by Andrew Millar
With a single drop of ink for a mirror, the Egyptian sorcerer undertakes to reveal to any chance comer far-reaching visions of the past.
George Eliot, Adam Bede
In The Republic, Plato lays down an early foundation for a philosophy of aesthetics in his discussions on the arts and its place in an ideal State. Plato’s most radical assertion regarding the arts is that they are wholly mimetic: that is, all art—poetry, painting, theatre—is a form of imitation of reality, and thus is removed from truth.[i] In this essay, I will first explicate Plato’s argument for art as mere imitation and demonstrate how this argument is applied to poetry and painting. I will also argue that Plato’s devaluation of the arts as mere imitation (and thus removed from ‘truth’) is complicated by several paradoxical limitations in his argument that are revealed when contrasted with real artworks. To do this, I will critique Plato’s argument using Parmigianino’s painting Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror[ii] and John Ashbery’s poem of the same name.
Plato begins his argument with the style of poetry—that is, to say, the form, rather than the content.[iii] He argues that all poetry is “a narration of events” and can take the form either of imitation, a simple narration, or some combination of these two.[iv] Simple narration is distinct from imitation in that it involves only the poet narrating events in the poet’s voice. Using an example from The Odyssey where Homer briefly assumes the person of Chryses in the narration, Plato claims that in speaking as another person, a poet assimilates their style and in turn imitates the person whose character they are assuming.[v] Before this point in the narrative, Homer was engaged in the simple narration of the poet. However, in a brief interlude, he assumed the voice of Chryses and thereby imitated his manner and person. Ergo, a poet’s narrative is one which is fundamentally driven by imitation for Plato.[vi] Plato does not believe that all poetry deals only in imitation, but even in the simple narration of events, he claims that there is often a mixture of imitation and narration, and that this is almost inescapable.[vii]
Given that Plato’s concerns with the arts are centred around their place in an ideal State, he takes political issue with poetic imitation. Firstly, he claims that it has already been decided that one person may only do one thing well, and not many.[viii] By the same logic, Plato argues this is true of imitation; no person may be able to imitate many things as well as they would be able to imitate a single thing.[ix] If these assumptions are granted, it follows then that such a person will not be able to “play a serious part in life” and simultaneously be someone who imitates many other roles, for they cannot succeed in many, but only in one. [x] In this sense, every person in the ideal State has a singular purpose to which they should strive, and imitation only occludes and obfuscates this purpose. The only form of imitation Plato concedes to is that of virtuous imitation.[xi] Plato permits this form of imitation in light of another criticism; imitation, when practiced in youth and throughout life, becomes habitual and second-nature. A person, in essence, becomes that which they are imitating.
To round out his argument, Plato delineates his conception of imitation using an example of bed-making in relation to painting.[xii] Drawing on the idea of Forms, Plato claims that of the many different beds in the world, there exists only one true Form: the Idea of a bed.[xiii] This in itself is a distinct metaphysical claim about the nature of reality. Plato’s world of Forms denotes that reality ‘in itself’ exists only in a pure Form. A bed-maker then will always make a bed “in accordance with the idea,”[xiv] but no maker of things can make the ideas themselves. There is only a single way for one to be such a maker of all works according to Plato—to spin a mirror round and round and encompass all within the Earth and around it. To do so would be to only create in appearance, which Plato argues is analogous to the work of the skilled painter, who may in one sense ‘create’ a bed in its appearance.[xv] Plato offers a tripartite structure of reality using three beds as an exemplar; there is the idea of the bed as it exists, made by God[xvi]; there is the bed made by the carpenter, which is only a particular bed and not the essence of a bed itself; and there is the bed of the painter.[xvii] In this sense, the painter is “thrice removed from the truth,”[xviii] much like the tragic poet. A painter for Plato merely imitates that which others create, which is already a degree removed from the ideal Form of an object as it is made by God.
