This article studies the relationship between writing or literatura and image or painting by looking at the work of painter René Magritte (1898-1967), specifically metaphor as a paradigmatic example. Despite Magritte’s popularity, his work is misunderstood as literary, when it is actually poetic. The visual metaphors in his work are not random but instead influence the observer’s cognitive processes to understand his work and construct meaning from it. From a comparative literatura perspective, visual metaphor is a different resource than verbal metaphor. Visual metaphor is a show of beauty inviting the observer to be awed.