Archives for June 2007
Diderot
27 June 2007 | Uncategorized
Extracts from Diderot’s 1761 Salon [from Seznec / Adhémar, 1957, vol I]:
M. Pierre
There is from M. Pierre a Descent from the Cross, a Flight Into Egypt, the Beheading of Saint John the Baptist, and the Judgment of Paris. He’s rich; he’s had education; he made the trip to Rome; he’s said to have brains; he [...]
Invective in La Font
27 June 2007 | Uncategorized
In 1754 La Font wrote on the Salon of 1753, his first such essay since 1747. He begins:
Your taste for the fine arts, Monsieur, impelled you to the point of demanding that I continuously brief you of everything new to appear in this city. But do you think that, since you left it at the [...]
The “Birth” of Art Criticism
27 June 2007 | Uncategorized
Entrons en matière, as the French would say. Sort of like, let’s get down to business. In the mid to late eighteenth century, a generation of French writers began the traditions of art criticism that continued through the period studied in my dissertation. Some writers would argue that there wasn’t really art criticism at all [...]
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Voltaire
25 June 2007 | Uncategorized
In 1972, Roland Mortier published an article “Les formes de la satire chez Voltaire,” in 18e eeuwse satire in woord en beeld [pp. 43-64], the proceedings of a 1971 symposium at Teylers Museum in Haarlem:
And didn’t Musset make a symbol out of him in assimilating him to the perverse and sardonic laughter of an old [...]
The Republic of Letters
7 June 2007 | Uncategorized
Before we move on to Diderot, a few words about his (near) contemporaries, from Françoise Waquet, whose work I first read about in Ferreyrolles. In 2005 she published “La République des Lettres: un univers de conflits” in the collection Pouvoirs, Contestations et Comportements dans l’Europe moderne. She notes first that
Pierre Bayle, in a note to the [...]
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The Seventeenth Century
7 June 2007 | Uncategorized
As we approach the present, the available literature multiplies and I’ll have to be increasingly selective. I’ve been thinking of just jumping ahead to Diderot, and then back-filling studies of select figures, based on who Diderot’s most important influences seem to have been. Maybe I will, but first it’s worth taking a look at Gérard [...]
Read ‘The Seventeenth Century’
Reformation Polemics
1 June 2007 | Uncategorized
In his 2004 book Traité des invectives au temps de la Réforme, Claude Postel examines the use of invective in 1500s French debates between Catholics and Protestants.
It’s admirably summarized by James H. Dahlinger in the Fall 2005 issue of The Sixteenth Century Journal:
He defines invective: injurious, violent, vulgar, vehement, abusive address that is destructive of [...]
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