commentary on    D i d e r o t ' s      S a l o n       o f        1767

It was in 1737 that the Salon became a regular event. The term 'Salon' derives from the 'Salon Carré', a set of rooms in the Louvre. Between 1737 and 1743 the exhibitions were held annually. From 1748 until 1795 they were biennial events. they opened on august 25, the King's name day and they lasted through September. Members of the Académie Royale were entitled to enter work. The exhibition was free, and a large section of the populace would pay a visit - indeed it was in reality the only opportunity the public had to view contemporary work. The exhibition was accompanied by a 'livret', a catalogue, literally a list of the works displayed. While these exhibitions were reviewed in newspapers and journals from the outset, it was not until Grimm, in his Correspondance Littéraire, and eventually Diderot, in his Salons , began writing about the works that any relationship to the word 'criticism', as we understand it, ensued.

 
Diderot's introduction to this discussion of Vernet's work in his salon of 1767 describes his coming upon a social gathering of culturally optimistic people discussing the merits or otherwise of poetry, of art and of philosophy in a genteel and idyllic rustic setting. Diderot's writing is conversational and abundant in social observation. He talks about the leisure of a 'discerning clientele' indulging in the discussion of intellectual pursuits in a rural situation. a bacchanalian academy set in paradise. But Diderot hints at a certain coarseness of argument coming from them : they are disorganised and their arguments 'circular'. Diderot is at pains to set these apart from a real intelligentsia. They are onlookers, part of the 'crowd scene'. Diderot though, is 'focused'. From one of this group Diderot selects his - as he calls him, cicerone . Diderot's a/illusion to Cicero paradoxically warns the reader of some possible journey, feat, memory, place which will have a significance in the future. diderot is on holiday [en vacance]. [As in his Conversation on the Natural Son, he is 'on leave', 'relaxed', 'uninhibited', - away from d'Alembert, Buffon and the rest of his Parisian circle. Perhaps he can allow himself a certain latitude, a certain freedom of expression? A certain licence/permission, perhaps to test some boundaries? - to move out of the 'picture' of conventional criticism and move across/through the frame to a landscape of fantasy and critical laissez-faire?].
This sense of licence was at the heart of the whole notion of Diderot's choice of critical subject. Eighteenth century French paintings were subject to a hierarchy of genres. History painting, such as Fragonard's Corséus and Callirhoé was certainly judged to be intellectually superior to landscape paintings such as Vernet's. It was a question of 'events' versus 'appearances'. However in the eighteenth century the artist's role as mediator between art and reality began to be reassessed, as can be inferred from this comment by Joshua Reynolds . .

Whether it is the human figure, an animal or even inanimate objects, there is nothing, however uncompromising in appearance, but may be raised into dignity, convey sentiment, and produce emotion, in the hands of a painter of genius

Landscape painting's rise in importance was linked to the emerging interest in the ideal, [ as distinct from ideal models] and the argument that it has the power to select and reorganise the real in order to attain a selective imitation, and, eventually, the sublime. These matters are discussed and defined in Batteux's Les beaux Arts Réduits a un même principe. As the principal genres were organised in a hierarchy, so were the individual categories sub-divided. landscape painting was itself divided into the 'heroic' and the 'pastoral'. Landscape painting, and its necessity of observation at first hand also loosened the grip of 'le Maître' on the pupil. It also encouraged the importance of the notion of the 'personal response' and the three-way pact of nature, the artist, and the viewer [and the viewer's response to the picture and the possibility of the picture stimulating the viewer into imagining their own response to the scene, and how that would differ from the artist's]. This interest in observation and the senses came in the first instance from Locke in his thesis that all knowledge was derived from the information gathered by the senses, and then particularly by Diderot and condillac in France. In his introduction to the Encyclopédie, Diderot emphasises the power of observation to reveal the truth. knowledge was the result of the mind's comparisons of different observations. Visual experience became the subject of a whole new range of subject matter such as his essay entitled Letter on the Blind, and particularly in his Salons. Diderot , like Reynolds, felt that every object in nature was a potential subject for the artist. In his 'composition, 1753', he discusses the organic, interdependent nature of the objects inside the painting [the discussion of the rose]. For Diderot, the painting had to exhibit the same organic unity as did nature, where everything had its own place and functional rhetoric - the commonplace, manners. the painting was a mimic of the organisation of the world as well as the resemblance of it. Diderot was making a point that painting was moving towards a situation where the organisation, not the subject, was paramount.
 
Diderot then plays one of his 'distancing games'. He writes a critical commentary and inserts it as a precursor to the type of analysis he will eventually use in his discussion and description of Vernet's work . A pre-echo, a preface. Diderot will serve up this game several times more. . . . . He starts his piece by making disparaging remarks about his ability to do the works justice. He apologises in advance for his 'rash comments'. he promises a promenade rich in error and misjudgment. Diderot is in reality already distancing himself from the notion of himself, encouraging the reader to disassociate his remarks, and see them as mere entrances, opening gambits whose calculated naiveté provide a platform, a scene for 'Diderot' to come to the rescue. There is already a conversation piece in the making.
 .

  . . . I felt my movement suddenly checked

The Shepherdess of the Alps   1763  

. . . . . . . . to the right, in the distance , a mountain summit rose to meet the clouds
at this moment chance had placed a traveller there, upright and serene.
The traveller fulfils the role of the 'focal point'.
The base of the mountain is obscured by a mass of rock
the rock stretches across the view . . .

the first site

                               
Diderot begins to let slip his 'confusion' between the painting and the scene. The scene is endless, infinite. There is no 'edge' to this view. Only something artificial, contrived, can have an 'edge' to it.

. . . . . this severs the foreground from the background
On the far right, on a rocky outcrop two fishermen are in conversation.
Extending into the distance there is an embankment, along which a wagon makes its way to the distant village.

 
                                Diderot then arranges for his cicerone to ask him if an artist such as Vernet could have improved upon this scene. With a clump of trees perhaps placed in a well-mannered position? Would he have been able to render the subtleties of light? Of course replies Diderot, of course he would, has he not invariably succeeded in the past? Diderot's use of the phrase 'well mannered' hints at a discursive, rhetorical reaction to the forming of a relationship between picture and scene. He seems to be at once guarding against the temptations of augmentation. As augmentation lends grandeur to the insignificant, taken 'to its highest degree', or sometimes 'even beyond it', it moves out of the realms of the ordered into that of the wild and uncontrollable. There is then a parallel mimicry created : that of the movement between the frame of picture and scene, and the movement in and through their frame of 'acceptable' discourse. Perhaps Diderot was mindful of the danger in this augmentation, a situation where 'words must necessarily fail him' , the sudden unavailability of a vocabulary to continue with his argument. That the augmentation of [in] the language would create a limit on the augmentation of the meaning. Decorum therefore can't have a positional view in the sense of a 'stance', it must [must] instead generate its own sense of appropriateness. Diderot's fear of augmentation mirrors his subject. He seems to be seeing augmentation as a property whose life depends on the frugality of its usage, but whose effect demands maximum exposure, possibly a mechanism for infiltrating the discursive by the figurative. His plea for something beyond the superlative brings him in conflict with duration. He has to sever the repetition of augmentation in order to pass through the finality of the superlative. whereas augmentation feeds on gradation and what can be termed 'appropriateness', this 'supra' superlative can never be part of the superlative that it cannot exist without.
This causes Diderot to retreat, to move a step back, inside the frame of decorum [itself the scene of augmentation]. He confronts his own politesse, manifested in the gradation of the polite [ Latin politus, polished] through the textures of gradation [a gradation which is only completely possible through the visual or the oral, discourse always has unequal [rude] 'spaces' between the words] which could be described in terms of 'the genuinely polite', the 'extremely polite', the 'quite polite'. The measure [measured] of its politeness related to the appropriate level of politeness deemed necessary at the time and in those particular circumstances [at the place], and from this the calculation [a politeness in itself] of the corridor, the no man's land separating [joining] the frontiers through which [nervously] progress is made. Augmentation therefore insists on compliance with a legislature of limitation. A statute [from Old French estatut, from Late Latin stattum, from Latin statuere to set up, decree, ultimately from stare to stand], returning augmentation back into the arms of sententiousness, a mechanism for limiting the 'mostness' of the most. Forte! Forte! Forte! Schumann would later demand. Manners, propriety, 'the proper', 'the polite' must also present themselves for an aesthetic interrogation. Propriety/proportion. A different reason for commencement and termination, concealment and display, frugality and exposure.
Diderot plays with the reader's suspicions when he gives the air of only being half interested in this conversation. the main thrust of his perceptions, he tells us, is concerned with a small part of the scene, a microcosm, a model of the whole. In one example, diderot picks out a torrent of water, then tells his cicerone to go back to the Salon where he will find the subject of this scene. Yes, the subject, not the object - for the painting has included in it an extra, a supplement, in the form of a wisp of cloud which by its position in space clarifies the disorder of the previously perceived nature. Diderot uses this device to be able to revisit the paintings, or at least to put himself in the position in the scene, to open up a space between the view and the work that had its own territory, its own legitimisation. Vernet's paintings are not, he is saying, 'actualities'. They are combinations of reality reconvened to give a particular effect. To be convincing , they must be in accordance with the laws of nature, and, paradoxically, in order to do this they must create a scene of independent legitimisation through which these fragments are filtered. Diderot is claiming here that Vernet has an instinctive knowledge of nature's laws, and was therefore able, and with justification to summon up the correct 'piece' to insert at any time. This enabled him to think of the landscape in terms of a 'sense impression', a ground on which to improvise.

