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must say a word about the famous Salons of Diderot (1765, 1766, 1767). The art critic does not satisfy us anymore. It is too literary. It takes too happy about the , the idea to give a development that replaces the work of the writer at work by the painter or sculptor. Here, as elsewhere, the method of Diderot's thought is to hang at the thought of others, lost breath digressions, paintings, statues provide an outlet for more internal bubbling sentimentality, reflection, imagination ferments in him.
But let's not be too severe for Diderot. No truth, first, the devil is true of man, but the truth is otherwise a bit too real. With this strong sense of reality that we have seen in him, he sees the painting, and shows. Before you rant, and while reciting, it puts us in front of the painting where he hangs his thoughts or his effusions: in five lines, half a page, it gives us the sensation. This is no small talent for art criticism. It has, moreover, that of smell, report the nature , accuracy expressive faces, gestures, attitudes, criticism and comments are an original taste, we recognize the man who saw naturally their particularity in their respective reports and the external forms of life. But he still has a quality more valuable: it is to judge, in fact, painting a painter, to focus on light, color, enjoy their delicate or powerful combinations. If his criticism is more technical, is not that the public would not follow? And is it not also the paintings, statues of which he spoke did not include? These works were all full of literary intentions: they wanted to act on public issues and ideas that the topics suggested, saucy ideas in Boucher or Fragonard voluptuous or moral ideas in Greuze, philosophical ideas in Bouchardon. The means of painting and sculpture were a language with which you spoke to intelligence. In the same composition, was still the prevailing literature: the theater provided models of arrangement and coordination of a principle of natural objects. Diderot was wrong, no doubt, to push in that direction. If mishandled Boucher, Greuze he applauded, he shouted: "Let us morals, my friend! And indeed Greuze painted inspirational dramas and boring as the Father of family.
Still the Salons of Diderot are a work of considerable time. We have the right to say that he founded - if not the art critic - at least of art journalism. This is the first time we encounter a literary matters, and has been for the fine arts. Diderot paintings, statues a subject of literature, whereas previously the arts and literature were closed worlds, without communication, and that did not exist for one another. Similarly, artists and writers lived apart, each on their own: Ms. Geoffrin had his dinner artists and writers' dinner, which did not have many guests in common. Diderot knock down all those barriers. Literary man, he haunts the workshops, he talks, he played and he rubs his ideas against their theories, aesthetics poetics against their picturesque beauty or plastic. Confined to the public so far in literary taste, he opens a window on the art through all its expansions and its sentimental dissertations thinker, it is education of the senses of his readers, he teaches them to see and enjoy, to grasp the truth of an attitude, the delicacy of a tone. All this found later, and this communication is established between art and literature is not without contributing to the Romantic revolution.
