Roger de Piles

Naming colours in art writing in the 18th century in France

This contribution aims to provide an understanding of a paradox: how to write about colours, to name colours, when one defends a "colorist" conception of the painting in the 18th century in France.
The 18th century saw indeed the victory of the colourists in painting: according to Roger de Piles “La couleur est ce qui rend les objets sensibles à la vue” ("Color is what makes objects sensitive to sight",1708). Therefore, because of its visible character, his successors assimilate painting to colour. But it is also the age of the rise of a discourse on art. Taking as sources the two main corpuses that are the Conferences of the Royal Academy of Painting and the collection of booklets of exhibition (the Deloynes collection), I will try to show how the colorist painters try to approach by language what, according to them, escapes him the most.
What colours use (in language) those who claim colour in painting? What do we learn about it?
The assumption I will try to support is that naming the colour of the painting is used less to name what exists than to name what can not be named.

Il s'agit d'analyser l'inflexion de la notion esthétique de "grâce" et de "je ne sais quoi" vers l'effet gracieux dans le discours la peinture de Roger de Piles à Watelet et d'examiner comment la notion s'articule avec le classicisme, le rococo et le néo-classicisme.

Farbe ist eine der zentralen Kategorien in der kennerschaftlichen Bewertung von Kunstwerken, doch zugleich entzieht sie sich beharrlich ei-ner formalistischen Einhegung. Darüber wie und vor allem nach welchen Kriterien die Farbigkeit von Bildern zu bewerten sei, wurde immer wieder und mitunter erbittert gestritten. Der Aufsatz versucht die zentrale Bedeu-tung von Praktiken des Vergleichens für den Umgang mit Farbe innerhalb der Kennerschaft aufzudecken. Es zeigt sich, dass dem Zustandekommen von Farburteilen im 18. Jahrhundert komplexe, vielschichtige Vergleichsoperationen vorausgingen. Am Beispiel von Charles Le Bruns Reines de Perse werden diese Verkettungen von Vergleichen zwischen Anschauung und Diskurs exemplarisch ausgeleuchtet.

C’est en partant du concept de couleur à laquelle Deleuze consacre une «note» dans sa Logique de la sensation que nous tenterons dans cet article une sorte de "lecture à rebours".  A partir des concepts de couleur et de modulation, nous esquisserons notamment quelques pistes de réflexion et replacerons ces concepts au sein du discours pictural français des XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles, qui s’inspire largement de la terminologie musicale.

A la faveur d'une double évolution de la notion de fabuleux/merveilleux et de beau, au début 18e siècle, la notion de beau tend à se confondre avec celle d'un merveilleux conçu comme un émerveillement. Le merveilleux n'est beau que dans la mesure où il émerveille. L'article met ainsi en relation des discours théoriques (Fontenelle, Roger de Piles) avec des corpus littéraires (Marivaux, contes).

On changes in the interpretation of well-known and traditional art-theoretical concepts during the late seventeenth and the eighteenth century that occurred when art theory changed hands from groups identifying with authority and the social status quo, to groups, who, for various reasons, felt excluded from the highest social circles, or only accepted when they shed their identities and beliefs.

The article traces parallels between painting and make-up suggested in art criticism, journalism and fiction of the modern era. In the 17th century, comparisons with make-up were used in the debates concerning the role of colour in painting and the degree to which nature could be beautified. Two centuries later, discussions focused on cosmetics, the use of which was hailed by bohemians as an artistic gesture, in defiance of bourgeois notions of taste. Finally, towards the early 20th century, make-up was increasingly linked to art in commercial and everyday contexts, whereas avant-garde artists and modernist writers tended to regard these practices as mutually opposite. The article examines the evolution of views on the relationship between painting and make-up with regard to the notions of nature and artifice, original and copy, as well as constructions of gender.

The Natural and the Mannered in the French Pictorial Theory of the 17th and 18th Centuries

In the 17th and 18th centuries, the term ‘manner’ is one of the most important keywords in the French pictorial discourse. In the 17th century, it stands for a general creative technique, as well as for a personal creative technique; however, its third, rather negative meaning is distance from nature. In the Age of Enlightenment, the semantic field of this notion is reduced: from its several original meanings, it keeps only mannered, as synonym for artificial and affected, and antonym for natural. The aim of this paper is to clarify the relevance of the contrast between ‘natural’ and ‘mannered’ in some theoretical writings on the art of the 17th and 18th centuries.

