Text, image, intertext: Diderot, Chardin and Pliny

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KATE E. TUNSTALL
Text, image, intertext:
Diderot, Chardin and Pliny
IN eighteenth-century France, Pliny’s writings on art were a subject of
particular interest. In 1725 book 35 of the Natural history, which is devoted
to painting, was published separately in French translation, and in 1772
Falconet published his translation of all the three books related to art. 1
We do not know exactly when Diderot read Pliny on art, though he had
certainly read him by the mid 1760s as his correspondence with Falconet
reveals, 2 and he would have had extensive indirect knowledge of the ancient
writer’s ideas on painting from the late 1740s and early 1750s when his
borrowings from the Bibliothèque du roi included works such as Félibien’s
Entretiens sur les vies et sur les ouvrages des plus excellens peintres anciens et
modernes and de Piles’s Cours de peinture par principes, both of which contain
numerous references to Pliny. 3 Yet the intertextual presence of Pliny in
Diderot’s own art criticism has received no serious critical attention. This
essay addresses that critical oversight and explores Diderot’s use of
anecdotes from Pliny, with particular reference to his writing on Chardin.
Pliny’s most famous contribution to the history of art is no doubt his
story of the competition between Zeuxis and Parrhasios in which:
On dit que [Parrhasius] présenta le défi à Zeuxis, qui ayant apporté des Raisins
peints avec tant de vérité, que des Oiseaux vinrent pour les bécqueter; l’autre
apporta un Rideau si naturellement représenté, que Zeuxis, fier du sufrage des
Oiseaux, demanda que le Rideau fût tiré pour qu’on vı̂t le Tableau: qu’alors
Zeuxis ayant reconnu son erreur, acorda avec une franchise modeste le prix à son
rival, parceque lui n’avoit trompé que des Oiseaux, & Parrhasius un Artiste. 4
1. Histoire de la peinture ancienne, extraite de l’Histoire naturelle de Pline l’Ancien, liv. XXXV.
Avec le texte latin, corrige´ sur les mss. De Vossius et sur la 1. e´dition de Venise, & e´clairci par des
remarques nouvelles (London, G. Bowyer, 1725); Traduction des 34 e, 35e et 36 e livres de Pline
l’Ancien, ed. and trans. Etienne-Maurice Falconet, 2 vol. (Amsterdam, Marc-Michel Rey,
1772). A second edition of Falconet’s translation appeared the following year, published in
The Hague.
2. Denis Diderot and Etienne-Maurice Falconet, Le Pour et le contre: correspondance
pole´mique sur le respect de la poste´rite´, Pline et les anciens auteurs qui ont parle´ de peinture et de
sculpture, éd. Yves Benot (Paris, 1958). For an exploration of Diderot’s knowledge of
classical authors, see France Marchal, La Culture de Diderot (Paris, 1999).
3. See Jacques Proust, ‘L’initiation artistique de Diderot’, Gazette des beaux-arts 55
(1960), p.225-32.
4. Traduction des 34 e, 35 e et 36 e livres de Pline l’Ancien, avec des notes, par M. Falconet.
Seconde édition. On y a joint autres écrits relatifs aux beaux-arts, 2 vol. (The Hague,
SVEC 2006:12 (345-357)
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Yet despite its fame, Pliny’s story has often been thought of as a sign of a
limited understanding of the nature of pictorial representation. Most
recently, Norman Bryson has lamented the way in which it installed from
the Renaissance onwards an understanding of painting as ‘a utopian
dream of [...] a perfect reduplication of the objects of the world’, 5 the art
of producing ‘the Essential Copy’. 6 One casualty of this view of painting is
style: as Bryson has argued, if painting is about producing an exact
imitation, artistic style can only be understood in terms of deviation from
nature. He writes: ‘the Essential Copy, if it were ever achieved, would
possess no stylistic features, since the simulacrum would at last have
purged away all traces of the productive process’. 7 To the extent that the
Zeuxis’s-grapes view of painting was thought problematic in the eighteenth century, however, it tended to be because Zeuxis painted grapes.
Falconet complained: ‘Ce conte est répété par-tout comme une merveille.
Cependant chacun sait aujourd’hui, ou doit savoir, combien il est facile
de faire illusion dans ce genre de Peinture.’ 8 Pliny’s notion of painting as
an art of the Essential Copy is brought up short by the hierarchy of genre
within painting which Félibien had formulated as follows:
Celuy qui fait parfaitement des paı̈sages est au dessus d’un autre qui ne fait que
des fruits, des fleurs ou des coquilles. Celuy qui peint des animaux vivans est plus
estimable que ceux qui ne représentent que des choses mortes & sans mouvemens;
Et comme la figure de l’homme est le plus parfait ouvrage de Dieu sur la terre, il
est certain aussi que celuy qui se rend l’imitateur de Dieu en peignant des figures
humaines, est beaucoup plus excellent que tous les autres. 9
Such a theory attaches value to painting only in terms of its subject
matter; paintings of the human form are the most valuable and those of
inanimate objects such as flowers and fruit the least. Zeuxis’s grapes and
Parrhasios’s curtain, despite their extraordinary illusionism, are thereby
deemed to be of little artistic value. 10
Daniel Monnier, 1773), vol.1, p.153. See also André Félibien, Entretiens sur les vies et sur les
ouvrages des plus excellens peintres anciens et modernes, 2 vol. (London, David Mortier, 1705),
vol.1, p.51-52.
5. Norman Bryson, Word and image: French painting of the ancien re´gime (Cambridge, 1981),
p.xv.
