Imitation (art)

Imitation is the doctrine of artistic creativity according to which the creative process should be based on the close imitation of the masterpieces of the preceding authors. This concept was first formulated by Dionysius of Halicarnassus in the first century BCE as imitatio, and has since dominated for almost two thousand years the Western history of the arts and classicism.^[1] Plato has regarded imitation as a general principle of art, as he viewed art itself as an imitation of life. This theory was popular and well accepted during the classical period.^[2] During the Renaissance period, imitation was seen as a means of obtaining one's personal style; this was alluded to by the artists of that era like Cennino Cennini, Petrarch and Pier Paolo Vergerio.^[3] In the 18th century, Romanticism reversed it with the creation of the institution of romantic originality.^[1] In the 20th century, the modernist and postmodern movements in turn discarded the romantic idea of creativity, and heightened the practice of imitation, copying, plagiarism, rewriting, appropriation and so on as the central artistic device.

Notes

1. Shroder (1972) p.282 quote:

   The doctrine of imitation, to which Nodier indirectly refers, had of course dominated classicism from its inception, when Du Bellay recommended it in the Defense et illustration de la langue francaise. The rejection of that doctrine was a basic tenet of romanticism; as Hugo put it in his preface to the 1826 edition of Odes et ballades, 'celui qui imite un poete romantique devient necessairement classique, puisqu'il imite.'

2. Verdenius, Willem Jacob (1949). Mimesis: Plato's Doctrine of Artistic Imitation and Its Meaning to Us. Brill Archive. ISBN 978-90-04-03556-0.
3. Bolland, Andrea (1996). "Art and humanism in early Renaissance Padua: Cennini, Vergerio and Petrarch on Imitation". Renaissance Quarterly. 49 (3): 469–487. doi:10.2307/2863363. JSTOR 2863363. S2CID 194095177 – via JSTOR.

References

• Shroder, Maurice Z. (1972) France / Roman - Romanesque - Romantique - Romantisme in Eichner, Hans (1972) "Romantic" and Its Cognates: The European History of a Word