De Piles Research Articles

The Primacy of Form over Color: On the Discussion of Primary and Secondary Qualities in Herder’s Pygmalion

Abstract A key question in the art debate in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was whether color should be used for sculpture. Recent archaeological research had shown that the sculpture in ancient Greece was polychrome, but skepticism about applying paint to one’s own work was widespread among modern sculptors. Some scholars explain this reluctance as a consequence of racial prejudice: the Greek athlete was an image of white Europeans. This article will try to show that a re-reading of Johann Gottfried Herder’s book on sculpture can give us a different and more probable explanation. Herder shared Roger de Piles’s view that the essence of sculpture was form, while color was most characteristic of painting. What set Herder apart from his predecessor, however, was his attempt to give the theory a scientific rationale. He found this in contemporary accounts of visually impaired persons’ relationship to the sensory world and not least in empiricist philosophy’s distinction between primary and secondary sensory properties.

Vermilion, or why Cézanne took the shine off things

This article argues that, in the early 1870s, Paul Cézanne began to make colours (including vermilion) his medium, whereas previously he had tended to treat them as inert materials, which he needed to force for effect. One factor in Cézanne’s change of heart was his receptiveness to the theme developed in the novels Manette Salomon (1867), by Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, and La Proie et l’ombre (1876), by Marius Roux, that failing to relate responsively to his medium can have catastrophic consequences for the painter. Another was Cézanne’s espousal of Camille Pissarro’s practice in the early 1870s of using ton to create ‘harmony’ for the express purpose of ‘modelling’. The relationship between Cézanne’s ideas about ton and three theoretical sources are then examined. Two are much earlier: Roger de Piles’s writings about colour harmony and its spatial effects; and the treatise Michel-François Dandré-Bardon wrote in the eighteenth century that applied de Piles’s ideas to ton. The other is the series of manuals the animal painter, Julien de la Rochenoire, published in the 1850s, which maintain that ‘relations’ between tons were crucial to ‘modelling’. How Cézanne used tons is then analysed in the painting Madame Cézanne in a Red Armchair (1877) (now in Boston). It is shown that colour relationships are more numerous and more finely integrated in this work than in its sister painting (in Stockholm), with the result that its harmony is especially tightly knit. This, it is maintained, allows it to model-shape at the same time as bestowing cohesion to the depicted scene. The article ends by considering how, unlike the de Goncourts’ Naz Coriolis or Claude Monet, who pushed painting to its limits in an attempt to capture the effects of shine and sparkle, Cézanne opted to play them down in order to give solidity to the world depicted in his paintings.

Plates by TORTEBAT, 1760 (Paris): an Abstract of Anatomy, for painting and carving

This edition occured in 1760 and was produced in Paris by the printer J‐B Crépy from 10 (on 12) original copper plates of a first edition published in 1668 which were kept by Charles‐Antoine Jombert. The exact title was “Abrégé d'anatomie, accomodé aux arts de peinture et de sculpture” = Abstract of anatomy, adaptated to the arts of painting and carving. It opened on 4 figures of the skeleton, then 7 figures of myology. They were inspired by Vesalius. The judgment of Cushing was: “by common consent the most beautiful reproduction of Vesalius' illustrations ever to be made”. Six of the plates presented a printed text on the reverse side. This work is probably a collaboration between Roger de Piles (1635–1709) and the engraver François Tortebat (1621–1690). It is discussed if this work is the one of Roger de Piles alone, as a note in his “Cours de peinture par principes” (Paris, 1708, p. 153) assessed: “In the past, I have written under a borrowed name (i.e. Abrégé d'Anatomie by Tortebat) an abstract of anatomy adaptated to the arts of painting and and carving”.This abstract is from the Experimental Biology 2019 Meeting. There is no full text article associated with this abstract published in The FASEB Journal.

Between Coloris and Dessein

Charles de La Fosse is associated with two defining, if opposed, poles of Academic theory and practice: the dessein camp associated with the practice and theory of Charles Le Brun; and the coloris camp, associated with the theory of Roger de Piles and the practice of Antoine Watteau. In this paper I will analyse La Fosse’s Assumption of the Virgin (Musée Magnin), looking specifically at its invocation of works by Poussin of the late 1620s and early 1630s. Rather than focusing on the differences between the dessein and the coloris camps, this paper will consider how the two theories might have found pictorial expression in the works of Poussin. I argue that La Fosse broadened the understanding of Poussin’s work beyond Le Brun’s theoretical framework. La Fosse’s work might be viewed as a practical intervention in theoretical debates, one that reconciled two seemingly opposed camps.

