## 1. The Classical Legacy



French thinkers considered their country as the heir to the Greek and
Roman empires. Whether they strictly followed ancient models or not,
they saw their work as a continuation of the classical tradition.
Aristotle, Horace, and Plutarch, to name just a few writers, were
major influences on the literature of seventeenth and eighteenth
century France. This self-image of the French explains not only their
discomfort with artistic innovation, but also their disparagement of
other European countries, their anxieties about what to include in
their national literary canon, and their efforts to impose a
masculine, patriotic aesthetic on the painting of the era.



This loyalty to the Greco-Roman tradition came into conflict with some
new ideas in the mid-seventeenth century during the Quarrel of the
Ancients and the Moderns. The quarrel had several phases that focused
on different problems and it spanned approximately seven decades. The
earliest phase began in the 1650s when a handful of authors attempted
to renew the genre of epic poetry, since everyone acknowledged that
the French had never created their own equivalent to the
*Aeneid*, as the Italians had done (Tasso's *Jerusalem
Delivered*, 1581) and as the English would soon do (Milton's
*Paradise Lost*, 1667). To name just two examples, Desmarets de
Saint-Sorlin and Jean Chapelain wrote poems following epic conventions
but with Christian subjects: the conversion of the first French king
Clovis and the story of Joan of Arc, respectively. These poems were
publicly mocked by partisans of the Ancient camp, most notably by
Nicolas Boileau, a poet with powerful support at court. Whether these
Christian epics failed because of their literary qualities or because
Boileau's satires were so successful in swaying public opinion,
they have now been largely forgotten.



After these attempts at modernizing the epic, the next phase of the
Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns focused on other aspects of
modern life. This time, Boileau faced a new opponent, Charles
Perrault, now best known as a compiler of fairy tales. In fact, fairy
tales were significant because they celebrated the European oral
tradition that did not have Greco-Roman roots, in contrast to the
fables of La Fontaine, who was a partisan of the Ancients. Perrault
took a stand for the Modern side by writing *Parallel of the
Ancients and the Moderns* (1688-97), a series of dialogues
between three interlocutors: an abbot who represents the Modern camp,
a *president* or high-level administrator who represents
the Ancient camp, and a cavalier who tries to reconcile the two points
of view. At stake was the view of human history as one of degeneration
or of progress: the Ancients beheld Antiquity as the Golden Age, so
subsequent history could only represent a deterioration--in the
arts, in morals, and in other aspects of life. The Moderns saw new
inventions and scientific discoveries as signs of an upward trend.
Even in terms of manners, the Moderns claimed that the newly developed
French courtly politeness was an improvement on the rough, though
heroic, behavior of the Ancient Romans and Greeks. For example, in
Perrault's dialogue, the Modern partisan objects to the mention
in the *Iliad* that Zeus could beat his wife Hera, whereas that
behavior was considered taboo among the upper classes of Ancien
Regime France. The abbot even compares Zeus' behavior to
that of a French peasant. This contrast between ancient Greek and
Early Modern French codes of conduct would reappear in the next phase
of the Quarrel.



The final phase of the Quarrel, in the 1710s, mainly centered on how
Homer's *Iliad* should be translated. The two most
prominent players were Anne Dacier and the abbe Houdar de la
Motte. Dacier, a distinguished Hellenic scholar, produced her prose
translation of the *Iliad* in 1711; based on this work, Houdar,
who knew little Greek, published a radically shortened poetic version
in 1714. In his preface, Houdar represented the Modern camp by daring
to criticize Homer, and in the main text, he not only cut out parts of
the *Iliad* that he considered too repetitive or long-winded,
such as the description of Achilles's shield, but he also
removed the sections in which the manners of the Ancients appeared too
uncouth for his taste. In contrast, Anne Dacier advocated for a more
faithful translation and showed less regard for the French sense of
politeness. She struck against the Moderns in her polemic *On the
Corruption of Taste* (1714), deploring the effeminate morals and
literature of her contemporaries, in contrast to the heroic ones of
Antiquity.



In all phases of the quarrel, all parties agreed that Antiquity should
be admired and at no time was the Greco-Roman canon put into question.
Ancient literature was the core of boys' education in Ancien
Regime France and it remained the standard for French
intellectuals until the end of the eighteenth century, in spite of
popular new developments in the novel and theater. After the Quarrel
of the Ancients and the Moderns, Enlightenment writers reconciled both
sides by recognizing scientific innovations and improvements in
lifestyle without losing their desire to imitate ancient literary
forms or admire the grandeur of ancient heroes.



