This is an excerpt from my longer rendering into English of one of the first modern art historical texts, written by Etienne La Font de Saint Yenne (1747). Poorly received by the French Beaux Arts community, La Font's work daringly proposed that paintings be evaluated more by their viewers casting votes as to their merit than by the judgements of a few, analogous to evaluations of authors in commercial ecosystems of print and publishing in the 18th century.
Aside from this compelling central project, La Font remains interesting: his language is both eloquent and slippery, and his program idiosyncratic: he is at once in the mainstream (in terms of his asumptions about gender and the role of royal patronage in the arts) and in the margins (seeing the potential of arts which use historical approaches beyond the motivations of verisimilitude).
preface
This little work was going to appear during the exposition of paintings at the Louvre last September. But due to a few unforeseen hitches, its printing has been delayed until the present.
We risk several digressions by throwing a little variety into style and avoiding the always lethargic monotony of long dissertations on the same subjects, by which few are amused. Otherwise, how can we save readers the boredom of praises being repeated? We hope that this essay can engage many of our better writers, versed equally in stylish graces and knowledge of the Fine Arts, to complete a project which could be extremely advantageous to them.
EXTRACT from a letter of mister Bonneval with the advocacy of La Tour, printed by the Mercury, last October, page. 137.
...It is hoped that this exposition will be followed judisciously, feeling the character of each painter, and the different parts in which they excel. I agree that this project requires the author to examine much knowledge, on the whole, this amenity of style, which makes critique useful and harmless. A similar work gradually and senselessly learned would put spectators with some genius in a state in which they are not risking judgments as bizarre as I hear sometimes. The beauty of coloring no longer seduces enough to give elegance to the gravity of draperies and to the irregularity of ordering. Duration won't be cofounded with power of expression, elegance with coyness, and so on.
REFLECTIONS on some causes of the present state of Painting in France.
Love of painting and the Fine Arts and zeal for their advancement are the only themes that make these sentiments appear in public, on the works shown this year at the Louvre. We must wholly maintain that they be given as verdicts. If it is thought that nothing would be more absurd than the project of wanting to subject the judgment of others to one's own, it will be believed simultaneously that it could be very advantageous to progress in the arts, as in letters, to propose critical reflections, yet modest, without passion and without any personal investment, which should allow us to perceive faults of authors along with them, and encourage them to reach a greater perfection.
A painting shown is a book updated by printing. It is a work modeled on the theater: each person has the right to give his judgment. These judgments are the fairest and most unified of the public that are collected and presented to authors and are not at all their own, having been persuaded that this same Public, whose judgments are so often bizarre and unjust by their prejudice or their haste, is rarely deceived when all its voices are reconciled on the merit or defects of a given work, as it were.
It is with the most scrupulous regards and the very real intention to not offend anyone, that judgments of judicious connoisseurs are related, enlightened by sources and enlightened still more by this natural light called sentiment, since it makes us feel the dissonance or harmony of a work upon a first glance, and this sentiment is the basis of taste, a taste closed and never varying from the true beauty that it has almost never acquired unless it were the gift of a happy birth. Few authors arrive at a reputation of the first order without the help of advice and critique, not only from their colleagues, many of whom only judge the beauties and errors of their art relative to a coldness and drought of rules, or by a routine of comparison to their own methods (often uniform and repeated), but by the critique of a disinterested and enlightened spectator, who without manipulating a paintbrush, judges by a natural taste and without a servile attention to rules. We must not consult rules on the decorum of tones, on the choice of details, on their particular and general effects, and on the harmony of this beautiful ensemble which charms the eyes.
Several painters have not yet arrived at this reputation of first order of which I am going to speak, because they lack a good choice of subjects. This is the dangerous obstacle of painters poorly versed in history, or those who, presuming to have power, and, ignoring the limits of their talents, want to shine in all genres, often by an excessive vanity, sometimes too by a base envy of the success of their colleagues in genres other than their own. This jealousy, so contemptible to the man of genius, this odious daughter of pride and often sister of mediocrity, how many good writers has she seduced who have wanted to try all sorts of things, and pass for universal geniuses? A mind* of the first order of the last century, of which he has still good fortune to illustrate, who is celebrated within all the genres, has made many poor imitators, who would have perhaps been models themselves, if they had known to stay within the sphere of their competency.
I return to the choice of subjects on which the fortune of paintings most often depends. Although the number of those that offer us sacred History, common and mythical would be almost infinite, we nevertheless always see lazy authors, born plagiarists, attaching themselves to subjects treated thousands and thousands of times. Are they ignorant of novelty's control on our mind, and that it always holds a merited place in our writings? It is only given that great geniuses, seeking intensely to discover in subjects exhausted in the eyes of vulgar minds, an infinity of new, interesting circumstances, which linked to the principal action, and presented under new and ingenious aspects, know to rejuvenate these subjects used in appearance, by choosing a more beautiful moment and novel interest. An author in painting, as in poetry, must measure his project by these powers, in order to not fall into the error of certain painters who flatter themselves by charmingly disguising the novelty of subjects which have tumbled down from old age. But they cannot imagine new beauties in their compositions, compositions in which they still desire to sustain a certain reputation of the merited mind of which they constantly remind themselves: too level-headed, besides, to add inappropriate episodes in all subjects sacred and historically inviolable, they weaken the essential in action in order to substitute exaggerated and violent attitudes: they throw on faces, particularly in one overstated expression of gazes that becomes a grimace as indecent to the Sacred, as comedy is to the Profane.
* Mr. Fontenelle