OUTPUT 1: IDEAS ON ART BY PLATO

1. “Next in order to harmonies, rhythms will naturally follow… to discover what rhythms
are the expressions of a courageous and harmonious life.” (p 47 – text, pdf bottom of 25
to 26)

2. “The art of the painter and every other creative and constructive art are full of them –
weaving, embroidery, architecture, and every kind of manufacture; also nature, animal
and vegetable – in all of them there is grace or the absence of grace.” (p 47 – text, p 27 –
pdf)

3. “Not thinking ourselves perfect in the art of reading until we recognise them wherever
they are found… Or, as we recognize the reflection of letters in the water or in a mirror,
only when we know the letters themselves… the same art and study giving us the
knowledge of both: neither we nor our guardians, whom we have to educate, can ever
become musical until we and they know the essential forms, believing them all to be
within the sphere of one art and study.” (p 49 – text, p 28 – pdf)

4. “Neither are comic and tragic actors the same; yet all these things are but imitations…
And human nature, appears to have been coined into yet smaller pieces, and to be as
incapable of imitating many things well, as of performing well the actions of which the
imitations are copies.” (p 41 – text, p 20 – pdf)

5. “Suppose a just and good man in the course of a narration comes on some saying or
action of another good man: he will be most ready to play the part of the good man when
he is acting firmly and wisely… But when he comes to a character which is unworthy of
him, he will not make a study of that… at other times he will be ashamed to play a part
which he has never practised, nor will he like to fashion and frame himself after the baser
models; he feels the employment of such an art, unless in jest, to be beneath him, and his
mind revolts at it.” (p 43 – text, bottom of p 21 to 22 – pdf)

6. “But there are only two ideas or forms of them-one the idea of a bed, the other of a
table… And the maker of either of them makes a bed or he makes a table for our use, in
accordance with the idea-that is our way of speaking in this and similar instances-but no
artificer makes the ideas themselves… And there is another artist, One who is the maker
of all the works of all other workmen… For this is he who is able to make not only vessels
of every kind,
but plants and animals, himself and all other things” (p 52 – text, p 31 – pdf)

7. “The poet is like a painter who, as we have already observed, will make a likeness of a
cobbler though he understands nothing of cobbling… his picture is good enough for those
who know no more than he does, and judge only by colours and figures… the poet with
his words and phrases may be said to lay on the colors of the several arts, himself
understanding their nature only enough to imitate them.” (p 57 – text, p 36 – pdf)

8. “There are three arts which are concerned with all things: one which uses, another
which makes, and a third which imitates them… And the excellence or beauty or truth of
every structure… is relative to the use for which nature or the artist has intended them.”
(p 58 – text, p 37 – pdf)

9. “I said that painting or drawing, and imitation in general, when doing their own proper
work, are far removed from the truth… The imitative art is an inferior who marries an
inferior, and has inferior offspring… Do not rely on a probability derived from the analogy
of painting; but let us examine further and see whether the faculty with which poetical
imitation is concerned is good or bad.” (p 60 – text, p 39 – pdf)