hich is the art of painting
designed to be--an imitation of things as they are, or as they
appear--of appearance or of reality?

Of appearance.

Then the imitator, I said, is a long way off the truth, and can do all
things because he lightly touches on a small part of them, and that part
an image. For example: A painter will paint a cobbler, carpenter, or
any other artist, though he knows nothing of their arts; and, if he is
a good artist, he may deceive children or simple persons, when he shows
them his picture of a carpenter from a distance, and they will fancy
that they are looking at a real carpenter.

Certainly.

And whenever any one informs us that he has found a man who knows all
the arts, and all things else that anybody knows, and every single thing
with a higher degree of accuracy than any other man--whoever tells us
this, I think that we can only imagine him to be a simple creature who
is likely to have been deceived by some wizard or actor whom he met, and
whom he thought all-knowing, because he himself was unable to analyse
the nature of knowledge and ignorance and imitation.

Most true.

And so, when we hear persons saying that the tragedians, and Homer, who
is at their head, know all the arts and all things human, virtue as well
as vice, and divine things too, for that the good poet cannot compose
well unless he knows his subject, and that he who has not this knowledge
can never be a poet, we ought to consider whether here also there may
not be a similar illusion. Perhaps they may have come across imitators
and been deceived by them; they may not have remembered when they saw
their works that these were but imitations thrice removed from the
truth, and could easily be made without any knowledge of the truth,
because they are appearances only and not realities? Or, after all, they
may be in the right, and poets do really know the things about which
they seem to the many to speak so well?

The question, he said, should by all means be considered.

Now do you suppose that if a person were able to make the original as
well as the image, he would seriously devote himself to the image-making
branch? Would he allow imitation to be the ruling principle of his life,
as if he had nothing higher in him?

I should say not.

The real artist, who knew what he was imitating, would be interested in
realities and not in imitations; and would desire to leave as memorials
of himself works many and fair; and, in