Perhaps the most important of these premises is that the visual arts chiefly involve statements of truth rather than of imitation. According to the chapter "Of Ideas of Imitation," Fuseli, Burke, and Coleridge falsely distinguished between imitation and copying, both of which produce a rather low and limited, but nonetheless authentic, form of pleasure, for

whenever anything looks like what it is not, the resemblance being so great as nearly to deceive, we feel a kind of pleasurable surprise, an agreeable excitement of mind, exactly the same in its nature as we receive from juggling. Whenever we perceive this in something produced by art, that is to say, whenever the work is seen to resemble something which we know it is not, we receive what I call an idea of imitation. (3.100).

Although he admits that imitation, which earlier critics had made the central principle of the arts, does produce a genuine source of aesthetic pleasure, he argues that it is but a comparatively minor one; for art proceeds by statements about form, rather than by imitations of it. For example, a marble statue of a man, says Ruskin, is not an imitation of a human being but the actual form of one. "Form is form, bona fide and actual, whether in marble or in flesh -- not an imitation or resemblance of form, but real form. The chalk outline of the bough of a tree on paper, is not an imitation; it looks like chalk and paper -- not like wood, and that which it suggests to the mind is not properly said to be like the form of a bough, it is the form of a bough" (3.101). Ideas of truth, rather than ideas of imitation, therefore, provide the central pleasures of visual art; and "the word Truth, as applied to art, signifies the faithful statement, either to the mind or senses, of any fact of nature. We receive an idea of truth, then, when we perceive the faithfulness of such a statement" (3.104).