Diderot Et Roger De Piles

PMLA ◽  
1970 ◽  
Vol 85 (3) ◽  
pp. 444-455 ◽  
Author(s):  
Par Gîta May
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Fine Arts ◽  
Composition Design ◽  
Art Form ◽  
French Art ◽  
High Esteem ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Technical Terms

While it has recently been established (thanks to the records of the Bibliothèque du Roi, now the Bibliotheque Nationale) that Diderot read a major treatise by Roger de Piles, the influential seventeenth-century art critic and theorist, as early as 1748, the nature and extent of Diderot's indebtedness to his predecessor have not yet been fully explored. Internal evidence, as well as direct and indirect references, reveal the impact of Roger de Piles on Diderot's ideas concerning composition, design, and color. Roger de Piles was the first French art critic to take an uninhibited delight in light and color and to attempt to render, through a bold use of concrete and technical terms, the freshness and vividness of his impressions. In this respect, too, he is an important precursor of Diderot, for the latter frequently borrowed especially apt expressions and images from the writings of Roger de Piles. Articles in the Encyclopedia devoted to the fine arts also confirm the high esteem in which de Piles was held by eighteenth-century artists and connoisseurs. Diderot and his contemporaries recognized above all de Piles's expertise in practical matters concerning the artist's craft. Even though Diderot departs from de Piles in his preoccupation with the moral message of a work of art, he shares with his predecessor a spontaneous appreciation of the exuberant forms, the animated scenes, the down-to-earth realism that characterize the Dutch and Flemish schools of painting. The sketch, as an art form more revelatory of a painter's inner spirit and genius than the more finished product, was the subject of several key remarks by de Piles which Diderot, in turn, amplified and developed in his critical essays. And it was in the writings of de Piles that Diderot found some of his most telling arguments against artificiality and mannerism in art and against an unquestioning adherence to doctrine and dogma. (In French)

Dissent and Education

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Burden
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Educational Activity ◽  
Educational Institutions ◽  
Higher Educational Institutions ◽  
Legal Restrictions ◽  
Higher Educational ◽  
Set Up ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Dissenting Academies

Much eighteenth-century Dissenting educational activity was built on an older tradition of Puritan endeavour. In the middle of the seventeenth century, the godly had seen education as an important tool in spreading their ideas but, in the aftermath of the Restoration, had found themselves increasingly excluded from universities and schools. Consequently, Dissenters began to develop their own higher educational institutions (in the shape of Dissenting academies) and also began to set up their own schools. While the enforcement of some of the legal restrictions that made it difficult for Dissenting institutions diminished across the eighteenth century, the restrictions did not disappear entirely. While there has been considerable focus on Dissenting academies and their contribution to debates about doctrinal orthodoxy, the impact of Dissenting schools was also considerable.

Tracing the Impact of Krishnalila Narratives on Bengal Temple Architecture: A Study of Terracotta Temples of Baranagar

2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-70
Author(s):  
Bikas Karmakar ◽  
Ila Gupta
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
West Bengal ◽  
Local People ◽  
Visual Data ◽  
Literary Sources ◽  
The Impact

The Krishnalila narratives have an indelible impact on the architectural imaginations and designs of artisans of Bengal from seventeenth to nineteenth century. The article attempts to identify such portrayals on the front facades of the Baranagar temples of eighteenth century in Murshidabad, West Bengal. It explores the specific reasons for their inclusion and the changing nature of narratives and iconography under the varying impact of Krishna cult. It relies on literary sources, on site interviews with the priest, temple caretaker and local people and visual data collected during field visits. While romance was the primary theme of the seventeenth century temples, the eighteenth century Baranagar temples saw a diversification of themes to include heroic exploits of Krishna; portrayal of other deities attracted the devotees of Vaishnava, Shaiva and Shakta sects. Such depictions while revealing the secular nature of the chief patron also acted as a tool for legitimization of her authority.

