Le parole, i dipinti e il mondo in un frammento empedocleo e in un passo platonico

The aim of this work is to carry out a comparison between an Empedocles’ fragment with a Plato’s passage. Empedocles’ passage is fragment B23, which shows a parallel between the creation of painted images and the appearance of entities in the world. Plato’s passage is taken from the Cratylus (424d-425a), in which the author estab- lishes a similarity between the way in which colours, in a portrait, refer to something in reality, and the way in which the grammata, in a word, refer to an entity of reality. These two passages, if compared, show their obvious differences, but also an undeniable con- sonance. This consonance is detectable in reference to the painting meant as a mixture of colours, to the mixture meant as a creation of entities, and to creation meant as a manifestation of words, of images.