This long quarrel had largely concerned whether writers had properly
applied literary rules. This ancient method for evaluating literature,
which we can observe as early as in Aristotle's
*Poetics*, aimed to determine whether literary works correctly
followed the conventions of, say, genre, diction, or the decorum that
was based on characters' social category. While some French
thinkers were still approaching literature this way, others were
developing new ways of judging beauty--artistic and
otherwise--at the cognitive level. The sides they took in debates
not only reflected the way they reasoned, but their social milieu and
their institutional status.


## 2. Salon Culture and Sensibility



Early in the Ancien Regime, in 1635, the government of Louis
XIII, controlled by Cardinal de Richelieu, established the
Academie Francaise, with the mission of standardizing
the French language. Before this institution came into being, there
had been literary circles, which later scholars called
*salons*, run by upper-class women and men for their select
guests, that had fostered the production of new writings and held
debates about how to refine the French language. The Academie
Francaise brought some of this activity under national
authority, granted it royal patronage, and controlled the membership,
limiting it to exactly 40 men. Nevertheless, salons continued their
work for the next centuries; they continued to patronize emerging
talents and exerted a great influence on public reception of the
arts.



Seventeenth-century salon culture developed concepts of taste that
were closely aligned with an aristocratic view of politeness and
sensibility. Cassirer calls this approach "empiricist"
and, indeed, these ideas were dependent on the senses and the stimuli
they received, more than on reason or on conventions of genre.



An early influential thinker was Dominique Bouhours, a Jesuit and
frequent guest at salons who wrote *Entretiens d'Ariste et
d'Eugene*, a series of dialogues about good taste. In
this work, he deals with the arts, particularly eloquence, but also
manners. Bouhours is best known for coining the term *je ne sais
quoi* or "I don't know what"--a special,
undefinable quality that transcends any rules. His interlocutors evoke
the possibility that a work of art could follow all the rules yet fail
to please, if it lacks that special something. They compare the *je
ne sais quoi* in the arts to the ineffable in the contemplation of
nature or in Catholic theology. In another part of his
*Entretiens*, Bouhours denounces exaggeration or excessive
ornamentation in language: a common trope in works about rhetoric
since Antiquity. His interlocutors apply this idea to
seventeenth-century Europe when they agree that, with its simplicity
and modesty, the French language is superior to bombastic Spanish and
effeminate Italian. These linguistic prejudices indicate to us that
Bouhours was trying to establish the status of France as the cultural
heir to the Roman empire, in opposition to the two most dominant
cultures in Europe in his era.



In Bouhours' text, politeness and artistic taste are closely
tied, since it takes a special sense of discernment to perceive
literary beauty as well as the right thing to say in a social setting.
Both supposedly emanate from the acute sensibility of a refined person
who is accustomed to being surrounded by beauty and good manners. The
class implications of his ideas about taste are clear to see: only
those members of an elite had the instinct for both exquisite
politeness and exquisite artistic taste. It denies the possibility
that just anyone could receive enough training to reach this level of
refinement, an idea that would be shared by later theorists that
emerged from this salon culture.



The abbe Dubos, the marquise de Lambert, and Montesquieu, among
others, continued this line of thought in the early eighteenth
century. They belonged to a group of acquaintances that frequented the
same social circles, including Lambert's own salon. Because
their reflections on taste were closely tied to their sense of worldly
politeness, they shared a disdain for professional critics and any
semblance of pedantry. They were less concerned with defining beauty
and more intent on examining what happens in the mind and body of the
viewer when she contemplates a pleasing object. Their emphasis on
pleasure and sentiment was sensualist, based on input from the senses;
in Montesquieu's case, sensualism becomes frankly
hedonistic.



Jean-Baptiste Dubos, in his *Critical Reflections on Poetry,
Painting, and Music* (1719), presents the faculty of taste as a
sentiment that he calls a sixth sense, disregarding the role of reason
or of morality, which his contemporary Jean-Pierre Crousaz had
considered important aspects of taste. His work precedes Scottish
philosopher Francis Hutcheson's aesthetic treatise of 1725, in
which he also discusses a sixth sense that perceives beauty. According
to Dubos, the reception of artistic works happens in the body: we
tremble, cry, or feel a jolt of surprise when we see a play, for
example. He describes how the arts affect our emotions positively,
while admitting that the effect of seeing death depicted in painting
or theater, for example, is different than if we were to witness a
death in real life. He also goes into great detail to describe how
climate affects nations and consequently how it fosters or impedes the
proliferation of good artists in certain parts of the world. This type
of thinking began as far back as Hippocrates's reflections on
the effects of climate on national character and extends to Juan
Huarte's thoughts on the influence of body temperature on
eloquence and later to Montesquieu's claims about the way
climate determines human behavior and consequently each nation's
political system. This climate theory is part of Dubos's idea
that artistic perception happens in the body, both for the viewer and
for the creator. For him, art is ultimately a means of communication
from body to body.