Plato cements this distinction by comparing the various points of view from which one may observe a bed—the reality of its bed-ness remains the same despite its differing appearances: the difference is only apparent depending on where one may be standing in observation of the bed.[xix] Of the painter however, the imitation is not of things as they are—of an apparent difference—but rather of things as they appear. Thus, “The imitator … is a long way off the truth … A painter will paint a cobbler, carpenter, or any other artists, though he knows nothing of their arts.”[xx] In this sense, the imitator knows nothing of the nature of what they represent, they deal only in appearance, not in reality. Perhaps the ultimate, excoriating critique Plato offers of the painter (and poet) is this: “The real artist, who knew what he was imitating, would be interested in realities and not in imitations.”[xxi] This critique hinges on Plato’s ontological claims about the nature of reality as being dictated by Forms, and as such, painters and poets are working in the opposite direction of appearances, rather than with reality in itself.
Plato’s claim that the image-maker does not know true existence and deals only in appearances is challenged when looking to Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror by Parmigianino. In the painting, Parmigianino reproduces an image of himself as seen in a convex mirror, on a convex panel, with his hand distorted to an unnatural length, and the room around him curving away into the strange convex angles of the mirror.[xxii] Parmigianino’s painting plays paradoxically with the ideas of image and surface versus truth. For, who else better than a painter himself may paint a painter? And yet, Parmigianino knowingly paints using a convex mirror which distorts an expected surface reality, enacting a heightened realism that veers into the uncanny with the warping of space around his figure. Plato claims that the true artist would be interested in reality and not imitation, which is by nature untruthful.[xxiii] Parmigianino is a maker of imitations in the Platonic view and knows nothing of that whose image he reproduces. But what of himself? Does he not know intimately the delicate craft of his own artistry, of painting, and of himself? Parmigianino in this sense foregrounds the irreducibly perspectival nature of one’s relation to oneself. One could argue that the distortion of his own image in the convex mirror is a ‘truthful’ depiction of an innate limit to self-knowledge. The warped, distorted image of himself serves as a visual metaphor of his own limited perspective of himself as an image reproduced on a surface. Furthermore, perhaps there was no other way for Parmigianino to express such a truth other than through the visual medium of painting, and as such this would account for a structural inadequacy in Plato’s tripartite hierarchy. The playful paradox of the painting in its presentation of a truthful ‘reality’—that Parmigianino knows that which he paints, himself—and a distortion of surface reality in the convex mirror highlights a gap in one of Plato’s central concerns of the image-maker as artist.
Ashbery’s poem “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” also leans heavily into the paradox of representation and reality in its weaving in and out of vivid ekphrasis and Ashbery’s own musings on the painting and reality. Where Plato claims that imitation is thrice removed from truth, here Ashbery writes of Parmigianino:
“[…] he set himself
With great art to copy all that he saw in the glass,”
Chiefly his reflection, of which the portrait
Is the reflection once removed.[xxiv]
Now the image-maker of his own image stands only once removed from himself, perhaps twice when included in Ashbery’s poem. This in itself would still align with the Platonic view of a removal from truth, but Ashbery continues:
That everything is surface. The surface is what’s there
And nothing can exist except what’s there.[xxv]
Here Ashbery asserts that there is no such ideal Form of the thing. Surface is the only realm in which we exist and know the world. This in itself appears a direct challenge to Plato’s layering of truth from the ideal Form down to the imitation, where Ashbery troubles the distinctions between what exists as divine metaphysical truth and what exists in front of us, on the surface. Ashbery himself trained as a painter, and as both painter and poet he melds the two knowledges in his poem of the painting, which itself is a melding of image and reality. As such, Ashbery problematises the distinction between a knowledge of creating and the making of image or imitation. Ashbery’s deference to the mirror and what it (re)produces on the surface adds yet another layer to Parmigianino’s painting, as Ashbery only comes to know Parmigianino through a shared understanding of his craft and the painting which exists only in surface, as a mirror that ‘makes’ the whole world as Plato would have it. Ashbery has remarked of his poetry that he himself considers it Platonic—that it is in dialogue,[xxvi] and he uses abstract language in the way a painter uses a brush, “to get a greater, more complete kind of realism.”[xxvii] Both Ashbery and Parmigianino in their respective works are determined to problematise a Platonic tripartite structure of the truth of reality, and instead privilege the limitations of self-knowledge as surface, the image as we see it, and simultaneously tease out the multitudinous, manifold nature of the subject, where one person may not “[play] one part only.”[xxviii]
Plato’s theory of the arts asserts that it is all mere imitation. The artist, poet, or painter, knows nothing of that which they create, produce and imitate, and are instead three times removed from the truth of the Idea of that which they imitate. Plato privileges the notion that one person may only succeed in one thing, and that the imitator cannot know truly all that he imitates. Ashbery’s poem and Parmigianino’s painting trouble Plato’s account of art as untruthful imitation. In both manifestations of “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” Ashbery and Parmigianino playfully highlight the paradox of imitators and true makers. In their self-portraiture, both artists indeed know that which they imitate on the surface, and in turn unsettle the boundaries between surface and truth, knowledge and reality.
