VII

ON ART: DIDEROT AT THE LOUVRE

As sole proprietor of the Literary Correspondence, Melchior Grimm earned a sizable income by dispatching his secret, handwritten newsletter to several princes and princesses, two kings, a queen, one Russian empress, and the ruler of the Holy Roman Empire. The annual fee for this bimonthly journal ranged from one thousand to two thousand livres, depending on the distance Grimm needed to send the bulletin. All of the faraway nobles paid gladly. Receiving the Correspondence gave subscribers access to the capital’s tittle-tattle and scandals, as well as to in-depth reviews of the theater and opera scene. But there was also something far more intriguing in Grimm’s tabloid: an unending stream of otherwise unpublishable essays, literary experiments, and philosophical musings produced by Denis Diderot.¹ Over the course of the twenty-five years that the Paris philosophe provided material to Grimm (and Grimm’s successor, Meister), the Correspondence’s readers received early versions of The Nun, D’Alembert’s Dream, The Supplement to Bougainville’s Voyage, On Women, Jacques the Fatalist, as well as a number of other essays, short stories, and reviews.

Diderot plainly enjoyed communicating with Europe’s most enlightened rulers. For once, his writing had an appreciative audience. Yet being the chief contributor (and sometimes editor) of Grimm’s so-called boutique often felt like a thankless chore. This was particularly true every two years during the “Salon season” at the Louvre, when the members of the Royal Academy’s Salon of Painting and Sculpture exhibited what they believed to be the best examples of their painting, drawing, and sculpture. It was Grimm who had initially begun providing cursory reviews of these exhibitions in the mid-1750s. By the end of the same decade, however, he had profitably delegated this task to Diderot, his workhorse of a friend. From 1759 until 1781, the Encyclopedist, philosophe, and polymath took on the role of art critic for the Correspondence, providing reviews of nine Salons, two of them as extensive and original as anything else he wrote in his entire career.²

THE LOUVRE AND SURROUNDINGS ON TURGOT’S MAP OF PARIS, 1734–39

THE SALON

The opening day of the Royal Academy’s Salon of Painting and Sculpture was invariably August 25, the king’s feast day. Though Diderot generally preferred spending the dog days of summer at d’Holbach’s estate in Grandval, during “Salon years” he made an effort to return to the capital by early or mid-September, at which point he fell into the routine of art critic. This involved making a twenty-minute trip from the rue Taranne to the Louvre on almost a daily basis.

THE WESTERN SIDE OF THE LOUVRE, PAINTING BY PHILIBERT-LOUIS DEBUCOURT

The Louvre that Diderot knew had long ceased to be the primary seat of the French monarchy. Shortly after Louis XIV had moved himself and his family to Versailles in 1682, much of the palace had been transformed into the cultural and intellectual nerve center of the kingdom.³ In addition to housing the Académie française, the Royal Academy of Sciences, the Academy of Inscriptions and Belles-Lettres, the Academy of Architecture, and the Royal Printing Press, many of the former royal chambers were converted to “grace and favor” apartments and studio spaces destined for the members of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture.

Even outside of the Salon season, Diderot spent more time in or around the Louvre than most philosophes. Sometimes he simply came to watch some of his painter friends bring a canvas to life; on other occasions, he made the trip to dine with his friend Louis-Michel van Loo and his wife. But when the Salon was open, Diderot did not head for the large eastern section of the château where the artists had their apartments and studios; he went directly to the Salon Carré (Square Room), the exhibition space from which all other art Salons ultimately derived their name.

Like most people, Diderot found the biennial Salons as draining as they were exhilarating. On an average day, more than a thousand people shoehorned themselves into the relatively small four-thousand-square-foot space. To make matters worse, the only access to the Salon was by way of a narrow and congested stairway. One of Diderot’s contemporaries, the art critic Pidansat de Mairobert, claimed that navigating this passage was like running a gauntlet into an “abyss of heat” where the air was so “pestilential and impregnated with the exhalations of so many unhealthy persons” that one expected either “lightning” to strike or “plague” to break out.⁴

Diderot tended to arrive as early as possible in order to avoid both the heat and the crowds. By midmorning, swarms of people hovered around the sculpted heads, frescoes, and small-format artwork exhibited on the long tables in the center of the room. An even bigger throng crowded in front the paintings hanging on the Salon’s four walls. The outer ring of spectators peered at the portraits, genre paintings, and still lifes exhibited at eye level. Others positioned themselves behind this first group, analyzing the medium-sized narrative paintings, landscapes, and large-format portraits. The final band of people lingered at the center of the room, craning their necks and squinting at the outsized history canvases suspended from the Salon’s moldings, thirty feet in the air.