One misunderstanding that has arisen about Dubos is the assumption
that he democratizes taste, because in some passages of the
*Reflections*, he states that the "public" and
"*tout le monde*" can be susceptible to the proper
reception of artworks. However, in other passages he explains what he
means by these terms: "*tout le monde*" does not
mean "everyone", as it is usually translated: he in fact
uses "*le monde*" to mean high society, also called
"*le beau monde*" in the eighteenth century. As for
the general public, he explicitly excludes "the lower class of
people" from "the public capable of passing judgment on
poems or pictures" (Dubos, *Critical Reflections*,
II:245).



Like Dubos, the marquise de Lambert writes about good taste as a
sentiment of pleasure, or *agrement*, in her
*Reflections on Taste*. A person's correct judgment
depends on her degree of sensibility, and Lambert claims it cannot be
learned; instead,



> 
> 
> Nature gives us what we have of it, we never can acquire it, and the
> more refined Part of the World alone are acquainted with it in any
> Degree of Perfection. (Lambert 1748: 217 [1790: 183])
> 
> 
> 



She disregards definitions of beauty that are based on rules, perhaps
because these can be learned. In fact, she dismisses the concept of
beauty from her thoughts on taste and privileges the
"*agreable*", which can be translated as
"agreeable" or "pleasant":



> 
> 
> though Beauty has Rules, Agreeableness has none. The [beautiful]
> without the Agreeable can never give us a delicate Pleasure; the
> Agreeable is the native Subject of Taste, and 'tis thence that
> it pleases us infinitely beyond the [beautiful]; and it is as
> arbitrary and variable, even as the Taste itself. (Lambert 1748: 217
> [1790: 184])
> 
> 
> 



The impossibility of establishing definitive parameters for taste is a
continuation of Bouhours' "je ne sais quoi", which
relies on a sensitive person's instinctive ability to recognize
an appropriately pleasing object.



The marquise de Lambert's views were echoed in the works of
other writers of her circle, such as the abbe Trublet and
Cartaud de la Vilate (she also hosted both Anne Dacier and Houdar de
la Motte). Cartaud de la Vilate places particular emphasis on
delicacy, which is



> 
> 
> an exquisite discernment that nature has placed in certain organs for
> sorting out the different virtues of the objects that pertain to
> sentiment. (Cartaud de la Vilate 1726: 235 [translation by J.
> Tsien])
> 
> 
> 



These ideas of inborn sensibility to pleasing artistic objects refute
the possibility that taste can be learned.



Montesquieu also examines taste as a function of the viewer's
mind, through the filter of the same milieu of worldly refinement. The
examples to which he applies his aesthetic ideas are not exclusively
artistic: he includes activities like flirting, gambling, and social
dancing, alongside more conventional topics such as architecture, to
describe how the mind perceives pleasure. He explains these ideas in
his *Essay on Taste*, which appears in Diderot and
d'Alembert's *Encyclopedie* under the entry
"Gout" (1757), an entry which also includes
treatises on the same subject by Voltaire and d'Alembert. To
describe what objects please our minds, Montesquieu lists six
qualities: order, variety, symmetry, contrasts, the ability to provoke
curiosity, and the ability to provoke surprise. Each of these
qualities in excess has a bad effect, he claims, such as a Gothic
cathedral that offers too much variety and confuses us. On the other
hand, too much order and symmetry, for example in a long colonnade or
in a beautiful woman's face, can bore the onlooker. Like
Lambert, Montesquieu states that he is more interested in pleasure
than beauty; as an example, he claims to prefer a woman with irregular
features who can surprise him to a perfectly beautiful woman. To the
six qualities of pleasing objects above, he adds three ways in which
our minds experience these objects: sensibility, delicacy, and the
*je ne sais quoi*. These terms remind us of his allegiance to
the Bouhours-Dubos-salon line of thought about taste as a quality
inherent in certain refined, worldly people.