Conclusion

2020 ◽  
pp. 239-258
Author(s):  
Meredith McNeill Hale
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Latin America ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
The Netherlands ◽  
First Century ◽  
Political Satire ◽  
South Sea ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Battle Scenes ◽  
Intensive Investigation

This concluding chapter focuses on the question of circulation and impact: to what extent did De Hooghe’s satires travel beyond The Netherlands in the seventeenth century and what influence did they have on English political satire of the eighteenth century? The appearance of motifs from De Hooghe’s satires in mezzotints of c.1690 and prints on the subject of the South Sea Bubble of 1720 will be discussed as will instances in which De Hooghe’s satires were reissued in the eighteenth century. However, a comparison of this handful of examples with the liberal use of De Hooghe’s triumphal allegories and battle scenes in such distant locations as Latin America and Russia reveals one of the qualities that epitomizes political satire—its dramatic circumscription by temporal and geographical boundaries. Satire’s embeddedness in a specific political, historical, and cultural moment and its dependence upon text that often channels the idiosyncrasies of spoken language, render it difficult—often impossible without intensive investigation—to understand beyond its immediate context. This is as true for twenty-first-century satires as it was for those produced in the late seventeenth century.

A Latin Epitaph of the Early Nineteenth Century

1936 ◽  
Vol 5 (14) ◽  
pp. 121-122
Author(s):  
D. A. Macnaughton
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Rural Area ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Parish Church ◽  
Precise Meaning ◽  
High Esteem ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Impact

This epitaph is on a tombstone in the churchyard of Kenmore, Perthshire, a little village on the shores of Loch Tay, close to the point at which the river leaves the parent lake. In the early nineteenth century Kenmore had some importance as the market of a wide rural area and as containing the parish church and parish school. The epitaph is the work of the son, William Armstrong, who succeeded to his father's post and died in 1879. Purists might perhaps take exception to the post-classical authority of puritate, but it will be generally allowed that as the composition of the Headmaster of a rural parish school its Latinity is as remarkable as its pietas. It is to be regretted that the author left no pupil to pay him a fitting tribute in the same tongue. But among his alumni there were many who remembered his teaching with admiring gratitude. Of these was one of the principal farmers of the district who told me years ago that he held Latin in high esteem as the subject which, as he put it, ‘opened his head’. His precise meaning eluded me until in later years I reflected that Highland farmers have a gift of imagination and a command of terse and figurative expression. Clearly what he implied was that, just as, when Hephaestus split the skull of Zeus, Athene sprung out in full panoply, so the impact of the lene tormentum of Latin on his own brain let wisdom loose.

Conclusion

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert G. Ingram
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Modern State ◽  
English Reformation ◽  
Wars Of Religion ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Church

The conclusion explains why the English Reformation ended in the late eighteenth century. It discounts a secular and secularizing Enlightenment as an explanation. Rather, it offers three other reasons for the Reformation’s ending. Firstly, by the last quarter of the eighteenth century enough time had passed to make the seventeenth-century wars of religion less threatening than they had seemed earlier in the century. Secondly, the Reformation issues with which the eighteenth-century English dealt got supplanted by other, more urgent ones, often having to do with England’s expanding empire. Finally, and importantly, the Reformation ended because the polemical divines who are the subject of this book failed fully in their tasks of defining truth and of defending the autonomy of the established Church of England. In the end, the modern state took on the role as truth’s arbiter and made the Church a subordinate, dependent institution.

Stanisław Janeczek. Oświecenie chrześcijańskie. Z dziejów polskiej kultury filozoficznej [The Christian Enlightenment. A study in the history of Polish philosophical culture]

1970 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 291-295
Author(s):  
J. S.
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Education System ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Social Issues ◽  
Process Of Change ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Systematic Exposition

The subject of this study is the process of change which affected the teaching of philosophy in the secondary education system in the first phase of the Polish Enlightenment in the mid-18th century. Historians of science and philosophy have treated those changes as a spontaneous and uncritical attempt to include the problems of modem natural science seventeenth-century systems of philosophy, and ethical and social issues of the Enlightenment into the systematic exposition of Christian Aristotelianism, all despite the avowed opposition to these modes of culture. Hence the contemporary so-called 'philosophia recentiorum' has usually been regarded as a form of eclecticism, that is as a form structurally and culturally inconsistent, transitory, incomplete and dependent. Emphasis has also been laid on the impact Ch. Wolff allegedly had on the first stage of the Polish Enlightenment, the impact then replaced by English and French influences.

