Plato
In Republic Book X, Plato says a carpenter copies the Form of a bed and a painter copies the carpenter's bed. Painting is thus an imitation of an imitation, "third from the truth", and poetry stirs emotions that cloud reason, so poets should be banished from the ideal city.
Aristotle
In the Poetics, Aristotle calls imitation a human instinct from childhood and says we take pleasure in learning from imitations. Tragedy is "the imitation of an action that is serious and complete", producing catharsis through pity and fear. Poetry deals with what might happen, the universal, so it is more philosophical than history.
Legacy and critique
Renaissance perspective, naturalistic figures from Giotto onward and 19th-century realism carried the tradition. After photography and abstraction, expression theory, formalism and institutional theory challenged it.
References
- Plato. Republic, Book X. (Trans. G. M. A. Grube, rev. C. D. C. Reeve, Hackett, 1992)
- Aristotle. Poetics. (Trans. M. Heath, Penguin Classics, 1996)
- Auerbach, E. (1953). Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Princeton University Press.