## 3. Cartesian Beauty



Although this turn towards subjectivism and sensualism represented a
major innovation in aesthetics, Descartes was still a dominant
influence on French thought of the eighteenth century, and his
philosophy was applied to theories of beauty, even though he wrote
little on the topic. Scholars such as Crousaz and Andre
proposed objective measures of beauty, as Descartes did with truth,
that could be applied to any object. This standard would ideally
transcend the vicissitudes of fashion, personal biases, or cultural
differences.



Jean-Pierre de Crousaz, a professor of logic and mathematics in
Lausanne, Switzerland, published his *Treatise on Beauty* in
1715. He does not offer original ideas on the nature of the beautiful;
he takes up the old dictum that it is a mix of unity and diversity, so
as to preserve order and proportion from both caprice and monotony.
But he approaches it with a new awareness of the constraints and
prejudices that obstruct the way:



> 
> 
> Everyone possesses [an idea of the beautiful], but since it hardly
> ever appears alone we do not reflect upon it and fail to distinguish
> it from the tangle of other ideas which appear alongside it. (1715
> [AT: 390])
> 
> 
> 



The root of this difficulty lies in the duality of human
faculties:



> 
> 
> Sometimes ideas and feelings are in agreement with each other and an
> object merits the qualification "beautiful" on both
> counts. Sometimes, however, reason and feelings are at war with each
> other and then an object pleases and at the same time does not: from
> one perspective it is beautiful, while from another it lacks beauty.
> (1715 [AT: 392])
> 
> 
> 



Crousaz is not satisfied with this duality; on the contrary, he
believes we have a responsibility to discover



> 
> 
> which principles regulate our approbation when we judge something from
> ideas only [or, as he likes to say, "coolly"] and find it
> beautiful independently of feeling. (1715 [AT: 393])
> 
> 
> 



Taste is a forerunner of what reason would have approved, had it time
enough to weigh everything relevant to a judgment. Crousaz finally
reconciles knowledge with sensations, a fact that appears to testify
in favor of God's wisdom. Similar ideas are also to be found in
minor authors such as Frain du Tremblay, Brumoy, or Trublet.



Yves-Marie Andre's *Essay on Beauty* (1741) covers
the same territory, but with a strong influence from Malebranche. In
accordance with the Cartesian distinction between ideas (innate,
adventitious, and fictitious), Andre suggests several notions
of beauty. *Essential* beauty is "independent of any
institution, even divine" and so is identified with what is
universal, immutable, and recognizable by divine Reason.
*Natural* beauty concerns the whole range of created things; it
is "independent of any human opinion" but follows from
God's will; it is present in the harmony and finality of nature.
The lowest degree of beauty is the product of human activity and is
partly arbitrary, because it combines intellectual as well as sensual
ingredients. This *arbitrary* beauty that speaks to the eye and
ear is itself organized into three levels: genius, taste, and caprice
(in descending order). Only genius is recognizable by our reason, when
the latter is adequately supported by other faculties. Andre
summarizes:



> 
> 
> I call beautiful not what pleases to imagination's first
> sight--but what has a right to please reason and reflection by
> its own excellence. (*Essay on Beauty* quoted in Becq 1994: 419
> [translation by J. Morizot])
> 
> 
> 



For him, there is no distinction between *beauty* and
*truth*, and this is the very definition of the aesthetics of
perfection. But aesthetic feeling is a normal affective accompaniment
of any act of creation or reception, and the distinguishing feature of
humankind as a species.



Charles Batteux had somewhat different goals. When he published
*The Fine Arts Reduced to a Single Principle* in 1746, he took
up a challenge: to establish Aristotelian ideas firmly as the general
basis for a unified system of the arts. The main concept on which he
focuses is *mimesis*, but generalized to any kind of art (thus
going beyond Aristotle or Horace). To achieve this generalization, he
distinguishes the liberal arts, of which the object is pleasure (i.e.,
music, poetry, painting, sculpture, and dance), from the mechanical
ones, and he proposes an interpretation of what amounts to the
"imitation of the beautiful nature" (Batteux 1746). He
insists that imitation is not a matter of slavishly copying the given,
but a sensible and enlightened process that struggles its way forward
to the best result. Recalling the famous anecdote of Zeuxis who
composed his *Helen* out of parts taken from Crotone's
most perfect women, he concludes that the artist has the
responsibility to imitate what reason decides is nature's
essence. That is why Batteux praises artifice so much: "art is
made for fooling" (Batteux 1746), not because it is inherently
duplicitous but because truth is a complex construction that hides its
structure and development. Of course, the problem of taste remains
unresolved when we ask how the artist selects the parts that he will
assemble in his imitation of "beautiful nature": by what
standard does he determine that a certain part of nature is
beautiful?



