Diderot's Salons, or rhetoric turned on its head

The description of a painting often gives the impression of referring only to one referent : the actual canvas that the text describes. Diderotian criticism has made a major effort in recent years to elucidate the Salons from this perspective. Else-Marie Bukdahl in particular has set out to identify the paintings Diderot refers to and locate them in current museums and collections¹. This work has been accompanied by research that appears very different, but is in fact based on the same textual image / pictorial image  pair: when the researcher focuses on Diderot's aesthetic ideas², on the influence of eighteenth-century schools and artistic currents on the writing of the Salons, it at least implicitly considers painting (even if, more generally and subtly, the world of painters³ and no longer any particular painting) as the sole referent of the text. As for semiotic analyses, which question the capacity of writing to account for painting, to translate an iconic space into a system of linguistic signs, while echoing the structuralist revolution in the field of Diderotian research, they do not fundamentally call into question the initial presupposition : it is in relation to the image that the text is constructed⁴. Diderot's entire poetic effort would thus be oriented and informed by the textual translation of a pictorial space, perceived no longer as a collection of concrete paintings, nor even of aesthetic schools and ideas, but as a model of semiotic coherence heterogeneous to the scriptural model.

A matter of ritual, rather than translation

The point here, of course, is not to deny the existence in the Salons and for Diderot of this constitutive relationship. We do, however, hypothesize that this relationship is not primary. The reports on the exhibition organized by the Royal Academy of Painting every two years at the Salon carré in the Louvre were newspaper articles, intended to be read in the absence of any drawings or engravings, and, a fortiori, independently of the actual paintings, for which they were a substitute. From the point of view of text reception, then, the painting description refers immediately neither to a canvas that remains unknown to the reader (subscribers to the Correspondance littéraire, for which the Salons were written, resided abroad), nor to any illustration whatsoever. The absence of images is not experienced as a tragedy  on the contrary, it is a source of play, converting material lack into pleasure gain.

It is not, then, by confronting it with an image that the reader reads, appreciates and judges the text delivered to him  it is in relation to a practice of ἔκφρασις, a ritual of painting description, that he is supposed to determine himself. There is thus a second referent to the description of painting, a referent that we shall call rhetorical, provided we envisage rhetoric here not as an abstract (or even universal) grammar of language, a formal system of constraints and devices, but as a socially and historically integrated exercise of speech, an activity possessing an anthropological coherence limited in space and time and legitimizing itself through the precise ideological aim it pursues.

In other words, the description of a painting is not necessarily read to be confronted with the painting it describes, but rather, initially at least, to be integrated, subsumed into a general model of the ἔκφρασις, a rhetorical model with heavy anthropological and ideological implications. The first deviation, the first detour /// that the reader encounters is not that of the image to the text, as one might expect, but of the rhetorical model to its Diderotian translation. This detour is not semiotic, but poetic, the problem not being to move from one semiotic system and medium to another (Diderot is always resourceful in this area, as in so many others), but to transpose an ancient rhetorical model of ἔκφρασις into a modern reality, where this practice is anachronistic⁵.

We will first analyze the rhetorical model reconstructed by Diderot as a veritable fantasy of the perpetuation of the values of the city. Secondly, we'll show the revolution in the spectator's relationship to the image that this detour leads to, to the point of calling into question the very mechanism of mimesis. Finally, we'll consider the resulting poetic transformation in textual production, and the new division it institutes between text and image in what constitutes, in an inaugural manner in literary history, the genre of the Salon.

I. Reconstructing the rhetorical model

In the Preambles to his Salons, Diderot insists on the collective and pedagogical function of the exhibition⁶. Between the paintings and the public there is a back-and-forth, and even a veritable game of mirrors: the paintings represent the values of the city, which the public embodies and represents in turn. It is this equivalence that underpins the ritual of the ἔκφρασις. Here, the image is merely a pretext for reiterating values  moreover, it is only as good as the discourse it will generate. Like the performance of the aede singing his epic⁷, as the political ceremonial to which the eulogy of the dead gave rise⁸, the ἔκφρασις brings together a community that recognizes itself in shared cultural and ideological references, and grows stronger when it hears them recalled.

Reconstructing the cultural referent: Deshays' Saint Victor

It's as if Diderot had sought to transpose this practice into the paradoxical framework of the Correspondance littéraire, whose handwritten, unprinted presentation brings it closer to oral rituals and enunciative models. The digressions, the general considerations on art and, more generally, on culture in its relation to politics, do not, in this strategy of transposition, constitute a deviation from a rule of the genre, but quite the contrary confer a new legitimacy on the ritual of the ἔκφρασις by endowing it with the cultural referent which, in antiquity, only asked to be recalled. Here we see the first diversion  it's no longer a question of finding the myth from the history painting, the primary text from the secondary image that illustrates it⁹, but, in a double movement, of constructing the cultural referent and making the image its iconic realization. The passage from the common cultural fund to the mimetic representation that refers to it has lost its obviousness. The ἔκφρασις will therefore no longer be content with recalling values ; it will be recalling them /// will rebuild:

There are passions quite difficult to render. Almost never have they been seen in nature. Where then is the model? where does the painter find them ? what determines me, myself, to pronounce that he has found the truth ? fanaticism and its mute atrocity reign over every face in his painting¹⁰ by S^t Victor ; it's in that old praetor who questions him, and in that pontiff who holds a knife he's sharpening ; and in the saint whose looks reveal insanity of mind, and in the soldiers who have seized him and are holding him. These are as many astonished faces. How these figures are distributed, characterized, draped  how simple and grand ! the awful, but beautiful poetry ! The praetor is elevated to his dais. He commands. The scene takes place below. The beautiful accessories  this broken Jupiter  this overturned altar  this spilled inferno  what effect does this young acolyte, with his gentle, charming physiognomy, kneeling between the priest and the saint, produce between these ferocious natures? To the left of the viewer, the praetor and his assistants, raised on a dais  below on the same side, the priest, his god and his overturned altar  to the side, towards the middle, the young acolyte  to the right, the S^t, standing and bound  behind the saint, the soldiers who brought him. That's the picture. They say that the S^t Victor looks more like a man who insults, who braves, than a firm and quiet man who fears nothing and waits. Let them say it. Let's remember the lines Corneille put in Polyeucte's mouth. Let's imagine from these verses the figure of the fanatic who utters them, and we'll see Deshays' S^t Victor. (Salon de 1761, DPV XIII 236-237 ; CFL V 69-70¹¹.)

Deshays specialized in church painting. His Saint André cycle, destined for the Saint-André church in Rouen, earned him fame as a religious painter  the Saint-Louis church in Versailles¹², the Saint-Pierre collegiate church in Douais, the Saint-Roch church in Paris then commissioned him. It was thus part of a major revival of painting whose " epic harshness " and spiritual authenticity stand out from the bland rococo of the century¹³ that Deshays painted his Saint Victor, whose profoundly Christian cultural referent appeared anachronistic in Diderot's eyes. Such " passion " is no longer found " in nature " ; it has ceased to be ideologically prevalent. Because of this anachronism of the referent, the movement of recognition to which the ritual of the ἔκφρασις is in principle committed is rendered impossible by the erasure of the mimetic model, which it will therefore be advisable first to restore. The martyrdom of Saint Victor needs to be brought up to date.

To do this, the critic biases, hijacks the ancient referent to give it an approximate modern symbolic meaning  of Victor's story, we will be told nothing. For Diderot, it is fanatical passion that becomes the subject of the painting, and it is " its atrocity " that orders, informs and arranges each of its figures. The religious significance of the painting disappears: the representation of martyrdom, far from exalting faith, becomes the image of the excesses to which it leads. Its morality becomes secularized. The collective values of the former public space of representation are replaced by the subjective values of bourgeois private space¹⁴, in the forefront of which are, against the excesses of glory, rational control and the /// moderation of passions. Here, the painting's ideological message is radically hijacked: from a scene of Christian hagiography, we've moved on to the denunciation of religious fanaticism. The initial cultural referent, Christian, is replaced by another cultural referent, constituted in the field of Enlightenment philosophy.

In this first stage, then, the picture is not described ; it is still only referenced : " the awful, but beautiful poetry ! ", exclaims Diderot at the end of this first phase of reconstruction, marking that what preceded was not yet ἔκφρασις proper, but was elaborating the device prior to the ritual of recognition, the movement of anamnesis and sympathy that subsequently defines it. We were still dealing with the textual referent, the " poetry " of which painting is the second illustration. Now that this referent has been reconstructed and re-established, we need to go back from the image to the referent, from the pictorial effect back to its source and its cultural and ideological legitimization. This movement of return, which anthropologically characterizes the practice of ἔκφρασις, can only take place through praise. When the moment comes to retell values through painting, to note the adequacy of the immediate visual effect with the mediated cultural environment, the rhetorical model demands a hyperbolic demonstration of sympathy, an act of allegiance, an unreserved fusion of the speaker with the painter's production. There is no room here for criticism  it is not a singular opinion that expresses itself on an isolated image  it is the entire city that pays homage to itself through an image where its excellence is signified.

Diversion of the cultural referent, constitution of a secular morality

The time has come, then, for lyrical and impersonal exclamations  it's not Diderot who's speaking, it's the painting itself which, by the very fact of showing itself, delivers the ideological message where critic, painter and viewer meet and in which they commune. Yet the detour continues:

[...] the beautiful accessories ! This broken Jupiter, this overturned altar, this spilled inferno !

