自然·镜子·灯——文艺复兴时期的摹仿论与想像论

Nature, Mirror and Light——The Theory of Imitation and Imagination of the Renaissance

美国批评家艾布拉姆斯用“镜”比喻作家对自然的摹仿,用“灯”比喻作家投射的情感之光。文艺复兴时期受人文思想激荡,达·芬奇的“镜子论”强调在摹仿自然的同时,创造出与面前的事物其实不同的“第二自然”;而卡斯特尔维屈罗、马佐尼、锡德尼、培根等则认为诗不同于历史记录,它是创造性的摹仿,是想像性的虚构,这些观点都突破了柏拉图以来“摹仿上帝理式”的美学观念,改变了神学雄踞文坛的局面,有力推动了西方文论“主体意识”的发展。

M. H. Abrams, an American critic, compared the writer s imitation of nature to Mirror and his feelings to light. Gready influenced by the humanism of the Renaissance, the Theory of Mirror by Leonardo de Vinci stressed that while imitating the nature, the Second Nature was created, which was indeed different from what it really was; yet Lodovico Castelvetrol, Giagemo Mazzoni, Philip Sidney and Francis Bacon thought that poetry, different from historical record, was the imitation of creativity and the fabrication of imagination. All these opinions broke through the aesdietical sense of Imitating God' s Ideas, which was handed down from Plato, thus changed the situation in which theology had prevailed in literature and greatly promoted the development of the Principal Consciousness, one of the western literary theories.