“And yet, artists have long been judged bytheir capacity to imitate reality to perfection—a criterion that still prevailed in our own culture until recently. The Greeks had a wealth of anecdotes to extol their painters: painted grapes that birds tried to peck at, equine images that horses mistook for their fellow creatures, and a painted curtain that the artist’s rival demanded be lifted in order to reveal the picture hidden beneath. Legend has credited Giotto and Rembrandt with the same sorts of feats, and the Chinese and Japanese had very similar myths concerning their own famous painters: painted horses that leave the picture at night to graze and dragons that fly into the air as the artist applies the finishing touch. In North America, the Plains tribes made a mistake in a similar vein when they first saw a white painter, Catlin, at work. He had drawn one of them in profile; another, no great friend of the first, cried out on seeing the picture that it proved the model was but half a man. A deadly fight ensued.”
Claude Lévi-Strauss, Look, Listen, Read (1993).
[Translated by Brian C. J. Singer.]
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