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Who really said it

Painting is poetry which is seen and not heard, and poetry is a painting which is heard but not seen

Written by Leonardo da Vinci 1452–1519 · Florentine painter, engineer & compulsive notebook-keeper
Verified Rights unconfirmed

Genuinely his. The Italian — La pittura è una poesia che si vede e non si sente, e la poesia è una pittura che si sente e non si vede — opens the chapter Differenza che ha la pittura con la poesia in the Trattato della pittura ↗, the treatise assembled from his notebooks after his death. The English is a translation, and we could not establish who made it.

Last verified 6 Aug 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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“Painting is poetry which is seen and not heard, and poetry is a painting which is heard but not seen” Painting is poetry which is seen and not heard, and poetry is a painting which is heard but not seen. — Leonardo da Vinci, Trattato della pittura, chapter “Differenza che ha la pittura con la poesia” (compiled by Francesco Melzi before 1542; first printed 1651). English wording is a translation; translator unidentified. Via Quotle.info

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We couldn’t establish where this was first published, so there’s no rights status to give. Credit it as shown above — just don’t present it as public domain, and get permission for commercial or published reuse.

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In context

Evoking the world of Leonardo da Vinci — Italian polymath — painter, engineer, anatomist, theorist. Theme: "Painting is poetry which is seen and not heard, and poetry is a painting which is heard but not seen". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

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Minimalist editorial slide for the quote "Painting is poetry which is seen and not heard, and poetry is a painting which is heard but not seen". Clean background, a single muted accent color, generous negative space, subtle paper or linen texture, no literal illustration — let the words carry it. Reserve clear space for a serif quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Provenance

Where it actually comes from

Work
Trattato della pittura (A Treatise on Painting)
Chapter
“Differenza che ha la pittura con la poesia” — ch. 16, part one
Compiled
By Francesco Melzi from Leonardo’s notebooks before 1542; first printed 1651
Translation
English wording is a later rendering; translator unidentified

La pittura è una poesia che si vede e non si sente, e la poesia è una pittura che si sente e non si vede. Adunque queste due poesie, o vuoi dire due pitture, hanno scambiati i sensi, per i quali esse dovrebbero penetrare all’intelletto. Perchè se l’una e l’altra è pittura, devono passare al senso comune per il senso più nobile, cioè l’occhio; e se l’una e l’altra è poesia, esse hanno a passare per il senso meno nobile, cioè l’udito. the chapter runs on

The original, as transcribed on Italian Wikisource from Gaetano Milanesi’s 1890 edition of the treatise, itself taken from Cod. Vaticano Urbinate 1270. The famous English line translates the first sentence only; the chapter goes on to Leonardo’s deaf-born-versus-blind-born argument for the superiority of painting.

The manuscript
Codex Vaticanus Urbinas Latinus 1270, digitised by the Vatican Library
Trattato della pittura, part one, on Italian Wikisource

How we checked it

  • Started with Wikiquote ↗, which carries the line in its sourced quotes section — not under Attributed, Disputed or Misattributed — and traces it to A Treatise on Painting (1651), “The Paragone,” compiled by Francesco Melzi prior to 1542.
  • Found the Italian original on Italian Wikisource ↗, opening the chapter Differenza che ha la pittura con la poesia in Gaetano Milanesi’s 1890 edition, which that transcription states was made from Cod. Vaticano Urbinate 1270.
  • Confirmed the manuscript itself: the Vatican Library ↗ catalogues Urb.lat.1270 as Leonardo’s Trattato della pittura, sixteenth century, fully digitised.
  • Then went hunting for the translator. We searched the full text of the two public-domain English editions of the notebooks — Jean Paul Richter’s ↗ and Edward McCurdy’s ↗ — and this wording is in neither; both render the neighbouring paragone passages quite differently. So we name no translator.

Leonardo’s Italian is long out of copyright, and the edition quoted above — Gaetano Milanesi’s Trattato della pittura (Rome: Unione Cooperativa Editrice, 1890) — is public domain in the United States. Rights in a translation attach to the translation itself, though, and we could not establish who produced this exact English wording or when it first appeared, so we make no public-domain claim for the English.

Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.

Fact-check

What travels wrong

Nobody fabricated this one. But three things about it get garbled on the way to the poster — and one of them is baked into the English.

Leonardo, credited as the originator older than him

Pairing painting with silent poetry, and poetry with a picture that speaks, was already an ancient commonplace: Plutarch ↗ reports Simonides of Ceos calling painting inarticulate poetry and poetry articulate painting. Leonardo takes the received formula, swaps the senses round, and turns it into a weapon.

