Diderot and the destination of art

Abstract

While Denis Diderot’s pronouncements on art have received a great deal of critical attention, they have not been sufficiently studied from the point of view of prevailing approaches to imitation. Consideration of his salon criticism reveals that questions of mimesis and imitation are fundamental to an understanding of his views on painting and to the destination of art in eighteenth-century France. Whether his objections are addressed to artists who failed to “follow the poet,” or to those who (in his view) neglected nature, Diderot’s frequently censorious remarks invariably revolve around issues that found their most developed expression in the humanistic theory of painting. As a result, his criticism raises questions about the continuing viability of a hierarchy of genres that placed grand narrative painting at its apex, and treated the minor genres as subordinate parerga to “le grand genre” of history painting. Seeking an accommodation for these “lesser” genres, Diderot developed critical concepts that sought to treat genre painting with the same seriousness as subjects drawn from mythology and the Bible, and led to his suggestion for an intermediate genre to reconcile these conflicts that he called, in his writings on drama, “le genre sérieux.” Diderot’s suggestion leads ineluctably to his advocacy for the work of Jean-Baptiste Greuze and Jean-Baptiste Chardin, whose domestic interiors and dead game were, for him, less an imitation of nature than a recreation of nature itself.