Peindre les nuages, de l’aube des Lumières au crépuscule du Romantisme

Abstract

This article serves as an introduction to the dossier, Painting Clouds from the Dawn of the Enlightenment to the Twilight of the Romanticism, bringing together the contributions concerning the painting of clouds, from European researches in different disciplines: philosophy, art history, geography-climatology, history of science, and literature. With the aid of these contrinutions, and of the fundamental work by Hubert Damish, Theorie du Nuage. Pour une Histoire de la Peinture, 1972 (Theory of the Cloud: for a History of Painting, 1972), this introduction proposes a chronological exploration of the painting of clouds and its evolution, from the cloud as manifestation of the holy (up to the Renaissance) to post-Impressionism. The dialogue between science and art provides the occasion to raise certain questions: did the invention of the classification of clouds (1803) have an incidence on their pictorial representation? In what measure did the discovery of the vibratory nature of light (Augustin Fresnel beginning in 1819) influence the practice of painters like Turner, and then the Impressionists? A view of ensemble of the set of connections of our deliberations does not lead to the conclusion of an evolution towards the realism in the painting of clouds, or even to a progressive equivalence between the perceptive experience and the representation of the cloud.