Between Academicism and its Critics: Leonardo da Vinci’s Traité de la Peinture and Eighteenth-Century French Art Theory

2017 ◽  
pp. 300-324
Author(s):  
Thomas Kirchner
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Art Theory ◽  
French Art

A ‘milky mass’ and ‘uniform material’: white marble in eighteenth-century French discourses on sculpture and geology

2021 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 215-225
Author(s):  
Marthe Kretzschmar
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Grain Size ◽  
Denis Diderot ◽  
Art Theory ◽  
White Marble ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The Earth ◽  
History Of ◽  
Interdisciplinary Network

Knowledge of the materiality of stone during the Enlightenment expanded following the exploration of mineralogical structure, to alter ideas about taxonomy and challenge the role of rocks in the history of the earth. Close studies of the material of marble sculpture generated expertise on grain size, surface varieties and stone deposits. This mode of reception became intertwined with contemporary controversies about the age of the earth. This article focuses on both French sculpture and geological discourses of the eighteenth century to reveal an international and interdisciplinary network centring on protagonists such as Denis Diderot, Paul-Henri Thiry d’Holbach and Étienne-Maurice Falconet; through these figures, debates can be connected concerning both geology and art theory. Within these contexts, the article discusses the translation processes between these artistic and geological interests.

scholarly journals Disciplinary crisis in valorisation of art

2017 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 143-152
Author(s):  
Nataša Lah
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Dynamic System ◽  
Social Status ◽  
Art History ◽  
Art Theory ◽  
Short Account ◽  
Actual Time ◽  
History Of ◽  
As If

Generally speaking, values among objects - as well as among art valuables - are defined based on the especially significant properties and qualificatives differentiating i.e. privileging that artwork within a family of congenial phenomena/objects; first in the time of its origination and then in present time. The history of aesthetics and that of cultures both mirror the unstable status of the qualificatives of art value i.e. conditions for the historical transformations of valorisation. Objects or phenomena which pretended to be what we today call the valuable artworks, have acquired the required qualification within a hierarchised framework of their own time's cultural demand1 . A dynamic system of changes in equalising artwork's value with its social status brought about the disciplinary crisis of art theory, which failed to adapt axiologically to the new receptions of art and the standards of actual time.2 I'll derive a short account of crisis from the fundamental questions concerning the meaning of beauty, value and valorisation within culture and art, through history. The crisis arises during the period from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, when art history became disciplinary articulated, incorporating the valorisation mechanisms of that time into its own methodological matrix, as if it was supratemporal and ahistorical.

scholarly journals From Exquisite to Transgressive Moderns? The Goncourt's "Decadent" Eighteenth-Century Art Revival

Nordlit ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 159
Author(s):  
Juliet Simpson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
French Art ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Art And Culture ◽  
Aesthetic Understanding ◽  
Aesthetic Expression

As avid collectors of French eighteenth-century art, the Goncourts' contribution to its nineteenth-century history is well-known. This article, however, explores a less welldocumented aspect of their L'Art du dix-huitième siècle (1858-1875): that is, its articulation of an art of latency and decadence prior to the term's fin-de-siècle association with explicitly transgressive cultures of modernity. Indeed, the paper argues that the Goncourts were amongst the first writers of their age to use the art of an age linked with political and cultural decay, to foreground latently decadent tendencies in mid nineteenth-century French art and culture. In so doing, they were to produce a paradigm of "decadence" defining not decline, but a new and highly modern artistry of heightened aesthetic expression. The article will explore these ideas in two principal ways. First, it considers neglected relations between the Goncourts' and Taine's ideas on art, and specifically, the Goncourts' use and exploitation of Tainean indicators of decadence, broached in Taine's study on La Fontaine (1861), for opposing artistically and culturally productive ends. Second it develops these ideas in a discussion of the three artist-studies in L'Art du dixhuitième siècle in which the Goncourts' developing theme of "decadence" is articulated with especial force and prescience: in "Boucher" (1861), "Greuze" (1863) and ‘Fragonard' (1864). These, as the paper argues, suggest particularly defined channels for the Goncourts' engagement with key Tainean ideas of the period, offering related opportunities for their promotion of corruption, vice and decline as aesthetically and culturally compelling. In repositioning Boucher's sensualism as "indécence", Greuze's "innocence" as "perverse" and Fragonard's Italianate expressivity as "impure", the Goncourts not only situate their "histories" in the vanguard of a new, transgressive aesthetic understanding of eighteenth-century art, they re-appropriate its Romantically exquisite aspects as emblems of an art of exquisite corruption and as triggers for recreation.

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)

scholarly journals Artists and the city: mapping the art worlds of eighteenth-century Paris

Urban History ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 106-131
Author(s):  
HANNAH WILLIAMS
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
World View ◽  
Art World ◽  
Urban Art ◽  
Digital Mapping ◽  
Art Worlds ◽  
French Art ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries ◽  
The City

ABSTRACT:Paris is renowned for artistic neighbourhoods like Montmartre and Montparnasse in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But for earlier periods, the art-historical picture is much vaguer. Where did artists live and work in the eighteenth century? Which neighbourhoods formed the cultural geography of the early modern art world? Drawing on data from a large-scale digital mapping project locating the addresses of hundreds of eighteenth-century artists, this article answers these crucial questions of urban art history. Following an overview of the digital project, the article explores three different mappings of the city's art worlds: a century long survey of the neighbourhoods inhabited by the Academy's artists; a comparison of where the Guild's artists were living in a single year and a wider world view of Parisian artists abroad. Through its new cartographic models of Paris's art worlds, this article brings the city to the foreground of eighteenth-century French art.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document