Plato on Mimesis and the Banishment of the Poets

Plato's Republic (c. 375 BCE) contains, in Book X, the most systematic ancient argument against representational art: the bed analogy at 596a-598d. Plato distinguishes the Form of the bed, made by a god and grasped only by reason; the particular bed made by a craftsman, who looks to the Form as his model; and the painter's bed, which imitates not the Form but only the carpenter's bed as it appears from one viewpoint, with none of its structural reality. The painter's product is therefore, in Plato's phrase, "third from the king and from the truth" (597e): an imitation of an imitation, doubly removed from the Forms that constitute genuine reality on Plato's metaphysics. Because painting and poetry alike work by reproducing appearances rather than grasping the underlying Forms through reason, Plato classes them as a kind of knack (empeiria) rather than a craft (technê) grounded in real understanding, applicable to any subject the poet chooses to represent without possessing expert knowledge of it.