Abstract
This essay examines the relations between decoration and knowledge, reason and imagination, truth and fable in eighteenth‐century France. Focusing on the Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, par une société de gens de lettres edited by Denis Diderot and Jean Le Rond d'Alembert, it explores the complicated and contradictory relations of these concepts developed not only in the Encyclopédie's entries, but especially in its Frontispiece designed by C.N. Cochin, fils. Using Maurice Quentin de La Tour's monumental pastel portrait of the marquise de Pompadour sitting beside the Encyclopédie as a central example, the essay also suggests that tensions between decoration/knowledge, reason/imagination, truth/fable still shape current interpretation.
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