Aristote à l'épreuve de Platon ou le cas mimesis

Abstract

The term mimesis, used by Aristotle in the Poetics, has long been a major issue in aesthetics. First used by Plato, as a negative qualification for representational arts, it gained credit and value with Plotinus and subsequently, with Ficino in the Renaissance, who led to a crucial defense of mimetic arts. For the Italian literary theorists of the Renaissance, Aristotle's view of mimesis in the Poetics, very different and at the same time very akin to Plato's, appeared as an opportunity to restate the meanings of the word in order to create a global theory of poetry. Using Plato's Sophist as an emblematic reference, some of them, namely Mazzoni, Segni and Tasso, freely switching from Plato and Neo-platonism to Aristotle, managed to redefine poetic mimesis by putting a neo-platonic emphasis both on phantasy and intellectual truth, thus opening Aristotle's acceptations to a wider range of criteria.