6. Norman Bryson, Vision and painting: the logic of the gaze (New Haven, CT, 1983), p.1335. Bryson’s study opens with the anecdote from Pliny, p.1.
7. Bryson, Vision and painting, p.7. See also Ernest Gombrich, Art and illusion: a study in
the psychology of pictorial representation (1960; Oxford, 1989), p.3.
8. Falconet, Traduction, 2nd ed., vol.1, p.287.
9. André Félibien, Confe´rences de l’Acade´mie royale de peinture et de sculpture pendant l’anne´e
1667 (Paris, Frédéric Léonard, 1669, reprinted London, 1972), n.p.
10. Indeed one might say that it is precisely because of that illusionism that they are of
little value, for it requires purging any trace of the artistic process which might have been
valued. For an exploration of the relations between illusion and artistic technique, see
Marian Hobson, The Object of art: theories of illusion in eighteenth-century France (Cambridge,
1981). For her observations on Chardin, see p.77-80.
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Text, image, intertext: Diderot, Chardin and Pliny
The competing claims of illusion, style and genre are issues with which
Diderot’s art criticism is intimately bound up. They are present in a
particularly tense configuration in his writing on Chardin about which
readers have often expressed surprise, dissatisfaction and even irritation. 11
He offers for the most part what can be described as a Plinian view of
Chardin’s art, claiming ‘c’est toujours la nature et la vérité’; 12 ‘c’est la
nature même’ (vol.4, p.264); ‘Chardin est si vrai, si vrai’ (p.345). In the
Salon de 1763 he retells Pliny’s story with Chardin winning the contest,
beating the two great illusionists of antiquity (p.265). It is as a result of
this Plinian view that Diderot has difficulty engaging with Chardin’s style
on which many of his contemporaries commented in some detail. 13 When
Diderot tries to engage with Chardin’s ‘faire’, his ‘manière’, his ‘technique’, he ties himself in knots: ‘Il n’a point de manière; je me trompe, il a
la sienne; mais puisqu’il a une manière sienne, il devrait être faux dans
quelques circonstances, et il ne l’est jamais’ (p.349). Furthermore, Diderot
tends to adhere to the theory of the hierarchy of genre, claiming that
Chardin’s represents ‘une nature basse, commune et domestique’ (p.218)
and that his ‘genre de peinture’ is ‘le plus facile’ (p.349). This view of
the status of Chardin’s subject matter, when combined with an adherence
to the Plinian view of painting, produces the inevitable paradox: how
is Diderot to account for his admiration for Chardin’s paintings of
inanimate, everyday objects, objects that are not in themselves admirable, without making reference to the style in which they are painted,
which he cannot do without undermining the claim that they are perfect
illusions?
This paradox is central to Diderot’s text on Chardin in the Salon de
1763. A close reading of it reveals that while the Plinian view of art as
illusion is the source of the paradox, Pliny is also involved in some of
Diderot’s most interesting attempts to negotiate it. 14 In this text, which
11. René Démoris complains about the naivety of Diderot’s approach to Chardin,
referring to his ‘discours [...] de la parfaite imitation, incessant développement d’un
‘‘comme ça ressemble’’ ’ (‘Diderot et Chardin: la voie du silence’, in Diderot: les beaux-arts et
la musique, Actes du colloque international tenu à Aix les 14, 15 et 16 décembre 1984, Aixen-Provence, 1986, p.43-54, p.45). Michael Baxandall describes what Diderot has to say of
Chardin as ‘disappointing’ (‘Pictures and ideas: Chardin’s A Lady taking tea’, in Patterns of
intention: on the historical explanation of pictures, New Haven, CT, 1989, p.74-104, p.80).
Frédéric Ogée states that Diderot’s approach to Chardin is ‘exclamatory and superlative,
and expresses some form of bemused embarrassment, while saying little about the paintings’ (‘Chardin’s time: reflections on the tercentenary exhibition and twenty years of
scholarship’, Eighteenth-century studies 33.3, 2000, p.431-50, p.439).
12. Denis Diderot, Œuvres, ed. Laurent Versini, 5 vol. (Paris, 1994-1997), vol.4, p.197.
All subsequent references are to this edition, vol.4, and are given in the text.
13. See, for example, Charles-Nicolas Cochin, ‘De l’illusion dans la peinture’, in Recueil
de quelques pie`ces concernant les arts. Discours sur la connaissance des arts fonde´s sur le dessin et
particulie`rement de la peinture. Discours prononce´ à la se´ance publique de l’Acade´mie des sciences, belleslettres et arts de Rouen (Geneva, 1972), p.72-3.
14. For another detailed study of this text, see François Lecercle, ‘L’écriture Chardin’,
Early modern France 1 (1994), p.143-61. His thesis is essentially a comparative one which
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explores Le Bocal d’olives and La Raie, Diderot alludes in a number of ways
to Pliny’s story of Zeuxis and the birds. He offers it as a story about desire
as well as about mimesis, which enables him to convey the merit of
Chardin’s Le Bocal d’olives by staging the inherent appeal of the objects
depicted in it as well as their illusionistic qualities. Such an approach
founders, however, with La Raie since Diderot is unable to account for his
admiration for this painting with reference to any appeal of the object in
the painting because it is a gutted skate, which, if perfectly reduplicated,
would cause the spectator to turn away in disgust. Since the gutted skate
does not have this effect on him, the Zeuxis’s-grapes view of painting is
compromised, and Diderot is forced to engage with Chardin’s style. What
he says is frequently quoted by critics and often cited in exhibition catalogues, but it is rarely analysed in any depth. René Démoris has dismissed
it as ‘une ébauche de description semi-technique [qui] tourne court’, 15
and François Lecercle claims it to be ‘terrain connu’. 16 Yet a careful
reading of it uncovers further allusions to painters and paintings described by Pliny, to Protogenes and his painting of a dog, and to Apelles and
his painting of Venus rising from the waves. These allusions permit
Diderot, at crisis point in relation to the mimetic view of painting, to
engage with both style and genre, without entirely compromising the idea
of illusion.
