mimesis (from Greek , ‘imitation’), the modeling of one thing on another, or the presenting of one thing by another; imitation. The concept played a central role in the account formulated by Plato and Aristotle of what we would now call the fine arts. The poet, the dramatist, the painter, the musician, the sculptor, all compose a mimesis of reality. Though Plato, in his account of painting, definitely had in mind that the painter imitates physical reality, the general concept of mimesis used by Plato and Aristotle is usually better translated by ‘representation’ than by ‘imitation’: it belongs to the nature of the work of art to represent, to re-present, reality. This representational or mimetic theory of art remained far and away the dominant theory in the West until the rise of Romanticism – though by no means everyone agreed with Plato that it is concrete items of physical reality that the artist represents. The hold of the mimetic theory was broken by the insistence of the Romantics that, rather than the work of art being an imitation, it is the artist who, in his or her creative activity, imitates Nature or God by composing an autonomous object. Few contemporary theorists of art would say that the essence of art is to represent; the mimetic theory is all but dead. In part this is a reflection of the power of the Romantic alternative to the mimetic theory; in part it is a reflection of the rise to prominence over the last century of nonobjective, abstract painting and sculpture and of ‘absolute’ instrumental music. Nonetheless, the phenomenon of representation has not ceased to draw the attention of theorists. In recent years three quite different general theories of representation have appeared: Nelson Goodman’s (The Languages of Art), Nicholas Wolterstorff’s (Works and Worlds of Art), and Kendall Walton’s (Mimesis as Make-Believe). See also AESTHETIC. N.P.W.