                 The debate between the "beautiful" and the "picturesque", which culminated in the great controversy of the 1790s, has its roots in the early and mid-18th century. Diderot seems to be arguing for a space between the landscape and the picture. A half way house. A place where each situation can reflect on each other. A model. In essence, figurally, a garden. It is no coincidence that contemporary to Diderot's salon pieces were earnest debates as to the finer details of how a landscape should be designed, and how such a landscape could and should be perceived. To some extent, the argument polarises in Richard Payne Knight's distinction between the linear and the painterly, the clear and the unclear, the 'beautiful' and the picturesque' [ and later in the beautiful and the sublime]: whereas sculpture and poetry require order and regularity 'painting and music delight in wild and irregular variety' - thus addressing themselves to sight and hearing respectively, and producing 'merely' sensual pleasure. The argument implies that the picturesque depends less on the nature of the whole than on visual and tactile/visual - such effects as the 'smooth' lawn and other properties inherent in that whole : the picturesque is merely that kind of beauty which belongs exclusively to the sense of vision, or to the imagination guided by that sense.
The notion of 'poetic invention' is assumed to be linked primarily to visual images, a view confirmed by the essayist Joseph Addison, [1672-1719 ], there is no Single Image in the Fancy that did not make its first Entrance through the Sight
The visualisation of a scene was regarded as an indication of the highest achievement of poetry. The popularisation, in the 18th century, of Plutarch's reported quotation from Simonides that painting is silent poetry, and poetry a speaking picture suggests a parallelism between poetry and painting that committed poetry to what Coleridge later described as 'the despotism of the eye', and painting (as well as landscape garden design) to a poetic/moral content ad extra that received its most articulate expression in the works of the picturesque theorists such as Capability Brown and William Kent.
Classical landscape paintings such as those of Claude were popular in the 18th century because of their explicit content. Natural landscape could be seen to possess, on the one hand, structured harmony that could be associated with landscape painting or, on the other, wild disorder redolent of the sublime. A third option would be, of course, a balance of the two. In any case, intention whether human or divine, artful or natural, is implicit : the poetic force of landscape is contained in what is, not in what it can be seen to say : Vernet, or 'Vernet seen through Diderot's eyes', or rather 'his mind', supersedes the portioning of nature into gardens by an approach to nature which sees it as neither garden nor natural landscape. But to define an aesthetic that fully encompasses the structure and intention of a garden, notice must be taken of the physiological approach to the nature of beauty and how such an approach developed from a visual rhetoric and its consequent critiques of symmetry, harmony and variety. The contemporary controversy over the notion of favouring of the 'belts, clumps and vapid lawns' of Launcelot Brown, and the straight avenues and parterres of 'old', especially Italian, gardens is encapsulated in the debate over 'false taste' and 'modern gardening' , a criticism of which forms much of the basis for a theory of the picturesque. Published in 1725, Francis Hutcheson's Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue is one of the first systematic works of modern aesthetics. Distinguishing between 'simple' and 'complex' Ideas of Objects, he talks of the 'Diversity of Fancy' concerning the latter, a diversity which leads to 'Far greater Pleasures', an inherent ingredient of a 'Sense of Beauty'. An open plain 'not diversified by Woods, Hills, Water, Buildings', he argues, is less pleasurable than a 'fine landskip'. It is the appreciation of complex ideas (and he cites gardens as an example of such ideas) which forms 'a fine Genius or Taste', and which leads towards an experience of the beautiful. The difference between external sense, to which objects can give no pleasure, and internal sense, is crucial in this respect: internal sense is the 'passive power of receiving Ideas of Beauty from all Objects in which there is Uniformity amidst Variety'. Beauty is thus created by figures in which there is 'Uniformity amidst Variety'.
Hutcheson extends the notion of imitation to include imitation by intention or idea rather than of a natural object alone, so that beauty can be induced by 'Correspondence to some universally supposed intention of the Artificer'. He then goes ahead to use a gardening illustration: artists may not attain highest intention simply by imitating 'original beauty' (that is, by imitating objects), because 'relative Beauty' (that is, imitation of intention) with a degree of 'original Beauty' could give greater pleasure, and therefore a higher sense of beauty. He adds: 'Regularity in laying out of Gardens in Parterres, Vistas, parallel walks, is often neglected to obtain an Imitation of Nature even in some of its Wildernesses'. But there is a paradox here, a paradox that underlies picturesque theory: how can natural irregularity be designed?
This obvious need for the construction of a language of contrast and harmony developed into such notions as 'Prospects' and 'Solitude' : In effect, open views of landscape and enclosed areas within gardens. But inside this argument of contrasts there must be a place of harmony, a 'mean Pleasure' . . the midway point where the senses can rest in equilibrium. The landscape, or 'Situation' as it was sometimes termed, should reject extremes, otherwise the senses would 'pall and be displeas'd'. This notion of constrained opposites is similar to Shaftesbury's 'compos'd' and 'accidental' and indeed to Horace's 'simplex munditiis' translated as 'unaffected Simplicity and Neatness, a noble Elegance and Decency, a due Proportion, demonstrating the beautiful, and harmonious Rules of Symmetry and Variety'. Ideally then the beauties of formal gardens lie 'within a narrow compass', while the mind 'requires something else to gratify her' and is satisfied more in natural landscape where the eye can wander up and down 'without Confinement'; that in effect nature is more pleasurable the more it resembles art.
This position, this midway, desires the feeling of 'connection' : the meeting of characteristics so as to form firstly a harmony, and eventually a rationale ' the nice Assemblage of Parts proportion'd to each other and justly, connected together in one general Form, Structure or Arrangement'. This is a visualisation, as it were, of Shaftesbury's concept of universal harmony and what he calls the 'sense of order and proportion' seen in his book Characteristicks. The illustration for 'Treatise IV' has a dark and a bright side balanced by a double-faced woman representing the duality of man. The dark side is a 'distracted universe', a natural landscape of rugged mountains and the sun in eclipse, while the bright side, ruled by the scales of Libra, shows a perspective avenue representing the Elysian Fields. In contrast, the illustration for 'Miscellaneous Reflections' shows Ephesian Diana (nature) in front of a gentle landscape of hedgerows and hills and, above in a pediment, a basket containing flowers mixed without order, representing 'freedom from form'. To the left, a blind alley is closed off by a net that traps birds and suggests the restraints of hypocrisy. At the beginning, as well as at

 the end, of the century, neither formal avenue nor natural landscape has a fixed meaning. The malevolence of natural landscape or the restrained 'hypocrisy' of rigid formality must be contrasted with the simple formlessness of nature and the harmony and balance of perspective avenues.
But 'connection', means more than just an 'assemblage of parts'. The balance becomes not only judgement of taste but is also subject to a 'neurological' definition. Burke points out that the Sublime stretches the nervous fibres beyond their normal tone and induces horror, while beauty relaxes the fibres below their normal tone and induces pleasure. In this sense the psychological effects of the picturesque act as a moderating influence to these sensations, in that it corrects 'the languor of beauty or the tension of sublimity'. Thus the purpose of these 'improvements' is to mix 'what is striking with what is simply pleasing'.
The Picturesque thus occupies the 'middle ground'. Burke sees beauty as characterised by smoothness and gradual variation, but this blandness excludes the variety and intricacy essential to the picturesque. On the other hand a conclusion can be drawn that beauty is only beauty when contrasted with sublimity [languor and tension] in the mean of the picturesque (garden and park). There is no such contrast in Brownian "modern gardening" where "everything is distinct and separate" introducing a "solitary and insulated appearance". Formal gardens possess an overall "connection" or sense of the totality of nature; every visible accompaniment is in unison, so that systematic regularity can be determined from every point of view. Just as Italian gardens synthesise garden and landscape beyond the garden, formality not only harmonises but associates parts as well.
 
