Le 18e siècle comme ère de la peinture

Ken-ichi Sasaki : The 18th Century as an age of painting. The Horatian maxim "Ut pictura poesis" was most influential in the 18th Century, and theorists of every type of art took painting as their model. Painting was considered as the ideal of poetic description (Marmontel), theatre (Diderot), ballet (Noverre), gardens (Girardin) and music (Cahusac), and this paradigmatic status accorded to painting can also be seen in general theories of art (Dubos, Batteux). The interest shown in the sense of sight is also evident in philosophical theories of vision (Berkeley, Condillac, Diderot and Herder). From the viewpoint of aesthetic experience, however, what is fundamental is the fact that painting constituted a pseudo-reality seen as a field of experience ; thus painting as the paradigm of art is essentially linked to the style of aesthetic experience peculiar to the 18th century.Sasaki Ken-ichi. Le 18e siècle comme ère de la peinture. In: Dix-huitième Siècle, n°27, 1995. L'Antiquité. pp. 481-502