Under the guise of praise, a decentering takes place : what should, in the initial cultural referent, constitute the heart of the representation, the rejection of paganism, is transformed into a beautiful accessory devoid of content. A kind of equivalence is introduced " between the sacrificer and the saint ", both qualified as " ferocious natures ", while a new central figure emerges unexpectedly, charged with delivering the new ideological message : " this young acolyte with a gentle and charming physiognomy " will embody the moderation of passions and the exaltation of reasonable virtues against the advocates of Christian and pagan fanaticism sent back to back. The subversion is not lacking in insolence, when one considers that the painting was intended for a church  it is not the community of the ancient public space of representation that will communicate through it with its cultural referent, but the community of the bourgeois private space where philosophers seek to impose the values of tolerance and secularism.

Criticism versus praise

Thus, even during the critical suspense implied by the ritual of the ἔκφρασις, Diderot continues his détournement. The reconstruction of the rhetorical model (always in the anthropological sense we have given to this term) reveals within it contradictory polarities irreducible to a single consensual ideological system. Faced with this picture, there will always be several communities, several possible fusions. Here, between the religious fusion and the secular fusion, the eulogy dialogues :

They say that the S^t Victor looks more like a man who insults, who braves, than a firm, quiet man who fears nothing and waits. Let them /// say.

To the martyred Saint Victor, awaiting with confident serenity the torment that will confirm him in his faith, and confirm his faith by his example, another view, another audience oppose the fanatical Victor who, scorning the laws and manifesting by outrage his ὕβρις, discredits faith by the intolerance not only it arouses, but expresses. Cleverly, the secular vision, which is the one reconstructed by Diderot, is ultimately rejected outside the discourse, outside the ἔκφρασις : this " ils disent " which refers to invisible detractors, to a noise caught in the hustle and bustle of the Salon, and which the Diderotian discourse quotes without appearing to approve, nevertheless synthesizes the ideological message that this same discourse conveys at the end of the detour of the rhetorical model. But the formal effectiveness of the ἔκφρασις is saved : by the time the values, however subverted, that the image represents are celebrated, the judge's " je " is erased. Responsibility for the misappropriation is pushed outside the ritual, while the secular content of the cultural referent is imposed in the course of the ritual itself. "Let them say": this contradiction, this ideological gap, this dissonance in symbolization, remains unresolved. Values and counter-values are designated, their respective positions fixed, but no positive resolution of this dialectical and secret work of negativity is envisaged. It is the example that constitutes the cultural device from which the mise en images  will operate:

Let's recall the verses Corneille put into Polyeucte's mouth. Based on these lines, let's imagine the figure of the fanatic who utters them, and we'll see Deshays' S^t Victor.

In these final lines devoted to the painting, the rhetorical model that conditions the ritual of the ἔκφρασις seems to apply with rigor : the painting evokes the Corneille verses it illustrates, and whose mere mention is enough to restore the image. The order is respected according to which the text is first, the painting second, and the ἔκφρασις the movement that restores the text from the image. What we see is not the plausible gesture of a man of nature, it is, behind the canvas, Corneille's tragedy. Painting reactivates a common cultural reference, it is its representation : representation of public space, theatrical representation, but by no means representation. So we see nothing visible in the modern sense of the term, since everything here is still a matter of words.

However, between Corneille's verses, veritable apologetic tirades of faith underpinned by a deeply Christian ideological reference, and " the figure of a fanatic who utters them ", a transgressive evocation of an actor's performance hijacking the apologetic content in a perspective of outrage and satire, in a word between utterance and enunciation, the same gap, the same dissonance is perpetuated. The new rhetorical model is dialogic: this gap between text and actor's performance, between the ideal model of the poet and the ideal model of the actor, is the subject of the theoretical reflection of the Paradox. As a consequence, the very system of cultural referencing of the image is undermined.

II. From cultural referent to visual referent

Many times, the device collapses  between the referent text and the image that illustrates it, the link distends, the very idea of a relationship becomes not only improbable, but laughable. Thus, with regard to Restout's Aman coming out of the Palace of Ahasuerus, irritated that Mordecai doesn't adore him:

For the Amman painting, we read what it is on the book, but can guess nothing about it on canvas. (Salon de 1759, DPV XIII 70 ; CFL III 562.)

Between the cultural referent on whose trail the booklet's leaflet is supposed to place us and the pictorial achievement that should illustrate it, the solution /// of continuity is obvious: the painting can no longer be deciphered, making the ritual of anamnesis and sympathy impossible. In a way unprecedented for ἔκφρασις, in principle founded on praise, bad paintings then appear. Failure, daubiness, gaucherie, contresens invade the discourse, drawing the contours of a subjective critical instance to which the ritual was initially alien (in Philostratus' Gallery of Paintings, all the paintings are successful)¹⁵. Another writing practice then interferes with the old rhetorical model: the practice of the journalist exercising the autonomous powers of individual judgment, manifesting to the point of caprice the prerogatives of free will whose fresh ideological legitimacy the new bourgeois private space ensures. It's no longer a matter of simply bending the rhetorical model, of subverting the cultural referent of the web from within, but of revoking the image that doesn't bend to the ritual, of sovereignly substituting another image, more in line with the idea that the " je "-critic has of the (new) rhetorical model and its illustration : it's no longer the text, it's then the image that dialogizes.

Here's a Vestale by Nattier ; and you'll imagine youth, innocence, candor, sparse hair, a drapery with large folds, pulled back over the head and revealing part of the forehead ; a little pallor ; for pallor suits piety (and tenderness) well. None of this, but instead, an elegant headdress, an elaborate fit, all the affectation of a woman of the world at her toilette, and eyes full of voluptuousness, to say nothing more. (Salon de 1759, DPV XIII 73 ; CFL III 564.)

The image conjured up by the cultural referent is opposed by real painting, by the idea of Vestale, Nattier's Vestale. The image that " you will imagine " does not constitute a ἔκφρασις ; it is the " poetry " of the subject, the text that the painting is meant to illustrate. It synthesizes, as it were, all the stories of Vestals told by Latin authors : Vestals of Virgil, of Titus Livius, Vestals of the founding myths of ancient Rome, they gave rise to a standard literary portrait that Diderot relates, or rather accommodates here.

This is not to deny the existence of a pictorial culture in the viewer, but it seems to us of a very different nature from what we mean by it today. There are indeed "traditional physiognomies" in painting, due to the repetition of subjects that tend to become stereotyped. But these physiognomies, with which Diderot perhaps identifies his Vestal model, do not constitute a properly iconic referent: they formalize the cultural referent (textual), they participate in a system of formal constraints, a staging device in which the spectator ritually expects to see represented the myth, the text, the story he is invited to recall. Whereas textual culture is a culture of great texts (given to imitate in return), pictorial culture is a culture of stereotypes (given to spot and decode). These physiognomies of tradition, these expected devices, if they are perpetuated, for painters, by the exercise of copying famous paintings, of subjection to the models of the masters, allow on the contrary, for the viewer, not to look at the painting as an image, but immediately to decipher it in order to find the primary text : the more the device is expected, the less it gives itself to be seen  the more the physiognomy is " de tradition ", the less we look at it as a real physiognomy, the more it becomes transparent and fades between Virgil, Titus Livius and us. Let the pictorial medium tend towards realistic autonomy, and the textual referent becomes illegible.

This ideal of /// invisible mimesis is not original in itself  at the same time, it is said that good eloquence is that which cannot be seen. But all these amateurs who look at painting have learned at school and practiced eloquence  very few have touched paint. The specificity of painting in the old system stems from this compartmentalization  not seeing the eloquence that one also practises is the play of two points of view whose passage one masters  not seeing painting, on the contrary, is not compensated for. The space of painters is inaccessible.

A purely iconic device

What do we encounter on canvas ? Not an illustration of the myth, but a real portrait  not Virgil's model, but a young woman plying her trade as a model  not the imitation of a cultural referent of which this young woman would be the conduit, but, without mediation, the realistic reproduction of the model on display. These " eyes full of voluptuousness " that regularly cause a scandal in the Salons betray the painter's technique, shamelessly reveal the equivocation of the posing sessions : it's not the use of a prostitute to paint a Vestal that shocks ; it's the painter's exclusive abandonment to his flesh model, the erasure of the ancient cultural referent in favor of a visual, photographic referent, so to speak, for which the image no longer legitimates itself through the text it illustrates, but through monstration, exhibition, the entrapment and disturbance of the gaze, through the whole inter-personal device of which it is the sign and preserves the trace. An essential shift then occurs in the relationship between text and image: the primary text disappears, and the image provided by reality becomes the primitive reference. An exclusively iconic device is put in place, in which the painter's technique ensures the link between the real image and the image represented. History painting (i.e., text painting) begins a slow decline, to the benefit of genre painting, or even still life, which by simply arranging objects in a space of pure color and geometry accomplishes in the most radical way this new device at the end of which the canvas will emancipate itself from language.

The symbolic dimension of painting is not abolished for all that. But whereas the rendering of the real had hitherto been no more than an exercise in prior virtuosity, and a beautiful still life executed by a young painter was worth a certificate of aptitude before an important commission, henceforth this rendering, this ability to grasp the real and, so to speak, abolish painting by giving it for nature itself, this virtuosity becomes the painter's ultimate goal.

The symbolic dimension of painting is not abolished.

The glance as a value

From then on, the image will no longer give rise to the deciphering of its primary text. It is the painter's gaze that the viewer will have to rediscover, a point of view, a position of overhang gained over nature. Contemplation of the painting is no longer a collective ceremony, but the conjunction of two glances, the meeting of the artist's gaze and the visitor's gaze. In this intertwining of the gaze, the values of private space crystallize : the autonomy of the subject, the sovereign power of his critical judgment, the technical (rational) motivation of this judgment.