 
                              Diderot then moves his position too. He looks at this argument from a different viewpoint and at the same time moves the nature of the argument. The new question asks 'is the painting more or less perfect than the subject. Do we look at art through nature, or is our idea of nature conditioned by an aesthetic constructed by us from our observation of art?'
                                Diderot moves on firstly to another slightly different question. He begins with an illustration describing the difference between chance and probability. Art has the properties of chance. Nature exhibits the constraints of probability. He moves on to experiment with the idea of beauty and quantity. Is beauty there because there is always more ugliness? If there were more things beautiful than ugly would there be a need for this category? Is it an absolute or a relative? Is this formula based on scarcity and value? Does it have an economy? Diderot reflects his contemporaries Condillac and La Mettrie in his interest in the mechanical, the copy, the cliché and the commonplace, the systematic and the symmetrical. He asks If one were to invent a machine capable of producing paintings like Raphael's, would such paintings continue to be beautiful?    No, Diderot tells us. But the machine - by which I think he means a rational and knowing presence - could be beautiful. The process itself could achieve the same heights as the paintings by the nature of its inherent intellectual and spiritual presence. The resultant image was an image of this process as much as a resemblance of a form. Diderot conjures up an image of Raphael as a painting machine, producing a steady supply of Raphaels. These would become commonplace, so that they became as common as leaves and clouds. If this were to become fact we would then marvel at the order of these things, the relationships that nature had graced them with. Diderot was inferring that the process of looking has the same value as the organisation of this experience. They are the same in the sense that one cannot exist without the other. Diderot finishes the first site with a coup de théâtre.
                                

At this point a western wind sweeping across the landscape enveloped us in a thick, swirling cloud of dust.

The whirlwind introduces the scene of the immediate, the power of nature, the irrational, the pointing up of place and time, [I was there when . . ] the idea of motion, the entrapment of the metaphor, as perhaps Diderot wants to pretend that nature is entrapping himself - or at least wishes/pleads for it to do so.

Summer Evening, Landscape in Italy 1751

to the right, mountains covered with trees and wild shrubs

 
The second site
                 
 
in shadow, as travellers would say. In half-tone, as artists would say. Diderot immediately brings up the subject of the connection between perception and its recording and judgement. The second site is explored in a much more systematic way than the first.
Diderot notes a passer-by too keen on travelling to take in the scene. . but . . .' (we) penetrated further into a distant prospect well beyond the mountain we'd climbed which had previously blocked it from our view'. Diderot wants to get past the 'view' and into the very scene of the viewing. His companion remarks on passing a particularly dramatic scene . . . and Louthenberg, and Vernet, and Claude Lorrain? . . . Diderot invokes the dualism of fear and pleasure in nature and the spectacular.
 

To the left and right, the foot of mountains, to the left a wide, dark cavern

Diderot sees a cave and immediately imagines a young boy and girl emerging. She has covered her eyes with her free hand, as if she feared the light and wanted to encounter the young man's gaze.

On the bank of the lake a woman rests with her dog
further, on the same bank   

a group of men and women such as an intelligent painter would have imagined them.

Diderot second guesses the painter's intentions. He pre-empts his decision making, he steals his thunder. Diderot is stupefied.

I was motionless, my glance wandered without pausing at any single object.

                Silence, solitude, suspension of time, the eternal, the immense, the vast : all the main characteristics of the grace of stupefaction and the sublime are here.
Burke talks of the passion caused by the Sublime.

'The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature, when those causes operate most powerfully, is astonishment; and astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror.'

                                           
'The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature, when those causes operate most powerfully, is astonishment; and astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror.'
Burke sees the sublime as a state of mind attained when all other matter is dismissed. Admiration, reverence and respect are secondary effects to Astonishment. Burke's introduction to his topic states quite clearly that his intentions are centred around power, developed and itemised in terms of qualities and quantities of terror and dimension.
Burke speaks too of the passion caused by the Sublime. Astonishment in the soul results in horror, a state of being where the mind is entirely filled with horror - there is no space left for entertaining any other notions. Burke's notion of a space entirely filled with horror is impressive in its inclusivity, but unconvincing as a reality. Horror itself must have its own scales of grandeur or otherwise. Astonishment therefore is the highest power imaginable - though lesser ones are admiration, reverence and respect. Burke develops his idea of terror into the hermeneutic sphere. Fear robs the mind of rational thought. It is an apprehension of pain, and therefore resembles actual pain. With regard to sight, what is terrible is also Sublime. The Sublime is dangerous. Terror is linked to size, to largeness, such phenomena as oceans and deserts. In contrast to this mental and figurative excess, the discursive terminology used to describe these effects must be used sparsely - there is no room for hyperbole, which would lessen the effect, not accentuate it. For Hyperbole, though it implies an intensity of feeling inside the metaphor, also violates the decorum in that it distorts the truth by saying too much. It expands the sense of the meaning to such a degree that its frontiers fracture and it virtually invites trespass. But like many transgressions, it is committed in order to be discovered and punished. It craves 'the oxygen of publicity'. It insists on its own notoriety and demands investigation and reportage. Yet there is no intent to deceive here. Diderot uses the device to put the reader in authority. The author charges the reader with the responsibility of calculating the level of compensation necessary to estimate the difference between the claims of the hyperbole and the experiences that the author assumes that the reader is in command of. So Diderot's hyperbole is a trope of difference and proportion, which while defying decorum in one aspect, invents a new decorum of contrivance between author and reader, and introduces another possible problem of the author being cast adrift if that understanding is not forthcoming.
Burke continues his own augmentation.
'To make anything very terrible, obscurity seems in general to be necessary'.
He sees the paradox of the diminishing returns of description and clarity, for clarification of the nature of the force involved only results in its diminution. Understanding the danger makes it appear less dangerous. This 'unknowing' is part of the nature of the danger. Burke develops his notion of this 'unknowing'. He sees reasons in nature why the obscure idea, when properly conveyed, should be more 'effecting' than the clear. Ignorance of things is a quality that causes our admiration and excites our passions. Knowledge and reason dilute the terror. A

gain Burke evokes rhetoric when he makes a rather startling statement [ in the sense that it 'suddenly' appears in the argument] that 'Vulgarity is a form of unknowing.' Burke sees that a multiplicity of images heaped on each other creates a feeling of confusion and emotional turmoil. As a critique is applied to them, and their relationships and functions become apparent, they lose this blur, they lose their obscurity. Continuing his excursion into the figural, he offers the sense that painting deals with mimesis, and much of the pleasure of painting is in this recognition, and that often in nature the hazy, the dark and the indistinct produce grander passions than the lucid and the clear. [ Throughout this comparison Burke has recourse to the figural in his description of both painting and poetry]. Greatness points towards infinity. It cannot perceives its bounds. To perceive an object is the same thing as to perceive its bounds. When painters try to give clear representations of the terrible there is always a problem with tragedy resembling farce, when the very striving for the earnest results in the grotesque. He would sympathise with Diderot's dilemma, that painting has no temporal dimension, and terror is a temporal phenomenon. Seeing all the elements at once is akin to listening to the notes of a cadence simultaneously. Burke is now beginning to move around the edge of his own canvas. He expresses the authority of height over length . . .

'To the sublime in building, the greatness of dimension seems requisite . . . no greatness in the manner can effectually compensate for the want of proper dimensions. Too great a length will mean the perspective is lost'

'To the sublime in building, the greatness of dimension seems requisite . . . no greatness in the manner can effectually compensate for the want of proper dimensions. Too great a length will mean the perspective is lost'
As a quality of the sublime, physical largeness is a major value, though smallness and even minuteness [proportion again] can also have the quality of the sublime in terms of contrast.

