Plastic time

time and the visual arts

John Brough

pp. 223-244

in: John Brough, Lester Embree (eds), The many faces of time, Berlin, Springer, 2000

Abstract

In his Elements of Criticism, published in 1761, Henry Home, Lord Kaimes, advanced the view that "a picture is confined to a moment of time, and cannot take in a succession of incidents."¹ A few years later, Lessing, an admirer of Kaimes, drew a sharp distinction between the arts of time—poetry, above all—and the arts of space—painting and sculpture. ". . . Succession of time," Lessing wrote in Laocoon, "is the province of the poet just as space is that of the painter."² A few innocent incursions of one of these two sorts of art into the territory of the other might be tolerated, but the integrity of each finally depends on its keeping within its own bounds. Thus painting, if it seeks to include time at all, must present only a single moment of a body or bodies in action; and poetry, if it intends to paint a word-picture of an object whose features exist simultaneously in space, must do so by describing the temporally extended action by which the object came into being, as Homer did in the case of Achilles' shield.

Cited authors

Homer