Moreover, they suggest a remarkable viewing of La Raie, a viewing
which also challenges the commonly held view of Diderot’s writing about
Chardin. If critics have claimed that Diderot’s writing on Chardin is
lacking in imagination, it is perhaps because this is what Diderot claims of
the genre of painting in which Chardin paints. 17 He states: ‘C’est que
cette peinture qu’on appelle de genre, devrait être celle des vieillards ou
de ceux qui sont nés vieux. Elle ne demande que de l’étude et de la
patience. Nulle verve, peu de génie, guère de poésie, beaucoup de technique et de vérité; et puis c’est tout’ (p.346). Taking his cue from this,
Jean Starobinski has claimed: ‘[Diderot] ne peut rien y ajouter [à la
peinture de Chardin] – ni réminiscence voluptueuse, ni grande idée
morale’, 18 and with reference to Chardin’s technique in particular, Daniel
Brewer has concluded that for Diderot: ‘Chardin refuses the need for
supplemental activity of spectatorial imagination [...] he limits the
argues that Diderot’s short paragraphs and their rather jerky logic offer a kind of textual
analogue for Chardin’s brushstrokes.
15. Démoris, ‘Diderot et Chardin: la voie du silence’, p.45.
16. François Lecercle, ‘Le regard dédoublé’, Nouvelle Revue de psychanalyse 44 (1991),
p.101-28, p.108.
17. In his recent book Diderot devant l’image (Paris, 2000), Philippe Déan warns against
allowing Diderot’s theoretical pronouncements to inform interpretation of his writing and
remarks on ‘une opposition et une contradiction profondes entre le projet théorique [...] et
le résultat critique tel qu’il se donne à lire au niveau de l’écriture’ (p.11).
18. Jean Starobinski, Diderot dans l’espace des peintres, suivi de Le Sacrifice en reˆve (Paris,
1991), p.52.
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viewer’s imagination, restricting the desire to narrate and the narration of
desire’. 19 A psychoanalytical approach, such as that by Lecercle, offers a
challenge to such views, revealing the narrative presence of desire in
Diderot’s writing on Chardin, but it tends to argue that the objects of
desire are the objects depicted in the paintings. 20 Close attention to
Diderot’s description of La Raie in the text of 1763, however, and in
particular to the description of Chardin’s style with its allusion to Apelles’s Venus rising from the waves, suggests not only the presence of desire,
of ‘réminiscence voluptueuse’, but also that the object of that desire is as
much the paint itself as objects depicted in it.
From the outset, illusion is a dominant theme in the entry on Chardin
in the Salon de 1763, particularly in the first half of the text which deals
with Le Bocal d’olives. The text begins by identifying the painter as a
colourist: ‘C’est celui-ci qui est un peintre, c’est celui-ci qui est un coloriste’ (p.264), an identification that immediately asserts the mimetic aim
of painting since colour was that part of painting – the other being
drawing – which was most associated with illusion. 21 From then on,
references to the illusionistic nature of Chardin’s canvasses abound: ‘Les
objets sont hors de la toile et d’une vérité à tromper les yeux’ (p.264).
Other kinds of copying are also mentioned in the text as Diderot twice
refers to an apprentice copying Chardin’s paintings: ‘Si je destinais mon
enfant à la peinture, voilà le tableau [Le Bocal d’olives] que j’achèterais.
‘‘Copie-moi cela, lui dirais-je, copie-moi cela encore.’’ Mais peut-être la
nature n’est-elle pas plus difficile à copier. [...] Après que mon enfant
aurait copié et recopié ce morceau, je l’occuperais sur la Raie de´pouille´e du
même maı̂tre’ (p.264).
Moreover, Diderot’s writing itself aims at mimesis, recreating Chardin’s
illusion for the reader by omitting any mention of the painter’s art:
‘L’artiste a placé sur une table un vase de vieille porcelaine de la Chine,
deux biscuits, un bocal rempli d’olives, une corbeille de fruits, deux verres
à moitié pleins de vin, une bigarade, avec un pâté’ (p.264). He does not
say the artist placed the objects on the table and then painted them;
instead he presents Chardin’s paintings as if they were some kind of
installation. In the Salon de 1765, such an approach is developed further
when he recommends to the reader how he might create a Chardin for
himself: ‘Placez sur un banc de pierre un panier d’osier plein de prunes,
19. Daniel Brewer, The Discourse of Enlightenment in eighteenth-century France: Diderot and the
art of philosophizing (Cambridge, 1993), p.158.
20. Lecercle, ‘Le regard dédoublé’.
21. Colour is also associated with Zeuxis. In his translation of Charles Du Fresnoy’s De
arte graphica, Roger de Piles writes: ‘Aussi ne voit-on personne qui ne rétablisse la CROMATIQUE, et qui la remette en vigueur au point que la porta Zeuxis, lorsque par cette
partie, qui est pleine de charmes et de magie, et qui scait si admirablement tromper la vue,
il se rendit égal au fameux Apelle. Prince des Peintres, & qu’il mérita pour toujours la
reputation qu’il s’est établie par tout le monde’ (Roger de Piles, Œuvres, 5 vol., Amsterdam,
Arkstée and Merkus, 1767, vol.5, p.43).