'Might is an ability that is superior to great obstacles. It is called dominance: if it is superior even to the resistance of something that itself possesses might'

Kant introduces the category of the Dynamically Sublime. The arousal of fear is the primary quality of this sub-division. But fear is a quality that is best judged and appreciated from a position of safety. From this position terror and fear can safely be analysed and various gradations and categories delineated and tabulated. Indeed, the greater the safety, the greater the augmentation of this fear factor. These graduations mirror a complementary scale of 'gladness', of appreciation of safety and well-being, of liberation from danger. Kant introduces a sequel [echo] to Diderot's description of Vernet's painting ' On the other hand, consider bold, overhanging and, as it were, threatening rocks, thunderclouds piling up in the sky and moving about accompanied by lightening and thunderclaps, volcanoes with all their destructive power, hurricanes with all the devastation they leave behind, the boundless ocean heaved up, the high waterfall of a mighty river, and so on.'
Kant defines the Dynamically Sublime in terms of our relationship with fear. On the one hand there is our terror and fear when confronted with nature, and on the other hand our desire not to be dominated by these forces, but to be able to judge them and consequently our ability to come to terms with them by calling on our own strength to overcome these very terrors. The terrors that nature can conjure up therefore excite our imaginations to overcome and elevate ourselves above nature itself. So the dynamic is the imagination, the ability to see outside the terror, to place it in our own context, not just the natural world's.

Diderot cries out.
He shatters the solitude by now feeling the need to express to nature what it is showing him. The beholder speaks back, giving nature its gift of astonishment. there is an economy here, a tacit agreement of what worship requires and donates to the beholder.
It's a fictional view one has to believe exists somewhere.
Diderot plays with the beholder. This is the very scene, but is it possible to know this? Diderot now constructs a stage set out of the assorted scenic bric-a-brac he finds to hand to hang his argument on.

There is a vertical plane balanced on two mountain peaks
The space above is in light
the space at the sides is in shadow

Again, Diderot describes the scene in terms of a composition , made up of tones, half-tints, darkened areas - that is areas deemed to have been altered, and constructed. The mezzo-tints render the scene in a display of systematic tonality. There is a perfection too in this very substitution. There are objects which are clear and distinct, and there are other objects which could have these qualities too if their importance was thought necessary.

There are cool waters in the foreground
the suggestion of heat in the background

Diderot fantasises, then comes out with
How remarkable how the artist has created the aerial perspective.
Diderot needs his companion, the Abbé, to be shocked by this naming of a pictorial device to describe the scene. He has substituted a construction of a landscape for the real thing, therefore producing a painting independent of the work. Diderot is actually describing a garden, a scene somewhere between the illusionary and the real. A place where gamesmanship and deceit can be played out for real.

Following the shore of the lake
Night was beginning to fall
they retraced their steps back to the chateau.

By way of a coda, Diderot describes the recitation of passages from virgil that the two children, who were not allowed to accompany the two on the scenic part of the journey, had learnt by heart. Diderot uses this narrative device to allow him to compare
the differing charms of painting and poetry.
Diderot mirrors Poussin in his mixture of allegory and fantasy. Again Diderot resorts to the use of the dream as a way of describing reality without having to be part of it himself. Diderot treats the dream as a landscape painting, and like his criticism of these, he wants to be seen to be part, to take part in it.
'I dreamt of the different charms of painting and poetry: of the difficulty of rendering into one language the passages one understands best in the other.
Diderot launches into a long description of Jupiter's headache. Jupiter's headache is eased by the birth of Minerva. She enters the world through his mouth, and in full battle-dress. Though everyone admired her beauty, her dress was the centre of discussion. Jupiter had his daughter try on all of these garments, but it was universally decided that the original dress was superior.
Diderot tells us that the Abbé had no difficulty in understanding the point of the fable, but he makes no effort to explain its place in the text to his readers.

The Abbé is 'blinded' by a dust storm

                                 Diderot sees the event as a occurrence which 'marks a point', a happening which anchors a particular experience to a place or a moment in time, as Cicero's memory system used symbols to mark every fifth or every twentieth room. This is further developed by continual changes of tense. Diderot challenges the rights of these events to disturb the order of nature. Or, paradoxically, are these events too part of the 'order'. Is there anything outside of this state of affairs? Diderot develops this into the nature[!] of chance and probability.

An Italian Landscape 1758

The third site
   

Diderot and the Abbé rest on the shore of a cove

There is a chateau whose garden slopes down to the sea

In fact the starting point of the promenade. The walkers are tired. Instead of retracing their steps, the group hire a skiff and row back across the bay. Of course this has the effect of showing them a mirror image of the scenes they have experienced.

They again pass the cave.

                                As they do so Diderot threatens to invent an incident of storm and disaster. It would have brought the cries of frightened women from the terrace to your ears.
                                He returns to his theme of the beholder in his emphasis on the feelings of the watchers of the tragedy rather than the feelings of the victims. The victims are to experience their terror through seeing the frightened cries and anguished demeanor of their women on the shore. But suddenly the storm has abated. It was a dream - or rather it wasn't a dream, it was a fiction. Not even a real fiction, but an imagined fiction, a threatened fiction.
Diderot's writings are full of examples of his experimentation with various forms of narrative. He was particularly fond of the 'duologue', but in 'Conversations with the Natural Son' Diderot invents a scenario where characters, actions and thoughts could at any one time be written and read as being either Diderot's own thoughts, the thoughts of his companion, the writer 'Diderot', or the thoughts and fancies of the writer's various characters - in reality as it were, or in 'character'.

    
This is a brief résumé of conversations with the Natural son
'Diderot' took a break in the country, [a similar situation to the salon piece itself ] and heard from several quarters an extraordinary story, that of

a man who on the same day had risked his life for another, and at the same time given this other person all his wealth and the woman who was the object of both their passions. This man was Dorval, who 'Diderot' then befriends. Dorval relates to him the strange tale of events that happened in his family, 'Diderot' finds that Lysimond, Dorval's father, has suggested that he write a drama based on the events. This would be for a private performance. in fact it is not really a 'play' at all, it is a masque, a ritual, performed in the actual house in which the actions originally took place.
However Lysimond dies before the play can be performed. Notwithstanding this the other characters in the play plan a performance, each playing 'themselves'. there would be no audience, except 'Diderot', who Dorval, as a favour, allows to watch the play unseen from a hideaway. The 'text' of The Natural Son then follows.
The 'novel' then resumes. 'Diderot' explains why he could not see the last act. Dorval's father, Lysimond had been held captive by the British. The sight of the character 'Lysimond' [played by an actor] in prison clothes and in a bad state had so upset the actors that they were unable to carry on.
'Diderot' was moved more by this interruption of reality than of the actual play itself. he asks Dorval for a copy of the text of the play which he returns to him with remarks and questions written in the margins. They become friends and spend time together walking in the country discussing their ideas for a new kind of theatre.
This turns out to be a form of natural realism where the actors talk and react to each other rather than address the audience as in the Comédie française, and where the action takes place without the conscious awareness of an audience. There is a discussion of the virtues of the tableau over the coup de théâtre, and there is a visionary discussion on continually changing scenery and contiguous and synchronised action.
Dorval insists that what he has written is not a play, since the realistic portrayal of events was its raison d'être. When 'Diderot' criticises a piece of dialogue, Dorval agrees with him, but argues that since the dialogue was a true record of an utterance made by the character in real life, it was incumbent upon him to reproduce this in the 'play' even if a more verbally satisfying solution presented itself. Put another way, the play might have been better if things had happened differently.

Diderot's use of conversation and duologue is widespread in his work. Le Fils Naturel and the Salon of 1767 have many qualities in common . . . . .
. . . . . Dorval insists that what he has written is not a play, since the realistic portrayal of events was its raison d'être. When 'Diderot' criticises a piece of dialogue, Dorval agrees with him . . . . . . . During this sequence of the conversation we are aware that it is 'Dorval' who is addressing us. Diderot uses this ploy as a means of doubly assuring us of the authenticity of his views,
. . . . . Here is what we said. But what a difference there is between what Dorval said to me and what I write!
for it is a character in[side] the play that is addressing us, a figure that is at any one time both 'in character' and 'himself', only differing for us in the imaginary differences that we may choose to invent for him.
. . . . Diderot talks about his own work in a seemingly objective way through the voices of Dorval and 'Diderot' . This too is a prismatic reflection of the style Diderot selects for the play itself, but whereas in the play itself Diderot forces the characters to mimic each other to death [Lysimond is a metaphor for this - he dies for the play, for diderot to live . . . a sacrifice] in the real life, the sunny uplands of the 'Conversations', Diderot allows [himself, 'Diderot'] the liberty of being both inside and outside of his own persona.
        
