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Title

LE PARADOXE DU CRITIQUE D’ART: LA TENSION ENTRE PATHÉTIQUE ET IRONIE DEVANT LES TABLEAUX TOUCHANTS [PARADOX AS THE CRITIQUE OF ART: TENSION BETWEEN PATHOS AND IRONY OF THE “TOUCHING” PAINTINGS]

Author(s)

Nadège Langbour

Information about the author(s)

Nadège Langbour, PhD, Associate Professor, CEREdi, University of Rouen, Department of Philology and Humanities, Lavoisier str., 76821 Mont-Saint-Aignan, France. E-mail: nadege.langbour@free.fr

Received

October 24, 2016

Published

25 Dec 2016

Issue

Vol. 1, no 3–4

Department

World Literature

Pages

112-121

DOI

DOI: 10.22455/2500-4247-2016-1-3-4-112-121

UDK

УДК 821.133.1

BBK

ББК 83.3 (4 Фр)

Abstract

In his Salons, Denis Diderot pays special attention to “touching,” pathetic paintings, and his interest to J.-B. Greuze’s art is evidence to that. When Diderot turns to describe Greuze’s canvases or genre painting of J.-B. Le Prince or P. A. Baudouin, he finds himself within the framework of sentimental rhetoric related at once to the pathos of the painted scene and to the sensations of the viewer. Diderot’s style becomes heterogeneous and has a peculiar fluidity that often conceals tongue-in-cheek ironic comments. This irony is, in the first place, a critical instrument of the “salonist” that allows touch upon some of the technical infelicities of the paintings with sly humor. At the same time, not only paintings become the targets of Diderot’s irony; irony manifests itself in the depiction of pathetic paintings when Diderot himself enters the stage. Diderot appears as a “dicephalus” of a kind, a creature with two heads — at once a spectator and an actor. As a spectator, he is fully immersed in the painting, follows the pathos of the scene and describes it with the help of sentimental rhetoric. As an actor, he is capable to distance himself from the painted scene and becomes “insensitive” as the actor whose principles of acting he explicates in “The Paradox of the Actor.” This latter capacity of the contemplator predetermines ironic comments in his descriptions of pathetic paintings.

Keywords

D. Diderot, Salons, touching paintings, J.-B. Greuze, J.-B. Le Prince, P. A. Baudouin, rhetoric, sentimentality.

Works cited

1 Diderot D. Salon de 1763. Paris, Hermann, 1984. 294 p. 2 Diderot D. Salon de 1765. Paris, Hermann, 1984. 370 p. 3 Diderot D. Salon de 1767. Paris, Hermann, 1995. 564 p. 4 Diderot D. Correspondance, texte établi par Georges Roth, t. IX. Paris, Editions de Minuit, 1963. 261 p. 5 Mal L. Entre ironie philosophique et ironie romantique: les Salons de Diderot. Recherches sur Diderot et sur l’Encyclopédie. № 45. Paris, Société Diderot, Amateurs de Livres, 2011. 258 p.

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