“Painting is poetry seen and poetry is painting heard” – Leonardo da Vinci. Art is a form of social consciousness, an integral part of human culture. It is the process and outcome of the meaningful expression of feelings in an image. Literature and painting are among the main art forms. They are historically formed stable forms of creative activity, in which the artist realizes the content of life Each art form has a specific arsenal of graphic and expressive means. The primary forms of art are 1) Fine Art, 2) Literature, 3) Music, 4) Architecture, and Applied Art. Literature (Latin lit(t)eratura, literally – written, from lit(t)era – letter) – in a broad sense, the totality of any verbal texts. Literature works with the word – its main difference from other arts. The word is the basic element of literature, the link between the material and the spiritual. The representativeness is transmitted in fiction indirectly, with the help of words. Visual culture is the one that can be perceived visually. Painting belongs to this culture. Painting is the art of depicting objects on the surface with paints, with the aim to make an impression on the viewer, similar to what he would get from the real objects of nature, also by the nature of the depicted objects to cause in the viewer a certain mood or express any artistic idea. As we see, the main difference between painting and literature is the difference in the means of human exposure.
At different periods of cultural development of mankind literature was given a different place among the other arts – from the leading to one of the last. This can be explained by the predominance of one or another trend in literature, as well as the degree of development of technical civilization. For example, ancient thinkers, artists of the Renaissance and classicists were convinced of the advantages of sculpture and painting over literature. The Romanticists put poetry and music in the first place among all the arts. However, already in XVIII century in the European aesthetics there was a different tendency – promotion of literature in the first place. Lessing, who saw the advantages of literature over sculpture and painting, laid its foundation. Subsequently, Hegel and Belinsky paid tribute to this trend.