        Dorval, who is portrayed as a rather passive character in the drama, does come to life in his role as the conversationalist. Did Diderot purposely write his character down, so as to write him up in the novel? Is Diderot suggesting that a figure is more interesting in reality than in character - that it is the quality of the author's text which can seek to elevate them back to and beyond their real 'role' in life?

'The performance was so life-like that, forgetting at several points that I was a spectator, and an unseen one, I was about to leave my place and add real character to the scene'

   What does Diderot, or even for that matter, 'Diderot' mean by 'real'? 'Diderot' is often tempted to unmask himself [both physically and literally] and join in the action. He

 In 1765 Fragonard exhibited 'The High Priest Coresus Immolates Himself to Save Callirhoë '
The subject derives from Pausanias' Description of Greece. Calydon spurns love of the priest Corseus / she is beset by plague of madness initiated by Callirhoe / Dionysus instructs Coresus to kill Callirhoe / instead, Corseus kills himself.
Diderot was commissioned to review the work, and the resultant piece was published in the Salon of 1765. Due to a misunderstanding over the Louvre's opening hours Diderot was unable to see the picture itself, but wrote a review of it in the double conceit of an imaginary dream. The subject of this dream was a morning spent at the exhibition and an ensuing evening reading Plato.
'It seemed that I was enclosed in the place known as Plato's cave. It was a long and gloomy cavern. I was sitting in the midst of a crowd of men, women and children. We all had our feet and hands in chains and our heads so firmly fastened by wooden clamps that it was impossible to look round. But the thing which surprises me was that the majority of my fellow-prisoners were drinking laughing and singing, not seeming in the least troubled by their chains, and you would have said, so far as appearances went, that it was their natural situation in life and they had no desire for anything different. It even seemed to me that people looked rather hostile at those who tried to free their feet and hands or head or help others to do so; that they called them evil names; that they shrank away from them, as if they had an infectious disease: and that, when any mishap occurred in the cave, these would be the first to be blamed. Installed in the way that I have explained to you, we all had our backs turned to the entrance of this habitation and were only able to look at its far end, which was hung with an immense canvas or curtain. Behind us there were kings, ministers, priests, doctors, apostles, prophets, theologians, politicians, rogues, charlatans, makers of illusions, and the whole troupe of merchants of hopes and fears. Each had a supply of little coloured and transparent images, of the kind suitable to their own condition: and these images were so well constructed, so well painted, so numerous and so varied, that there was all that was needed to represent every scene of life, comic, tragic, or burlesque. These charlatans, I then realised - placed as they were between us and the entrance to the cave - had hanging behind them a great lamp, to the light of which they exposed their images; and the shadows of these latter, passing over our heads and growing in size as they travelled, were cast upon the great screen at the end of the cavern, forming whole scenes - scenes so natural, so true to life that we took them for real. Sometimes they made us laugh, till we split our sides; sometimes they made us weep salt tears - a fact which will seem less strange to you when I say that behind the screen other subordinate rogues, in the pay of the former ones, supplied these shadows with the voices, the accents, the speech appropriate to their roles.
The screen at the end of the cave is filled with figures weeping, laughing, gambling, drinking, singing, revelling. One is drowning, one is being hanged, a third is being placed on a pedestal. The screen clears and the story begins to unfold............................. a young priest of Bacchus appears, ivy-garlanded and bearing a thyrsus. He serves beakers full of wine to a group of Maenads, and all grow drunk and rush through the streets to the fury of the citizens. The priest is then seen trying to seduce a woman, who treats him with scorn. By now all the citizens are drunk too and engage in an orgy of incest. Some old men, untouched by the fracas, are seen in a Temple. They are weeping and beating their heads on the floor when a loud voice proclaims 'She must die, or another die in her place'. The walls of the Temple fall away revealing the floor which is covered in rich carpets. To the right is a sacrificial vessel and on either side huge towering columns of white marble. There is a black urn half draped with bloodstained cloths, a giant candelabrum, an altar and a brazier. The high-priest Corseus now appears and utters a cry (which draws an answering groan from Diderot). Next, a young woman appears, trembling and as pale as death, for she is the sacrificial victim. Meeting the priest Corseus, her lover, she sinks to the floor. Three acolytes enter, one of amazing beauty. As the sacrifice is prepared, the Temple fills up. The priest raises his knife and... thrusts it into his own breast. All watch thunderstruck as the chill of death falls over him. Even the aged priests 'whose cruel regard must often have fed on the vapour of the blood shed at altars', cannot withhold their tears . . . . .'
Diderot pictures human life as a series of a captivating but essentially trivial scenes of passion, cruelty, and superstition devised by mountebanks, a condition that, as humans ourselves, we are incapable of ignoring. Diderot attempts to not only imagine Fragonard's painting , but to imagine the creative process, the decisions, the exclusions that it underwent. In doing this he recreates the critical function too. He criticises the painting as it exists in its various stages, and also revises his own opinions in the light of the various (imaginary) developments that the painting moves through.
 

was not able therefore to adequately separate himself, as an entity, from the play itself - he had therefore lost the ability [right] to enter into any critical relationship. In the same way, in the scene when Lysimond [played by an 'outsider' {an actor}] enters and the rest of the cast are overcome with grief to the point that the performance is abandoned, again shows this lack of 'space' between reality and fiction - in the sense , as diderot talks about in The paradox of the actor, that the actors are not totally 'in character'. There is something of their persona that refuses to go inside the character, and there is some of the character that the actor is unable to contain and has to egress. The 'old man' plays Lysimond [real time] acting out lysimond's actions [history]. The other actors are unable to continue, so deep is their grief. But what is subject of the grief's desire? Is it the grief [surely already consummated] for Lysimond's return from capture? Or is it the imagining of the emotions unleashed of an 'undeceased' Lysimond coping with the re-enactment in the play of his emotional return? Is it the pathos that the actions of the old man in imitating the role of the dead Lysimond that are so unbearable to the rest of the cast?
Diderot is making a distinction between a public effect, [such as a history painting] and a private performance, [landscape, still-life], perhaps anticipating what was to become known as a soiree, in which the performance, though containing a 'text', was essentially made special by the difference and uniqueness of that performance [at that time, at that date, in those rooms etc.]. In his Paradox, Diderot goes further and explains that there is a difference in relation to acting in fiction and feeling the effects of (say) tragedy in reality

. . . . Have you ever been Cleopatra, Merope, Agrippina? What do these people matter to you?
Diderot is moving towards the scene of decorum and the proper, towards a rhetoric for the theatre, for the soiree, for nature itself. In each of these there is an economy of means, a compromise, and some sacrifice of the truth of nature.
Diderot describes himself walking away from the play when it is abandoned after the second act [another instance of the promenade]
. . . . . I must be a fool to get upset like this. All this is just a comedy. Dorval made it up out of his head. He wrote the words from his imagination, and today we are amusing ourselves acting it out.
Diderot tries to imagine the play as fiction, but fails. But this 'failure' is fiction too. The melodrama that ensues is a supplement to the action, it could even be thought of as a coda, or more fanciful [as Dorval would desire it] the culmination, the last variation 'con brilliante'. In procuring the dénouement, of positioning it outside the drama itself, Diderot prevents the reader from entering the same relationship to the text as the characters have to the drama, and therefore insists that the spectator enter the disputed territory, of the private/spectacle, order/subversion in person.
At one point Diderot also takes his players, 'in character', out of the drama altogether, and moves them into the critique. 'Diderot' is discussing the merits of a particular scene in the play
. . .What a fine tableau, for it really was one, I think, was made by Poor Clairville, lying on his friend's breast, as though it were the only refuge left to him.

Diderot allows Dorval to interrupt -
You may well think of his troubles, but what about mine? How cruel that moment was for me!

the interruption referring to an action in his own life and its resemblance to that of a scene in the drama, so therefore breaking the hymen of the critic's thought of the text as 'the last word'.
        Dorval's play can only ever be an impression of the play. we are not seeing 'what actually happened'. In fact in the introduction Diderot makes it quite clear that 'Diderot' is aware of this, which of course introduces the reader to the first signs of a rift between the real and the dramatic
. . . . but what difference there is between what Dorval said to me and what I am writing!
The exclamation mark is a taunt.

I can no longer see Dorval, I can no longer hear him. I am alone, amid the dust of books and in the darkness of my study ....... and the lines I write are feeble, sad and cold.

