Les Salons de Diderot: Théorie et écriture (review)

Diderot’s writings on the Salons of the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture, which he provided for Grimm for publication in the Correspondance littéraire, have received recent attention in monographs by both Aurélia Gaillard and Stéphane Lojkine (who also contributes to the work in question here). This collection of articles devoted to Diderot’s art criticism provides a good overview of the range of reflection on his writings on the topic, while still maintaining a certain coherence in its approach. The editors’ introduction suggests the complex nature of ‘la théorie de l’art’ — a seventeenth-century didactic concept relating to technical and practical knowledge — in Diderot’s art criticism, which, they suggest, in its dynamism and its philosophical and aesthetic concerns actually constitutes the modern concept of ‘la théorie de l’art’. A second introductory article by Barthélemy Jobert gives a useful background to the history of the Salon and how it functioned, which leaves the reader with a richer understanding of the interaction between the critic and the subjects of his criticism. The remaining eight articles are divided into two parts, under the headings ‘Esquisses théoriques’ and ‘Poésie critique’, although it is difficult, at times, to see the purpose of this division. For example, Michel Delon’s study of Diderot’s attachment to paintings that attempted to render the subtlety of ‘la chute du jour’, which appears in the second section, is closely related in its concerns to Stéphane Loubère’s analysis of the critic’s sensualist aesthetic, which is dealt with in the first. Indeed, the paradox that Loubère notes in Diderot’s aesthetic pleasure when confronted with a canvas, which sees him torn between admiration of its technical qualities and the desire to be enchanted by it, seems to be reconciled to a certain extent by Delon’s assertion that, for Diderot, ‘L’idéal de la vie sur la toile, ce sont “les tons, les dégradations, les nuances”’ (p. 127). Other contributors focus on specific terms and how they are related to Diderot’s art criticism: Lavezzi shows how Diderot drew on William Hogarth’s Analysis of Beauty (1753) to adopt his terms ‘pyramide’ and ‘ligne serpentine’, not to describe geometrical forms, but as theoretical notions. René Démoris focuses on his criticism of what is ‘maniéré’, concluding that Diderot does not clearly distinguish on a theoretical level between mannerism and art itself. Frantz gives specific examples of the established idea that Diderot brought concepts from his criticism of theatre to that of art. The effects of Diderot’s intimate style in his reviews of the Salons is the subject of an interesting article by Jean-Christophe Abramovici, and this draws attention to the diffusion and dissemination of Diderot’s art criticism, which was virtually unknown to the Parisian Salon-going public. The collection also contains a useful and attractive central section of eight colour reproductions.