Despite the exhibition’s challenges, it would be difficult to overestimate the thrill of seeing this vibrant mosaic of oil paintings, some of which were still wet. On the most obvious level, painting was the sole medium that provided a truly suggestive, color-rich rendering of Greek mythology, Roman history, or even the king himself. Large landscape canvases also allowed the public, most of whom had never seen a mountain range or the ocean, to imagine the natural wonders of the world. But the exhilaration of the biennial Salon not only came from the visual or mimetic qualities of the works being exposed; it also stemmed from painting’s status as the highest expression of artistic modernity, as well as from the fact that these masterpieces were destined to disappear forever after the exhibition, carted off to richly appointed hôtels particuliers, provincial châteaux, or palaces.⁵

The obvious purpose of organizing such Salons, at least from the Academy’s point of view, was presenting (and ultimately selling) its members’ paintings and sculptures to the country’s elite. Yet the legacy of these exhibitions is actually quite different. In stark contrast to what happened in other spaces of eighteenth-century high culture — the Paris Opéra and Comédie-Française for example — the Louvre’s Salons did not limit or control their audiences through ticket pricing or hierarchical seating. Indeed, the Academy (at the king’s invitation) opened the Louvre’s doors to anyone who was interested in seeing the art. Free and open to the public, the Salon drew both the expected audience of foreign diplomats, aristocrats, financiers, tax farmers, rich merchants, and budding artists, and a range of so-called commoners, including laborers and servants. These working-class communities joined the fray, commenting on, interpreting, and evaluating the art that they would probably never see again. While the paintings and sculptures exhibited at the Louvre could only be owned by the very, very rich — some paintings cost a hundred times a typical worker’s annual salary — the Salon nonetheless planted seeds for the democratization of art culture.⁶

Not everybody thought this was a great thing. Many members of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture resented any encroachment on their royally sanctioned monopoly on taste. In the Academy’s view, to be a connoisseur of painting and sculpture, one necessarily had to be a practitioner; simple amateurs or self-proclaimed lovers of the fine arts could never rival what the artists themselves understood about their creations.⁷ For many sculptors and painters, the only thing worse than uninformed crowds voicing their loathsome and ignorant opinions while staring dully at the art on display, had been the anonymous art critics of the 1740s who had dared to publish illegal pamphlets criticizing the Academy’s artists.⁸ This situation had so vexed the members of the guild that the Academy went on strike in 1749, refusing to hold another Salon until such time that the police had put an end to these illicit publications.⁹

Diderot certainly sympathized with the artists; he, too, had often been on the receiving end of cynical and disparaging criticism. And yet, unlike many members of the Academy, he appreciated the company of the nonartists who came to the Salon. Indeed, during the hours that he spent slipping in and out of the crowds at the Louvre, he took great pleasure in listening in to the “verdicts of old men,” “the thoughts of children,” “the judgments of men of letters,” “the opinions of sophisticates,” and “the views of the people.”¹⁰ These varied perspectives, he wrote, infused his own thinking on art. If he undoubtedly believed that a discriminating palate was a real and measurable thing — a capacity to sense the “true and the good, along with the circumstances rendering it beautiful” — he was also convinced that anyone could acquire an appreciation of beauty and art through “reiterated experience,” by investing the time to understand “nature or the art that copies it.”¹¹ He, of course, was the living proof: the son of a provincial cutler who became the century’s most noteworthy art critic.

HOW TO THINK AND WRITE ABOUT ART

To write about the Louvre’s Salons, Diderot embraced a freeform journalistic voice that was filled with his own personality. Addressing Grimm directly in the introductory remarks to his second Salon review, in 1761, he informed his associate and editor (along with the subscribers to the Correspondance) that this “letter” would be filled with his own sometimes haphazard and muddled comments: “Here, my friend, are the ideas that passed through my head when I saw the paintings exhibited this year at the Salon. I am throwing them down on paper without worrying about sorting them or expressing them [fully].”¹²

Despite this deceptively slapdash method, Diderot was anything but a lighthearted dilettante. In the same way that he had studied medicine, natural history, music, and mathematics, he had also pored over Leonardo da Vinci’s Traité de la peinture (Treatise on Painting), Jean Cousin’s La vraie science de la portraiture (The True Science of Portraiture), Roger de Piles’s Abrégé de la vie des peintres (English translation: The Principles of Painting), Roland Fréart de Chambray’s Parallèle de l’architecture antique et de la moderne (The Parallels between Modern and Classical Architecture), and Charles Le Brun’s Méthode pour apprendre à dessiner les passions (Method for Learning to Draw the Passions [emotional states]).¹³ He had also been deeply interested in aesthetics as early as 1750, reading Plato, Augustine, and Wolff in order to write the article “Beau” (“Beauty”) for the first volume of the Encyclopédie.¹⁴