Faced with this exclusively iconic device, which represents an absolute upheaval in relation to the ancient - rhetorical - constitution of the image, the ritual of the ἔκφρασις undergoes its decisive diversion : the anamnesis will not concern the text of the painting, but the painter's glance  sympathy will no longer be born of the fusion between the values of the city that the representation conveys, but of the fusion with the /// reality that painting no longer imitates, but reproduces. This shift from a system of textual referencing to a system of visual referencing¹⁶ in the apprehension of the painted work is particularly noticeable during the account of Vernet's Vue du port de La Rochelle:

His Port de Rochefort is very beautiful. It fixes the attention of artists by the ingratitude of the subject ; but that of La Rochelle is infinitely more piquant. Here's what you might call a sky. These are transparent waters. And all these groups are little paintings, true and characteristic of the locality. The figures are of the most correct drawing. How witty and light is the touch! Who understands aerial perspective better than this man? This feeling is peculiar to the philosopher, for it seems to me that everyone has agreed in preferring the painting of the Port de Rochefort to that of the Port de La Rochelle, and some connoisseurs have looked upon it as the most beautiful painting they have ever seen. It's true that there's more variety and therefore more poetry in that of the Port de La Rochelle. Let's hear what the philosopher has to say about it¹⁷.
Look at the Port de La Rochelle with a telescope that embraces the field of the painting and excludes the border ; and suddenly forgetting that you are examining a piece of painting, you will exclaim, as if you were placed on top of a mountain, spectator of nature itself : O the beautiful point of view !
. And then, this artist's fertility of genius and speed of execution are inconceivable. If he'd spent two years painting just one of these pieces, we wouldn't be surprised, and there are twenty of the same force ! It's the universe shown in all its many guises, at all points of the day, in all kinds of light.
I don't always look&nbsp. I don't always look  sometimes I listen. I heard a viewer of one of these paintings say to his neighbor : The Claude Lorrain seems to me even more piquant ; and the latter replied : All right, but it's less true.
This answer didn't seem right to me. The two artists compared are equally true ; but Le Lorrain chose rarer moments and more extraordinary phenomena.
But, you might say, you prefer Le Lorrain to Vernet ; because when one takes up the pen or the brush, it's not to say or to show a common thing ?
. I agree. But consider that Vernet's great compositions are not the product of a free imagination. It's a commissioned work  it's a place that has to be rendered as it is, and notice that in these very pieces, Vernet shows a different head, a different talent than Le Lorrain, by the incredible multitude of actions, objects and particular scenes. One is a landscape painter  the other a history painter, and of the first strength, in all parts of painting. (Salon de 1763, DPV XIII 388-389 ; CFL V 440-441.)

The entire text oscillates between the categories of the beautiful and the piquant, the prickly and the true. While the piquant seems to characterize, at least the second time around, the old mode of pictorial referencing, the true refers to the new iconic device. Indeed, the " ingratitude of the subject ", characteristic of the erasure of the cultural referent, is opposed to the " variety " and " poetry " of a rhetorically ordered composition. In the first case, painting presents itself as a pure reproduction of a reality devoid of any symbolic dimension  it's a thankless subject, of nature that evokes nothing, refers to nothing. In the second case, reality produces the same effect that a composition in the old system would have produced. The poetry of the painting recovers, reintroduces the functions of the rhetorical model in a /// genre, that of the landscape, a priori minor and purely technical, a genre that was initially situated on the bangs of this model.

The issue at stake in the minutes then becomes clear : as an administrative commission painting, the work of a technician and not a poet, intended for purely instrumental use (Vernet had been commissioned to paint all the ports of France to collate them as a sort of inventory¹⁸), Vernet's painting should not be able to claim ἔκφρασις. It does not refer to a pervasive cultural past, to a text whose illustration the painter would undertake. It has no message, at least in the old system of referencing.

However, Diderot praises it, and from the new perspective of a purely iconic device. To represent this device, he imagines himself pointing the lens of a telescope at the " field of the painting ", abolishing painting with this inaugural gesture of the landscape photographer. The telescope pointed at the painting to find the real is equivalent to the lens pointed at the real to create a painting  here, the boundary between the real and the represented is called into question. This boundary loses its legitimacy once the system of textual referencing enters into crisis, and then collapses. If painting is no longer the transparent medium of a text, it is visual in the same way as reality.

Behind the canvas, it's no longer a text that the viewer goes looking for, but nature, nature that the painter hasn't imitated (one hardly imitates in painting except subjects), but on which he has cut out a point of view : " O the beautiful point of view ! "

The three paradoxes of the new iconic device

The gaze occupies a central place in this new device¹⁹, which explains the paradoxical position occupied by the painter's technical activity : at the moment when it leaves the secondary rank of a necessary but valueless talent in its own right to become a value in its own right, technique ceases to be visible. On canvas, it is reality itself that we see  striving entirely for the faithful reproduction of reality, for the " true ", technique triumphs only in being forgotten. To let oneself be seen is to miss its effect. Through the canvas, the painter gives the illusion of delivering the pure immateriality of a glance at the world. A pure product of technique, since no cultural mediation enters into it, this glance sovereignly denies technique, since it abolishes any intermediary support between reality and the viewer, other than the channel of its device, this lens directed at the world, this oriented gaze.

If the referent becomes visual, the ἔκφρασις will no longer deliver us the familiarity of a common ideological and cultural context, but instead the singularity of a personal worldview. The world presents itself to us, exposes itself to our gaze : the collective dimension, in the face-to-face encounter of canvas and audience, now exists only on one side, through our consent to merge with the painter's gaze.

The transparent evidence of the deictics (" Here is what we can call a sky ; here are transparent waters " and " This is the universe ") objectifies the painter's glance. It forces us, the viewers, to sink into it. But, and this is the second paradox of this device, this unmediated exposure of the real, this /// They fragment the reality they deliver and the content they display. The very unity of the point of view is a factor of dispersion on the painted surface. The Port de La Rochelle alone constitutes " as many small paintings, true and characteristic of the local " as there are groups of characters represented. We find the same dispersion from one painting to the next. Admittedly, the painting only makes sense in the series into which it is integrated, but nothing orders this series other than the uniform exhaustiveness demanded by the commission. There are " twenty [paintings] of the same strength ", constituting a whole, but not linked like the articulated parts of a composed totality. " It is the universe shown under all kinds of faces, at all points of the day, in all lights " : the sovereign order that governs this sublime production can only be envisaged sub specie æternitatis, in the overall design of the demiurge.

The " variety ", the " incredible multitude of actions, objects and particular scenes ", if they break with the architectonic ideal of the rhetorical model, if only by the visible praise they constitute in the mouths of both Grimm and Diderot, seem well to account for what, in the new iconic device that is being set up here, takes the place with the technique of value. The single ceremonial that brought the community together around a representation of its values has been replaced by a fragmented ceremonial, a meandering of the gaze from group to group, from individual to individual, from object to object. Detail becomes high art, not as a veneered or detachable exercise in technical virtuosity, as a Mannerist feat (Diderot claims Vernet's condemnation of " la manière "), but, on the contrary, as a new structuring principle in which the values of a subjectivity ready to take political power flourish : the activity of the port is rendered by a veritable trail of details, of activities in the private sphere where each individual character freely exercises his or her know-how, but whose totality constitutes this teeming, animated system, organized in its very disorganization, which we can call precisely " activity of the port ". It is technique, placed at the center of the painter's activity, that enables him to render the details. It is the progression of these details that constitutes the new system of organization of the painted surface. It is this system of organization that marks the shift, in the axiological referencing of painting, from the old public space of representation (gradually developed, then subverted and dialogized) to the new bourgeois private space.

The symbolic dimension of painting therefore only becomes clear when, from this fragmented space constituted by the new iconic device, the viewer's gaze reconstructs a structuring path, reconstitutes this global vision that the canvas ultimately delivers, both the painter's singular vision of the world and the collective, exposed vision of new values emanating from the activities of the private sphere. This ambivalence of a vision at once superbly subjective (" the beautiful point of view ") and revolutionarily common (" the incredible multitude ") constitutes the third paradox of the iconic device.

The spice of the web

Then, something crystallizes in the image, a circulation of the gaze is established, it makes sense. This moment of crystallization, sometimes emphasized by the critic, is only suggested here by the " piquant " with which he first graces the canvas, which he then seems to take away, and with which he reassures it to end with brilliance. What is the " piquant " of the canvas ?

The Encyclopédie distinguishes four meanings for the adjective " piquant " : that which is pungent to the touch, " which has a sharp point ", that which is pungent to the taste " as salt, vinegar, the juice of unripe fruit, the new wine of /// Champagne ", what's piquant for the sight (" a woman is piquant, when she attracts lively attention from those who look at her, by her freshness, her lightness, the radiance of her complexion, the vivacity of her eyes, her youth ") and what's piquant for the mind (" a word is piquant, when it reproaches us in a strong way with some defect or real or prejudice ").

