The painter ... does not set his palette with the real hues of the
rainbow. When he pictures to us the character of a hero, or paints some
scene of nature, he does not present us with a living man in the
character of the hero (for this is the business of dramatic art); nor
does he make up his landscape of real rocks, or trees, or water, but
with fictitious resemblances of these. Yet in these figments he is as
truly bound by the laws of the appearance of those realities, of which
they are the copy (and very much to the same extent), as the musician is
by the natural laws and properties of sound.
In short, the whole object of physical science, or, in other words, the
whole of sensible nature, is included in the domain of imitative art,
either as the subjects, the objects, or the materials of imitation:
every fine art, therefore, has certain physical sciences collateral to
it, on the abstractions of which it builds, more or less, according to
its nature and purpose. But the drift of the art itself is something
totally distinct from that of the physical science to which it is
related; and it is not more absurd to say that physiology or anatomy
constitute the science of poetry or dramatic art than that acoustics and
harmonics are the science of music; optics, of painting; mechanics, or
other branches of physical science, that of architecture.
_Dyce._