Leonardo, quoted in English translation artefact

He wrote si sente, which in Italian covers both being heard and being felt. That is why the identical sentence circulates in two English costumes — “seen and not heard … heard but not seen” and “seen rather than felt … felt rather than seen” — and why quote sites file them as two separate Leonardo quotations. Both come from the one Italian line ↗.

Leonardo, as author of A Treatise on Painting posthumous

Leonardo never wrote a book called A Treatise on Painting. His heir Francesco Melzi gathered the material from eighteen of Leonardo’s “books” before 1542, and it was first printed, abridged, as Trattato della pittura by Raffaelo du Fresne in 1651 — see the publication history ↗.

Leonardo, as an even-handed friend to both arts out of context

Quoted alone it reads as a graceful compliment paid equally to painters and poets. In context it is the opening move of an argument that painting wins: the rest of the chapter ↗ proposes judging painting by a man born deaf and poetry by a man born blind, and concludes that the deaf man will understand everything while the blind man will get nothing.

The sentence is real Leonardo, preserved in the Vatican’s Codex Urbinas Latinus 1270 ↗. The only genuine uncertainty is who put it into these particular English words.

Context

Why he was writing this at all

Fifteenth-century intellectuals ranked the arts, and painting ranked badly. Poetry was a liberal art, the business of educated men; painting was a manual trade practised by people with dirty hands. The argument over that ranking is called the paragone, the comparison, and Leonardo — a man who could not read Latin and was tired of being condescended to by men who could — wrote pages of it.

This line is his opening flourish in that fight. It sounds generous, and it is really a trap: if painting and poetry have swapped the senses by which they reach us, then the question becomes which sense is the nobler. Leonardo has an answer ready, and it is the eye.

Judge painting by a man born deaf, and poetry by a man born blind. Leonardo liked his odds.

Read the full story

The notes survive because Francesco Melzi, who inherited Leonardo’s papers, sorted them into a treatise. That compilation is the Codex Urbinas in the Vatican Library; the printed Trattato della pittura of 1651 was an abridgement of it, and the treatise was only published in its fuller modern form after the manuscript was rediscovered in the Vatican, in 1817.

The English wording repays a second look. Italian sentire does duty for both hearing and feeling, so a translator has to choose. Choose “heard” and you get the version on this page, which keeps Leonardo’s point about the ear being the lesser sense. Choose “felt” and you get a softer, more romantic sentence that is quoted just as widely — and that quietly loses the argument Leonardo was making.

Explore

Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

Creativity Wisdom

Go further

Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Leonardo da Vincien.wikiquote.org

Wikiquote’s sourced entry for this line, citing A Treatise on Painting (1651) and “The Paragone”
Trattato della pittura, part oneit.wikisource.org

The Italian original in full, chapter 16, from Milanesi’s 1890 edition of the Vatican manuscript
Codex Urbinas Latinus 1270digi.vatlib.it

The Vatican Library’s digitised sixteenth-century manuscript of the Trattato della pittura
The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vincigutenberg.org

Jean Paul Richter’s English edition of the notebooks, including his paragone selections
Leonardo da Vinci’s Note-Booksarchive.org

Edward McCurdy’s English arrangement, with the painting-versus-poetry chapter in full
Plutarch, On the Fame of the Athenianspenelope.uchicago.edu

The ancient source for the silent-poetry / speaking-picture formula Leonardo was reworking

The man who wrote it

Leonardo da Vinci

Leonardo da Vinci

1452–1519 · Italian polymath — painter, engineer, anatomist, theorist

Born near the Tuscan hill town of Vinci on 15 April 1452 and dead at 67 on 2 May 1519, Leonardo is remembered for a handful of finished paintings and thousands of pages of notes on anatomy, water, optics, machines and art. He published none of it. Everything we quote as his “writing” comes out of those notebooks, sorted and shaped by other hands after his death — which is why so many Leonardo quotations are solid in substance and slippery in wording.

For writers & researchers

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Cite the source

Leonardo da Vinci, Trattato della pittura, compiled by Francesco Melzi before 1542 from Leonardo's notebooks (Vatican Library, Codex Urbinas Latinus 1270); first printed in abridged form by Raffaelo du Fresne, 1651. Text cited from the edition of Gaetano Milanesi (Rome: Unione Cooperativa Editrice, 1890), part one, chap. 16, "Differenza che ha la pittura con la poesia." English wording as given in Wikiquote; translator unidentified.

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Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Painting is poetry which is seen and not heard, and poetry is a painting which is heard but not seen’?” Last verified 6 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/painting-is-poetry-which-is-seen-and-not-heard-and-poetry/

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