzed nothing much was left to be done.
The eighteenth century inherited and accepted this
idea but ceased to be preoccupied with it. These senti-
ments were best voiced by an aesthetician who was
typical of his century, Edmund Burke: “Aristotle has
spoken so much and so solidly upon the force of imita-
tion in his poetics, that it makes any further discourse
upon this subject the less necessary.” This appeared
in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas
on the Sublime and the Beautiful ([1757], Part I, Sec.
XVI). However, Burke himself did not interpret imita-
tion in the Aristotelian way, as he demanded faithful
copying.
At the end of the eighteenth century after the dis-
covery of Herculaneum and Pompeii and the archeol-
ogists' travels in Greece, it became more popular than
ever to imitate antiquity. It was the era of Mengs and
Winckelmann, Adam and Flaxman, Canova and
Thorwaldsen. However, the concern was a matter of
practical application; the theory of imitation did not
advance farther.
The nineteenth century laid the greatest stress on
being faithful to nature (not to antiquity). Nevertheless,
the term “imitation,” which for ages played the leading
part in the theory of art, disappeared suddenly; it
acquired a pejorative meaning and was used to denote
something unauthentic, faked—imitations of diamonds,
marble, furs, etc., and could no longer be applied to
art. Which other terms have taken its place? Mainly
“realism” and “naturalism.” Those were the watch-
words of writers like G. Planche (1816), J. H. Champ-
fleury (1857) and É. Zola (about 1870) and artists,
beginning with G. Courbet (1855). The theory of
naturalism was, in fact, a continuation of the theory
of imitation but with a certain difference; it was con-
cerned not so much with art reproducing things but—
like science—exploring them.
The twentieth-century theorists of art abandoned
not only the term “imitation” but also its principle.
Our age does not deny that art relies on nature—even
Picasso says that it could not be possible otherwise—
but it does not maintain that art imitates nature. For
some art is construction, for others expression; for none
is it imitation. We indeed agree with the Greek
“mimesis” in its original sense of expression and the
Democritian sense of being guided by the laws of
nature. “We do
not wish to
copy nor to reproduce
nature,” writes Mondrian, “we want to
shape it as
nature shapes the fruit.” On the other hand, our times
do not wish to imitate in the sense of copying the
appearance of things, the idea which was in the fore-
ground for so many centuries after Plato. The majority
of contemporaries would rather agree with Girolamo
Savonarola in his
De simplicitate vitae humanae (ed.
Lyon [1638], III, 1, 87) who asserted that what in fact
belongs to art is only that which
does not imitate nature
(
ea sunt proprie artis, quae non Vere naturam imi-
tantur).