프랑스 왕립 미술아카데미에서의 루벤스 다시 쓰기: 로제 드 필과 색채 논쟁

17세기 프랑스 고전주의 미학의 정립 과정에서 주요한 역할을 수행했던 니콜라스 푸생과 샤를르 르 브룅 그리고 앙드레 펠리비앙은 공통적으로 세밀한 소묘와 명확한 양식에 의해 창출되는 이성적 미의 개념을 강조했다. 이들은 회화 작업 과정에서 소묘와 색채는 각기 다른 기능과 역할을 수행하며 두개의 표현 수단이 지닌 가치 또한 상이하다는 주장을 펼쳤다. 소묘는 지적이며 이성적인 영역에 속하고 색채는 물질적이며 기술적 작업이라는 것이 이들의 생각이었다. 회회 작업에서 소묘와 색채 간의 우월 관계를 규정하면서 소묘 중심적인 회화 이론을 왕립 미술아카데미의 규범으로 채택하려는 이들의 시도는 색채 논쟁을 불러일으키는 계기가 되었다. 1670년대 프랑스 왕립 미술아카데미에서 시작된 색채 논쟁은 소묘를 중시여기는 고전주의 화가 및 미술 이론가들과 색채 미학의 추종자들 간의 미학적 대립을 의미한다. 본 논문에서는 1660년대 프랑스 고전주의 미학이 정립되던 시점에서 1700년대 초 로코코 미학이 태동하던 시기 사이 프랑스 미술계에서 이루어진 루벤스 작품에 관한 해석과 평가 그리고 수용 과정을 색채 논쟁과 로제 드 필의 저술 활동을 중심으로 조망해 보고자 한다.

Pierwsze rozważania na temat koloru we Francji przełomu XVII i XVIII wieku

A dispute concerning the importance of various artistic devices arose unexpectedly as a result of meetings held in the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture in Paris at the end of the 17th century. Its consequences, however, reiterated 100 years later in considerations on philosophical aesthetics in works by authors such as Denis Diderot, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, or even Immanuel Kant. In 1667, in the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, a wide-ranging program of meetings was initiated in order to discuss theoretical aspects of art as well as comment on particular works later prepared for printing by Andre Felibien. For the Academy, one of the main aims was to prove that the status which painters, graphic artists, and sculptors enjoyed was comparable to that achieved by poets and musicians and that all the above mentioned artists are more than mere craftsmen. Drawing is the common point to all these fields of art and as s composition can justify the recognition of painting, graphics, and sculpture as art rather than craft since these primarily require intellectual work, then skills. The situation drastically changed in 1673 due to Roger de Piles who claimed that in art colouration (or a well-developed colour-matching skill) not colour itself is the key issue. Owing to that he was able to differentiate between a craftsman and an artist without referring to a drawing.

Rococo et fugacité du regard :émergence et modifications de la notion de ‹ papillotage ›

Abstract The word ‘papillotage’ was introduced into art discourse by Roger de Piles in the late seventeenth century. Then, and throughout the eighteenth century, the term referred to an unpleasant physiological effect on the eye (a flickering effect) created by a disordered pictorial composition or insufficient contrast between colors. From the mid-eighteenth century, however, the term acquired a second and vaguer meaning in the context of moralistic and critical discourses. Essentially, the term became synonymous with superficiality, instability, and frivolity. Used in diatribes against voluptuous paintings, ‘papillotage’ reflected an ideological posture. A similar use of the term is evident in historiographical discourses characterizing Rococo art.

美術の批評と絵画談義 : 物語としてのロジェ・ド・ピール『会話』

美術の批評と絵画談義 : 物語としてのロジェ・ド・ピール『会話』

ロジェ・ド・ピールの作品記述における語り手 の位置について

ロジェ・ド・ピールの作品記述における語り手 の位置について

Alphonse Fortia de Piles and Louis de Boisgélin de Kerdu – emigrants travelling in German countries and Denmark at the end of the 18th century (English language)

Alphonse Fortia de Piles and Louis de Boisgélin de Kerdu – emigrants travelling in German countries and Denmark at the end of the 18th century (English language)

The Origins of Broken Colours

This study examines the origins and understanding of the concept of 'broken colours' in the seventeenth century. The phrase relates to mixtures of colours, often to those resulting in a reduced chromatic value, but included more kinds of colour mixtures when used by early modern writers. It appeared in the art literature of England, the Low Countries, Germany and France in short sequence, and seems to have been directly associated with an ancient expression for colour mixtures, 'corrupted colours'. The interpretation of ancient mentions of 'corrupted colours' by the scholar Franciscus Junius, published in Latin, English and Dutch, are investigated together with discussions of 'broken colours' by Edward Norgate in England, Samuel van Hoogstraten in Holland, Joachim von Sandrart in Germany and Charles Alphonse Dufresnoy, Roger de Piles and the members of the Académie Royale in France.

