Ut pictura poesis

Ut pictura poesis is an often-repeated Latin phrase, literally "as is painting so is poetry," which occurs most famously near the end of Horace's Ars Poetica. Horace meant that poetry (in its widest sense, "imaginative texts") merited the same careful interpretation that was, in Horace's day, reserved for painting.

Some centuries before, Simonides of Ceos (c. 556 – 468 BC) had stated, "Poema pictura loquens, pictura poema silens," meaning "Poetry is a speaking picture, painting a silent poetry." Throughout history, this claim has attracted spirited dispute. Plato found painting and writing to be unreliable sources of understanding since they simulated a false reality, and thus disregarded these practices entirely. In the Renaissance, a controversy arose over which of the two forms was superior, and it was concluded that painting took precedence because sight outranked hearing in the hierarchy of the senses. This resembles another heated debate at the time, the paragone, which opposed painting to sculpture.

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing opens his Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry (1766) by observing that "the first who compared painting with poetry [Simonides of Ceos] was a man of fine feeling," though, Lessing makes it clear, not a critic or philosopher. Lessing argues that painting is a synchronic, visual phenomenon, one of space that is immediately in its entirety understood and appreciated, while poetry (again, in its widest sense) is a diachronic art of the ear, one that depends on time to unfold itself for the reader's appreciation. He recommends that poetry and painting should not be confused, and that they are best practiced and appreciated "As two equitable friendly neighbouring states."

Commenting on the significance of the phrase "ut pictura poesis", Leon Golden states:

Poetry resembles painting. Some works will captivate you when you stand very close to them and others if you are at a greater distance. This one prefers a darker vantage point, that one wants to be seen in the light since it feels no terror before the penetrating judgment of the critic. This pleases only once, that will give pleasure even if we go back to it ten times over.

W. J. T. Mitchell trenchantly observed that "We tend to think that to compare poetry with painting is to make a metaphor, while to differentiate poetry from painting is to state a literal truth."

In Horace's Ars Poetica, the phrase "ut pictura poesis" comes immediately after another famous quotation "bonus dormitat Homerus", literally "even Homer nods", an indication that even the most skilled poet can compose inferior verse.