Aesthetics, in modern philosophy

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy M. Costelloe
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Fine Arts ◽  
The Other ◽  
Psychological Processes ◽  
Philosophical Inquiry ◽  
Intellectual Origins ◽  
History Of ◽  
Internal Sense ◽  
Landscape Gardening

The term aesthetics is derived linguistically from the Greek term meaning sensitive or sentient. It is first used to designate a particular area of philosophical inquiry in mid-eighteenth-century Germany, though the intellectual origins of the discipline trace to earlier French and British writers, with the latter providing many founding texts of the emerging area of study. The new subject matter was distinguished by its rise coeval with the Continental Enlightenment and a focus on philosophical issues surrounding the fine arts and judgements of value captured by concepts of beauty, sublimity, and their relata. In France, the seventeenth-century tradition of criticism divides into two strands of thought: one influenced directly by Cartesian rationalism, the other modified by principles drawn from British empiricism. German contributions to aesthetics develop within a rationalist framework derived from Leibnizian philosophy and marked an effort to systematize the newly articulated domain of knowledge. British writers follow primarily empiricist principles but fall into three groups depending on whether they emphasize an internal sense, the faculty of imagination, or psychological processes of association. The British aesthetic tradition is also distinguished by debates over the picturesque, an aesthetic drawn from landscape painting and inseparable from the history of English landscape gardening.

32.—Some Ocean Tide Measurements of the Eighteenth Century, and their Relevance Today

1972 ◽  
Vol 72 (1) ◽  
pp. 331-339 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. E. Cartwright
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
High Precision ◽  
Scientific Data ◽  
Ocean Tide ◽  
Oceanic Tides ◽  
The Subject ◽  
St Helena

SynopsisAfter an introductory survey of seventeenth-century approaches to the subject, two important examples of tide-measuring activity in the eighteenth-century are described. The five years’ continuous observations at Brest, 1711–16, involved great perseverence in effort and accuracy. The treatment of the records by Cassini and their later retrieval by Lalande affords an interesting lesson in the publication of scientific data. The observations made at St Helena in 1761 are remarkable for having been made with high precision by leading astronomers in difficult swell conditions. Finally, a method is described of using these data to search for small differences in the oceanic tides between the eighteenth-century and the present, with a brief discussion of the results.

Second Sight in Scotland

2020 ◽  
pp. 144-166
Author(s):  
Michael Hunter
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Empirical Study ◽  
The Uncanny ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Long Eighteenth Century ◽  
Changing Attitudes ◽  
The Universe

This chapter considers changing attitudes during the long eighteenth century to second sight — the uncanny ability of certain individuals to foresee the future — in Scotland. This was a topic which fascinated Boyle in the late seventeenth century. This chapter illustrates how his enquiries on the subject began a tradition of empirical study of the phenomenon which continued into the eighteenth century. But then a change came, and by about 1800 the possibility of second sight was increasingly rejected among English and Scottish intellectuals on the grounds that it was incompatible with the ‘principles’ by which the universe operated. In parallel with this, however, a separate tradition emerged in which second sight and related phenomena were deemed appropriate for imaginative interpretation by poets and others, which is significant in itself.

The Royal Society and Italy 1667-1795

1982 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-81 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Experimental Science ◽  
Robert Boyle ◽  
The Past ◽  
Psychology Today ◽  
Italian Science ◽  
High Esteem ◽  
John Wallis

Italy has often held a special place in the view of cultivated Englishmen, and this is especially the case for Italian sciences in the seventeenth century (1). At the first beginnings of the Royal Society in 1645 the young men who met for discussions in London held Italian science in high esteem. So much was this the case that among their topics of discussion, as John Wallis, by then Savilian Professor at Oxford, recalled in 1678, were the valves in the veins (whose description by Fabricius of Aquapendente had so impressed William Harvey), Galileo s telescopic discoveries and Torricelli s barometric experiment, all part of that ‘New Philosophy’ which he took to have been founded by Galileo and Bacon. This last was certainly the view to which most of the early Fellows of the Royal Society subscribed, paying constant tribute to Galileo’s role in the foundation of the new experimental science as well as in the advancement of the Copernican theory, as can be seen from the works of Robert Boyle and, later, Newton. The chronological point, self-evident but not always remembered, that living men are not constrained by dates, although historians may wish to be, is exemplified in the case of Newton’s respect for Galileo enunciated in 1687 in the first edition of the Principia , maintained through all the vicissitudes of revision in 1713 and 1723, and as long as the Principia was read, as it was throughout the seventy-five years after Newton’s death (1727), his 1687 tribute to Galileo remained fresh. Similarly, the works of post-Galilean Italian scientists by no means lost their influence because time had worn on into the eighteenth century and they had published in the seventeenth; even today a fifty-year-old book in a new edition may excite new readers, and this of course was even more true in the past when scientific advances approximated in their rate of development to those of, say, economics or psychology today.

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