It is also important to mention composer Jean-Philippe Rameau, who
passionately adhered to Cartesian thought. In his *Treatise on
Harmony* (1722), he attempted to lay the scientific foundations of
music, and codifies many of the ideas that are the basis of our
analysis of music to this day (e.g., tonality, major vs. minor keys,
principles of composition and accompaniment). For Rameau, harmony is
more fundamental to music than melody. Nonetheless, from the
*Demonstration of the principle of harmony* (1750) on, and
after the so-called *Querelle des bouffons* or "Quarrel
of Buffoons", where Rousseau took him to task (in his *Letter
about French Music* 1753, a libel in favor of the Italian opera),
Rameau retreated to the certainty that music is the universal
"key" to any subject whatsoever, including geometry.


## 4. The Enlightenment *Philosophes*



After Montesquieu, the other philosophers of the Enlightenment
borrowed from the theories mentioned above to come up with their
descriptions of taste as a combination of three elements: sentiment,
reason, and a knowledge of rules. Simultaneously, they distanced
themselves from both the refined world of salons that had promoted
their careers and the academics who had developed theories of beauty.
Even Montesquieu criticized salons as having a feminizing influence
that discouraged serious scholarship. Meanwhile, Voltaire describes
scholars as myopic and dust-covered in his poem *The Temple of
Taste* (1733). The majority of Enlightenment philosophers saw
themselves as erudite, serious thinkers who also lived in society. In
terms of taste, they set themselves off as a caste of professional
critics who claimed the right to make artistic judgments that were
more authoritative than the potentially wayward preferences of the
general public.



Voltaire describes good taste as a combination of sentiment and
erudition. In his article "Taste" in the
*Encyclopedie*, he gives the example of a young man who
cries at a theatrical performance. Voltaire demands that this
spontaneous reaction eventually be backed up by an understanding of
the reasons why the play had this effect on him--namely, rules
such as the Aristotelean unities. The experience is similar to that
described by Crousaz, except that the latter describes the ideal
artistic reception as an immediate sentiment that is later confirmed
by reason rather than rules. As for more extensive thoughts on beauty,
however, Voltaire scholars affirm in their works devoted to his role
as critic that he did not have an all-encompassing aesthetic theory.
Instead, he made pronouncements on taste in the arts on a case-by-case
basis, with a clear preference for Greco-Roman conventions, but still
willing to make exceptions for certain passages by great writers who
broke these rules, such as Shakespeare.



Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote little about taste and beauty, only
diatribes about the corrupting influence of the arts in general and a
few pieces about musical composition. It was Marmontel, his fellow
*philosophe*, who attempted to create a theory of taste
extrapolated from Rousseau's philosophy. In his *Essai sur le
gout*, which prefaces his *Elements de
litterature* (1787), Marmontel determines, like Batteux and
many others, that good taste is based on nature. He then recounts a
series of stages in which man passes from good taste to bad taste and
then back to good. First there are the "savage men" who
express themselves with eloquence but no "excessive
hyperbole" or "superfluous epithet". In
Marmontel's system, the second stage is that of the
"uncultured" or "barbaric" man, who prefers
artificial and convoluted language. Alienated from nature, he has been
corrupted by luxury, vanity, and the whims of fashion. This bad taste
can be compared to Andre's lowest type of taste, which he
calls arbitrary, because it is capricious and constantly changing.
Finally, in Marmontel's model, the "civilized man"
emerges in the third stage, when he returns to a modified nature. This
trajectory is clearly based on Rousseau's schema, as he recounts
it in his political works, of the noble savage who becomes corrupted
by society, and who finally, in some unspecified future, will see
society self-destruct and, in a way, come full circle to the beginning
again. Aside from these ideas, Marmontel's poetics were a return
to a conventional system of classification of figures of style,
compatible with his contemporary Dumarsais' listing of
tropes.