In 1719, Jean-Baptiste Dubos described the connoisseurial judgement as a veritable "goût de comparaison," literally, a taste of comparison. This early reflection on the importance of practices of comparing is surprising, and can serve as the starting point for investigating its fundamental role in art connoisseurship. What kind of preconditions, merits, implications, and limits can be connected to comparative arrangements in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries? Is it even possible to ascertain a change of comparative practices within the history of connoisseurship? Connoisseurs-so the argument-expanded specific skills by means of increasingly efficient comparisons that enabled them to systematize and categorize the vast heritage of artistic artifacts.

"Become the greatest plein air painter in the world, greater than Rapha-el": the visionary art of Csontváry
A b s t r a c t : The study focuses on the turning point in the life of Tivadar Csontváry Kosztka (1853-1919), one of the most original geniuses of Hungari-an painting, whose art cannot be related to any pictorial trend. It presents the exceptional career of this painter: it is under the effect of a mystical vision-telling him that he would become a plein air painter, greater than Raphael-that in 1894 he abandons his profession as a pharmacist in Igló to devote himself to art. From this vision the new man will be born: the pharmacist Tivadar Kosztka will become the painter Csontváry who undertakes trips to the land of the legends in search of the "great motive" and manages to create a visionary artistic universe.

Se recogen en esta edición veinticuatro juicios sobre Tintoretto, escritos
entre los años 1545 y 1780: trece en italiano, nueve en español y dos
en francés, entre cartas, guías de Venecia, testimonios de viaje, tratados
de pintura, memorias y apuntes sueltos. En Inglaterra no se escribió
nada que valiera la pena sobre el artista hasta principios del siglo XIX
(las Lectures on Painting de Henry Fuseli y Stones of Venice de John
Ruskin, ambos excelentes). Cada juicio va acompañado de una breve introducción en la que más que presentar al autor, intento explicar las ideas estéticas que pueda
tener sobre Tintoretto. Tintoretto era considerado un "pintor de borrones", y me gustaría que el lector se detuviera a pensar un momento en la curiosa paradoja que supone pintar con el ánimo de borrar.

L’article publie les annotations du théoricien de l’art français Roger de Piles (Clamecy 1635 - Paris 1709) sur son exemplaire de la 'Felsina pittrice' de Carlo Cesare Malvasia, conservé aujourd’hui à la Bibliothèque de l’Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art de Paris. Ce travail s’inscrit dans le cadre de l’édition critique et commentée de la 'Felsina pittrice' de Malvasia dirigée par Elizabeth Cropper au CASVA - Center for the Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts de la National Gallery of Art de Washington, D.C. [dernières épreuves corrigées en pièce jointe]

When, in 1719, abbé Jean-Bapiste Dubos described connoisseurial judgment as a practice based on a “goût de comparaison“, a “taste of comparison”, he was one of the first who consequently thought together the doing of comparing and judging. However, as the “Abregé de la vie des peintres” by Roger de Piles, published twenty years earlier, can show this was not a genuine finding. It is probable that practices of early connoisseurship on art help to establish a theoretical reflection pursuant to which comparative activity precedes aesthetical judgment in most of the cases.  In my paper I seek to analyze the impact of comparisons on the physical, material and contextual preconditions of judging aesthetically. What are, for instance, the merits, implications and limits of comparative viewing for the formation of an aesthetic judgment? To what extent helped practices of comparing to mediate between the connoisseur’s intuition and a so-called intersubjective judgment? I argue that it has not been the aesthetic judgment in the first place, but the rising institutionalization of comparative practices in 18th century that culminated in a formation of taste.

LInk: http://www.lalaragimov.com/r/rogerdepiles
My lightly abridged translation of pages about drawing technique (pp 9-33) from the 1684 book Les premiers élémens de la peinture pratique.  I haven't found an English version, so I made one.  I will be glad if you contact me with corrections or comments.