Ut pictura poesis

Ut pictura poesis is a Latin phrase literally meaning "as is painting so is poetry." The statement (often repeated) occurs most famously in Horace's Ars Poetica, near the end, immediately after the "other" most famous quotation from Horace's treatise on poetics, "bonus dormitat Homerus", or "even Homer nods" (an indication that even the most skilled poet can compose inferior verse):

Horace meant that poetry (in its widest sense, "imaginative texts") merited the same careful interpretation that was, in Horace's day, reserved for painting.

Lessing opens his Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry (1766) by observing that "the first who compared painting with poetry [Simonides of Ceos] was a man of fine feeling," though, Lessing makes it clear, not a critic or philosopher. Lessing argues that painting is a synchronic, visual phenomenon, one of space that is immediately in its entirety understood and appreciated, while poetry (again, in its widest sense) is a diachronic art of the ear, one that depends on time to unfold itself for the reader's appreciation. He recommends that poetry and painting should not be confused, and that they are best practiced and appreciated “as two equitable and friendly neighbors.”

W. J. T. Mitchell trenchantly observed that "We tend to think that to compare poetry with painting is to make a metaphor, while to differentiate poetry from painting is to state a literal truth."

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Wikipedia