Piquant thus designates an ambivalent sensation, at once aggression, injury and pleasant titillation : it hooks us while pretending to repel us. Indeed, Trévoux's dictionary specifies that " transported figuratively, this word applies sometimes to what offends or may offend, sometimes to what pleases the mind ". The example of the piquant woman is not indifferent, allowing us to spin the metaphor of desire, a bittersweet sting, as an emblematic figure of the ambivalence of piquant : the piquancy of the seductive woman is opposed to the regularity of the beautiful woman ; piquant conversation quickly turns to amorous conversation : " the first pleasures of every engagement have I don't know what of piquancy which excites the desire to commit oneself further " (Trévoux, ibid.). The trigger of a closing trap of desire, piquant is here explicitly associated with crystallization, leading to the pictorial definition, too vague not to undergo the imprint of what has preceded : " In painting, piquant is called that which excites a feeling of approval more lively than usual. " (Ibid.) The piquant painting therefore wins over (sympathizes with) : the iconic device has functioned as a trap for the gaze, something of the viewer's desire has been captured, he is stung and, by this wound made to him, he loves...

That piquant refers first and foremost to the device of the canvas is shown by the opposition Diderot establishes in the Salons between the " piquant thought " and " happy execution " :

It seems to me that, when you pick up a brush, you should have some strong, ingenious, delicate or piquant idea, and propose some effect, some impression. [...] There are very few artists who have ideas, and there is hardly a single one who can do without them. Yes, without doubt, Chardin is allowed to show a kitchen with a maid bent over her barrel, rinsing her dishes [...]. Point de milieu : either interesting ideas, an original subject, or an astonishing feat. The best would be to unite the two, and the piquant thought and the happy execution. If the sublime technique wasn't there, Chardin's ideal would be miserable. (Salon de 1765, Bachelier, n° 43, DPV XIV 111 ; CFL VI 82-83.)

In this sense, Le Lorrain is more piquant than Vernet who, like Chardin, doesn't compose in the rhetorical sense, but photographs his landscapes. There are no rare ideas, no sumptuous sunsets, no subtly linked actions in a Vernet who, on the contrary, is distinguished by clear skies, poor vegetation, modest, stripped-down architecture, isolated actions, each absorbed in its own space, a kind of minimal realism.

But very quickly this compositional piquancy becomes point-of-view piquancy, and thus marks the shift to a system of iconic  referencing:

Carle modeled his machine, and studied its lights, shortcuts, effects, in the very vagueness of the air. If he discovered a vantage point more favorable than another, he would stop there, and turn his whole composition around in a more piquant, bolder and more picturesque way. (Salon de 1765, Carle Vanloo, Septième esquisse pour la chapelle de Saint-Grégoire, DPV XIV 48 ; CFL VI 35²⁰.)

Carle Vanloo turning and turning " his machine [...] in the very wave of the air " indulges in the same gymnastics as Vernet showing /// "The universe [...] from all kinds of angles, at all points of the day, in all kinds of light ". To ensnare the eye, it's no longer a question of skilful composition, but of finding the angle of attack, the axis of piquant perspective  not inventing the extraordinary, but seizing the effective point of view, that which, suddenly, makes the picture. In this sense, Vernet is more piquant than Le Lorrain, of a piquancy that is no longer theatrical (rhetorically composed, with a view to representation), but photographic (founded on an iconic device, a point of view).

The piquant then becomes an effect of light, as if light concentrated, in the image, the powers of the new structuring system, substituting the visual wound of chiaroscuro for the moral wound of the textual referent (the piquant word, line, discourse underlying history painting).

[...] and that lamp, should she drop²¹ the light on Love's eyes ? shouldn't she hold it aside, and interpose her hand, to dampen its brightness. That would be a way of illuminating this piece in a very piquant way. (Salon de 1761, Vien, Psyché qui vient avec sa lampe surprendre et voir Amour endormi, DPV XIII 234 ; CFL V 67.)

[...] the masses of shadow raising in the strongest and most piquant way the dazzling splendor of the clear ones (Salon de 1765, Fragonard, Corésus et Callirhoé, DPV XIV 264 ; CFL VI 199).

[What artist] would have imagined breaking the continuity of this rocky pavement by this clump of trees...Vernet [...] could he have rendered the warm, prickly effect of this light playing between their trunks and branches ? (Salon de 1767, Promenade Vernet, Premier site, DPV XVI 176 ; CFL VII 133.)

Beyond the archway, which shines the softest light and whose light is dim, pale, like that which has passed through glass panes, another portion of bare, dark wall where we see a few black monks standing. (Salon de 1767, Hubert Robert, Partie d'un temple, DPV XVI 363-364 ; CFL VII 289-290.)

First I'd like the artist to tell me why this lamp hanging at the back of his painting, brightly illuminates the front and leaves the background dark. This lighting effect is piquant ; all right. But is it true? (Salon de 1767, Durameau, Une Sainte Famille, DPV XVI 445 ; CFL VII 359.)

The light, the color bathing this or that scene, suddenly reveals, in reality, a moment that becomes autonomous, crystallizes a pictorially coherent whole, triggers a process of semiotization : the " piquant " of the painting designates this coalescence, legitimizes its visual referencing by this point (R. Barthes's punctum) that protrudes from reality and that painting captures.

The piquancy of the canvas, then, is what crystallizes meaning for the viewer, either through the rhetorical device of the idea, or through the properly visual power of the effect. Le Lorrain is piquant in the manner of a poet, because his compositions represent a rare and sublime scene ; Vernet is piquant in the manner of a photographer, isolating in reality a point of view likely to trap the gaze and thereby constituting a device.

The fullness of nature that photogenizes the canvas, but also the painter's " spiritual touch " endowed with the same power of concentration, framing and right aim as the poetic point, the painting's " piquant " here catastrophically reconciles, through a floating of meaning, the new iconic device and its mode of visual referencing, with the rhetorical model from which painting has departed, but without which /// the ἔκφρασις no longer makes sense. Painting regains a constitution, if not rhetorical, then at least textual : it closes and illuminates itself through its point, both clausule and point of the cone formed by the gaze, the " beautiful point of view ". This reconciliation is only possible because the metaphor is fresh: beneath the visual sting of the canvas points the needle of the desire trap, and with it the mechanics of symbolization. When, in more modern French, the identification of " piquant " and " spirituel " becomes commonplace, the metaphor of the Port piquant will become incongruous, incomprehensible. Between the textual referential system and the pictorial referential system, any communication, any " piquant " compromise will have become impossible.

Subversion of genre hierarchy, primacy of conjuncture

Through this means of piquancy, Diderot can then maliciously divert the hierarchy of genres from its initial rhetorical legitimization to, by relying on metaphor, proclaim Vernet, a modest genre painter in principle, a painter of history, and belittle Le Lorrain, who often organized his seascapes and tempests around a historical or mythological pretext, to the rank of landscape painter. In the mouth of the anonymous spectator whose discourse the critic overhears, the " piquant " still refers to the old rhetorical model : Claude Lorrain is more piquant because he better handles the poetic part of painting, the historical subject whose image will be the illustration. It is then the " rare moment ", the " extraordinary phenomenon " that gives painting its value of invention, that allows crystallization around a point²². But when the critic himself describes Le Port de La Rochelle as " infinitely more piquant ", he's referring to the new model, in whose iconic device the point is a matter of looking, not poetry. So, " it's a place that has to be rendered as it is " : invention is nil  it's all a matter of a turn of the head, of a talent not in composition, but in the choice of the angle of view and the rendering of a particular atmosphere, in other words, not in the structure, but in the conjuncture of the painted work.

Or this conjuncture, this hors-texte of the image now constitutes the real story that it's a matter of painting. It is in them that the values of the new symbolic system are now embodied : while the wanderings of Ulysses and the tragedies of the martyrology turn to enchantment and decoration, to landscape therefore, " particular scenes " organize the symbolic environment of a public that now defines itself in terms of its universe and domestic activities rather than the great representations of the past : the community no longer represents itself in the bygone decorum of classical tragedy  it shows itself in the present. Painting is no longer about representation, but about demonstration : at once exposing reality and asserting pre-revolutionary values.

III. Towards an encyclopedic model

This shift from composed to exhibited painting, from rhetorical to visual referencing (which gradually constitutes a new culture) upends writing and at the same time gives decisive impetus to the Salons genre. As long as the ritual of praise, defeated as we've seen from Diderot's earliest essays, remains the ritual of reference year in, year out, no genre is formed. Curiously, the rhetorical model prohibits the rhetorical structuring of the Salon : each painted work is worth its own weight, the ἔκφρασις closes on itself and articulates itself neither to the one that precedes it, nor to the one that follows. The list is arbitrary, the succession random, the arrangement insignificant. Only in retrospect will Diderot point out that he follows the order of the libretto faute /// better.

The structure

But when writing is confronted with a purely iconic device, things are quite different. Painting is then constituted as a journey : it's the eye's journey across the canvas that crystallizes meaning there and, in genre scenes, re-establishes the group's social cohesion. The ἔκφρασις is no longer closed in on itself : it's a path cut through an a priori heterogeneous heap, a journey without definitive origin or end. What's more, with the disappearance of the mediations that previously isolated the real (instrumental) from the represented (symbolic), the viewer's fusion with the canvas involves a genuine entry into this ambiguous place where painting and nature are undifferentiated. This entry is suggested, in the account of the Port de La Rochelle, by the device of the " lunette ". It identifies the journey of the ἔκφρασις with the actual journey of the gaze, and beyond that with a journey of the viewer through nature. The walk defines both painting as an exclusively iconic device and the ἔκφρασις as an open structure. It was only a short step from there to making the Salon a vast promenade that poetically recovers the principle of wandering that presides over the wanderings of the real visitor: the ideal path of the gaze on the canvas and the real path of the viewer from one canvas to another interpenetrate until they merge.