By using Dorval as the 'fountain of knowledge' and 'Diderot' as 'the inquisitor', Diderot is able to depend less on, and even give the impression of not caring about, the narrative development of an exterior plot. He is more concerned in creating an alternative interior narrative which takes as its subject the accommodation, harmonisation and reconciliation of Dorval's and 'Diderot's' concepts of the real and the imaginary.

River Landscape with a waterfall 1762

Rocky river landscape 1763

 
fourth site
 

                         This is treated in a far more impressionist manner. The linearity falls into disrepair, the sightings are more random, the scenario less systematised, the objects less distinct. Gone are the geographical and athletic references. Instead there is a more reflective style of writing. The observations become more conversational, more generalised, more allegorical, less picturesque. He rests his eyes on the landscape rather than travels around it, and he begins to put more emphasis onto reflection rather than mere observation.
                                Vernet's paintings were not portrayals of actualities. They were combinations of fragments of reality reconvened to give a particular effect. these were fully convincing and were in accord with the laws of nature. Diderot felt that vernet had an instinctive knowledge of nature's laws, and therefore was able to summon up the correct 'piece' to insert in the jigsaw at any time. he was master of his own game. Diderot is seeing in Vernet's painting method a relationship between composition and precomposition, a type of serialism in which the actual landscape was the starting point in terms of a sense impression, a 'ground' ['grounds' in terms of legitimisation too] on which to improvise. Imitation is at the service of expression. Vernet's role as the painter is seen as an inspired mediator between art and reality - which Diderot celebrates in the salon in the double pun of 'the point of view'. As Diderot infiltrates Vernet's picture space, he recreates the experience itself through experiencing, with us in company, its reconstruction. Diderot asks us to take on the role of the eyewitness - not in the observance of nature, but of the witnessing of the verification of the moment of the sensation when art and nature are the same. He is asking us to take the place of condillac's statue, to be a vessel, a mute, to which the artist can attach the various sensations which allow us to see his vision, to allow us to make our own representation through his eyes. So the reader, the viewer, is not allowed to see just the finished result. But the spectator is allowed to become totally absorbed in the aesthetic experience. Inside this construction was an understanding that though the work may live through the deceiving of the eyes, through its representation of a three dimensional world in two dimensions, the emotions were not to be part of this: there was always an inside and an outside here, always a line , a frontier of demarcation. In this sense, the spectator's entry into the picture is not illusion. The success of the work depended on total absorption in the process of looking at the work. Diderot was insistent that nothing was to intrude between the spectator and the painting. The painting should have a dominating idea and nothing should distract the beholder from the central concept. Flamboyant brushwork and allegory should also be sacrificed to dramatic unity. These were distractions that inserted a membrane [member] between the work and the spectator. The spectator had firstly to decipher its meaning, engaging the mind before any emotional responses could flourish. The ideal work of art is therefore one in which the spectator feels the same emotion as s/he would do in reality. The artist must never therefore admit to the presence of the spectator, [which diderot overcomes/subverts in the Conversation on the Natural son], otherwise the latter's emotional involvement could waver. Diderot praised Vernet's concentration on a single recognisable pictorial idea for its ability to encourage this behaviour. Pictorial conventions could not necessarily on their own ensure enthralment. The subject was of equal importance. It was essential for the viewer to be made to feel sympathetic [in sympathy] with the subject, to make him identify with the issues. diderot gives a list of subjects which he feels have 'universal substance', subjects which may encourage the suspension of difference between art and reality. But this rationale relied ultimately on the desire and will of the spectator to want to enter a state of empathy, to want to be part of the 'scene': the artist requires the complicity of the viewer. More than this, it was essential to stimulate the viewer's imaginative and creative responses to the work. In fact their participation. The viewer can then extend the imaginative perspective of the work [which by its very nature will be edited] through their own imaginative resources, controlled of course by the same rules and regulations [sententious > sententia maxima > maximum meaning] which the work will have literally or subconsciously ingrained in the viewer's rationale. Diderot is arguing that the 'art object' was only half of the event. the other half contained the potential of the spectator's imagination [an undefined quantity], giving rise to the notion that all art is 'left open', that the artist's signature, the 'signing off', is a moment of egress, not termination. This new emphasis on the imaginative response to a work of art let in the concept of interpretation, and the consequent notion that there were as many interpretations as there were viewers. It is interesting to note too the beginnings of the interest in the sketch. Previously thought to be merely a means of gathering and recording information for attachment to later, constructed, and considered views, these became documents of interest in themselves. For they were seen as documents containing, without egress, the very essence of the 'scene', unadulterated by any 'thoughts' or intellectualisation. They were an essence, a perfume. They were 'fresh' and 'natural' responses, as if the very act of working from them diluted their innocence. This innocence had a temporality - as if it diminished as the time between the act of drawing and that of painting expanded. by their very nature[!] they were often unfinished, therefore 'left open' for the viewer to [countersign] continue in their imagination their own development and conclusions, or even their concept of where the artist's imagination may have led them. At the same time this allowed the spectator to gain a privileged 'view' of the 'artist at work', to continue, without any barrier of public presentation, the innermost, private reveries of the artist, which became one of the central themes of the romantic period. This notion of egress encourages the anticipation of the dream, the continuance of the visual effect back into a spoken /written narrative. This naturalistic setting invokes the reverie, a state which alters the previously static relationship of observer and observed .
Diderot also hints at the notion of the involuntary, the incapability of the spectator to escape the painting's advances, and the implication that the more irresistible the painting is, the more its philosophical value, and that this desire is something that is in ourselves, and that the work of art is a catalyst to the unveiling of these thoughts and emotions.

 Diderot                -       Conversations on the Natural Son        -       second conversation

'The next day, I went to the foot of the hill. It was a lonely, wild place. The view was of a few hamlets spread out over the plain; beyond, a range of irregular, jagged mountains which formed a part of the horizon. We were shaded by some oak trees, and the muted sound could be heard of an underground stream flowing nearby. It was that season when the earth is covered with the fruits it grants to the toil and sweat of man. Dorval had arrived first. I went up to him without him noticing me. He had abandoned himself to the spectacle of nature. His chest swelled out and he was breathing deeply. his eyes were fixed on everything around him. I could see on his face the various impressions in what he saw, and I was beginning to share in his rapture when I cried out, almost involuntarily " He is under the spell".

Landscape with a waterfall 1761

The sixth site

In the distance,
To the right
                
 
the top of a rock disappearing into the clouds
In the foreground, an old building, an arcade leading to a lighthouse
behind this , a range of hills
To the extreme right, a waterfall
To the left, a promontory with fishermen going about their work
On the promontory, a forest
to the left a rock, a stone building, an inlet of the sea
To the right, the lighthouse and the sea stretching into infinity

               If you do not make an effort to reconstruct this site to yourself accurately, you will take me for a madman when I tell you that I uttered a cry of admiration, that I was left motionless and dumbfounded . . .Oh nature, how great you are! Oh, Nature, how imposing, majestic and beautiful you are!

                                
                                                
                                                                                  
Diderot is in agreement with Burke in their connecting of Infinity and terror - They both connect the sublime with a venture into the unknown, the possibility of a psychological space inside the spatial, perspectival ordering of objects in illusionistic space. The notion of 'ordering' is seen as a condition of the sublime. A great profusion of things which are splendid in themselves are magnificent. Apparent disorder also creates a sense of grandeur. In the opposite direction Burke goes so far as to say that
'The appearance of care is unhelpful to the portrayal of magnificence'.
This apparent confusion creates the illusion of infinity, a place where perspective and visual laws, agreements, vanish. Burke then goes on to consider power. Magnificence and Power. Pain, he claims, is much stronger than pleasure. Pleasure is 'stolen' from us. Pain is submitted on us, against our will. Strength is beautiful when controlled, it becomes sublime when it is acting against our will and gets out of control. Magnificence and Complexity. A quality Burke associates with the sublime is that of difficulty. Burke uses the example of Stonehenge to suggest that objects that are obviously the result of toil and struggle have a grandeur [the rudeness, and as before, the vulgarity of the work] that approaches the sublime. Dexterity has the opposite effect, that of reducing the task to that of mere manners.
Burke again has recourse to the figural when he considers light. 'Colours depend on light'. A rapid change from light to dark can astonish, but darkness is judged to have more of the

 Sublime than light. Burke quotes from Milton. 'Dark with excessive light thy skirts appear'. Extreme light, by overcoming the organs of sight, obliterates all objects, its effect resembling darkness. Thus two ideas as opposite as can be imagined are reconciled in the extremes of both, their opposite nature brought together in producing the Sublime.
 

