The key, criminal phrase in arguments about the sister arts, ut pictura poesis comes from Horace's Ars Poetica, part II lines 361-5. I'm not a Latinist so am happy to give the brief passage in Ben Jonson's 1640 translation:

As painting, so is poesy. Some man's hand
Will take you more, the nearer that you stand;
As some the farther off; this loves the dark;
This fearing not the subtlest judge's mark,
Will in the light be viewed; this once the sight
Doth please; this ten times over will delight.

'As with painting so with poetry'; in other words: some paintings look better when you get closer, some look better from further off; some prefer light, some prefer obscurity. The invitation is to apply this to poetry.

The American poet John Hollander put together a major and expensive, fully illustrated anthology of poems about pictures, titled The Gazer's Spirit. In it he refers to Horace, pointing out that poetry first likens itself to painting, not the other way round. He instances Leonardo da Vinci when Da Vinci claims that painting is nobler and more powerful in effect because it approaches through the preferred sense of sight and balances this with Lessing's view in Laocoön that poetry is superior because, unlike painting, it includes time passing and can present the invisible and the imaginable.

Harold Bloom in his review of this anthology was critical of Hollander's view, remarking that

The Romantic tradition is particularly vexed by the dangerous formula "Ut pictura poesis"; Keats only seems to compose a speaking urn, and Turner does not paint silent poems. When criticism has been tempted by these analogies, it has ended in confusion, glorious as that can be in Ruskin or in Pater.

And he goes on in Mitchell's vein, accusing the poets in the anthology of appropriating, adding:

Hollander's poets [and by this we may possibly understand, all poets writing about pictures] may seem to bow reverently before the paintings they seek to appropriate, but usurpation is not always a reverent process. Poets rather ruthlessly want to write their poems, and pragmatically the gazer's spirit often reduces even the most awesome painting to so much materia poetica.

Again the accusing terms: ruthless appropriators, usurpers. As if the whole world of experience were not materia poetica!

'I recall Pater's description of the Mona Lisa,' writes Yeats in his Introduction to the Oxford Book of Modern Verse in 1936, wondering whether Pater's description foreshadowed 'a poetry, a philosophy where the individual is nothing', a place of flux where objects lose their contour and where, he tells us, 'human experience is no longer shut into brief lives'.

It is the importance of this question that led Yeats to read Pater's description as poetry, indeed to form it as poetry, and to begin his anthology with the excerpt from Pater divided into lines to form a poem he calls "Mona Lisa":

She is older than the rocks among which she sits;
Like the Vampire,
She has been dead many times,
And learned the secrets of the grave;
And has been a diver in deep seas,
And keeps their fallen day about her;
And trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants:
And, as Leda,
Was the mother of Helen of Troy,
And, as Saint Anne,
Was the mother of Mary;
And all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes,
And lives
Only in the delicacy
With which it has moulded the changing lineaments,
And tinged the eyelids and the hands.

Pater, himself, did not write a poem; it was Yeats who read the poem into it. I have written above that "In comparing Vasari's perception of the Mona Lisa with Pater's we understand that we are dealing with two different ways of seeing. Both seem to be trying to present an object to us — the same object — but from different points of view." Yeats seems to be seeing a third thing through Pater's writing. To Yeats, the object described by Pater is of secondary importance. He does not consider Leonardo da Vinci, let alone the original sitter, Lisa del Giocondo. He is thinking about Pater's text and where it may lead in terms of poetry and philosophy. The object — Leonardo's painting of Lisa del Giocondo — continues to exist in its own right of course, and has not been exhausted by either Vasari or Pater, although perception of it is modified by both. Other perceptions continue to modify it, and none of these perceptions excludes another. Such perceptions build expectations but so do many other things: the idea of authenticity, the idea of value, the idea of its place in the development of visual art, the picture's condition, history and provenance and so forth. What we see — what Professor Mitchell might see — is contingent on a great many factors.

*

One of these factors is text. The great majority of paintings in western art until the twentieth century had their origins in text. Giotto's painting, and many of Leonardo's paintings, were predicated on readings of the Bible, the various apocrypha and their interpretations. We identify figures and events because we recognize them from stories. Byzantine art works entirely on religious imagery in which the individual visual image and the hierarchical arrangement of visual images is dependent on doctrine, and are in fact embodiments of doctrine. They are not primarily there for the purpose of aesthetic admiration, but rather to bring the viewer into the visual presence of that which is first articulated in words.

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