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auquel une méchante ficelle serve d’anse, et jetez autour des noix, deux
ou trois cerises et quelques grapillons de raisin’ (p.348). In 1763 Diderot
even goes as far as to claim that Chardin’s objects are not made of paint,
but rather of the same substance as the objects themselves (p.264):
c’est que ce vase de porcelaine est de la porcelaine; c’est que ces olives sont
réellement séparées de l’œil par l’eau dans laquelle elles nagent [...]. Ô Chardin,
ce n’est pas du blanc, du rouge, du noir que tu broies sur ta palette; c’est la
substance même des objets, c’est l’air et la lumière que tu prends sur la pointe de
ton pinceau, et que tu attaches sur la toile.
This surely is the utopian dream of the Plinian Essential Copy realised:
Chardin makes his vase out of porcelain, suspends his olives in real water,
uses real air and light, not paint at all. And yet the idea of the Essential
Copy also overreaches itself rather here, as there is a suggestion that the
artist is a kind of demiurge; he creates objects rather than copying preexisting ones. Diderot will return to the relation between illusion and
creation later in the text.
The spectator’s response to this illusion is not only to see the objects as
real, but to imagine reaching out and touching them: ‘c’est qu’il n’y a
qu’à prendre ces biscuits et les manger; cette bigarade, l’ouvrir et la
presser; ce verre de vin, et le boire; ces fruits, et les pêler; ce pâté, et y
mettre le couteau’ (p.265). Diderot’s response here recalls that of the birds
to Zeuxis’s grapes, and indeed that of Zeuxis himself to Parrhasios’s
curtain, and the text concludes with an explicit reference to the painters
of antiquity: ‘crachez sur le rideau d’Apelle et sur les raisins de Zeuxis.
On trompe sans peine un artiste impatient, et les animaux sont mauvais
juges en peinture. N’avons-nous pas vu les oiseaux du jardin du roi aller
se casser la tête contre la plus mauvaise des perspectives? Mais c’est vous,
c’est moi que Chardin trompera quand il voudra’ (p.265).
In the first half of the text then as well as in its closing lines, Diderot
presents Chardin’s art, as Pliny had done that of Zeuxis and Parrhasios,
as one which not only deceives the eye, but also arouses the desire to
touch. 22 Indeed the vigour of the actions that Chardin’s objects entice the
spectator to perform seems to indicate the strength of that illusion as well
as the appealing nature of those objects: opening, squeezing, peeling and
piercing are sensual acts, violent ones even.
The Plinian idea of painting as perfect imitation soon comes under
pressure, however, as Diderot turns to La Raie or, as he calls it, La Raie
de´pouille´e. 23 His mention of this painting here is interesting for it was not
22. De Piles states: ‘les Yeux ont horreur des choses que les Mains ne voudraient pas
toucher’ (Œuvres, vol.5, p.67). For an analysis of the relations between sight and touch in
art theory of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in France, see Jacqueline Lichtenstein, La Tâche aveugle: essai sur les relations de la peinture et de la sculpture à l’âge moderne
(Paris, 2003).
23. For analyses of this painting, see Démoris, Chardin, la chair et l’objet (Paris, 1999)
p.31-36; Lecercle, ‘Le regard dédoublé’; and the special issue of Critique 315-16 (1973).
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in fact exhibited at the salon of 1763. It was probably painted in 1726 and
was Chardin’s morceau de re´ception for the Académie in 1728, where it was
still on show. 24 In mentioning it here, Diderot turns it into a kind of
pendant to Le Bocal d’olives, something that Chardin certainly did not
intend. Having imagined touching, peeling, piercing the objects in the
Bocal d’olives in the first half of the text, he then refers to La Raie de´pouille´e,
the central object of which – a gutted skate – has already been touched,
peeled and pierced. 25 As such, it might be thought that the pendants
would engender contrasting responses: where the illusionism of Le Bocal
d’olives caused the spectator to reach out and touch its objects, the gutted
skate would, if it is equally illusionistic, cause the spectator to turn away
in disgust. Yet it does not, and as such the Zeuxis’s-grapes idea of painting
so clearly championed in the first half of the text, is compromised. Diderot
avoids explicitly admitting as much, however: ‘L’objet est dégoûtant;
mais c’est la chair même du poisson. C’est la peau. C’est son sang; l’aspect
même de la chose n’affecterait pas autrement. M. Pierre, regardez bien ce
morceau, quand vous irez à l’Académie, et apprenez, si vous pouvez, le
secret de sauver par le talent le dégoût de certaines natures’ (p.265). The
structure and logic of this paragraph is, as a number of critics have
remarked, peculiar. 26 Diderot states that the object in the picture is disgusting, and echoing what he had said in relation to Le Bocal d’olives, he
claims that it is made of the same substance as the real thing – flesh, skin
and blood –, and that it ought therefore to have the same effect on us as
the thing itself. However, he then suddenly turns away from the reader
and addresses the painter, Pierre, to whom he says that the artist has
succeeded in ‘saving’ the object from being disgusting. Diderot thus
concludes that the disgusting object is not in fact disgusting after all. The
paradox can already be felt when Diderot says ‘l’objet est dégoûtant; mais
c’est la chair même du poisson’; we were surely expecting ‘l’objet est
dégoûtant parce que c’est la chair même du poisson’. It is as if he were
about to say ‘the object is disgusting, but it’s so lifelike that it’s not
disgusting’, and in order to avoid making this obviously absurd statement, he turns to Pierre and admits to him that La Raie de´pouille´e is not an
There is also a video study of the painting by Alain Jaubert, Chardin: La Raie (Paris, Musée
du Louvre, 1991).
