A simile of Empedocles

As when painters -- men about their craft
through craft instructed -- fill in upright panels
and lay their hands to multicolored substances,
in concert mixing more of some and less of others,
and arrange them into forms like unto all things,
putting forth trees and men along with women
and beasts with birds and fish nursed on water
and, superlative in honor, gods of long tenure:
Go therefore with wits ungulled into believing the source of mortal things
is any different, no matter how unutterably many come into view.
Instead, take this on divine authority for certain knowledge.

Fragment 31B21 (DK)

A story of the painter Apelles

They say that when he was painting a horse, he became so frustrated in his wish to depict the horse's lather that he flung the sponge he used for wiping pigments off his brushes—and that its impact on the picture replicated the lather of a horse.

Sextus Empiricus, Outlines of Pyrrhonism 1.28