idea of art as imitation

PLATO’S IDEA OF MIMESIS
The idea of art as imitation can be traced back to book ten of Plato’s The Republic, c.340 BCE (Sheppard 1987: 5–9). Here, Plato dismissed painting, which he understood in terms of mimesis or imitation, as
having limited use. A painting of a table was neither the ideal form of the table (the perfect idea of a table which existed in divine imagination) nor the table made in a carpenter’s workshop. According to Plato, a painting of a table was merely a copy and had limited practical value since it could not even be used to actually make or design a real table (Plato 1987: 424–26). Although elsewhere, Plato was more supportive of schematic art (Hyman 1989: 84–88), his comments here suggest that the practice of strongly imitative and
illusionistic painting is little short of a fraudulent activity.

Plato’s approach to art was framed by the classical world and its values. The principle of imitation makes more sense when we consider the belief, prominent since the Renaissance, that artists should attempt as accurate a representation of their subject as possible. Beliefs of this kind shaped much of the Western canon of art – those examples judged by the academies to be benchmarks of their kind. In fact, it took nearly 400 years after the birth of Leonardo da Vinci, for an
avant-garde challenge to the dominant belief that art was fundamen- tally about achieving naturalistic effects. But the idea that art should
be imitative of things in the world remains widespread, and is not an
untypical response by some to aspects of contemporary practice.