PLATO'S METAPHOR OF "SHADOW PAINTING": ANTITHESIS AND "PARTICIPATION" IN THE PHAEDOAND THE REPUBLIC

Contrary to the traditional interpretation of Plato's attitude towards painting as derogatory it has recently been rightly argued that its treatment in the Platonic corpus is too complicated to be dismissed as simply negative. In this paper I focus on Plato's references to "shadow painting in the Phaedo and the Republic and investigate the way in which this fifth-century pictorial technique becomes a distinctive metaphor that addresses complex ontological and epistemological problems, namely the notion of antithesis and the so-called "compresense" of opposites (enantia) in the world of Doxa, as well as the relationship between Forms and physical particulars.