The ἔκφρασις is no longer content to describe and celebrate the canvas  it weaves a network of relationships from one canvas to the next, inscribes its object in a series and problematizes a multiple space : from the fragmented, isolated islands that each painting constitutes, it becomes the aim of the writing to establish a coherent whole, to build a system, a signifying mesh. The account then situates the painting not only in relation to the artist's other canvases presented in the Salon (the whole of which provides the material for an article), but also in relation to the productions of other years, and above all of other painters whom chance, or the upholsterer's malice, has had hanging next to or opposite it : this latter relationship, where conjuncture triumphs, is particularly characteristic of the new mode of referencing and the writing it induces.

To the emergence of an exhibition value instituting the painted work no longer as an ideological mirror of the city, but as a moment of σκέψις for the walker²³, i.e. of looking and judging, of balancing and going back and forth from one canvas to another, to this σκέψις, therefore, which now anthropologically constitutes the canvas corresponds, at the level of the writing of the Salons, the establishment of a writing of comparison, of relation, of network, where the closed structures of the ἔκφρασις shatter, and which is governed by an unprecedented structuring logic. But this logic only induces partial structurations : the heterogeneity of the materials of the account is integrated, even surpassed by the overhanging, encompassing position of the critical gaze, without dissolving into a totalizing rhetorical or theoretical reconstruction. The cavern device set up in connection with Fragonard's Coresus and Callirhoe in the Salon of 1765, the Vernet Promenade in the Salon of 1767, les tableaux à l'encan dans celui de 1769²⁴, all tend to homogenize the material by means of a fiction whose integrating purpose is obvious. But this fiction always comes up short: far from tightening the unity of each of the Salons, it isolates subsets that are clearly heterogeneous to the body of the text, reproducing on a larger scale the same problem of a lack of linkage with what precedes and follows them. Even when several tables are grouped together to form a structural unit, this unit, like the isolated reports, constitutes a fragmenting island. /// the multiple space of the Salon.

The structuring logic that corresponds to the new σκέψις therefore does not aim at a reduction of this constitutive heterogeneity  on the contrary, it boasts of it and plays with it : the system of relations it weaves is only justified on the basis of a primary irreducibility of the materials to a rhetorically ordered discourse, an irreducibility that the integrating fictions seek to dent, but in fact reinforce by their fragmentary character. Each genre, each subject, each painter, each canvas requires, on the part of the critic, a particular skill, a different gaze, a language adapted to the cultural references in which his object is inscribed. The space of the Salon is a multiple space because the cultural field has fragmented  yet it is precisely this fragmentation of the referential system, this need to take into consideration particular skills in order to continue to have access to it, that the encyclopedic adventure reports.

In the same way, in fact, it was no longer a question, in L'Encyclopédie, of reducing the heterogeneity of the subjects tackled to a universalizing common sense in order to integrate them into the rhetorically regulated machine of a Cyclopædia of homogeneous, regular conception, writing and aim, harmoniously arranging knowledge on the well-ordered shelves of a humanist library. L'Encyclopédie is intended to be contradictory, obscure and bloated. Its articles are polemical, its cross-references subversive : not only does the knowledge it dispenses no longer claim to be irenic, but the statements knowingly contradict each other, and boast of their imperfection. L'Encylopédie presents itself not as a sum, but as a process. We find here, in the intellectual process, that logic of the journey, of the network, which anthropologically and poetically defines the Salon.

There is thus truly a structuring logic in the Salons, insofar as the splintering of statements ceases to be envisaged as a natural handicap that rhetorical artifice would be responsible for compensating for, and instead constitutes the obligatory starting point for a process that is both heuristic and poetic : only this splintering, only these bloatings enable the new encyclopedic approach²⁵ to engage with the Salons, i.e. both a dialogical thinking and writing to be constructed.

The poetics of ruins : journey and disappointment

The emergence of a poetics of ruins²⁶, first as a pictorial genre of landscape, then as a literary practice of meditation on painting, is characteristic of this structuring logic that constitutes the new genre of Salons. If nature is no longer integrated into a historical scene likely to legitimize the representation of landscape, (this integration, Poussin²⁷ or Claude le Lorrain²⁸ had practiced it) the walk through the ruins, either by the actual visitor to the Salon, or by a represented visitor, the inhabitation of these ruins by a strolling population and, beyond that, by a critical gaze that settles its reverie there, perpetuate a similar strategy of integration into History, albeit with a different logic. The painting ceases to be an emblematic representation of a frozen, stylized moment  it reproduces the movement of History on nature  it evokes the gap between the time of splendor and the time of ruin, it contrasts the heroic and glorious universe of the monument with the everyday world of a peaceful third estate. The memory of the conquerors and builders of the Cornelian tragedy is superimposed on the humble activity of the shepherd feeding his flock. /// of the herdsman, the washerwoman busy with her laundry, the fisherman, the merchant. The bourgeois sphere of private activities colonizes a public space of representation that is being ruined. This is not simply a case of one value system replacing another; these new values are only constituted by the degradation and fragmentation of the old ones, and in the dynamic transition from one to the other. They rework a system already there, in the same way that, when he inscribes his activity in the photographic model, the painter does not invent, but transforms an iconic conjuncture already given.

Diderot describes Hubert Robert's Port de Rome, the artist's reception piece :

In the center of the painting we see the isolated rotunda ; on the right and left, in the background, portions of palaces. Below these palaces, two huge staircases lead to a wide esplanade in front of the rotunda ; and from there to a second terreplein below the esplanade. The esplanade is circular in the middle, covering the entire width of the picture, as is the terreplein below it. The terreplein is closed off by chained bollards. At the bottom of the circular part of the esplanade, at the level of the terreplein, there is a sort of depression or grotto. From the terreplein, a few steps lead down to the sea, or harbor, which is shaped like an oblong square. The two long sides of this space form the two harbor beaches, which extend from the bottom of the two large staircases to the edge of the canvas. These beaches are like two large parallelograms. We see merchants standing and sitting, bundles of goods. Citizens and other figures go up and down the large staircases. To the left, parallel to the shore and harbor, is a palace facade. And there's more. The artist has erected two large obelisks at either end of the esplanade. A small, narrow staircase, whose steps are contiguous with those of the grand staircase, are much higher, and form a singular parapet for comers and goers, who can go up and down without hindering the freedom of the grand staircase. (Salon de 1767, DPV XVI 348 ; CFL VII 276-277.)

The gaze that describes this arrangement of ruined architectures is not a subjectivized gaze : impersonal turns of phrase such as " on voit ", repeated three times, " on descend ", or " il y a ", this time do not pose, faced with the object that is being shown, the instance of an " je " subject likely to focus, frame, cut out the image that is being constructed. The ruin shows itself, exhibits itself, gives itself to be seen, continuing the process of autonomizing the iconic device. From object, it becomes from the second sentence the subject of the ἔκφρασις, and exposes itself at the head of the verbs, momentarily ellipsing both critic and spectator : " The terre-plein is closed... "  " the two long sides of this space form... "  " these strikes are... ".

Symmetrically, the critic becomes an object on the canvas. He blends into the course of his space, inhabiting the place. Indeed, the description revolves around the two grand staircases that lead from the upper to the lower part of the painting, from the rotunda esplanade to the harbor quay. These staircases seem to be climbed or descended sometimes by a remnant of an external, spectatorial subjective instance (the " on " in " on descend " is indefinite, not exactly impersonal), sometimes by hybrid beings, half-real, half-fictional. /// (" shopkeeper " and " citizens " real, and at the same time painted characters²⁹). But the most extraordinary of these incongruously blended displacements is the creeping of an additional small staircase (" We also see a small narrow staircase crawling circularly against the outer face of this esplanade "), as if architecture were also participating, on an equal footing with people, characters and spectators, in this occupation of space by movement that now constitutes, in the canvas, the structuring network. The exhibition of the ruin, the δεῖξις that animates it, homogenizes in a single medium registers that mimesis used to separate. Not only the real and the represented (the citizens and the characters), but the set and the spectator (the little staircase and the indefinite " on "), i.e. what's furthest downstage and what's furthest out, are integrated into a common to-and-fro, a single network " for comers and goers ".

The object looked at thus becomes a moving subject, and reciprocally the looking subject merges into the object looked at. Such an exchange, in which the subject's distance from the object is called into question, may seem paradoxical in a device we analyzed above as a moment of σκέψις, i.e. as the epiphany of a critical gaze triumphantly claiming the arbitrariness of its point of view as the constitutive conjuncture of the canvas. But it's precisely because the encounter between the object that appears on the canvas and the viewer's gaze that cuts, circumscribes and understands it becomes the crucial moment when painting is constituted, that this encounter ceases to be self-evident and becomes the stake of the new ritual. This ritual of encounter begins with a preliminary indifferentiation between the viewer and the pictorial mass. Then, on the canvas, something crystallizes and becomes an object as the viewer withdraws from contemplation, distancing himself from what becomes his object. The stone circles and rectangles begin by fascinating the gaze, which drowns in their shapes, only for the gap to be marked.

Here again, there can be no question of immediately and totally establishing a logic in which the different parts of the painting would compose a total, integrated structure. First, there's the moment of fascination when the gaze hasn't yet formed, and the parts of the still-uncreated object play separate games  each staircase, the esplanade, the obelisks, the jumble of bales and goods juxtapose, pile up, mingle with an " on " that sees without yet looking  these are materials of the visible that nothing yet dominates. A network emerges from this heterogeneous confusion, but with no pre-existing plan, no well-ordered strategy. Judgment only emerges from an irreducible verbal jumble, yet without ceasing the swaying, the back-and-forth where the gaze gradually takes on consistency. The σκέψις, if it completes the iconic device, participates in an essential incompletion, in that primitive heap in which the eye first allowed itself to be trapped and in whose holds it remains.