But most important, Diderot made an effort to see as much art as possible. He visited the collections at Versailles, at the Luxembourg Palace, and at the Palais-Royal, and made arrangements to view collections belonging to private enthusiasts. He also consciously absorbed and developed his technical vocabulary and artistic sensibility by visiting the Louvre’s Salons with the Academy’s painters and sculptors themselves. This produced something of a paradox in his criticism since, as he put it, “if it sometimes happens that I wound artists, very often it’s with weapons that they themselves have sharpened for me.”¹⁵

Diderot had also begun to think quite seriously about what art criticism should be by the time that he attended his third Salon, in 1763. As he looked at the range and variety of the 127 paintings displayed that year, he mused that the best way to write about art would be to attune himself to the style of the artist, and to deploy a corresponding number of prose styles.

To describe a Salon to my liking and yours, do you know, my friend, what one would need? All sorts of tastes, a heart sensitive to all charms, a soul susceptible to an infinity of different passions, a variety of styles that responds to the variety of brushes; to be grand or voluptuous with Deshays [the painter of huge and powerful religious and mythological subjects], simple and true with Chardin [the master of the still life], delicate with Vien [the forerunner of simplistic Neoclassical scenes], poignant with Greuze [the genius of doleful genre scenes], and to conjure up all sorts of illusions with Vernet [the unparalleled master of landscapes].¹⁶

Four years later, in 1767, Diderot shared an even more all-encompassing desire. In order to write about art in a more encyclopedic and comprehensive way, he said that he would need to travel and study the vast collections of Italian, Flemish, and French masterpieces that were either hundreds of miles away or sequestered in private residences. Gaining access to this faraway or hidden art was only his first objective, however. In order to best describe art that would never be seen by the subscribers to the Correspondence, he dreamt of commissioning sketches of the paintings and sculptures he was reviewing. This combination of text and image, he promised, would allow him to produce “a totally new Salon” that would highlight “the treatment and handling of a modern artist” compared to his predecessors.¹⁷

Time, logistics, and feasibility prevented Diderot from bringing this illustrated, pan-European history of art into being. And yet, the very fact that Diderot recognized the incongruity of writing about decontextualized paintings (for people who would never see the art itself) led him to compensate by creating an entirely different kind of art criticism. By the time that he wrote his longest and most famous Salon reviews, those of 1765 and 1767, he was not only entering into an imagined dialogue with the painters and sculptors who had produced the art; he often plunged directly into the compositions himself, sometimes as a character in the painting and sometimes as a fellow artist. In his hands, art criticism became far more than simple evaluation; it became a space of crisscrossing exchanges between the artist, the artwork, and the spectator, an opportunity to comment on and sometimes re-create the aesthetic experience of viewership.

TALKING TO ARTISTS

In his most euphoric moments, Diderot gushes with fervent and passionate praise about the art he saw at the Salon. This was certainly the case when he reviewed Étienne Falconet’s sculptural depiction of the myth of Pygmalion and Galatea at the Salon of 1763. Falconet, who took his cue from Ovid’s legendary tale of how a sculptor falls in love with his own statue, posed Pygmalion on his knees in front of Galatea at the precise moment the goddess Venus breathes life into the statue. The sculptor’s ability to capture the complexity of this emotional moment prompts Diderot to suggest that his friend had achieved something miraculous: “Falconet! How is it that you were able to place surprise, joy, and love all together in a piece of white stone? Imitator of the Gods, if they did indeed animate statues, you have replicated this miracle by animating this one. Come, let me embrace you.”¹⁸

Measuring his own pleasure was just the beginning of how Diderot envisioned his role as a critic. Steeped in the vocabulary of the artists whom he came to know over the years, he also evaluated art against a series of formal criteria. For a piece of art to be successful, from his perspective, it needed a unified composition whose formal elements — these included rendering, staging, conceptual clarity, contrast, and execution — achieved or even surpassed the potential of its medium. This was especially true for his favorite genre, oil painting.

