More than Meets the Eye by Georgina Kleege

Author:Georgina Kleege
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2017-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

I’ll describe the paintings for you, and my descriptions will be such that, with a bit of imagination and taste, you’ll be able to envision them spatially, disposing the objects within them more or less as we see them on the canvas.9

He calls on his readers’ imagination—the ability to translate his words into mental images—and their taste—the discernment to judge these mental images against the conventions of academy painting of the day. Readers would have been familiar with these conventions and understood the hierarchy of subject matter: still lifes, landscapes, portraits, and history paintings.

Diderot often points out the difficulties of his task, particularly with larger history paintings depicting scenes from the Bible or classical mythology where scores of figures are distributed around the picture plane. For instance as he describes Jean-Jacques Bachelier’s “Hector Rebuking Paris for his Cowardice,” he breaks off in the middle to point out that he has only dealt with half the canvas:

Have you followed all that? Can you picture it in your head? Then you’ve grasped the left side of the painting. Now for the right side.

Having drawn this map of half the painting in his readers’ heads, he shoves it to one side to fill in the rest of the image. Then, as he concludes he congratulates himself:

Ah! my friend, now I can breathe easier, and you as well. I must have a truly obliging imagination, if it managed to take in all that. And you’re hoping perhaps that I’m going to provide a detailed critique of this world? Oh no; you want me to finish, and that would be endless. But rest assured that this description is precise, save a few minor details; a regular tour de force, if you will.10

He delights in his memory’s capacity to absorb so much detail, and then to translate it all into words in order to transfer the image to readers’ minds. But this kind of verbal mapping was not his only method. Because looking at art involves more than identifying the objects depicted and their arrangement in space, Diderot frequently abandons this form of description to make up narratives that would explain the images or evoke the same emotional response the image produced in him. In one instance he even invents a dream that turns out to replicate a painting by Fragonard. Frequently he rants against the artists, imagining better versions of the same subjects. Occasionally he records or invents conversations he overheard or engaged in at the exhibits, recreating the crowded, noisy atmosphere and the aesthetic debates of the day. Elsewhere, as in his description of a still life by Chardin, his review becomes a kind of list of instructions the reader could follow to recreate a real-life version of the painting:

Imagine a squared construction of greyish stone, a kind of window with ledge and cornice. Arrange there with all the nobility and elegance you can muster a garland of large grapes extending the length of the cornice and hanging down on either side. Inside the

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