“Antiquity ascribed to [Simonides] the famous remark, ‘Painting is silent poetry and poetry is painting that speaks.’ This is a stimulating comparison, for painting is a technique that calls on the intellectual quality Empedocles calls metis, professional know how and an indissociable magical kind of skill. A painter brings together various colors, and from these inert materials he creates figures the Greeks describe as poikila; flickering, many-colored, living things. For an entire tradition, painting was an art of illusions, ‘trickery."
-Marcel Detienne, The Masters of Truth in Archaic Greece (Hyperion Art Journal)