What Diderot prized above all in a painting was the illusion of artlessness. This was a tall order, in his opinion, since the medium was perhaps the most “deceitful” of the fine arts. Whereas dancers move their own bodies in order to produce art, singers produce sound from their own vocal cords, and sculptors “release” their sculptures from a block of marble, the painter has a much more convoluted task.¹⁹ What the artist “blends on his palette,” as Diderot wrote poetically of the Salon of 1763, “is not flesh, blood, wool, sunlight, and air from the atmosphere, but soil, plant sap, calcined bones, shredded stones, and metallic lime.”²⁰ The “best and most harmonious painting,” as he put it, is “a web of lies that cover each other.”²¹

Of all the members of the Academy, it was the master of color, Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, who was the best liar in Diderot’s estimation. Chardin, who was one of the philosophe’s closest friends at the Academy, specialized in what were ostensibly the lower genres of painting: domestic scenes, portraits, and, especially, still lifes. Yet the painter’s understated compositions coupled with his virtuosity as a colorist seduced Diderot completely: “Back away, move in close, the illusion is the same [in a Chardin painting], there’s no confusion, no artificiality, no distracting flickering effects; the eye is always diverted, because calm and serenity are everywhere. One stops in front of a Chardin as if by instinct, just as a traveler exhausted by his trip tends to sit down, almost without noticing it, in a place that’s green, quiet, well watered, shady, and cool.”²²

In his first Salon review, in 1759, Diderot was so inspired by two Chardin still lifes that he proclaims that he could “grab the bottles” that the artist has painted “by the neck.”²³ Four years later, while looking at the painter’s remarkably lifelike rendition of some olives floating in water alongside some “biscuits,” the philosophe calls out to his artist friend and exclaims: “Oh Chardin, it is not white, red, and black that you blend on your palate; it is the very substance of the objects; it is the air and light that you dip with your brush, and that you stick to your canvas.”²⁴

*THE RAY,* PAINTING BY JEAN-BAPTISTE SIMÉON CHARDIN

Diderot was even more in awe of Chardin’s paintbrush when he stood in front of The Ray, a haunting still-life masterpiece featuring the ghostly, humanlike face of an eviscerated stingray hanging on a hook amidst a handful of scattered oysters. After praising the artist for the powerful and lifelike rendering of the skin and blood of the dead animal, Diderot concludes that only Chardin could redeem such a gruesome image with his supreme “talent.”²⁵ While Diderot never came up with a theory to explain the precise source of his appreciation, his glowing review nonetheless reflects an ability to oscillate freely between attraction and repulsion.²⁶

By the mid-1760s, Diderot was impatient to experience more of this kind of art, art that might make him recoil, yet delight him aesthetically. In his review of the Salon of 1765, he proclaims that “I hate all the mean, petty [actions] that indicate merely a base soul, but I do not hate great crimes, first, because they make for beautiful paintings and fine tragedies; and also because grand, sublime actions and great crimes have the same characteristic energy.”²⁷

Some of Diderot’s fascination with the aesthetic power of suffering, terror, or evil flows directly from Edmund Burke’s 1757 A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime, which the philosophe had reviewed for the Literary Correspondence. Like the Irish philosopher and statesman, Diderot believed that there is a fundamental difference between the classical notion of beauty and the feeling brought on by something that is so morally or physically immense that it defies our ability to rationally process what we are experiencing. Such overwhelming moments of aesthetic shock, in his opinion, were a perfect antidote to the boredom of eighteenth-century rococo pastorals. A great painting, as he put it in his Notes on Painting, sometimes required a subject that was “savage, crude, striking, enormous.”²⁸

There are times, when Diderot writes like this, that he seems to be whispering into the ears of nineteenth-century Romantic painters, daring them to produce the type of color-rich scenes of orgiastic excess, chaos, and ferocity that are best embodied by Eugène Delacroix’s 1844 Death of Sardanapalus.²⁹ Such calls for a new form of painting relying on the rawness, shock, or primal energy of life remained little more than passing notions in his criticism, however. Far more prominent in his Salon reviews was the (seemingly contradictory) belief that art should have a salutary moral influence on its spectator. The visual arts, he often maintained, had a duty to become more relevant to the middle class and, like the Enlightenment project as a whole, to communicate values leading to a more just and honest society. “To make virtue attractive, vice odious, ridiculousness salient,” he proclaims solemnly in his Notes on Painting, “such is the project of any honest man who takes up the pen, the paintbrush, or the chisel.”³⁰

Diderot’s tendency to prescribe a moral foundation for the fine arts remains one of the more curious aspects of his entire career. Its source, quite frankly, is up for debate. Is this simply the logical extension of the philosophe’s role as earnest reformer of society’s morals? Is this an undigested part of his bourgeois upbringing? Or could this moralism stem from Diderot’s tangible desire to distance himself from his own somewhat salacious reputation as an author of smut? Whatever the case, the occasional eruption of heavy-handed moralism in his Salon reviews not only leads him astray from his otherwise freethinking inclinations; it prevents him from appreciating the genius of some of his era’s best painters.³¹ This is certainly the case for François Boucher. By the mid-1760s, the sixty-year-old Boucher had produced a sizable and impressive body of work that included beautifully lit landscapes, subtle genre paintings, large historical and mythological canvases, and exquisite portraits (including several of his great admirer and patron, Madame de Pompadour).³² Named the official “Painter of the King” in 1765, Boucher was among the richest and most successful artists of the era.

