 Resemblance theories of depiction are commonly traced to Republic, book X, where Plato suggests that a painting of an object is a mimesis (imitation or representation) of its shape and colour. The idea is intuitively plausible, and it provides the basis for a variety of attempts by philosophers to define or analyse the concept of a picture, or to explain how pictures represent. It is true that pictures represent things that do not have shapes or colours, such as God and Justice, but they do so by depicting things that do have shapes and colours, such as bearded men and blindfolded women carrying scales. Accordingly, the basic thought that underlies resemblance theories of depiction is that pictures are composed of shapes and colours that resemble the shapes and colours of the visible objects they depict. But even if this provides an adequate starting-point, a convincing theory of depiction needs to be elaborated with care, as Nelson Goodman (1968) showed. The simplistic claim that A depicts B if and only if A appreciably resembles B is demonstrably false. According to Goodman “more error could hardly be compressed into so short a formula” (1968: 3–4).