It is thus that the dissolution of morals, the necessary consequence of luxury, brings with it in its turn
the corruption of taste. Further, if by chance there be found among men of uncommon ability, an
individual with enough strength of mind to refuse to comply with the spirit of the age, and to debase
himself by puerile productions, his lot will be hard. He will die in indigence and oblivion. This is not
so much a prediction as a fact already confirmed by experience! Yes, Carle Vanloo and Pierre [history
painters], the time is already come when your brushes, destined to increase the majesty of our temples
by sublime and holy images, must fall from your hands, or else be prostituted to adorn the panels of a
coach with lascivious paintings. And you inimitable Pigalle [French sculptor], rival of Phidias and
Praxiteles [ancient Greek sculptors], whose chisel the ancients would have employed to carve them
gods, whose images almost excuse their idolatry in our eyes; even your hand must condescend to
fashion the belly of a porcelain monkey, or else remain idle.
(Discourse on the Arts and Sciences (Discours sur les sciences et les arts, 1750) in Rousseau, 1973, 20)Quite apart from the fact that Rousseau later became less critical of the arts in general, especially as his
own writing became so popular, the problem with the regeneration narrative is that it ignores the
continuing interest in sensual art evident in the work of Fragonard, Fuseli, Orientalist and other artists.
Additionally, La Font de SaintYenne’s antirococo views were quickly subjected to counterattack by
other commentators (Crow, 1985, 6–7). The moral order in eighteenthcentury art continued to display a
divergence of formal academic priorities and hierarchies from the preferences of the increasingly
important art market. Grand history painting at the end of the century contributed to moral regeneration
only because it reformed itself in line with the priorities of “sensibility” that had arisen mainly within the
lower genres. Furthermore, neoclassicism did not always produce the kind of morally elevating art that
the regeneration myth suggests. Houdon’s sculpture of Winter was banned from the Salon in 1785 and the
plaster model of Pajou’s later Psyche Abandoned was banned from the same Salon on the grounds that it
used a mythological subject as the pretext for eroticism (Walsh, 2012, 234–235). An ethics of sensuous
and sensual pleasure remained important to the end of the century, if suppressed temporarily during the
Revolution: the marble version of Pajou’s sculpture was well received in 1791.
In terms of ethics, the modernity of eighteenthcentury art lay not so much in the grand statements of
neoclassical art or in a rejection of oldregime degeneracy as in the ability of the higher genres to absorb
and transform the moral sensitivities brought to art by its exposure to a wider public, a process in which
La Font’s critical voice played a part. Also “modern” was an incipient awareness that art and morality
might each require distinctive processes and standards of judgment, and that the aesthetic might inhabit a
“disinterested” or autonomous dimension of human experience.
Further Reading
Barker, Emma. 2005. Greuze and the Painting of Sentiment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
An excellent scholarly analysis of the cult of sensibility through a historicized reading of Greuze’s
paintings.
Hallett, Mark and Christine Riding, with an essay by Frédéric Ogée and Olivier Meslay and additional
catalogue contributions by Tim Batchelor. 2006. Hogarth (exh. cat.). London: Tate. An excellent
introduction to the moral and social issues represented in Hogarth’s art.