Andrew is an English literature and philosophy student interested in the various intersections of literature, art, philosophy, and literary theory. He is particularly interested in phenomenology and the worlds of modernist and postmodernist literature.
ENDNOTES
[i] Plato, The Republic, trans. Benjamin Jowett (London: Penguin, 1977), 597.
[ii] Parmigianino, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, 1524, Oil on convex panel, 9.6” (24.4cm), Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, https://www.khm.at/objektdb/detail/1407
[iii] Plato, The Republic, 392.
[iv] Plato, The Republic, 392.
[v] Plato, The Republic, 393.
[vi] Plato, The Republic, 393.
[vii] Plato, The Republic, 393.
[viii] A shoe-maker for example may be excellent at making shoes, but will not necessarily go on to be an excellent blacksmith or carpenter.
[ix] Plato, The Republic, 394.
[x] Plato, The Republic, 395.
[xi] That is, only to imitate the virtuous qualities permissible in the ideal State as a model of sorts.
[xii] Plato also draws on table-making in his example, but for the sake of brevity and consistency, I will focus only on the example of bed-making in relation to imitation.
[xiii] Plato, The Republic, 596.
[xiv] Plato, The Republic, 596.
[xv] Plato, The Republic, 596.
[xvi] Plato argues that there can only ever be one true idea of the bed, for even if God had created two beds, there would still have had to be an original, single ideal bed from which the two were created in image.
[xvii] Plato, The Republic, 597.
[xviii] Plato, The Republic, 598.
[xix] Plato, The Republic, 598.
[xx] Plato, The Republic, 598.
[xxi] Plato, The Republic, 599.
[xxii] Parmigianino, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, 1524.
[xxiii] Plato, The Republic, 599.
[xxiv] John Ashbery, “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” 474.
[xxv] John Ashbery, “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” 476.
[xxvi] S.P Mohanty and Jonathan Monroe, “John Ashbery and the Articulation of the Social,” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987), 44.
[xxvii] Clark D Lunberry, “That’s the Beauty of It, Or, Why John Ashbery is Not a Painter,” Journal of Modern Literature 34, no. 4 (2011), 173.
[xxviii] Plato, The Republic, 599.
WORKS CITED
Ashbery, John. “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.” In Collected Poems 1956-1987, edited by Mark Ford, 474-487. New York: The Library of America, 2008.
Lunberry, Clark D. “That’s the Beauty of It, Or, Why John Ashbery is Not a Painter.” Journal of Modern Literature 34, no. 4 (2011): 172-184.
Mohanty, S.P., and Jonathan Monroe. “John Ashbery and the Articulation of the Social.” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987): 36-63.
Parmigianino. Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. 1524, Oil on convex panel, 9.6” (24.4cm). Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. https://www.khm.at/objektdb/detail/1407.
Plato. “The Republic.” In The Portable Plato, edited by Scott Buchanan, translated by Benjamin Jowett, 392-403 & 595-608. London: Penguin, 1977.
Featured photo: Francesco Mazzola, called Parmigianino – Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror – Google Art Project.jpg. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons. File:Francesco Mazzola, called Parmigianino – Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror – Google Art Project.jpg – Wikimedia Commons
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