24. Diderot also recalled it in the Salon de 1761: ‘Il y a au salon de l’Académie un
tableau de réception qui montre qu’il a entendu la magie des couleurs’ (p.219).
25. There are other striking objects in the picture, such as a cat that has jumped up onto
the table with the skate on it and is about to send a pile of oysters crashing onto the floor.
However, Diderot only mentions the skate.
26. Démoris writes of ‘un ‘malin démon [qui] semble le conduire à d’étranges et inaperçues fautes de logique’ (‘Diderot et Chardin: la voie du silence’, p.45). Lecercle glosses
the paragraph thus: ‘syllogisme boı̂teux. Majeure: l’objet est dégoûtant. Mineure: la
représentation est parfaitement fidèle. Conclusion: la représentation ne soulève pas le
dégoût, qui est levé par le talent’ (‘Le regard dédoublé’, p.111).
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exact replica of the thing itself, but a transformation of the thing by artistic
talent, even its salvation.
Unable now to continue with his references to illusion, Diderot describes
Chardin’s style, his application of paint. Instead of reaching out and
touching the objects, he moves up close to study the paint:
On n’entend rien à cette magie. Ce sont des couches épaisses de couleur appliquées les unes sur les autres, et dont l’effet transpire de dessous en dessus. D’autres
fois on dirait que c’est une vapeur qu’on a soufflée sur la toile; ailleurs, une écume
légère qu’on y a jetée. [...]. Approchez-vous, tout se brouille, s’aplatit et disparaı̂t; éloignez-vous, tout se recrée et se reproduit. 27
Contrary to what has been said of it by Démoris and Lecercle, this
description is rich and suggestive, containing in addition to the reference
to magic, metaphysical, theological and even erotic connotations, and
moreover, an allusion to a story about painting from Pliny. The allusions
to Pliny are to be found in the reference to the layering of the paint and,
more significantly, in the reference to spume thrown onto the canvas.
Pliny’s story is about Protogenes’s painting, not of a dead fish, but of a
panting and salivating dog. It begins with a reference to the artist’s
technique of layering his paint on the canvas: ‘Il mit à ce Tableau quatre
couleurs l’une sur l’autre, pour le défendre des injures du temps & de la
vétusté, afin qu’une couleur venant à tomber, l’autre la remplaçât.’ 28
Diderot’s paragraph on Chardin’s technique also begins with a reference
to his layering of paint. Although in the Salon de 1767, Diderot will
explain how Chardin’s technique resists the effects of time (p.593), 29 here
the aim and the effects achieved by Chardin are very different from those
obtained by Protogenes. The latter is concerned with the inevitable
peeling away of paint over time to the detriment of the illusion and his
application of the layers ensure that if the surface layer falls away,
27. The final sentence of this paragraph has recently attracted much attention with
critics reading it as a sign of Diderot’s interest in the process of perception (Déan, Diderot
devant l’image, p.337-38), and as his version of the Freudian fort-da game with objects
disappearing and reappearing as he gets close to them and moves away again (see Lecercle,
‘Le regard dédoublé’, p.108). A similar statement appears in the Salon de 1765: ‘Le faire de
Chardin est particulier. Il a de commun avec la manière heurtée que de près on ne sait ce
que c’est, et qu’à mesure qu’on s’éloigne, l’objet se crée et finit par être celui de la nature;
quelquefois aussi il vous plaı̂t également de près et de loin’ (p.349). In the Salon de 1767,
however, he claims the reverse, namely that the illusion is not destroyed by moving up
close: ‘Eloignez-vous, approchez-vous, même illusion’ (p.593).
28. Traduction, 2nd ed., vol.1, p.168. There as debate in the eighteenth century as to
whether this technique had been adopted by Titian (see Traduction, vol.1, p.381).
29. Such an idea is of particular interest because still lifes are often associated with
memento mori and vanitas images, the message of which is the transience and futility of human
achievements. Although Chardin eschews this kind of symbolism in his painting, Diderot
refers to ideas associated with such a tradition in his entry on Chardin in the Salon de 1767.
Andrew H. Clark reminded me, in his kind response to the version of this paper delivered
at the 2005 ASECS meeting, that the question of posterity is central to Diderot and
Falconet’s discussion of Pliny.
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another identical one is revealed beneath it. The process described by
Diderot in relation to Chardin’s painting involves an opposite movement,
according to which an earlier, deeper layer of paint inexplicably rises
upwards to become visible now on the surface.
