Diderot Studies, vol. XXX (review)

Fourteen of the 18 articles collected in this volume focus specifically on Diderot's Salons (the four remaining explore related aesthetic issues in other works). The majority concern the early Salons, and one also looks at the Essais sur la peinture. They cover a broad and exciting range of topics. These include the development of the Salons with regard to Diderot's faith in the capacity of words to represent pictures; his use of a technical vocabulary borrowed from the worlds of painting and sculpture; his iconoclastic treatment of the 'sacred'; the relationship between time and colour; the role of the nude; the intertextual 'presence' of Montaigne in descriptions of portraits by Van Loo and Mme Therbouche. The essays overlap in subtle ways, their arguments bearing upon each other without being repetitive. They are nevertheless not always in agreement. Florence Boulerie, for example, argues that Diderot's habit of placing the painted image within a récit is limited ('a ses limites') to the extent that 'elle entraîne l'auteur fort loin des tableaux' and into 'narrations' that replace the original image with one that is pure invention on the author's part (p. 102). Phantasia thus replaces mimesis. Michel Delon provides a cogent alternative to this argument as he explores more spectral possibilities. The counterfactual conditionals in Diderot's ekphrasis are the sign of a playful 'experimentation' on the image, a mutual absorbtiveness between the actual and the virtual rather than a substitution of one for the other. Stéphane Lojkine's essay on 'description' goes in a similar direction, suggesting that the discourse of the Diderotian 'compte rendu' is caught between the contradictory logic and poetics of description and judgement. In an article exploring Diderot's ekphrastic indifference, Shane Agin argues that, by 1767, Diderot felt that he had 'exhausted his textual strategies for writing on art'. For Agin, the 1765 article on Fragonard's Corésus et Callirhoé and the 'Promenade Vernet' of 1767 are last-ditch attempts to be innovative in this domain. Other essays in the volume put the validity of this claim into question, none more so than Bernadette Fort's riveting analysis of the 'intertextuality and iconoclasm' of the Salon de 1775. Diderot's 'use' of Cochin—often labelled as mere plagiarism—should not be taken as proof that he is past it as a critic, but rather as a violent (and profoundly political) response to Cochin's 'silent appropriation of art criticism for the benefit of the corporate body he served' (p. 239). Diderot's 'parasitical text' worms its way into Cochin's work and 'hollow[s] it out' (p. 242). One of the effects of this phasmatic strategy of citation resembles that of the 'experimentation' identified by Delon. We are invited to view Diderot's works as sites of ghostly permanences and permutations, of masked mirrorings and metamorphoses. Few volumes on any subject will contain essays so consistently good. Anyone working on Diderot should read this book.