Simonides

Poema pictura loquens,
pictura poema silens

Poetry is a speaking picture,
painting is a mute poetry

Horace

Ut pictura poesis.

As is painting so is poetry.

Horace, Ars Poetica,361-5

Valery

In the strange faculty of doing certain things irrelevant to life with as much care, passion and persistence as if one's life depended on them . . . there we find what is called 'living.'

Craig Raine

All bad literature aspires to the condition of literature.  All good literature aspires to the condition of life.

from "Poetry Today"

Horst Bredekamp

Ideas come through drawing.


A Very Rare Book: The mystery surrounding a copy of Galileo's pivotal treatise, by Nicholas Schmidle, The New Yorker, December 16, 2013 p63

Chard de Niord

nature is an idea and not a place

www.charddeniord.com/index.php?/projects/what-the-animals-teach-us/
"What the Animals Teach Us" published in the Harvard Review, Push Cart Prize XXII, 

Picasso

It's magnificent to invent new subjects. 
Take van Gogh: potatoes, those shapeless things! 
To have painted that, or a pair of old shoes! 
That's really something!

–Pablo Picasso
Craig Raine, "Originality in Poetry" Haydn  & the Valve Trumpet Faber and Fabre, 1990