Diderot never denied Boucher’s greatness; he stood in awe, in fact, of the painter’s virtuosity, especially his ability to master the play of light and shadows in his compositions. Yet from the philosophe’s point of view, the artist was wasting his talent by producing an unending stream of imagined pastorals and landscapes featuring overdressed shepherdesses, fawning lovers, decorative animals, and vine-covered architectural elements: “What colors! What a variety! What richness of objects and ideas! This man has everything, except truth.”³³ Boucher’s biggest liability was that his frivolous canvases never let the viewer forget that he was standing in front of a meaningless painting designed — above all — to please a generation of unthinking courtiers.³⁴

The Boucher paintings that drew Diderot’s most censorious response were his licentious domestic tableaux, the most famous of which were his Brown Odalisque and his Blonde Odalisque. In both paintings, the painter had combined the erotic atmosphere of the Turkish seraglio with the velvet-adorned world of a Versailles or Parisian boudoir. The telltale traits of the rococo — of which Boucher was a directing figure — abound in both of these compositions. Sensual light illuminates rich textiles, jewelry, and ceramics as well as the flushed flesh of the two languid women, both of whom press their bodies heavily into the sheets. The model for Blonde Odalisque was supposedly one of Louis XV’s mistresses; the model for Brown Odalisque was apparently none other than the painter’s wife. Nearly two decades after Boucher had painted the Brown Odalisque (1745), Diderot was still bellyaching about the painting in his Salon of 1763 review, asserting that the artist had incited a generation of artists to “paint chubby and ruddy asses.”³⁵ Four years later, he once again went back to the same subject, libelously maintaining that Boucher “didn’t blush at prostituting his own wife” when he cast her as the painting’s subject.³⁶

Such sermonizing and censure seem somewhat jarring, coming as they do from one of the era’s most unrepentant apologists of pleasure.³⁷ Yet, both philosophically and ideologically speaking, Diderot was convinced that rococo artists like Boucher would have been better served by turning away from decadence and frivolity, and treating more serious and heroic subjects and sentiments. What Diderot longed for, as he once put it, was an artist who could “paint in the same way people spoke in Sparta,” which was to say fearlessly, candidly, and without ornamentation.³⁸ This was not, as it might seem, a recommendation that painters imitate the best works of antiquity, as had been suggested by the great German art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann. It was, rather, the desire that a new generation of painters combine the power of a serious and evocative subject with the purity and perhaps even geometrical simplicity of classical models.³⁹

Late in life, Diderot ultimately witnessed the triumph of this precise Neoclassical aesthetic at the Salon of 1781. Exhausted and unwell as he dragged himself around the exhibition, he was nonetheless struck by the young Jacques-Louis David’s critically acclaimed reception piece, Belisarius Begging for Alms.⁴⁰ A large-format history painting that David presented for his admission to the Academy, Belisarius depicts the fate of a once-heroic Byzantine general who (according to legend) ran afoul of the Roman emperor Justinian and was blinded as part of his punishment. David’s painting depicts the old soldier propping himself up against a large column while both sheltering a child and begging for alms from a beautiful young woman. This moving scene is witnessed by one of the general’s former soldiers, who throws up his arms with astonishment when he sees his commanding officer. Here, finally, was what Diderot had been craving: a brilliantly executed moralizing drama whose theme echoed the unaffected and natural nobility of its characters as well as its artist.

GREUZE

Well before Diderot saw some of the first examples of what would become French Neoclassicism, his hope for an alternative to putti and pastorals had focused on the master of the domestic drama, Jean-Baptiste Greuze. This self-taught artist had first triumphed at the 1755 Salon with his earnest genre painting, A Father Reading the Bible to His Family. In stark contrast to the other paintings at the Salon, Greuze’s small-format canvas depicted a simple and touching domestic scene that glorified the upright moral life of France’s lower classes.⁴¹

Diderot’s appreciation of Greuze was a perfect example of a philosophy finding the right artist. The first time he wrote about the painter was for his review of the Salon of 1761, after he had finally braved the crowds long enough to stand in front of the artist’s greatest achievement, his 1761 L’accordée du village, or The Marriage Contract.⁴² Sadness and emotion brim over in this depiction of a sober father who has just signed the marriage papers that will give his daughter to another man. The patriarch, who is one of the two primary foci in the painting, ignores both the notary, who sits to his left, and his future son-in-law, who now clutches the dowry. Instead, he reaches out to his daughter, either to embrace her, say goodbye, or offer a final word of advice. (The Salon attendees hotly debated this point.) The daughter, who looks subdued, casts her eyes downward, while a younger sister and mother both hang on her, sagging with emotion. Diderot praised this portrayal of the future bride, including the way in which Greuze brought out her honest, subtle, and natural eroticism.

