The Moment in Eighteenth-Century Art Criticism FRANCIS H. DOWLEY The doctrine of ut pictura poesis, reestablished and widely accepted during the Renaissance, continued to have a prevailing influence in the seventeenth century, and we find poets like Giovanni Battista Marino asserting that there is no difference between poetry and painting except that one imitates with words and the other with colors.1 Likewise, the painter and commen tator Charles Alphonse Dufresnoy, in De Arte Graphica of 1673, declared the two sister arts to be so close as to be interchange able.2 Acceptance of this theory was not of course universal, since Castelvetro for one had given more weight to the differences than to the similarities between the arts.3 In the seventeenth century, however, commentators earlier than Dufresnoy had shifted atten tion to a kind of dissimiliarity that had not been previously much in focus, namely, the limitations of ut pictura poesis that became evident when tested in relation to time and temporal succession. In 1637 Franciscus Junius stressed in his De pictura veterum a fundamental dichotomy between poetry and painting, by contrast ing the poet or historian who can readily follow the order of time from the origins of a narrative continuously to its conclusion, with 317 318 / FRANCIS H.DOWLEY the painter who must seize its most crucial point in the midst of the narrative, “where it most concerneth him.”4 Only from such a central vantage point can a painter refer back to events in the past or forward to those in the future. However, Junius’ adumbration of the problem of the dichotomy is not accompanied by specific applications. Granting that a painter cannot represent motion or succession in time as a poet can, the question arises why it was no longer acceptable, as it had been in the Trecento and earlier, for an artist to introduce into the same composition and with the same propor tions different actions at different times and in different loca tions. The development of one-point perspective put a premium on unity of space into which the insertion of diverse times and actions would have produced intolerable inconsistency. Was the unity of perspective space a cause or an effect of the trend to a stringent unity that soon reduced action and time to a single moment? The problem cannot be examined here. But the triple unity of space, time and action seems to have been implicitly assumed by painters long before they explicitly formulated it late in the seventeenth century. A member of the French academy of painting, Henri Testelin, clearly defined in 1675 the three unities of painting, consciously borrowing them from the drama, where of course they had been the center of controversy both in Italy and France since the days of Giraldo Cinthio, Robortello and many others.5 Testelin states quite definitely that in painting it is necessary to distinguish times and actions according to the maxim of the three unities.6 These unities would consist of a single time or moment; a single action occurring in that time; and the location of that action, which must be comprehensible within a single glance. Although applicable to most subjects in painting, the unities were primarily intended for serious actions of moral import drawn from classical history, religion, or mythology. Consideration of such events as subjects for painting would always be within the hierarchy of kinds of painting through which a general parallel could be drawn between levels of painting and levels of poetry. The Moment in Art Criticism I 319 Paintings of moral action, or to use a better known term, paintings of history, were on the highest level of the hierarchy and corre sponded to tragedy and serious drama on the highest level of literature. One need only recall the famous preface of Felibien to the Conferences on particular paintings in the royal collection, held in 1667.7 On that exalted level painting should show the creative imagination, the psychological penetration, the moral example, that the highest poetry shows. But how is painting to rise to such a level, if it is bound to the imitation of nature at a given moment? How can painting offer...