The Art of Chiaroscuro Writing: Condillac and the Question of Word Order

AbstractCondillac's use of clair‐obscur to discuss the role of inversion and sentence construction is akin to the wish to make pictorial chiaroscuro an element of intelligibility of painting, as in de Piles. This article draws on the French heritage of the two elements clair and obscur, each long‐standing metaphors. By associating clair‐obscur with inversion, Condillac places it within a history of ‘la clarté française’, freeing from the dead metaphor ‘clair‐obscur’ a series of potential meanings that the visual arts' definition of chiaroscuro had not attended to, and which are key to the uses that writers such as Diderot and Rétif de la Bretonne will make of ‘clair‐obscur’ in their literary works.

Chiaroscuro in the Eighteenth‐Century Ballet d'Action

AbstractThe use of the term chiaroscuro by choreographers and commentators on the ballet d'action was part of a deliberate strategy, in the context of controversy surrounding this innovative art. De Piles's emphasis on the use of colour rather than the geometry of line is analogous to Noverre and Angiolini's emphasis on body language in mime dance rather than formal step vocabulary. The rationale for using such terminology was to show that the ballet d'action was a hybrid genre and to redefine the nature of contemporary drama, just as the coloristes had sought to redefine the nature of painting a few decades earlier.

Watteau, Reverie, and Selfhood

Watteau's fêtes galantes break with key aspects of academic art theory in early eighteenth-century France, particularly as put forward by Roger de Piles, to elicit an experience of reverie in the spectator. Watteau's formal innovations inaugurated a new relationship between painting and beholder that opened up a new sphere of subjective experience, linking the artist's enterprise with the rise of modern interiority.

Taste Endures! The Rankings of Roger de Piles (†1709) and Three Centuries of Art Prices

Roger de Piles (1635–1709) was a French art critic who decomposed the style and ability of 58 different artists into areas of composition, drawing, color, and expression, rating each artist on a 20-point scale in each category. Based on evidence from two data sets that together span from the mid-eighteenth century to the present, this article shows that De Piles' overall ratings have withstood the test of a very long period of time, with estimates indicating that the works of his higher-rated artists achieved both greater returns and higher critical acclaim than the works of his lower-rated artists.

Painted Poetry: Colour in Baudelaire's Art Criticism (review)

Reviewed by: Painted Poetry: Colour in Baudelaire's Art Criticism J. A. Hiddleston Smith, Ann Kennedy . Painted Poetry: Colour in Baudelaire's Art Criticism. Modern French Identities no. 63. Bern: Peter Lang, 2011. Pp. 242. ISBN: 978-3-03911-09. Studies of colour in Baudelaire's art criticism have tended to take the form of essays and articles or to be part of a wider assessment of his outlook and practice. Clearly, there was a need for a thorough examination of the matter, and this book can be said in large measure to have filled a noticeable gap. The author's method is predominantly historical, both in the opening chapter on perceptions of colour before Baudelaire, and in subsequent chapters where she traces the evolution of the poet's thinking from the early Salon de 1845 to that of 1859. University students will be grateful to find in one place a lucid and reliable account of the contribution of such important predecessors of the poet such as the Poussinistes and Rubenistes, de Piles, Diderot, Newton, Goethe, Planche, Fourier, and many others, together with an account of attitudes to the hierarchy of genres, "Ut pictura poesis," and the development of the Salon. Similarly, the chapter on "The Science of Seeing" gives a rapid and lucid account of theories of colour from Runge to the pivotal figure of Chevreul whose positive and possible links to Baudelaire and also to Delacroix are carefully examined. The "substantifique moelle" of the book, however, is the long third chapter, "Colour and Drawing: Resolving the conflict?" It presents a painstaking account of every nuance of the development of the poet's shifting attitudes to these apparently antithetical elements which are said to be finally resolved in 1859. The focus is mainly on his understanding of Delacroix, of course, and Ingres, and the argument, well supported from a close reading of the texts with plentiful quotations and resumés, carries conviction. More stress could perhaps have been placed on two considerations which are relevant to Baudelaire's position as a journalist. The first is that in his publications he has to be mindful of his public, its convictions, prejudices, and sensitivities. He must have been aware of the immense prestige enjoyed by Ingres, and may well have felt obliged, initially, at least, to soften whatever censure he was inclined to make. The second is that he was not a systematic philosopher, much more an essayist, who claimed among other things "le droit de se contredire"—and these contradictions have been well enough pointed out. One suspects also that in order to convince he had recourse to whatever persuasive devices rhetoric could provide. The chapter ends with some sound observations on Daumier and the sense of colour conveyed by his lithographs, and with an evocation of Guys's "ébauches parfaites," but one is left wondering how exactly Meryon's exquisite etchings with their razor sharp outlines fits into the argument. The fourth chapter deals with colour symbolism in art, poetry and music, and here we are on fairly familiar ground, though it is helpful to have these elements brought into close proximity. It comprises also a thorough examination of Baudelaire's fascination with the combination of red and green, culminating in an understanding of his use of a quatrain from "Les Phares" in the section on Delacroix in Exposition universelle (1855), since it leads directly to his view of criticism as translation. After an overview of colour and imagination in the Salon de 1859 Chapter 5 points to the latter [End Page 341] as the superior faculty of which colour is the most important tool. This leads in turn to sections on the notion of translation: Delacroix as poet, the poet as painter (Hugo and Gautier), Balzac as etcher, and, most refreshingly and unexpected, Poe in relation to Delacroix, Ingres and Guys Unfortunately, the proof reading of the book is less than perfect, and more careful editing would have dispensed with such repetitions and redundancies such as 'it is worth noting', "it is interesting to note," "it is noticeable that." For all that the author has produced a highly serviceable and reliable textbook bringing together all the elements essential...