JEAN-BAPTISTE GREUZE’S *THE MARRIAGE CONTRACT*

The philosophe was similarly swept away two years later, in 1763, when Greuze produced what appeared to many observers to be a sequel entitled Filial Piety. This canvas depicts the same or a similar family at a later stage in life; this time, however, the father now lies paralyzed and on his deathbed, surrounded by a downcast and troubled household. Diderot applauded Greuze for producing yet another example of his “moralistic art,” and implored him to continue to “preach” in his paintings.⁴³

*GIRL WITH A DEAD CANARY,* PAINTING BY GREUZE

It is often said that Greuze’s paintings (much like Boucher’s) brought out one of the few conservative and unadventurous streaks in Diderot’s otherwise freethinking mind. Yet some of Greuze’s canvases also elicited a far more morally ambiguous reaction from the philosophe. At the Salon of 1765, for example, Diderot was particularly drawn to a small oval study of a young flush-cheeked girl weeping over the death of her bird. Diderot began his review by announcing that this “pretty elegy” was “delicious” and “the most attractive and perhaps most interesting” painting in the Salon.”⁴⁴

Allegorically minded spectators who stood before Greuze’s painting readily understood that this scene was rife with symbolic content. If cages signaled some form of imprisonment or confinement, then the open birdcage in the painting surely signified some kind of liberation or release. Diderot sensed this as well. Yet rather than reveal exactly what this might be, he speaks directly to the distraught sixteen-year-old in the painting in order to tease out the truth.

Come, little one, open up your heart to me, tell me truly, is it really the death of this bird that’s caused you to withdraw so sadly, so completely into yourself?…You lower your eyes, you don’t answer. Your tears are about to flow. I’m not your father, I’m neither indiscreet nor severe. Well, well, I’ve figured it out, he loved you, and for such a long time, he swore to it! He suffered so much! How difficult to see an object of our love suffer!⁴⁵

Once he has identified the source of her suffering — her lover — Diderot quickly outlines what transpired that same morning:

[U]nfortunately, your mother was absent; he came, you were alone; he was so handsome, his expressions so truthful! He said things that went right to your soul! And while saying them he was at your knees; that too can easily be surmised; he took one of your hands, from time to time you felt the warmth of the tears falling from his eyes and running the length of your arm. Still your mother didn’t return; it’s not your fault; it’s your mother’s fault…My goodness, how you’re crying! But what I say to you isn’t intended to make you cry. And why cry? He promised you, he’ll keep all his promises to you. When one has been fortunate enough to meet a charming child like yourself, become attached to her, give her pleasure, it’s for life…Your mother, she returned almost immediately after his departure, she found you in the dreamy state you were in a moment ago; one is always like that. Your mother spoke to you and you didn’t hear what she said; she told you to do one thing and you did another.⁴⁶

Just before he is about to tell his readers why the girl is so despondent, Diderot is “interrupted” by his editor Grimm, who mocks him for talking to the painting: “Why, my friend, you’re laughing at me; you’re making fun of a serious person who amuses himself by consoling a painted child for having lost her bird, for having lost what you will…”

Changing tone completely, Diderot goes on to explain to Grimm why he has been so taken with the portrait of this young girl. The composition of this painting is so sly and “cunning” that many of the people who stood before it did not understand what the artist was trying to communicate, namely, that this young woman is not only lamenting the loss of her bird, but her virginity as well.⁴⁷

Like much of his art criticism, Diderot’s appraisal of the Girl with a Dead Canary reveals the writer’s amusing tendency to interrupt himself, and to leap from one point of view to the next. When Diderot first addresses the young girl — this allegory of distraught femininity — he shows his empathy for her anguish and tries to dry her tears. As he turns back to Grimm, he dispenses with this mawkishness and admits that, while contemplating her alluring image, he had also imagined himself playing the role of the seducer: “I don’t like to trouble anyone,” he confesses, “yet I wouldn’t be too displeased to have been the cause of her pain.”⁴⁸ This is arguably one of the more significant moments in his Salon reviews. Shifting from sentimentality to unvarnished eroticism, Diderot demonstrates the depth and complexity of his own splintered relationship to the art. Ironically enough, it was Greuze, the well-known master of the sentimental family drama, who helped the critic move beyond the heavy-handed moralism that the philosophe preached elsewhere. If Diderot remained impervious to the frivolous displays of flesh that filled Boucher’s canvases, Greuze’s charming vignette of a young girl mourning the death of her bird lured the author of the Indiscreet Jewels out from hiding.