Diderot's monumental article "Beau" of the
*Encyclopedie* contains one of the best summaries of
French aesthetic thought in the eighteenth century, as well as some
new ideas for artistic judgment. Early in the article, he exposes the
circular reasoning inherent to theories of beauty: according to Saint
Augustine, unity is the defining characteristic of beauty--a
symmetrical building would be an example. "But why is symmetry
necessary?" asks Diderot, who answers himself, "Because it
pleases". "Why does it please?" he continues,
"Because it is beautiful". "Why is it beautiful?
Because it is unified". Unable to resolve this problem, he then
goes on to summarize the theories of beauty by Andre and
Crousaz, as well as by Hutcheson and German philosopher Christian
Wolff. While Diderot claims to consider Andre's treatise
the most profound and coherent, he still objects to the necessity of
innate ideas about what is beautiful. Instead, Diderot argues that all
conceptions of symmetry, proportion, and beauty come from our
observations.



His own definition of taste depends on what he calls
"rapports", or connections between various aspects of a
work. An artist creates these rapports and the most refined, the most
erudite, and the most sensitive viewer is the one who can discern the
largest number of them. His prime example is a line from
*Horace*, a 1640 tragedy by Corneille: "*qu'il
mourut*" or "that he had died". Diderot
explains that these words in isolation are neither beautiful nor ugly.
But if one knows the context within the plot of the play, that this is
the answer that a father gives when asked what he would have his son
do in battle, the listener finds more interest in the line. Diderot
adds several other circumstances from the play, for instance, that
this is the only surviving son, that he is alone against three
enemies, and that he is fighting for the honor of his country, that
create more rapports in the mind of the listener, until this
ultra-concise line becomes an object of great beauty. The rapports
described here involve understanding more and more of the plot and of
the human relationships depicted, which add layers of meaning to
certain lines. In his *Lettre sur les sourds et muets*,
translated as *Letter on the Deaf and Dumb* (1751b), Diderot
explains something similar, using the term "hieroglyphics"
rather than "rapports". He gives the example of a poem in
which men of taste can see a much larger number of
"hieroglyphs" or elements of prosody, than ordinary
people; in other words, they can do what literary scholars call a
close reading. What is not clear, however, is how people can reach the
stage of refinement where they are able to discern more rapports or
"hieroglyphs".


## 5. Painting: of Amateurs and Professionals



As debates about taste in literature and music were taking place,
other debates arose in the world of visual arts. Artists felt a new
authority to theorize publicly about their work, even though in 1719
Dubos still referred to them as "artisans", harking back
to an era in which artists had no more prestige than other skilled
manual laborers. However, Louis XIV had established the Royal Academy
of Painting and Sculpture in 1648 and thus gave these former artisans
a special status. He named Charles Le Brun, who occupied the role of
First Painter to the King, as the founding director of this Academy.
Its leaders created a set of apprenticeships and tests that the
aspirants had to pass in order to be formally accepted. Painters,
depending on how they wished to be received, could present a master
work in the "grand genre": that is, a historic,
mythological, or religious scene. Otherwise, they could undertake some
of the minor genres, which were, in descending hierarchical order,
portraits, landscapes, "genre" scenes that represented
daily life, and lastly, still lifes.



One major *querelle* occurred in the seventeenth century
between proponents of line and those of color, or between the
Poussinists and Rubenists. For a long time, color had been
disregarded, for at least three reasons: it is, in Charles Le
Brun's words, "but an accident produced by the reflection
of light and that varies according to circumstances" (1672 [AT:
183]); it appeals to sensuality whereas "we must not judge by
our senses alone but by reason" as Poussin puts it in a letter
to Chantelou dated 24 November 1647 (AT: 69); and it proves unable to
serve as a foundation for painting, unlike drawing, which is related
to the mind (the original sense of *disegno* = drawing or
design).



The painter Gabriel Blanchard cautiously started to endorse the use of
color in the Academy in 1671. He did not want to "diminish the
importance of design" but to



> 
> 
> establish three things in defense of color: first, that color is just
> as necessary to the art of painting as design; secondly, that if we
> diminish the worth of color, we thereby also diminish the worth of
> painters; and thirdly, that color merited the praise of the Ancients,
> and that it merits it again in our own age. (1671 [AT:
> 178-179])
> 
> 
> 



Design is a necessary foundation, certainly, but if the aim of the
painter is "both to deceive the eyes and to imitate
nature", it is reasonable to conclude that color serves that
goal best, because "herein lies the difference that
distinguishes painting from all the other arts and which gives
painting its own specific end" (AT: 180). This was clearly an
attempt to turn to his advantage Poussin's phrase that the aim
of painting is delectation--but insufficient indeed to convince
Le Brun.