In addition to this description of objects, Diderot makes special note of the atmosphere and lighting.
                                Closer to us all colours remain distinct, while in the distance they blend together and soften, their fusion producing a dull white
                                and,
                                 . . . a patch of forest lit by light originating from its far side

 
Burke writes an account of his notion of vision. He gives two contrasting theses. Vision is performed by having a picture formed by the rays of light which are reflected from the object, painted in one piece, instantaneously on the retina, or least nervous part of the eye.'
'Or, according to others, there is but one point of any object painted on the eye in such a manner as to be perceived at once; but by moving the eye, we gather up with great celerity, the several parts of the object, so as to perform one uniform piece.'
Burke then conducts an argument between these two propositions. He makes out a case that the physical act of perception causes pain, and is therefore part of the sublime. His argument suggests that light from a large body strikes the eye in an instant. That body is made up from a multitude of small points, the rays from which make this effect on the retina. So that all these minuscule strikes on the retina add up to a bombardment, which shakes the retina to such a degree as to cause pain.
His explanation of the second thesis is that if only one point of an object is visible at any time, the eye must scan these with 'great quickness', and consequently this will result in muscles being stretched and strained to a point of pain. Both explanations result in the construction of a vibratory, uncertain domain where vision is created in an environment of tension and unease.
 

This domain is realised in Burke's mind by the contemplation of darkness. Defying Locke's conjecture that darkness is 'not naturally' an idea of terror, Burke sees darkness as a place of uncertainty, a place in which mankind cannot know in 'what degree of safety they stand'. This inability to see potential danger, the ignorance of surrounding objects, and the inability to detect potential foes forces the unfortunate to pray for light. Burke suggests that darkness and blackness are virtually indivisible, though blackness may be used in terms of confined spaces. He gives an example of a newly sighted person being disquieted by seeing blackness. Blackness, Burke defines as but a partial darkness. It derives its powers from being 'not black' and also from being surrounded by other colours.

         Closer to us all colours remain distinct, while in the distance they blend together and soften, their fusion producing a dull white
                                and,
. . . a patch of forest lit by light originating from its far side to be transitory, to have a temporality similar to terror, which to continue its effect must be used infrequently. When the terror abates 'smoothness and glossiness' will dissipate it, and modify the starkness of the original.

It is in the sixth site that Diderot 'owns up' and discloses that these visits have been pure fiction, that the subject of his gaze was in fact Vernet's paintings.
 

Landscape with a fisherman 1763

seventh picture

       This essay is entitled 'picture', as distinct from the previous six 'sites'. Diderot declares that he is no longer addressing the Abbé, he is addressing the reader directly. This is the most complex site in terms of loci. Backwards and forwards moves the shuttle, concocting the correct nuance from the various narrative strands.

                             
1       In the centre the moon is floating above the horizon, intermittently hidden by dense cloud, creating a scenario of the lit and the unlit, and the drama of the movement between them.
2       To the right    i       a building
                              ii      forward from this, some abandoned pilings
                              iii     forward to the left,  a boat
3       further back    a sailing vessel advances towards the building
4       to the rear     limitless expanse of the ocean
5       far left            i       steep rocks
                              ii      beneath which the esplanade begins
6       far right               esplanade finishes at fountain.
7       Inside this area, Diderot describes the position of a multitude of characters, and he goes on to surmise  their relationships and likely employ.

 The position of objects is now described in relationship to each other. Diderot then interjects one of his favourite devices [devices, as in signs], that of analepsis, the restorative, the invigorating, the stimulating analeptikos , the cure. The cure for the art is the looking. The cure for the looking is the painting. Diderot then begins to effect the position of the painter, or at least a position in between Vernet's initial impulse and his compositional decision making. . .'

                                       'Forget the right side of his Moonlight, cover it up so that you can see only the rocks and the esplanade on the left, and you'll still have a beautiful picture. Isolate the portion with the sea and the sky, with the lunar light falling on the water, and you'll have a beautiful picture. Consider only that portion of his canvas with the rocks to the left, and you'll still have a beautiful thing. Content yourself with the esplanade and what's happening on it, look only at the steps with the various tasks being carried out there, and your taste will be satisfied. Cut out only the cistern with the two figures leaning against it, and you'll have a choice bit of painting under your arm.

   'Our aesthetic appreciation of nature enables us to relate to the world, to understand our limitations and the possibility of transcending them. But we are not creators of nature and neither do we formulate its critique, for we stand outside the nature to perceive the harmony that exists between our faculties and the objects on which they employed.'

                          Kant, writing 30 years after Burke and Diderot, also foresaw problems inherent in the idea of beauty. He saw that the idea of taste was a paradox, that aesthetic judgement was a contradiction since 'aesthetic' suggests subjective experience and 'judgement' suggests universal assent. 'Beauty' could easily be seen as part of the 'object' - a confusion of taste and fact. The pleasure of the object is intuitive - though it is expressed in the form of a judgement. Judgements therefore can be thought of as aesthetic because of their relationship to direct experience. These judgements must be empirical, they must have been formed through experience.
Acquiring the judgement of taste would mean a fundamental premise under the condition of which one might subsume the concept of an object, and then , by syllogism, draw the inference that it is beautiful. That, Kant reasoned, was impossible, for the pleasure must be felt immediately in the perception of the object, and it is always experience, and never conceptual thought that gives the right to aesthetic judgement, so that anything which alters the experience of an object would alter its aesthetic significance. Aesthetic judgements therefore should be free from concepts since beauty itself is not a concept in itself. The consideration of an aesthetic experience is not judgemental in the fact that it is the showing, the pointing out of the particular features that is important, not the explanation of them. This pointing out is akin to the notion of taste, a rationalisation of experience in a communal sense, based on agreement. The notion of beauty is rationalised too in the communal feeling of/for pleasure. The idea that others feel as you do is not derived from experience. It is a presupposition. This would in part explain Diderot's decision to write this critique in the form of a conversation, and to involve the Abbé as a receptacle for the storage and instant recall of these judgements. Diderot puts forward the idea that there can not be any one judgement, suggesting that the judgement consists of a state of thinking about judgement, of thinking that a theoretical judgement might be valid, that it would have the possibility of being seen to be so.
Diderot is clear that the pleasure in the beautiful, though it is immediate, nevertheless involves contemplation and reflection, and that aesthetic pleasure must also have the ability to be communicated through sight and the hearing, the senses that permit contemplation. Again, the invention of the Abbé enables Diderot to emphasise this point, suggesting to him that the act of contemplation requires that an object be thought of as a unique event rather than a universal concept, indeed, that the object becomes isolated from the world while it is gazed on. But contemplation is more acute than this. Every 'interest' the observer finds in the object is noted, is abstracted and stored. The object is under surveillance. The object is not an end to its means, but an end in itself. The observer's desires, aims and ambitions are held in abeyance [inside the fold] in the act of contemplation. There is a continual desire for the cycle to remain incomplete, to remain in limbo where the object can exist in a disinterested state.
Kant then questions the role of rationality in aesthetic contemplation. He argues that imagination has a central role in the synthesis of concept and intuition. Imagination is double-edged. It turns intuition into fact, but at the same time requires the fertilisation of experience with concepts. Kant thought that imagination could be freed from the rules of understanding.
Kant wants us to take pleasure in beauty in order to experience the harmonious workings of our own faculties and to project that harmony towards and onto the empirical world. We will see in objects the unity we discover in ourselves. This is the origin of our pleasure. Kant divides beauty into two categories, and makes a preliminary judgement on each
        being perceived without the aid of conceptual thought   -       free
        requiring conceptualisation of the object.              -       dependent
To perceive a painting one needs to understand the concept of the content and how it is expressed. This beauty would be less pure than the 'free' beauty associated with nature itself.
Nature is a pure beauty. There is no 'interest', no agenda, no 'purpose'. It produces feelings in us of organisation, of placement, of the proper. Kant puts forward a notion that aesthetic unity displays purposiveness without purpose, to the point that the experience of looking at objects and judging them finally discolours our ability to see nature 'freely'. It makes us look with a purpose. This concept of 'aesthetic experience' leads us to the notion of 'design' in nature, and the recognition that the artist in us would want to use these findings for our own ends.
The aesthetic idea also imprints on our senses the idea of the transcendental. The idea of the artist striving to go beyond the limits of experience to show things in a completeness that nature does not show. Kant calls this aesthetic condensation. It is the experience of trying to reach the transcendental that produces this aesthetic experience - this striving not just beyond our own imagination, our own experiences, but beyond our own conceptions. This leads to an aesthetic experience where we view ourselves in relation to a transcendental reality which lies beyond the field of thought. We come to see our limitations and the grandeur of the world. We perceive the harmony between nature and our faculties, and by the purposiveness of the relationships between the two, we experience beauty, but when we are dwarfed by the enormity of the world, and our inability to understand and control it, we glimpse the Sublime. The Sublime is a force. It incites us to abandon sensibility, manners, rhetoric. Kant defines the Sublime in a number of ways - 'that the mere capacity of thinking which, evidences a faculty of mind transcending every standard of taste', and, 'an object of nature the representation of which determines the mind to regard the elevation of nature beyond our reach as equivalent to a presentation of ideas.' The judgement of the Sublime approaches a moral judgement too. As the beautiful demands agreement on taste, in the Sublime we demand the extent the limits of the experience of the awesomeness of nature. By not taking the transcendental viewpoint he lacks the basis of a true morality.
Kant defines the Dynamically Sublime in terms of our relationship with fear. On the one hand there is our terror and fear when confronted with nature, and on the other hand our desire not to be dominated by these forces, but to be able to judge them and consequently our ability to come to terms with them by calling on our own strength to overcome these very terrors. The terrors that nature can conjure up therefore excite our imaginations to overcome and elevate ourselves above nature itself. So the dynamic is the imagination, the ability to see outside the terror, to place it in our own context, not just the natural world's.
Kant develops this further in his divisions of the mathematically Sublime [Ch. 26] and the dynamically sublime [Ch. 28]. The Sublime requires a 'mental movement' combined with an 'estimate of the object'. The mathematically sublime relates to the need for cognition of the absolutely great. Small, medium and large are all relativisms, but magnitude is a judgement, dependent on measure. Magnitude is always judged in terms of comparisons, of relatives. The Sublime cannot be judged by comparison. It can only be judged by its own criteria, that of the Sublime. Kant states that it is impossible to calculate the Sublime since both the multiplicity and the magnitude are unknown. It cannot therefore be computed. Its magnitude must always be based on comparison and can therefore be judged only in terms of aesthetics. But these comparisons must not be the result of personal judgement only - they must be capable of being upheld by universal agreement. He puts forward the notion that the 'object' need not necessarily exist at all, it may be formless, since only its potential greatness is needed to convey the judgement of being Sublime. 'Instead of the object, it is rather the cast of the mind in appreciating it that we have to estimate as Sublime'. The feeling of the Sublime is one of dissatisfaction in our inability to free our imaginations to the point where we can use reason to judge the Sublime. This restlessness is manifested in our need to 'set in motion' the quest for the Sublime, and whereas what is beautiful can be judged in restful contemplation, the Sublime is always a place of conflict between imagination and reason. Kant finishes this chapter . . . . . 'and the object is received as sublime with a pleasure that is only possible through the mediation of displeasure.'
 