L’idée en peinture au XVIIe siècle

In a letter to Chantelou dated 22 December 1647, Poussin writes of a painting to be executed that he has found its thought, “I mean the conception of the idea, and the work of the mind was complete.” It follows that Poussin’s idea belongs to the theoretical component of painting, namely the composition, and the idea constitutes the represented object aimed at by invention, which converts a historia into a picture and whose procurement provides sufficient satisfaction to an erudite painter like Poussin. Idea is the end or aim of pictorial thought and the regulative means for producing the visible work. Beyond a then perceptible tension between an ideal, indeed a divine Idea, to which Félibien’s idea of the painter comes close in his first Entretien, and an agent or force of conversion of the discursive into the figural, idea belongs henceforth also to the theory of the art of painting, as is witnessed by the titles of works by Fréart or Roger de Piles (Idée de la perfection de la peinture, Idée du peintre parfait): such an idea is thus a regulated presentation of what the painter must do if he wishes to excel. It is no longer conceived or made visible by the painter, but by a kind of enlightened connoisseur, not yet called a critic, but who distances himself sufficiently from the art of painting to teach and to adjudicate good taste. Not only does idea then aid, not in the fabrication of good paintings, but rather in the evaluation of painting, as Roger de Piles underlines at the end of his opuscule introducing the Abrégé de la vie des peintres, but it could well be formative or constitutive of taste itself—a shift by which Idea comes, by the century’s end, to regulate not the production of works, but the judgments passed on them.

Massacre rococo. Les bois bizarres peints par Jean-Baptiste Oudry pour Louis XV entre 1741 et 1752

Rococo Massacre : The Deformed Stag Antlers Painted by Jean-Baptiste Oudry for Eouis XV Between 1741 and 1752. The visual shock generated by the deformed stag antlers painted by Jean-Baptiste Oudry for King Louis XV, now kept in Fontainebleau, exposes the limitations of iconographie and monographic concerns for these works. The intricate and lost rituals of ancien régime venery, as well as the sexual and macabre content of these images complicate their interpretation. Integrating sensorial contact with carcasses, the king’s passion for hunting, the ideas of naturalists, and the aesthetic theories of Roger de Piles, ensures a better understanding of the state of sudden shock elicited by these images, as well as their violence, both on representational and structural levels.

The blind spot: an essay on the relations between painting and sculpture in the modern age

Beginning in the seventeenth century, many of Europe's greatest writers and artists became embroiled in a debate that centered on the priority of paintings or sculpture, touch or sight, colour or design, ancient or modern.The Blind Spot guides us through these historic quarrels, decoding the key terms of the heated discussions and revealing how the players were influenced by the concurrent explosions of scientific discoveries concerning the senses of sight and touch.Drawing on the works of Rene Descartes, Roger de Piles, Denis Diderot, Charles Baudelaire, and Emile Zola among others, this volume lets readers eavesdrop on an energetic and contentious topic that preoccupied European intellectuals for three hundred years.

Teaching & Learning Guide for: The View from the Interior: The New Body Scholarship in Renaissance/Early Modern Studies

Teaching & Learning Guide for: The View from the Interior: The New Body Scholarship in Renaissance/Early Modern Studies