THE ART OF SUGGESTION

In the most playful passages within Diderot’s Salon reviews, the art is no longer an object of study; it is a living thing. In Diderot’s account of the two portraits that Roland de la Porte (an excellent painter of still lifes) submitted to the Salon of 1765, the canvases actually speak up, rebuking their creator for attempting a new genre: “Monsieur Roland, lend an ear to your two portraits, and you’ll hear them tell you in a loud voice, despite their apparent weakness and dullness: ‘Go back to inanimate objects.’”⁴⁹

Much more memorably, at the Salon of 1767, Diderot takes a leisurely “promenade” through a series of charming landscapes painted by his friend Claude-Joseph Vernet. This imaginary voyage begins when Diderot interrupts his review and suddenly announces to Grimm: “I was about to review [Vernet’s works] with you, when I left for a country close to the sea that is celebrated for the beauty of its sites.”⁵⁰ Stepping “into” these paintings along with an unnamed abbot who engages the art critic in conversation, Diderot then begins strolling through each of the seven “sites.” In addition to luxuriating in Vernet’s representations of mountain summits, seascapes, waterfalls, castles, and the final port scene that ends the promenade, he occasionally infuses this travelogue with theoretical digressions on art itself.

*COAST SCENE: GENOA LIGHTHOUSE AND THE TEMPLE OF MINERVA MEDICA,* PAINTING BY CLAUDE-JOSEPH VERNET

One of the more important topics to surface during his walk and discussion with the abott is the artist’s role vis-à-vis nature itself. Reacting to his companion’s suggestion that a landscape painter should attempt to mechanically replicate the nature around him as well as possible, Diderot argues that the best artists produce a carefully crafted dialogue between the real and the imaginary. This is, of course, precisely what Vernet achieves in his paintings:

If you’d spent more time with [Vernet], perhaps he’d have taught you to see in nature what you don’t see now. How many things you’d find there that needed altering! How many of them his art would omit as they spoiled the overall effect and muddled the impression, and how many he’d draw together to double the enchantment! [If] Vernet had taught you to see nature better, nature, for her part, would have taught you to see Vernet better.⁵¹

A great artist, Diderot makes clear, not only perceives the essence of nature, but captures and reconstitutes its spirit, stimulating our imagination to enter into the painting in the process. This was also what Diderot was demonstrating in his criticism: by leading his readers into imagined versions of Vernet’s landscapes, he was creating a world that initially seems entirely natural, but ultimately reveals itself to be inspired art.

Such moments — when Diderot attempts to translate the full experience of art spectatorship via the medium of his writing — are the high points of his Salon reports. The most stunning example of this type of art criticism came in 1765, when Diderot reviewed the most popular painting of that year’s Salon, Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s ten-foot-by-seventeen-foot acceptance piece, The High Priest Coresus Sacrificing Himself to Save Callirhoe.

In stark contrast to the paintings for which Fragonard would later be known — erotic domestic scenes and figures of fantasy — the source for this massive history painting (which Louis XV purchased) was a second-century CE anecdote from Pausanias’s Description of Greece. Recently adapted for the French stage, the story itself was well known to the French public. During a time of plague, the inhabitants of the ancient Greek city of Calydon ask the oracle at Dodona how they might end the plague that has fallen upon the population. The oracle replies that they must sacrifice a beautiful girl named Callirhoe or find someone to die for her. At the climax of the story, the victim is brought to the temple where the head priest, a man named Coresus, who has always loved Callirhoe, has the task of slaying her to save the city.⁵²

FRAGONARD’S *THE HIGH PRIEST CORESUS SACRIFICING HIMSELF TO SAVE CALLIRHOE*

In his manipulative review of the painting, Diderot does not provide a straightforward reaction, explanation, or description of Fragonard’s rendering of this scene. Claiming that he could not get close enough to view the canvas itself — the crowds once again determining what one could or could not see at the Salon — the critic informs Grimm that he has decided, instead, to relate a hazy, hallucinatory dream. This strange and elaborate reverie ultimately culminates in Diderot’s own rendering of the events portrayed in Coresus and Callirhoe.