This reading of Vernet's work, and it is Vernet's paintings that we are now discussing, describes a work of flexibility and indeterminacy. Diderot is seeing the work as a series of 'happenings' which, though they have a coherence in themselves, have more resonance in groups. On their own, or in incomplete groups they have a sense of 'absence' which has a hermeneutic effect on those present. Diderot's quest for the invention of the labyrinth is echoed in the Encyclopédie. Diderot answers the questions posed by the different interpretations of the landscapes by inventing different ways of talking about them. Different ways of describing space, and different ways of going about describing space. Port-Royal logicians contrasted the narrative 'order of invention' with the systematic 'order of analysis'. Diderot here is offering a presentation of the anxiety prominent at the time between the sequential, linear modes of thought and synoptic or temporally organised ones. Diderot develops his theme of linearity here too in the developmental devices of his criticism, which gradually become less and less 'descriptive' in terms of topography, and more and more daring in the verbal space they demand. The sequential is in the foreground at one moment, the background the next. Diderot is inside the painting, gazing at himself scanning, reading the work of which he is now a necessary part. . Between the foreground and background is the terrain, a new terrain, a scene of gambits and adjustments. Diderot's path, his pèlerinage, takes the form of a fold, an arabesque between these surfaces.
                                The space between the words, the continual and expectant need to involve the reader in the process of selection is a method that Diderot uses to fabricate the empowerment of the reader - as perhaps he feels Vernet has done to him. Whereas in the first site Diderot is seeing the scene 'framed' ready for insertion into a painting, by the seventh site he is inside the work in a spatial sense too. He is reluctant to return the 'picture' as it now has been admitted to being to the frame. He is trying to disenfranchise this frame, to free both the painting , the frame and the view, so that any one part does not have any precedence over the other. The Parergon. As Diderot foresees Film and T.V. in Le fils Naturel, so he now envisages the series paintings of Cézanne's Mont Sainte Victoire and the evolution of Cubism. Is the Cicerone remembering the future as well as perceiving the present as he accompanies the Abbé and diderot?
                                Diderot then adds some comments about the relative merits, as paintings, of the various works. The fact that these are, according to Diderot,
                                of varying quality, is a matter of the moment, of the bodily state, of the state of the soul.
                                He gives a few examples of how domestic incidents can divert the true direction of genius. How seemingly trivial discomforts can divert the muse.
                                Chance too plays a role in chess and in all other intellectual games, and why shouldn't it here as well? Diderot then 'closes' his piece. . . . . . .
                                That's enough about Vernet
                                He concludes by describing two dream sequences. Firstly though , he lays the foundations for the scene of doubt by discussing the differences between dreams and sleeplessness- [perhaps what we are going to hear isn't categorised properly]. His soliloquy begins with the comment that
                                No philosopher known to me has successfully described the difference between sleeplessness and dreaming.
                                Was I sleepless when I thought I was dreaming?
                                or was I dreaming when I thought I was sleepless?
                        

        Who is it told me that one day the veil would be rent, and I'd be convinced I'd dreamed all that I 'd done and really done all that i had dreamed?
                                These two dreams are superficially different in that one is happy , one is sad. They again use the distancing ploy in that it is obvious that the imagery comes from Vernet, they are 'captured' in Diderot's as nature is in Vernet's paintings. Diderot seems to be hinting at the sublime/inal
                                In the Encyclopédie, Diderot compares the qualities of wit and genius.
                                 . . . . sound, genuine taste, the sublime in whatever type of art, the moving, the great effects of fear, compassion and terror, noble and elevated feelings, and great ideas resist epigrammatic style and contrast in expression.
                                and in the Salon,
                                anything which astonishes the mind, anything which inspires a feeling of terror is conducive to the sublime . . . The night hides the shapes of things, adds horror to their sounds: even that of a leaf in the depths of the forest sets the imagination working, and the imagination troubles the heart, so that everything is magnified.
                                Diderot seems to be offering up a definition of the sublime as something that 'disturbs' ordered perception. It produces amazement, awe, bewilderment and surprise. This is a fearsome, disruptive thing in its ability to destroy the bases of rational judgement and empirical reason. It emphasises the spatial dislocation and the passage of experience through a 'darkness'. It attempts to bias our value judgements towards the emotional and against the common-sense/place. If this is to be the case, and Art is about the sublime, it must therefore be 'outside' daily experience, and also, possibly, outside of morality. Diderot himself expressed it as something which
                                might well be the opposite of everyday morality . . . . . . I am very much afraid that man may be led straight to disaster along the path which leads the imitator of nature to the sublime.
                                Diderot sees the followers of this doctrine as doomed to misfortune and misery, a precursor of werther and, nearer home, Dorval.
                                Diderot links the sublime with his idea of Enthusiasm.
                                It is impossible in poetry, painting, eloquence or music to produce anything sublime without enthusiasm. Enthusiasm is a violent movement of the spirit by which we are transported into the midst of the objects we are to represent; then we see a whole scene take place in our imagination as if it were outside us [the cave again] : and it is, for as long as this illusion lasts, everything present is annihilated, and our ideas take on reality in its place . . . if this state is not madness, then it is very close to it.
                                This passage hints at the possibility of the imagination replacing the reality around us, and the ensuing terror that may ensue. In his Salons Diderot calls into question the traditional circuitry of creativity - the initial 'vision thing', the consequent rationalisation and ordering of this perception, and the final construction of the art object.