Simonides’ dictum “Painting is silent poetry, poetry is speaking painting” is very well known and appears over and over again in modern studies of ancient art and ecphrastic literature; Plutarch himself, who quotes it in The fame of the Athenians 3 (mor. 346F), refers to it elsewhere as “that often… Read more
In his History of Animals, Aristotle makes the following comment (HA VII 6, 585b28-586a4): “And from deformed [parents] deformed [offspring] comes to be, just as lame come to be from lame and blind from blind, and in general they resemble often the features that are against nature, and have inborn… Read more
Life-likeness is an old aesthetic ideal foregrounded time and again in ancient descriptions of works of art. The pertaining problems were addressed frequently: Perfect life-likeness in a way means perfect deception, while excessive authenticity can sometimes ruin the art work, as the epigram by Lucillius I quoted in my last… Read more
I am working on the problem of the authenticity of a series of fragments in the Doric dialect attributed to the mathematical Pythagorean Archytas of Tarentum, preserved by Stobaeus and called On Law and Justice (Περὶ νόμου καὶ δικαιοσύνης). A provisional version of the Greek texts and translation can be… Read more
As I mentioned in my previous post, the best evidence about Aristotle’s theoretical views about physiognomical inferences (if the passage is indeed by Aristotle) can be found at the very end of the Prior Analytics (in II 27, 70b7-38). For the application of these views, we have to turn to… Read more