Two men were going to play a special role in the color crusade. It may
seem odd to mention royal historiographer Andre Felibien
first because he is generally and rightly considered as a supporter of
Poussin. But he was also liberal-minded, respectful of differing
opinions (it was to cost him his position!) and anxious to find a fair
balance between the gifts of the mind and the talents of the hand. For
him, "beauty is a result of the proportion and symmetry between
corporeal and material parts" (1725 [AT: 220]), so that color
cannot be discarded since



> 
> 
> everything should appear so artfully connected that the whole painting
> seems to have been painted at one and the same time, and, as it were,
> from the same palette. (1725 [AT: 568], quoted by Louis-Guillaume
> Baillet de Saint-Julien, 1748, *Lettre sur la peinture, sculpture
> et architecture, Avec un examen des principaux Ouvrages exposes
> au Louvre au mois d'Aout*, Paris: [n.p.])
> 
> 
> 



When he translates Du Fresnoy's *De Arte Graphica* (1668)
and publishes his *Dialogue upon Coloring* (1673), art critic
Roger de Piles may appear to hold stronger views; however, by
transferring emphasis from color to coloring, he too stresses the
importance of harmony and the way it presupposes mastery of local
color and *chiaroscuro*. When de Piles entered the Academy
three decades later, he would produce a synthesis under the title
*Principles of Painting* (1708), in which he insists that



> 
> 
> true painting is such as not only surprises, but as it were, calls to
> us; and has so powerful an effect, that we cannot help coming near it,
> as if it had something to tell us. (1708 [AT: 309])
> 
> 
> 



In a word,



> 
> 
> the spectator is not obliged to seek for *truth* in a painting;
> but *truth*, by its effect, must *call to the
> spectator*, and force his attention. (1708 [AT: 310])
> 
> 
> 



That points to what he called "the whole together", that
is "a general subordination of objects one to another, as makes
them all concur to constitute but one", for the utmost
satisfaction of the eye (1708 [AT: 312]). The same lesson can be drawn
from Antoine Coypel's writings, where "the excellence of
painting" is no longer separate from "the aesthetic of the
painter". His nomination as Academy's Director in 1714 was
the sign that a page had been turned.



After Louis XIV, patronage of the arts was heavily influenced by the
stylistic preferences of Louis XV's official mistress the
Marquise de Pompadour, who selected the artists and architects who
would receive royal pensions, commissioned works that defined the
legacy of this era, and sponsored the porcelain works of
Sevres. She also introduced her brother, later ennobled as the
Marquis de Marigny, to the court; she arranged for the painter Antoine
Coypel and the architect Jacques-Germain Soufflot (later responsible
for the Pantheon in Paris) to undertake his education. Wielding her
political influence, she then had Marigny named Director General of
the King's Buildings, which made him an important decision-maker
in giving royal commissions to artists.



Aside from royal patronage, there were also roles for the
"amateurs" or "connoisseurs", individuals who
played an increasingly important role in shaping the arts during the
Ancien Regime. In the words of art historian Charlotte
Guichard,



> 
> 
> The *amateur* constituted an intermediate figure between the
> patron, characteristic of court society in early modern times, and the
> collector, who emerged as the art market developed. (Guichard 2012:
> 521)
> 
> 
> 



Among the most famous of these connoisseurs were the financier Pierre
Crozat and the Comte de Caylus. It was not enough for them to collect
thousands of works; they were also involved with indexing and
reproducing them through printmaking. The *Recueil Crozat*
(1729 and 1742) is the true ancestor of art books and dictionaries
devoted to fine arts, which began to multiply (see, e.g.,
Pernety's *Dictionnaire portatif* [1757], Watelet
and Levesque's *Dictionnaire des arts* [1792], and
especially Mariette's *Abecedario*, posthumously
published from 1851-1860). Catalogs began to proliferate and the
first monographs appeared, among the most important being *Recueil
Julienne*, Jean de Julienne's collection of 271 engravings
after Watteau's paintings. Caylus and Dezallier
d'Argenville also wrote about artists, sketched biographies and
established rules for discerning the delicacy of style or the
lightness of execution. All this took place in the larger context in
which the cosmopolitan amateurs of different countries were able to
easily travel abroad. (Such travels evolved into the ritual of the
Grand Tour.)



