Simonides once called painting silent poetry and poetry articulate painting. Comparing the two ‘sister arts’ in the sixth or fifth century BCE, he wrote the first chapter of a story which, even if one thinks only of antiquity, is a rather long one, and in which many of the issues raised seem tremendously complex. In addition, many ancient authors wanted to add their own passages to this story, and quite naturally different writers arrived at very different conclusions about the two arts' respective relationships. Yet however different these conclusions were, no writer, as a writer, could avoid agreeing with Simonides on a basic thing: any statement about the visual arts is inevitably a hermeneutical effort to make the visual speak, and in doing so it equally inevitably implies a deficit of the visual arts: namely, that art cannot speak and needs some form of ‘translation’ to be communicated. Discussing art in written texts, then, cannot but entail implicitly a statement about writing's hermeneutical superiority; this is the case even if the statement may explicitly deny any such superiority. It has been argued that this deficit in art is real and that there does exist a ‘Hermeneutic Gap’ in painting; whereas verbal discourse, so the argument goes, operates with a ‘hermeneutic of understanding’, painting, by contrast, is bound to a ‘hermeneutic of calculated misunderstanding’. Certainly there are paintings for which such a statement is correct—but there may be as many cases in which a text only construes such a gap and uses it as a good opportunity to establish its own hermeneutic superiority by contrasting itself with an image which is supposedly less precise in communicating meaning.