After a lengthy evocation of plague and pandemonium, as well as the divine decree that sentences the beautiful young Callirhoe (or her surrogate) to die, Diderot cuts to a scene in the temple where the sacrifice is about to take place. Recounting this climactic moment as if he is witnessing it himself, Diderot gives a gripping account of Coresus’s decision to kill himself in place of the woman he loves. This is, of course, the precise moment that Fragonard depicts in his painting:

At that very instant the high priest grips the sacrificial knife, he raises his arm; I think he’s about to strike the victim, to plunge it into the breast of she who had scorned him and whom the heavens had now delivered to him; not at all, he strikes himself. A generalized shriek pierces and rends the air. I see death’s symptoms make their way over the cheeks, the forehead of the loving, generous unfortunate; his knees give way, his head falls back, one of his arms hangs limp, the hand wielding the knife still fixes it in his heart.⁵³

Seemingly breathless as he describes the priest’s suicide, Diderot then moves through the rest of the painting, scanning the gallery of faces, all of which are frozen in horror. After fixing on the acolyte at the foot of the candelabrum, several female attendants, and the “cruel” priests who were attending to the ritual, Diderot’s gaze lands on a haunting old man in the bottom left portion of the painting.⁵⁴ It is here where he ends his dream: “I see his eyes, I see his mouth, I see him lurch forward, I hear his screams, they awaken me, the canvas withdraws…”⁵⁵ Writing alongside the painter as a partner and an equal, Diderot also allows us to feel how he himself felt when he first saw this canvas, wide-eyed and mouth agape.⁵⁶

Diderot’s digressive and trancelike account of Coresus and Callirhoe numbers among the most compelling examples of his dynamic art criticism.⁵⁷ In addition to replicating the illusionist atmosphere of Fragonard’s canvas, Diderot compels his reader to live through the most intense moments of the painting’s drama.⁵⁸ Yet the most noteworthy moment within this same review is not Diderot’s “translation” of Fragonard or the saga of Coresus: it is, rather, the retelling of Plato’s allegory of the cave that actually opened this long dream sequence.⁵⁹

Diderot’s dreamlike version of Plato’s cave initially seems very much like what we find in The Republic. The dream begins in a dark cavern in which there are a “multitude of men, women, and children,” all of whom are prisoners and forced to watch a series of projected images, echoes, and silhouettes of reality on one of the cavern’s walls.⁶⁰ The most obvious message behind both Plato’s and Diderot’s parables is not dissimilar: most people are prisoners of their own perception, going through life with only a hazy or illusion-filled idea of reality.⁶¹ The difference, however, is that Diderot has inflected his version of the allegory with a biting message about contemporary politics. The characters in Diderot’s dream, unlike those in Plato’s cave, do not confuse the shadows of reality with a higher, Platonic realm of forms; they are, rather, compelled to watch a coercive spectacle (which seems very much like modern cinema) designed to seduce and bully them into believing a series of manufactured lies.

All our hands and feet were chained and our heads so well secured by wooden restraints that it was impossible for us to turn them. [Our] backs were turned to the entrance of this place and we could see nothing but its inner reaches, across which an immense canvas had been hung.

Behind us were kings, ministers, priests, doctors, apostles, prophets, theologians, politicians, cheats, charlatans, masters of illusion, and the whole band of dealers in hopes and fears. Each of them had a small set of transparent, colored figures corresponding to his station, all so well made, so well painted, so numerous and diverse that they were able to represent all the comic, tragic, and burlesque scenes in life.

These charlatans…had a large hanging lamp behind them, in front of whose light they placed their little figures such that their shadows were projected over our heads, all the while increasing in size, and came to rest on the canvas at the back of the cave, composing scenes so natural, so true, that we took them to be real, now splitting our sides from laughing at them, now crying over them with ardent tears, which will seem a bit less strange when you know that behind the canvas there were subordinate knaves, hired by the first set, who furnished these shadows with the accents, the discourse, the true voices of their roles.⁶²

To understand the audacity of his review one needs to once again recall that Grimm was dispatching this periodical to a group of royals including the Count Dalberg, the Duke and Duchesse of Saxe-Gotha, the Margrave of Ansbach, the princes of Hesse-Darmstadt and of Nassau-Sarrebruck, the queen of Sweden, the king of Poland, and Diderot’s and Grimm’s imperial benefactress, Catherine of Russia.⁶³ The message embedded in this review would have been hard for the Correspondence’s subscribers to miss: as monarchs, they, along with their ministers, priests, and profiteers, were complicit in running a massive illusion factory whose function was to control the minds of the people.

Nowadays, 250 years after Diderot’s so-called Salons first left Paris for various courts throughout Europe, scholars continue to revel in this eccentric art criticism. In addition to providing firsthand details about the politics and personalities of the Academy of Painting and Sculpture, Diderot’s reviews take us back to a time when critics were lawbreakers, taste was a controlled substance, and the production, evaluation, and ownership of art was consciously limited to a tiny percentage of the French population. But perhaps more importantly, “listening” to Diderot as he unabashedly composes alongside the Salon’s artists serves another purpose. As the philosophe flouts the preconceptions of his era, he also invites us to question the conventions and expectations put in place by our own academies, and to make the viewing of art as personal and inspired as possible.