In an era before formal museums existed, the public had little access
to art, until the Royal Academy began displaying paintings in what is
known as the Salon in 1737. The Salon began as a political and social
event that was inaugurated in the Louvre's Salon Carre on
25 August--St. Louis' day--to pay homage to the king
and it was to last one month. Over the years, it became a valuable
guide for tracing the major trends in style and aesthetic ideas, for
lists of works as well as evolutionary trends in pictorial genres were
taken into account. But the most significant consequence of the rise
of the Salon was the birth of a new literary genre, namely, the salon
review, which flourished until the twentieth century and has been an
incomparable mirror of aesthetic thought. Originally, such reviews
were just a blend of descriptive reports and theoretical asides, often
controversial. The "salon" is for the benefit of a larger
public--that is, those not necessarily affiliated with some
artistic institution. As La Font de Saint-Yenne wrote in 1747:



> 
> 
> an exhibited picture is the same as a book on the day of publication,
> and as a play performed in the theater: everyone has the right to make
> his own judgment. We have gathered together the judgments of the
> public which showed the greatest amount of agreement and fairness, and
> we now present *them*, and not at all our own judgment, to the
> artists, in the belief that this same public [whose] judgments are so
> often bizarre and unjustly damning or hasty rarely errs when all its
> voices unite on the merit or weakness of any particular work. (1747
> [AT: 555])
> 
> 
> 



With Caylus, Baillet de Saint-Julien, and then above all Diderot, the
aesthetic importance of painting is increasingly emphasized, opening
the way to a long tradition of writers keen on painting.



Diderot's efforts as an art writer were based on two
complementary beliefs, namely, that the techniques used by a painter
to produce various effects are difficult for the ordinary viewer to
understand and articulate, and that it is a difficult but vital
challenge to capture, through literary language, the significant
aspects of a painting. That the painter's alchemy eludes the
viewer's understanding is something often repeated by Diderot,
notably with respect to Jean-Baptiste Chardin:



> 
> 
> It's magic, one can't understand how it's done:
> thick layers of colour, applied one on top of the other, each one
> filtering through from underneath to create the effect. At times, it
> looks as though the canvas has misted over from someone breathing on
> it; at others, as though a thin film of water has landed on
> it.... Close up, everything blurs, goes flat and disappears. From
> a distance, everything comes back to life and reappears. (1763 [AT:
> 604])
> 
> 
> 



At the same time, Diderot is aware that the painter's power
makes it extremely hard for the writer to give his reader a deep grasp
of a painting. Despite the difficulty, the writer must somehow express
the essence of a masterpiece, thereby achieving a kind of
*ekphrasis*, in which the art of writing attempts to capture in
words the essence and form of the visual art of painting. The critic
must not only provide the reader with a short description of the work
in question, but must attempt to make his words somehow equivalent to
the sentiment expressed by the painting in question.



Aside from the exceptional painters that Diderot admired, such as
Greuze and Chardin, the eighteenth century saw a rivalry between two
predominant styles, rococo and neoclassicism. Rococo artists such as
Francois Boucher tended to depict scenes of flirtation in rich
interiors or pastoral settings, which detractors scorned as
effeminate. Rococo artists sometimes chose mythological subjects and
neoclassical painters did as well, but the latter inserted overtly
didactic messages. Philosophers such as Diderot praised this latter
style because they claimed it would instill more of a virile sense of
patriotism among the populace. One could see the works of
Jacques-Louis David, during the Revolution, as the ultimate conflation
of classical subjects, images of traditionally manly virtue, and
messages of national pride. French interest in Antiquity had been
constant throughout the Ancien Regime, but it was further
enriched by the dissemination of printed images of archaeological
sites in Athens, Pompeii, and other cities in which new discoveries
had been made.



The end of the eighteenth century saw the birth of the museum.
Previously, people could see works of art only in private homes or in
religious institutions, even though during this period, certain
collectors began making their "cabinets of curiosities"
available to the public. The British Museum had opened in 1759 and the
Uffizi in 1765, but France was behind its neighbors, even if royal
collections were more accessible than before. The first suggestion for
creating a gallery in the unoccupied Louvre goes back to 1747 and was
reiterated in 1765 in the eponymous entry in the
*Encyclopedie* (Jaucourt 1765). The Louvre museum
finally opened in 1793.



The new accessibility of art to the masses, as well as the increasing
literacy and proliferation of printed works, transformed society in
the eighteenth century. The worldly judges of taste in the seventeenth
century gave way to the professional critics, i.e. the Enlightenment
*philosophes*. The new world created by the French Revolution
would soon expand--and further complicate--the connection
between the production of art and its reception by both critics and
the public.