lf according as they are more or less
powerful and according to age; because in the same circumstance an old
man or a youth will make a different movement.

[Sidenote: Power of Expression in Painting]

80.

The imagination does not perceive such excellent things as the eye,
because the eye receives the images or semblances from objects, and
transmits them to the perception, and from thence to the brain; and
there they are comprehended. But the imagination does not issue forth
from the brain, with the exception of that part of it which is
transmitted to the memory, and in the brain it remains and dies, if the
thing imagined is not of high quality. And in this case poetry is
formed in the mind or in the imagination of the poet, who depicts the
same objects as the painter, and by reason of the work of his fancy he
wishes to rival the painter, but in reality he is greatly inferior to
him, as we have shown above. Therefore with regard to the work of
fancy we will say that there is the same proportion between the art of
painting and that of poetry as exists between the body and the shadow
proceeding from it, and the proportion is still greater, inasmuch as
the shadow of such a body at least penetrates to {122} the brain
through the eye, but the imaginative embodiment of such a body does not
enter into the eye, but is born in the dark brain. Ah! What
difference there is between imagining such a light in the darkness of
the brain and seeing it in concrete shape set free from all darkness.

If thou, O poet, dost represent the battle and its bloodshed enveloped
by the obscure and dark air, amid the smoke of the terrifying and
deadly engines, together with the thick dust which darkens the air, and
the flight in terror of wretches panic-stricken by horrible death; in
this case the painter will surpass thee, because thy pen will be used
up before thou hast scarcely begun to describe what the art of the
painter represents for thee immediately. And thy tongue shall be
parched with thirst and thy body worn out with weariness and hunger
before thou canst show what the painter will reveal in an instant of
time. And in this painting there lacks nothing save the soul of the
things depicted, and every body is represented in its entirety as far
as it is visible in one aspect; and it would be a long and most tedious
matter for poetry to enumerate all the movements of each soldier in
such a war, and the parts of their limbs and th