Echoes and reversals also mark Diderot’s allusion to the rest of Pliny’s
story about Protogenes which continues as follows:
Il y a dans ce Tableau un chien fait d’une manière surprenante, attendu que le
hazard y eut aussi part. Protogène assez content des autres parties, ce qui lui
arrivoit très rarement, ne trouvoit pas qu’il eût bien exprimé l’écume d’un chien
haletant. Le soin qu’il avait pris lui déplaisoit; il ne pouvait en prendre moins;
cependant il lui en paroissoit trop, l’Art s’éloignoit de la Vérité; l’écume n’étoit
que peinte, elle ne sortoit pas de la gueule. Tourmenté d’inquiétude, parce que
dans son ouvrage il vouloit la vérité & non la vraisemblance, il éffaçoit souvent, il
changeoit de pinceau & rien ne le contentoit. Enfin, dépité contre l’Art parce
qu’il s’appercevoit, il jetta son éponge remplie de couleurs sur cet endroit qui lui
déplaisoit tant, & l’éponge remplaça les couleurs comme le désiroit son exactitude. Ce fut ainsi que le hazard imita la nature. 30
In addition to the fact that both Protogenes and Chardin are described as
painting animals with liquids of one sort or another seeping out of their
bodies, the terms of Pliny’s story resonate with those of Diderot. Pliny’s
story is about Fortune taking over from the artist in the creation of a work
of art; Diderot’s description is about magic and his use of the pronoun ‘on’
– ‘une vapeur qu’on a soufflée, une écume légère qu’on a jetée’ – denies the
artist any clear responsibility for applying the paint and therefore for
achieving the effects described. In neither Pliny nor Diderot is the paint
applied, strictly speaking, by the artist. Moreover, Diderot’s Chardin is
akin to Pliny’s Protogenes in the sense that he is concerned not just with
‘vraisemblance’ but with ‘le vrai’. Pliny suggests that the substance that
splatters the canvas when Protogenes throws the sponge is not just a perfect
resemblance of the saliva dribbling out of the dog’s mouth, but that, as
it dribbles down the canvas, it actually is saliva. The 1725 translation
30. Traduction, 2nd ed., vol.1, p.168. The story is also found in other writers of antiquity.
For an analysis of the various versions, see Georges Didi-Huberman, ‘La couleur d’écume
ou le paradoxe d’Apelle’, Critique 469-70 (1986), p.606-29. It appears in numerous seventeenth and eighteenth-century texts on painting; see, for example, Félibien, Entretiens,
vol.1, p.60. Diderot tells the story again in front of Franz Snyders’s Wild boar which he saw
in Dresden: ‘Il est en fureur; le sang et la lumière se mêlent dans ses yeux, son poil est
hérissé, l’écume tombe de sa gueule; je n’ai jamais vu une plus effrayante et plus vraie
imitation. Le peintre n’aurait jamais fait que cet animal, qu’il serait compté parmi les plus
savants artistes’ (p.1052). A similar story is told of Botticelli by Leonardo Da Vinci in his
Trattato della pintura (1651) which Diderot borrowed in translation along with Félibien’s
Entretiens and de Piles’s Cours de peinture from the Bibliothèque du roi between 1747 and
1751. Da Vinci writes: ‘Boticello, notre ami [...] disoit quelquefois qu’il ne falloit que jetter
contre un mur une palette remplie de diverses couleurs, & que le mêlange bizarre de ces
couleurs representeroit infailliblement un paı̂sage’ (Traite´ de la peinture par Le´onard Da Vinci,
revû et corrige´. Nouvelle e´dition augmente´e de la Vie de l’Autheur, Paris, chez Pierre-François
Giffard, 1716, p.7).
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captures this more clearly than that of Falconet: ‘voilà de quelle manière
le Hazard produisit, cette fois-là, la Nature même, dans la Peinture’. 31
Diderot echoed this idea earlier in the text when he claimed that Chardin
did not work with paint, but with the very substance of things, and here,
by calling the paint ‘écume’, he suggests that idea again, since ‘écume’ is
the term that Pliny uses to describe the real thing, and it could easily also
designate a substance seeping out of the body of a gutted skate.
Moreover, Pliny like Diderot is concerned here with the work of the
artist, and more specifically, with the threat that the visibility of such
work poses to a successful illusion. Pliny explains that for Protogenes the
truth of the dog’s saliva was hard to achieve, and that the harder he
worked to render it, the more paint he applied, the further he distanced
himself from the truth. Protogenes’s throw of the sponge achieves that
truth effortlessly, however, without any work. Here by referring to
Chardin’s paint as ‘écume jetée’, Diderot suggests that even when his
paint is visible, it does not indicate artwork. 32 Evoking Pliny’s story here
thus allows Diderot to suggest that Chardin’s skate is, like Protogenes’s
dog, the product of magic or fortune, in which not only is the visibility of
the paint not evidence of any work, but paradoxically it ensures the
success of the illusion, since the paint is the substance it represents. Here
again, illusion moves over into creation.
Diderot is not only concerned with illusion and/or creation, however;
he is also concerned with salvation, with the object being ‘saved’ from
being disgusting. This concern is entirely alien to Pliny who is not concerned by the status of the subject matter depicted, nor by the nature,
disgusting or otherwise, of the substance that Protogenes is seeking to
represent; Pliny is interested only in the artist’s ability successfully to
reproduce it, or indeed produce it. When his Protogenes throws the
sponge, it saves the picture from failure, saves it from being less than
perfectly mimetic. By contrast, for Diderot, if the ‘écume’ were simply a
perfect replica of the blood, skin and dead flesh, or if it was itself merely
blood, skin and dead flesh, it would be disgusting and unworthy not only
of admiration but of representation. So in addition to representation,
31. Histoire de la peinture ancienne, p.81. Didi-Huberman notes: ‘le paradoxe d’Apelle [...]
consiste donc à ce que l’aporie de la matière [...] sa résistance à l’égard d’un projet
iconique, devient tout à coup le télos, la fin même (but et réussite) du tableau’ (‘La couleur
d’écume’, p.627).
