Prose of the World: Denis Diderot and the Periphery of Enlightenment by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht

Author:Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht [Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781503615250
Google: tA-pzQEACAAJ
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2021-11-15T23:48:50.141812+00:00

6

“QUELS TABLEAUX!”

Acts of Judgment and the Singularity of Phenomena in Les salons

DURING THE LATER MONTHS of 1767, the small group of aristocrats in Eastern and Central Europe subscribed to Friedrich Melchior, Baron von Grimm’s Correspondance littéraire, philosophique et critique had an opportunity to read what Denis Diderot thought about his own appearance and about its rendition in a number of portraits, among them a large format by his older friend, the court painter Michel van Loo, that was exhibited in the current Salon of contemporary painting and sculpture at the Louvre.1 Nine times between 1759 and 1781 (with three interruptions), Diderot covered these biannual events for the Correspondance littéraire, in different tones and at different levels of precision, and all commentators agree that his writing about art reached its peak in 1765 and in 1767. By then, instead of analyzing pictures and sculptures in the order they appeared on the walls and in some open spaces of the Louvre, he had developed an approach of comparing, discussing, and evaluating the works of different artists in separate, individual clusters.2

Within one such cluster, Diderot’s reaction to van Loo’s painting, announced in the Salon catalogue as “8. Le Portrait M. Diderot,” stands out because, beginning with a triple opening reference to himself as the object of representation, as a friend of the artist, and as a thinker, it allows us to sense a will to independence from the genre-specific objectivity claims, aesthetic values, and discursive traditions that had long determined art criticism: “MOI. I like Michel myself, but I like the truth even more” (288).3 In the words following the pronoun “MOI,” Diderot refers to Aristotle’s famous statement that he was “a friend of Plato but even more so a friend of truth”; “MOI” refers to his likeness in van Loo’s work; but the pronoun also connects with the grammatical subject of the following sentence and can thus give more weight to its content as a personal principle (truth is a greater value than friendship); finally, these words do come together in a syntactical form that often articulates acts of judgment. But as we may assume that prioritizing truth over friendship must have been a moral principle for Diderot’s readers, rather than the result of a moral judgment, we will read these words as announcing, in the friendliest possible way, a not entirely positive aesthetic judgment of van Loo’s painting.

A series of quick, direct judgments referring to the relationship between the painting and Diderot’s self-image follows in the next sentences, where friendly gestures of approval are repeatedly undercut by critical remarks:

It’s quite like me, and he can say to anyone who doesn’t recognize it, like the gardener in the comic opera: “That’s because he’s never seen me without my wig.” It’s very much alive; that’s his gentleness, and his liveliness; but too young, the head too small, pretty like a woman, ogling, smiling, simpering, mincing, pouting; nothing of the sober colouring of the Cardinal de Choiseul.4

While Diderot sees a certain degree of resemblance

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