In Rome, the Greek concept was partly shaken, and visual artists were viewed as sharing, with poets, imagination and inspiration.
The Middle Ages, however, went even further than antiquity, when they revoked poetry's exceptional status: it, too, was an art and therefore craft and not creativity.
Nineteenth century religious skepticism allowed for a change in definition: now not only was art recognized as creativity, but it alone was.
The expression "poiein" ("to make") was applied specifically to poiesis (poetry) and to the poietes (poet, or "maker") who made it rather than to art in general in its modern understanding.
In the visual arts, freedom was limited by the proportions that Polyclitus had established for the human frame, and which he called "the canon" (meaning, "measure").
Aristotle had doubts as to whether poetry was imitation of reality, and as to whether it required adherence to truth: it was, rather, the realm of that "which is neither true nor false.
Horace wrote that not only poets but painters as well were entitled to the privilege of daring whatever they wished to ("quod libet audendi").
In the declining period of antiquity, Philostratus wrote that "one can discover a similarity between poetry and art and find that they have imagination in common."
"[5] Alongside this new, religious interpretation of the expression, there persisted the ancient view that art is not a domain of creativity.
The Middle Ages here went even further than antiquity; they made no exception of poetry: it too had its rules, was an art, and was therefore craft and not creativity.
The philosopher Marsilio Ficino wrote that the artist "thinks up" ("excogitatio") his works; the theoretician of architecture and painting, Leon Battista Alberti, that he "preordains" ("preordinazione"); Raphael, that he shapes a painting according to his idea; Leonardo da Vinci, that he employs "shapes that do not exist in nature"; Michelangelo, that the artist realizes his vision rather than imitating nature; Giorgio Vasari, that "nature is conquered by art"; the Venetian art theoretician, Paolo Pino, that painting is "inventing what is not"; Paolo Veronese, that painters avail themselves of the same liberties as do poets and madmen; Federico Zuccari (1542–1609), that the artist shapes "a new world, new paradises"; Cesare Cesariano (1483–1541), that architects are "demi-gods."
Denis Diderot felt that imagination is merely "the memory of forms and contents," and "creates nothing" but only combines, magnifies or diminishes.
Charles Batteux wrote that "The human mind cannot create, strictly speaking; all its products bear the stigmata of their model; even monsters invented by an imagination unhampered by laws can only be composed of parts taken from nature."
The latter objection was the weakest, as it was already beginning to be realized (e.g., by Houdar de la Motte, 1715) that rules ultimately are a human invention.
[9] The start of the scientific study of creativity is sometimes taken as J. P. Guilford's 1950 address to the American Psychological Association, which helped popularize the subject.