32. The question of Chardin’s work, its visibility, and the ease or effort with which
Chardin paints are issues to which Diderot often returns in his writing. In the Salon de 1761,
he claimed that Chardin painted with facility and barely finished his paintings (p.218),
whereas in 1769, he suggests that Chardin’s work is difficult for him (p.843). It seems that
Chardin himself talked of the effort involved in painting as reported both by Diderot in the
Salon de 1765 (p.292) and also by the eighteenth-century critic, Jean-Pierre Mariette: ‘Aussi
a-t-il toujours à la bouche que le travail lui coûte infiniment. Quand il voudroit le cacher,
son ouvrage le déceleroit malgré lui’ (‘Abécédario’, in Archives de l’art franc¸ais, 6 vols, Paris,
1851-1860, vol.2, 1851-1853, p.360).
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Text, image, intertext: Diderot, Chardin and Pliny
illusion and creation, Diderot is interested in transformation. It is here
that he parts company with Pliny.
There are a number of ways in which Diderot’s description suggests
that Chardin’s paint saves the object, transforming it from being disgusting into an object of beauty, even one with erotic appeal. Diderot’s
description of the physical substance of paint has metaphysical, theological connotations: the painterly effect that saves the object from being
disgusting is referred to in terms that evoke an ascension: ‘de dessous en
dessus’. The effect of the paint is to raise the object up, and though
‘vapeur’ is a term commonly used in eighteenth-century art criticism to
describe Chardin’s paint, 33 Diderot’s use of the term in his phrase ‘une
vapeur qu’on a soufflée sur la toile’ has theological connotations, evoking
an image of God breathing life into matter, 34 an image echoed ironically
later in the text when Diderot mentions the reaction of another painter,
Greuze, in front of Chardin’s Bocal d’olives: ‘On m’a dit que Greuze
montant au Salon et apercevant le morceau de Chardin que je viens de
décrire, le regarda et poussa un profond soupir.’ 35 The idea of animation
is also evoked by the metaphor of perspiration – ‘l’effet transpire de
dessous en dessus’ –, which confers on the paint the status of flesh, of a
living, breathing, sweating body. 36 Diderot is making the quite remarkable suggestion that whilst the object represented in the picture is dead –
the gutted skate –, the paint on the surface of the canvas is alive. 37
33. This is a topos in eighteenth-century art criticism on Chardin. Hobson notes that
Jacques Lacombe also uses the term ‘vapeur’: ‘C’est un travail qui ne produit tout son effet
qu’à une certaine distance; de près, le tableau n’offre qu’une sorte de vapeur qui semble
envelopper tous les objets’ (Jacques Lacombe, Le Salon, 1753, quoted in The Object of art,
p.77). Garrigues de Froment writes of a ‘brouillard’: ‘Il règne partout un brouillard qui ne
se dissipe ni de près ni de loin’ (Sentiments d’un amateur sur l’exposition des tableaux du Louvre et la
critique qui en a e´te´ faite, quoted in Marianne Roland Michel, Chardin, Paris, 1994, p.117).
34. Colour is given theological connotations in the Essais sur la peinture: ‘C’est le dessin
qui donne la forme aux êtres; c’est la couleur qui les anime. Voilà le souffle divin qui les
anime’ (p.472). The link between colour and soul suggests de Piles (see Œuvres, vol.2,
p.250-51).
35. There are some striking similarities between this paragraph on Chardin’s paint and
the terms Diderot uses in his Histoire et le secret de la peinture en cire (1755) to describe what
would also be removed from the surface of the canvas in the process of removing varnish:
‘quelqu’attention que l’on apporte à cette manœuvre, ces molécules précieuses qui constitutent la vérité, la délicatesse, la fraı̂cheur et l’originalité de la touche; cette âme de
l’artiste; ce souffle de vie qu’il a si légèrement répandu sur la toile; cette vapeur qui en
paraı̂t quelquefois séparée et comme éparse et suspendue en l’air entre les objets peints, et
l’œil du spectateur, n’en sera-t-elle point écartée?’ (in Denis Diderot, Œuvres comple`tes, ed.
Jean Varloot, 25 vol., Paris, 1975-, vol.9, p.170). The Histoire contains much reference to
Pliny’s description of encaustic painting.
36. Perspiration appears again in the Essais sur la peinture: ‘c’est la chair qu’il est difficile
de rendre; c’est ce blanc onctueux, égal sans être pale ni mat; c’est ce mélange de rouge et
de bleu qui transpire imperceptiblement; c’est le sang, la vie qui font le désespoir du
coloriste’ (p.475).
37. Elsewhere Diderot makes intriguing remarks about how inanimate objects should be
painted as if they were alive: ‘Il y a une loi pour la peinture de genre et pour les groupes
d’objets pêle-mêle entassés. Il faudrait leur supposer de la vie, et les disposer comme s’il
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The reference to ‘écume jetée’ and to ‘vapeur soufflée’ could both suggest
Protogenes’s dog, salivating and panting, yet Diderot also manages to
suggest that this living paint is the body of a woman.
Such a suggestion is achieved in part through the reference to Pierre in
the previous paragraph. When Diderot remarked to Pierre that he should
look at Chardin’s picture to learn how to ‘sauver par le talent le dégoût de
certaines natures’, it was because Pierre had failed to do so in the painting
that he had exhibited at the salon that year, a picture to which Diderot
refers a few pages earlier (p.250-51):
C’est une grande nudité de femme ivre, âgée, chairs molles, gorge flétrie, ventre
affaissé, cuisses plates, hanches élevées; fade de couleur, mal dessinée, surtout par
les jambes; moulue, dont les membres vont se détacher incessamment, usée par la
débauche des hommes et de vin. Dormez, charmante, dormez. Personne ne sera
tenté d’abuser de votre état et de votre sommeil.
