Plato thought a painted bed stood two steps away from the truth
For Plato, a painter's bed was a copy of a copy. God made the idea of a bed, a carpenter imitated that idea, and the artist imitated the carpenter. That argument about mimesis, the Greek word for imitation, still frames how people ask what art is for and whether it can tell the truth.
Mimesis names the way literature and art represent the real world, above all human actions. The word comes from the Greek verb for imitating, which in turn grew from mimos, an actor or imitator. In ancient Greece the idea guided artistic creation: the physical world was a model for beauty, truth and goodness, and a work succeeded by corresponding to it. Plato set mimesis against diegesis, the telling of a story in narration, and after him the term drifted toward a mainly literary sense.
Plato handled the idea warily. In the Ion he treats poetry as divine madness, meaning the poet works by inspiration rather than real knowledge of the subject and so cannot speak truth, which he reserves for philosophers. In Book II of The Republic, Socrates cautions his pupils to resist poetry's seductions. Book X brings the famous three beds: the ideal form, the carpenter's object and the painter's picture of it. The better the painter, the more convincing the image, yet it still captures only one angle, much like a reflection in a mirror, and the painter knows nothing of carpentry. Homer and his successors, in this view, merely repeat images of virtue without grasping it.
Aristotle was kinder. He also saw art as imitating nature, but added that it could perfect nature, using mathematics and symmetry to reach for what is timeless amid the change and decay of the living world. His scheme of four causes, beginning with the formal cause as a kind of blueprint and the material cause as the stuff a thing is made of, gave art a role in seeking first principles.
The debate never closed. Erich Auerbach's study Mimesis reads realism in Western literature by setting Homer's Odyssey beside the Bible. Later theorists ranged from Philip Sidney and Coleridge to Freud, Walter Benjamin, René Girard and Jean Baudrillard, whose idea of simulacra asks what happens when copies no longer point back to any original.
Source: Mimesis