Paradoxically, however, this back-and-forth in the verbal jumble of description leads to an impression of excessive order in the composition, the reproach of too much geometry, as if this monstrous assemblage, this complex architectural machinery hadn't led the viewer's gaze astray enough :

This piece is very beautiful. It's full of grandeur and majesty. We admire it ; but we are not moved by it. It doesn't make you dream. It's just a rare view where everything is big, but symmetrical. Suppose a vertical plane cuts through the middle of the rotunda and the harbour, the two portions on the right and left of this plane will show the same objects repeated. There's more poetry, more accidents, I don't mean in a thatched cottage, but in a single tree that has /// suffered from the years and seasons, than in the entire facade of a palace. You have to ruin a palace to make it an object of interest. It's so true that, whatever the doing, there's no real beauty without the ideal. The beauty of the ideal strikes all men, while the beauty of doing only stops the connoisseur in his tracks. If it makes him dream, it's about the art and the artist, not about the thing. He always stays off stage; he never enters. True eloquence is that which is forgotten. If I see that you're eloquent, you're not eloquent enough. There is between the merit of doing and the merit of the ideal, the difference between what attracts the eyes and what attracts the soul. (Continued from previous.)

The architecture represented must be truly ruined  not just damaged, but well and truly disarticulated, destructured : if the architectural (rhetorical) structure is not radically defeated, the other structure cannot develop. Michel Serres has shown how this tension between architecture and network, stone and greenery, planned space and multiple space, organized Hubert Robert's painting³⁰. A new dimension emerges in the writing that reflects this: the aim is no longer to identify the pictorial surface with a legible, predetermined message, with a drawing that carries meaning, but quite the opposite, to ruin the object, to reduce it to almost nothing, in order to build on this clean slate of the past the path of a reverie, the logic of indeterminacy that governs the mind of the meditative walker that the spectator has become. The "I" no longer reads; he pours himself out. And as he pours out his heart, he rediscovers the ancient gesture of closing his eyes before the image to see it better  reverie, in its own way, also leaves a space of mute visibility (" what binds the eyes ") for another space, blind, but of inspired speech. We " forget " the pictorial eloquence that " attaches the soul ", because this attachment is of the same order as that of the blindfold that blindfolds us : sublime, but mutilating.

The " je " thus triumphs at the cost of blindness. This vaticinating " je " is a wounded, diminished " je ". It's hardly exposed in the syntactic fabric : " je ne dis pas dans une chaumière " is an incise in which the " je " participates in a fixed turn of phrase that depersonalizes it  similarly, the sentence gathered into a clausule " si je m'aperce que vous êtes éloquent, vous ne l'êtes pas assez " refers to an abstract, indefinite " je ", the antithesis of that inimitable, affect-laden " moi " on which the discourse of subjectivity is built. These paradoxically rhetorical " je ", as well as the shift to the third person to refer to himself as " le connaisseur ", mark Diderot's establishment of a critical distance that is not simply legitimized by the relative failure of the painting.

This passage has sometimes been commented on by suggesting that, according to the art critic, in the poetics of ruins properly understood, the ideal would supplant the doing, the thatched cottage and the twisted tree would advantageously replace the palace too little ruined. In our opinion, such an interpretation is based on a misunderstanding of the nature of the text Diderot gives us to read  his aim is not normative  far removed from treatises on aesthetics, it is to give an account of a σκέψις, that is, of the very phenomenological experience of looking. This disappointment is not due to Hubert Robert's lack of talent  far from invalidating the canvas, it appears inherent to the genre and, more generally, to the exhibition value that was then manifesting itself, more and more generally, in painting. The poetics of ruins is essentially deceptive. Ruins are never ruined enough, and the fact of omnipresent architecture always competes with the ideal of a lost civilization, /// collapsed³¹. As for the spectator, if he enters the canvas (and this is one of the most original features of the iconic device), it is always to find himself " outside the scene ", outside the space that his gaze has cut out : the fatrasia and indifferentiation of the preliminary interior are succeeded by σκέψις and distanciation, which, projecting the gazing eye into an outside, constitute a gazed object. Here, exclusion naturally completes the journey.

Chardin's still lifes

The same deceptive poetics are at work in the natures-mortes, where the primacy of doing over the ideal is unashamedly avowed. Chardin's magic is a technical magic, acquired beyond any poetry by the sheer mastery of material and color :

You can't hear anything about this magic. These are thick layers of color applied one on top of the other, the effect of which transpires from below to above. At other times, it's as if steam has been blown onto the canvas ; elsewhere, a light scum has been thrown onto it. Rubens, Berghem, Greuze, Loutherbourg would explain this process much better than I can; all of them will make you feel the effect. Come closer, everything blurs, flattens and disappears  move away, everything is created and reproduced. (Salon de 1763, DPV XIII 380 ; CFL V 432.)

First approach, then move away : the first look is the close-up look. In these applied layers, of which only painters retain the secret, we find the disjointed jumble through which ruin preliminarily manifests itself. This disorder is the necessary prelude to the gaze. In place of the comings and goings of strollers, here we find the transpiration of effects " from below to above ", implicitly paralleling the eye's movement of approach and distance, in the same play of pendulums, the same indeterminacy constituting the moment of the σκέψις. The object is circumscribed, the distance of the gaze fixed, only at the end of this coming and going, combining the work of the painter (the superimposition of layers) and the approach of the viewer seeking the right position to enjoy the painting, in the same oscillation between making and unmaking, between blurred material and reproduced image. At the end of the monstration, once the object of the painting has emerged, the blown vapour and thrown foam will remain the remnants of this initially blurred, undone character of the image, of this chaos in which the networks of the iconic device are gradually established.

But the still-life drawing is only traced in the back-and-forth of colors, the vision crystallized, at the cost of a loss, which Diderot figures in an anecdote heavy with meaning :

I must, my friend, communicate to you an idea that comes to me, and which perhaps would not come back to me in another moment ; is that this painting, which we call genre painting, should be that of old men or those who were born old. All it requires is study and patience. No verve  little genius  little poetry  a lot of technique and truth  and then, that's it. Now, you know that the time when we get down to what is traditionally called the search for truth, or philosophy, is precisely the time when our temples turn gray, and we'd be ill-advised to write a gallant letter. By the way, my friend, this morning I saw my head all silvered, and I cried out like Sophocles, when Socrates asked him how love was going : A domino agresti et furioso profugi  I escape the savage master /// and furious³². (Salon de 1765, Chardin, DPV XIV 118 ; CFL VI 88.)

This curious ambivalence of genre painting, true but without genius, is none other than the ambivalence of the Platonic Socrates, midwife of truth because old enough to have become sterile. Just as philosophical σκέψις requires a prior detachment and, to do so, a loss of initiative in the production of discourse, so the pictorial σκέψις is addressed to graying temples because it is an exercise in renunciation, circumscribes the image in withdrawal from culture, and manifests for painting the loss of its ideological ambition.

This loss, whether represented by the midwife's menopause or by the disappearance of desire in the old man, could be the loss of the phallus of which J.Lacan showed that it crystallized in the experience of the gaze the passage from the imaginary field, where the scopic impulse is exercised, to the symbolic field, through which the image makes sense³³. With this in mind, it would be interesting to compare the iconic device of the still-life with the Baroque motif of the Vanitas, from which it may have originated³⁴, to identify the distancing of the viewer from the canvas and the message of detachment that the Vanitas signals. Diderot's fascinated discourse on Chardin's natures-mortes would derive its force of attraction from the obsessive repetition of a symbolic castration that J. Lacan places at the root of aesthetic pleasure.

This would be to dismiss too quickly the sublimation that takes place through the double comparison : Diderot not only compares Chardin to Socrates  he compares himself to Sophocles. In both cases, symbolic castration is sublimated by the creative power of the philosopher and poet. The σκέψις has hitherto functioned as a trap for the eye, reducing the symbolic to a purely deceptive exposure of the real  henceforth, it will free the gaze from all conjuncture, making it the very field and instrument of creation. The eye no longer falls into a trap  it invests a space of freedom where to draw as a demiurge a dream topography.

For, on closer inspection, Socrates' question to Sophocles metaphorizes nothing other than that of the canvas to the viewer. Diderot hears himself ask this question while looking in the mirror, in other words, in the position of the subject looking at himself in the object being looked at. And the article tells us that this object is the works exhibited by Chardin  what is still life if not a mirror of reality  what is the mirror if not a motif of Vanity ? In this double comparison of Chardin to Socrates, Diderot to Sophocles, it's the anthropological foundation of the gaze that's at stake, tipping the spectator from a deceptive experience into a creative one.

The gaze encountered in the mirror is therefore not superimposed here on the gaze posed on nature-death by a simple accident of digression. Yet this gray-hair anecdote is not rhetorically articulated to an explicit theoretical statement about the painter's art  simply juxtaposed, it seems, in a rhetorical logic of structure, digressive in relation to the painter's presentation, dilatory before the accounts of the paintings, and, thereby, ornamental at best. After all, the comparison is suggested, but remains implicit. Yet we have seen that, far from constituting yet another loop in the spiral of a beau dire, it is the foundation of the poetic practice that will be at work in the reviews. It therefore makes sense in a profound and effective way, simply by virtue of the strategic position it occupies at the head of the /// Chardin article. The writing of the Salons is structured like the walls of the Salon that the upholsterer dresses  its coherence is topographical, and what takes the place of structure is in fact a matter of device. The anecdote is placed at the entrance to the article, just as the upholsterer Chardin placed his paintings, to elicit comparisons that remain implicit, always on the borderline between the obtuse intention of the organizer and the obtuse over-interpretation of the recipient of the device. It is this ambiguity of a half-suggested, half-reconstructed structure that interactively and dialectically constitutes the encyclopedic model.