Quand on choisit de ces natures-là, il faut en sauver le dégôut par une
exécution supérieure, et c’est ce que M. le chevalier Pierre n’a pas fait. 38
That Diderot remembers Pierre’s drunk and sagging nymph in front of
Chardin’s dead skate suggests a link between the two pictures, one of
disgust at one level, but also strangely one of desire in that when Diderot
refers to the perspiring ‘couches épaisses de couleur’, he suggests a
recumbent woman, breathing and sweating. It is as though Chardin’s
paint has not only brought the skate back to life, but also conjured Pierre’s
nymph, now awake, sober, rejuvenated, erotically appealing. In this
context, the ‘écume jetée’ has obvious erotic connotations, which suggest
a link to another more famous painting also mentioned by Pliny: Apelles’s
Venus rising from the waves. 39 Hesiod tells the story of how she is born:
Et le grand Ciel vint, amenant la Nuit; et, enveloppant Terre, tout avide
d’amour, le voilà qui s’approche et s’épand en tous sens. Mais le fils, de son poste,
étendit la main gauche, tandis que, de la droite, il saisissait l’énorme, la longue
serpe aux dents aigües; et, brusquement, il faucha les bourses de son père, pour les
jeter ensuite, au hasard, derrière lui. Ce ne fut pas pourtant un vain débris qui
lors s’enfuit de sa main. [...] à peine les eût-il tranchées avec l’acier et jetées de la
terre dans la mer aux flux sans repos, qu’elles furent emportées au large, longtemps; et, tout autour, une blanche écume sortait du membre divin. De cette
écume une fille se forma. 40
s’étaient arrangés d’eux-mêmes’ (p.1031). Chardin seems to be particularly good at this:
‘Et ce Chardin, pourquoi prend-on ses imitations d’êtres inanimés pour la nature même?
C’est qu’il fait de la chair quand il lui plaı̂t’ (p.476). Diderot’s suggestion of a resuscitation
from the dead might be an allusion to the Christ-like appearance of the dead skate in
Chardin’s painting.
38. Just before he mentions this Venus, Diderot mentions Challe’s Ve´nus endormie: ‘une
masse de chair affaissée, et qui commence à se gâter’ (p.264). For an analysis of the sexual
connotations of La Raie, see Lecercle, ‘Le regard dédoublé’, p.122-23. Lecercle observes
that such connotations did not escape Diderot, p.122.
39. Traduction, 2nd ed., vol.1, p.163. See also Félibien, Entretiens, vol.1, p.57.
40. Hésiode, The´ogonie, quoted in Didi-Huberman, ‘La couleur d’écume’, p.611-12.
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Text, image, intertext: Diderot, Chardin and Pliny
Here beauty is created from disgusting substances: Venus rises out of the
sea, born from a swirling mixture of mutilated flesh, blood and sperm.
This is a similar mixture of substances to that which Diderot claims is
present on Chardin’s canvas and out of which another sea creature, the
skate, is born. Diderot’s description is remarkable: it suggests that
Chardin’s painting is both an illusionistic still life and a kind of Rococo
erotic fantasy.
It is shortly after this, in the final lines of the passage, that Diderot
makes reference to Zeuxis’s grapes and Apelles’s curtain. Following the
richly suggestive paragraph on paint in which ideas and images of illusion, creation, transformation, disgust and desire jostle, Diderot reinstates
the notion that Chardin’s objects are perfect replicas, returning to the
idea expressed in the opening lines of the text that the objects are so true
that they may be taken for the things themselves. He says, we recall:
‘crachez sur le rideau d’Apelle et sur les raisins de Zeuxis. On trompe sans
peine un artiste impatient, et les animaux sont mauvais juges en peinture.
N’avons-nous pas vu les oiseaux du jardin du roi aller se casser la tête
contre la plus mauvaise des perspectives? Mais c’est vous, c’est moi que
Chardin trompera quand il voudra.’
The text thus concludes with Chardin being presented as a modern
entrant in the ancient competition: where Apelles beats Zeuxis, Chardin
beats Apelles. Chardin is the superior illusionist. It is not as simple as that,
however, for Diderot’s version of Pliny’s anecdote about illusion has in
fact become embroiled in the questions of creation and transformation,
desire and disgust that we have seen elsewhere in the text. Diderot asks the
reader to ‘spit’ on the most famous paintings of antiquity, to throw
another kind of ‘écume’ at them. Where he reached out to touch Chardin’s olives, threw ‘spume’ at his dead fish / beautiful woman, and while
Greuze sighed over it, he now asks us to spit on Zeuxis’s grapes and
Apelles’s curtain. Clearly desire has turned to disgust once again (presumably this time at the inferior nature of the ancients’ illusions rather
than at their lowly subject matter). And yet our spit, our ‘écume jetée’,
might turn out to be like that of Protogenes: when it lands on the canvas,
it could improve on the illusion, create a ‘spitting image’, ‘un portrait
craché’. Better still, our ‘écume’ might do for Zeuxis’s and Apelles’s simple
copies of lowly inanimate objects what the ‘écume’ did for Chardin’s:
transform them into living, breathing, sweating, salivating subjects.
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