ABSTRACT
Comparisons of poetry or music to painting led to increased discriminations which repeatedly proved self-corrective so long as examples were given—without such examples analogy remained speculative and groping. The major change in the painting analogy occurred when it was temporarily displaced by the evolutionary or developmental analogy. The language of painters and their supporters in claiming social status for their art, and the language of poets and critics analogizing poetry to painting or the drama, assumed, that—regardless of the accuracy of these claims—one art was more eminent, more culturally useful than the other. If at the beginning of the eighteenth century poetry was compared to painting, at the beginning of the nineteenth century this practice was reversed and painting was compared with description or poetry. The development of the analogy to music arose simultaneously with the critical awareness of the kinesthetic function of the metaphor used to describe visible as well as invisible phenomena.