The canvas thus tauntingly asks the viewer how his loves are : it plays its deceptive role by reflecting in the gray of the hair the mark of time, under the narcissistic species here of the ruin of desire. But the viewer's response turns this symbolic bankruptcy into a victory for the spirit, an emancipation, a liberation from symbolic constraint: a domino agresti et furioso profugi. Such is the viewer's pleasure in front of the still life and, beyond that, in front of the new iconic device : through it, he escapes the wild and furious master  fleeing representation, bypassing the violence of symbolic castration, he penetrates an oasis of gentle urbanity  he retreats into a sheltered space where poetry and philosophy are practiced without constraint other than that of seeking truth. It's up to his gaze to carve out this space, to guarantee its autonomy. The public space of representation, where the rhetorical ritual of the ἔκφρασις was celebrated, and of which history painting was the replica, is definitively abandoned in favor of a private space where the networks of a gentle reverie are woven : escaping the castration of the dominus agrestis, the viewer does not find, in the experience of looking, the symbolic alienation that transmutes the visual object into a legible message, the painting into a coded text. The thickness of the image remains, irreducible to a motto. To dream before the canvas is indeed to undo the bonds of rhetorically ordered discourse - in this sense, the new poetics is deceptive - but it is also to meditate deeply, to philosophize in the full sense, to construct for oneself the referential culture of the object looked at³⁵.

The new way of looking that emerges here induces a new practice of pictorial description. It will no longer be a matter of reiterating the values of the city, or even of isolating the piquancy of a point of view (a transitional and purely negative phase in the elaboration of the new device), but rather of amalgamating, from the cut-out in the real that the painter provides to the viewer, the elements of a new cultural referenciation, of constructing a space no longer of representation, but of exposure (painting does not represent values ; it exposes the real), a space no longer public, but private (painting is not addressed to the civic collectivity, but to the gaze and affect of a singular spectator), a space innervated by the reverie of the critic-poet.

In front of the still-life, the amalgam effect is pushed to the extreme by the enumeration of the objects the painter has arranged in the space of the canvas. On the other hand, the creativity of the critical gaze, the cultural construction at work in the amalgam and the constitution of a structuring device with a theoretical and ideological dimension seem less obvious. Is this the nature of a device that forces its recipient to make explicit relationships that are always uncertain, or are we deluded by our modern ritual of looking, for which the absence of rhetorical articulation, which has become the norm, elicits no reaction, creates no structuring need? In any case, the amalgamation of nature-death objects is immediately sensitive in its deceptive dimension, but much less immediately convincing in its creative positivity.

Let's take the example of /// Music attributes :

The painter has scattered on a table covered with a reddish carpet a host of various objects distributed in the most natural and picturesque way  it's an upright music stand, it's in front of this music stand a two-branched torch behind it, a trumpet and a hunting horn, with the concave part of the trumpet visible over the desk  there are oboes, a mandorla, music papers spread out, the neck of a violin with its bow, and books on edge. If an evil animate being, a snake, were painted as true, it would frighten.
These three paintings are 3 feet 10 inches wide by 3 feet 10 inches high. (Salon de 1765, Chardin, DPV XIV 119-120 ; CFL VI 89.)

It would be hard to imagine a more neutral enumeration : the verbs first specify the configuration of the device (" The painter spread... " ; " a host of miscellaneous objects, distributed... ") ; they are then reduced to a simple presentative (" c'est un pupitre " ; " c'est [...] a torch " ; " c'est [...] a horn " ; " these are oboes "), only to disappear altogether (" oboes, a mandora, music papers spread out, the neck of a violin with its bow, and books laid on edge "). All links are broken from one object to the next. Description atomizes. The instruments themselves fragment: the " concave of the horn ", in other words, the bell of the hunting horn, the " neck of a violin ", cut out, isolated in the description, take on an autonomous existence full of strangeness.

Yet it began by suggesting a network : the verbs " répandre " and " distribuer " were followed by indications of place : " devant ", " par-derrière ", " par-dessus " articulated the first objects to the starting point of the description, the music stand, a kind of visual landmark in the iconic device. From the oboes onwards, however, the enumeration dispenses with adverbs and prepositions. Objects are juxtaposed, following one another without any hierarchy or direction other than the implicit one from right to left, always taken by Diderot. The eye, after having grasped around the music stand the embryo of an image (" on voit " is the symptom of this crystallization), is thus disoriented by the vertigo of a disordered accumulation : the scores are " spread out " as in a musician at work, the books, " laid on edge " in a dangerous balance, as if, abandoned for a moment for another activity, they were imminently to be taken back in hand. None of this is put away. It's not used, but it's not put away either. In between, it's gathered into a heap, torn from the network of absorbing activity, yet without coming to bend to the dead rationality of a tidied-up table, where the housework would have been done.

The impression is therefore ambiguous. It begins as an articulated device, but ends in bric-a-brac. It suggests activity, but an abandoned activity, detached from its context. Then, in a truly sententious epiphora, comes an unexpected reflection, which ends up disconcerting: " If an evil animate being, a snake, were painted as true, it would frighten. " The explicit relationship between the preceding description and the image of the snake contained here is very tenuous: if it was only a question of comparing two effects of reality, was it necessary to go so far, to the antipodes of music, to look for the abject creeping of an evil animal ? This incongruous reported image produces, outside the artificial logical articulation that seems to bring it about, an obtuse effect of meaning where it finds its true legitimization  as a result, against the obvie meaning of the text, it is no longer a matter of opposing the animate and the inanimate, but precisely of comparing them. /// we want. The juxtaposition for the reader of the purely fantasized space of the snake and the represented space of the music's attributes produces a signifiance that becomes the ultimate goal of the ἔκφρασις : neither the ideal world of rhetorical ritual (where music is a value), nor the real world delivered by mimesis (where music is represented by objects), signifiance participates in both. It constructs value-objects like this musical snake which, for logic, is a chimera.

Let's now look at Chardin's canvas : the flute, candle, trumpet, bagpipe pipes, violin neck and bow bristle with a sinuous line that, starting from the right of the painting, first hugs the oval of the canvas upwards, then descends towards the middle, and rises symmetrically to the left. As the painting is quite dark, this spiky sinuosity has something frightening like a snake. It's obvious, but Diderot doesn't explicitly make this comparison, even though it's the organizing comparison in our text. So there's a contradiction between the explicit opposition of the animated snake and the still life, and the implicit identification of the still life with a snake.

But the interplay between what's shown and what's hidden doesn't end there, if we consider the description's infelicities to the actual canvas : where Diderot remembers a " flambeau à deux branches ", there is only a candle ; where he sees " des oboe ", there is only a transverse flute, made of wood as they all were at the time. He also overlooks the two large golden tassels hanging from the trumpet's shoulder strap, and above all the little red and gold bagpipe, or more accurately the " musette de cour " from which the two blowpipes point, behind which stand out the " boîte à bourdons " like a large, short white tube, and, on the right, the red bellows designed to supply air to the bag of the bagpipe. On either side of the bellows snakes the shoulder strap of the bagpipe, of the same red velvet as the bag³⁶.

Diderot didn't have the paintings he was describing in front of him when he wrote. It was therefore materially impossible for him to give a faithful account of them. We therefore generally excuse him for these few inaccuracies, without taking advantage of them to reconstruct, when we have the paintings described, the path from the canvas seen to the description. For these infidelities have their logic: the omission of the acorns is compensated for by the doubling of the candle as a "two-branched torch", with a splendor equivalent to their gilding; the festive effect is simply displaced. As for the oboes, they condense the forgotten flute and bagpipe pipes  so many similar wooden pipes. Only one object has no substitute  it's the musette itself, the red velvet bag with shoulder strap that, in the foreground of the canvas, overwhelms the eye with its overflowing presence. The balance is struck outside the description, in the sententious epiphora: the bagpipe is, symbolically, a snake. The snake, removed from the painting, is placed opposite it, marking that signifiance is constituted both inside and outside the representation. The substitution may have been motivated by the lutherie plates found in the fifth volume of plates of the Encyclopédie : plate VI of the second suite, devoted entirely to the musette, is followed by a curious plate of undulating instruments, whose figure 1 is entitled /// " Snake ".

It is therefore the same process of displacement and condensation that, according to the Freudian logic of the dream, presides over the transformation of Chardin's painting into the image constituted by the critic's gaze. The strategy of transformation is easy enough to guess: if the candle splits into two, if the acorns disappear, if the flute merges into the plurality of oboes, it's to erase all phallic symbolism. But this repression is compensated for by the much more compromising construction of an evil snake on the rubble of a musette, whose round shapes dwarf those of the mandora and horn bell, triply representing the female sex. The painting was symmetrically distributed: to the left and right of the central feminine symbols, the bow and neck of the violin, on the one hand, and the flute, candle and trumpet, on the other. The white stripe on the candle was matched by the red stripe on the edge of the book, and the green morocco cover by the identical binding of the book on the music stand. The balanced construction, intended by Chardin as a representation of the triumph of the feminine, is overturned by Diderot, who eviscerates its center not only by obscuring the musette, but also by concluding that this is not a serpent, since the painting reproduces the inanimate.

