-
Thinking Like an Artist: Hogarth, Diderot, and the Aesthetics of Technique
- Eighteenth-Century Studies
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 46, Number 4, Summer 2013
- pp. 555-570
- 10.1353/ecs.2013.0037
- Article
- Additional Information
- Purchase/rental options available:
In The Analysis of Beauty, William Hogarth advocated an unusual kind of formalism based in artistic practice: not form distilled into a rule for judgment but rather derived from the artist's techniques for perception and composition. Denis Diderot, too, embraced an aesthetics of technique, particularly in the Paradoxe sur le comédien, in which he contends that what appears impassioned in an affecting dramatic performance is in fact calculated. Diderot, however, had the extra burden of reconciling the ideal of illusion with his demystification of the practitioner's perspective, a reconciliation he could only conceive as a paradox.