This reversal reproduces that of the article's preamble, figured by Sophocles' response to Socrates. Here too, the canvas sends back to the viewing subject a deceptive image of himself, where the phallus, cast into the shadows and periphery, must leave the light and central place to the feminine, where lost virility is imaged. The critic initially reinforces this deflation, even erasing from his description the peripheral residues of this dispersed phallus. But the process of condensation and displacement that is set in motion to accomplish this occultation somehow gets out of hand, overflows its original framework, and ends up turning against the central image that motivated it in the first place. The image of the snake thus constitutes both the culmination of the process and its reversal: affirming the snake's absence, it betrays its expected presence (without the snake, we wouldn't be thinking of a sexual symbolism in the painting) and removes the musette as a symbol of its death. Suddenly, the painting comes alive and becomes a single, large snake. It frightens and thereby exerts its power : but it is no longer the power of the painter ; it is the power of the critic's gaze, through which the description has been constituted into an image.

The ritual no longer consists in finding the common myth beneath the canvas, but in incorporating the image, transporting it from the canvas into the critical eye. This transport, this subjectivation, is achieved through condensation and displacement. The logic of the dream triumphs. This is a far cry from the allegorical meaning of the painting, and a far cry from the verism of the still life: Diderot's description represents neither music as a value, nor musical instruments as objects, but, in the disjointed jumble of scattered objects, deploys the power of the feminine phallus of the snake, through which objects take shape in dreams, take on value without being derealized or read allegorically. Significance develops in this device, where image and meaning, outside language, remain undifferentiated. Diderot expressed this paradoxical hors-langage of signifiance earlier in Latin  here, through the evocation of a snake  but always through irrelevant speech, hors-langue, to emphasize that it is outside the rhetorical legitimacy of what is said that the new ritual is exercised, that /// vision is formed.

The signifiance of painting is thus, as it were, retrenched : revealed by the mechanisms of phantasmatic production, it remains implicit, not because it participates in an ineffable truth of painting, but because, precisely, it is no longer painting, but the beholder who is at issue. On a painted surface where objects tend to detach themselves from all cultural referencing, he imprints the conjuncture of his own networks : all Chardin gives matter to the anecdote of Socrates and Sophocles  the Attributes of music, to the incongruous image of a snake.

The whole device constituted by these texts juxtaposed with one another as the paintings on the walls of the Salon are juxtaposed, with the same ruptures, the same irreducible incongruities, is legitimized only by the relationships it invites to be posed, the relations it suggests to be made, the comparisons it comes close to engaging. Suggestion, invitation, sketch  in the encyclopedic model that emerges here, structure is not given. Just as the viewer can no longer find a primary text beneath these paintings elaborated according to an exclusively iconic device, but must himself reconstitute from his own fund the cultural referencing of the canvases, so in what constitutes the genre of Salons, the reader can no longer exhume the hidden unity of a rhetorical architecture, but is invited to set the milestones of his journey himself, to take responsibility for the general meaning and ideological content. This is not to say that these texts, which sometimes seem poor or ungrateful, are left to arbitrary interpretation. The disjointedness does not constitute a resignation of content, still less a bankruptcy of meaning : simply, it reverses the roles, forcing the reader to engage, to involve himself in what is not said, to say the meaning himself.

In Simon Renard de Saint-André's Vanity and Musical Instruments³⁷, objects are arranged according to a code, however contradictory, however subverted : the upside-down skull refers to the futility of musical entertainment, the laurel that crowns it to the glory and immortality it brings. The almost empty hourglass, the almost consumed candle, represent the Epicurean fugit ætas, while the " pochette ", the pocket violin of the dancing masters, on the contrary, chants time, rhythm  the music is at once the flight of time and the marking of time, the futile pleasure of dancing and the serious apprehension of duration. The seashells are probably symbols of death (the large black one on the left) and resurrection (the small red one)³⁸, extending the ambivalence of the allegorical message.

In the Attributes of Music, this kind of reading becomes impossible : the candle, untouched, contrasts the stripe of its white material with the red stripe of the book's edge on the left, the flute on the right, overhanging the table, marks depth in the same way as the violin and bow on the left, as would a knife handle in an edible still-life. What motivates the presence and arrangement of these objects is, above all, a general harmony of form and color. Is there a meaning in the retreat of the horn and trumpet, instruments of glorious fanfare, behind the music stand, and, conversely, in the propulsion of the musette and mandora, instruments of courtly entertainment, to the front of the stage? More significantly, books and scores, what is written down, coded, constitute in /// Right, left, bottom, the frame of the composition and no longer its center, they now designate only the vanishing point of perspective, that empty space in the center of the canvas. At the heart of the composition, there is nothing to read  the legible is reduced to a framing function, as in photographs³⁹.

How, then, should we translate this violence of painting ? Is it to say that the painting of the humble is that of the philosophers, that a snake threatens a door top destined for Choisy's apartments, that the harmony of the arts has, for the prince, something to frighten about, that these exhibitions of splendid or humble objects, if they came to life, would bring death against the powerful... What do we know yet ? Readers take it upon themselves to talk about this violence, to see it as a thread running through an article. It's not a message that painting has taken upon itself to represent, but neither is it an arbitrary production  it's in the images that the text provokes. Simply, girded in the implicit signifiance, it remains below language, not yet a message, but a foreboding noise, caught by the gaze...

The poetics of the Salons are nourished by this detour of pictorial rhetoric and its ritual of textual referencing into a ritual of the gaze commanding the reverie of the spectator-promoter (and no longer reader). The genre that emerges from these reveries guided by the topography of the Salon and the itinerary of the libretto is a serial genre: writing no longer composes, but combines, no longer articulates, but juxtaposes. Yet these combinations and juxtapositions are the very logic of the dream, of its condensations and displacements. We've seen how the Chardin article in the Salon of 1765 was organized; on a smaller scale, the description of Vernet's Ports in the Salon of 1763 obeys the same logic. Between the actual description of the Ports, the use of the telescope to abolish the border and the comparison with Claude Le Lorrain, what is indeed the link ;

Failing a link, there's that little convex black mirror we used to reflect landscapes in miniature. The mirror isolated the subject the artist wished to depict from its surroundings, simplifying and stylizing it, increasing contrasts and reducing colors to the mere piquancy of a play of light and shadow. Very popular in England in the 17th and 18th centuries, it was also used by the poet Thomas Gray during his British travels in search of " picturesque "⁴⁰. In 1849, Mrs Merrifield, interviewing an Italian painter, heard about one of these black mirrors, which had belonged to Dughet and Poussin, and, before them, to Bamboccio (Pieter van Laer). According to this painter, the image reflected in the mirror " looked exactly like a Flemish landscape ". This mirror was called Claude-glass, lunette de Claude, as Le Lorrain is said to have invented it⁴¹.

Like the snake excluded from painting, Claude's telescope, excluded from Vernet's account, nevertheless motivates its unfolding, in the manner of a hieroglyph : it makes the link between Vernet and Le Lorrain, between the work of selection and isolation carried out by the telescope and the play of chiaroscuro, here absent, but which nevertheless ordinarily defines the piquant. The shift in meaning from mirror to telescope enabled by the ambiguity of glass is basically of the same order as that from rhetorical piquant to visual piquant : it makes it possible to bring together what, ideologically, explodes, diverges, in the illusion of a still unique discourse, to constitute the genre of the Salons in this contradictory and fragmented textual matter.

Editions used

• Œuvres complètes, chronological edition, introductions by Roger Lewinter, Paris, le Club français du /// Livre, 1969-1973, fifteen volumes in 8° (abbreviation CFL).
• Œuvres complètes, edition begun in 1975 under the direction of H. Dieckmann, J. Proust and J. Varloot, Paris, Hermann (abbreviation DPV). Edition in progress  twenty-one volumes published out of the thirty-three planned.

Bibliography

• Georges Benrekassa, " Diderot's philosophical practice in the Encyclopédie article of the Encyclopédie ", Stanford French Review VIII (Fall 1984), pp. 182-212.
• Else-Marie Bukdahl, Diderot critique d'art, translated from Danish by J. P. Faucher, Copenhagen, Rosenkilde and Bagger, 1980, 2 volumes.
• Jacques Chouillet, La Formation des idées esthétiques de Diderot, Paris, A. Colin, 1973, second part, chapter IV, pp. 553-594.
• Jacques Derrida, Mémoires d'aveugle ; l'autoportrait et autres ruines, Paris, Réunion des Musées Nationaux, collection Parti pris, 1990.
• Jacques Foucart, " Dutch and Flemish vanity painting ", in Les Vanités dans la peinture au dix-septième siècle, Paris, Musée du Petit Palais, 1990.
• Jürgen Habermas, L'Espace public, Archéologie de la publicité comme dimension constitutive de la société bourgeoise, Hermann Luchterhand Verlag, 1962, translated from the German by Marc B. de Launay, Paris, Payot, Critique de la politique, 1978.
• Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire, book XI, Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse, Seuil, 1973.
• Pierre Rosenberg, Chardin, exhibition catalog, Réunion des Musées Nationaux, Paris, 1979.
• Marc Sandoz, J. B. Deshays, 1729-1765, Editart-Quatre chemins, 1977.
• Michel Serres, preface to Jean de Cayeux, Hubert Robert et les jardins, Paris, Herscher, 1987 , pp. 6-13.
• Jean Starobinski, Diderot dans l'espace des peintres, Cahiers du musée national d'art moderne, n°24, Summer 1988, Réunion des Musées Nationaux, Paris, 1991.
• Bernard Vouilloux, " La description du tableau dans les Salons de Diderot ; la figure et le nom ", Poétique, tome 19, February 1988, n°73, pp. 27-50.

Notes