hedonism, or the pleasures of the physical senses, particularly the eye, which was to be entertained by
“chasing” or following waving lines on a canvas in a way we have already encountered in the picturesque
landscape aesthetic and in the rococo (see Chapter 2).
In his Essay on Taste (Essai sur le gout) for the French Encyclopédie, Montesquieu saw beauty as the
product of “order,” in, for example, figure groupings and composition, and a judicious amount of visual
“variety.” Variety could be taken to excess, however, in styles such as the Gothic. The latter was anathema
to those who, like Montesquieu, derived their ideal forms from the more restrained and harmonious
models of Greek art and architecture, which they felt were sure to please the mind of the observer
(Harrison, Wood and Gaiger, 2000, 526–528). He had little faith in any universal or absolute standard of
taste, emphasizing that the criteria applied by specific institutions, customs and habits might militate, in
practice, against any essentialist view of beauty. Other Enlightenment thinkers, such as Voltaire, were
bolder in their statements about the universalizing operations of taste, which they linked quite overtly with
current Eurocentric (and aristocratic) values (Harrison, Wood and Gaiger, 2000, 531). Kant reconciled
the notion of variations in individual taste with a quest for universally valid judgments by aligning the
judgments of the true man of taste with those of a sensus communis or “communal sense” through which
individuals placed their own subjective judgments in the context of “the collective Reasoning of
humanity” (Harrison, Wood and Gaiger, 2000, 779–782).
Less easily reconciled with universalizing or neoplatonic views of taste were approaches that,
particularly from the midcentury, drew on the cult of sensibility that emphasized the importance to taste
of the viewer’s emotional reactions to art. Edmund Burke’s views on aesthetics stressed the importance of
our emotions in identifying the beautiful (see Chapter 2), and by these means might have been thought to
licence subjectivity in matters of taste. He countered such misconceptions by suggesting that the same
emotions (“love, or some passion similar to it”; Burke, 1998, 28) were caused uniformly by any beautiful
object with essential qualities such as smallness, smoothness, softness and delicacy. At the same time, he
objected to more conventional neoplatonic criteria for beauty such as the beautiful proportions
observed in antique sculpture, or any notion of “perfect” form. His approach to the sublime was
characterized by a discussion of “wild” feelings responding to stimuli in a uniform way.
The critic Denis Diderot made constant reference, in his Salons (1759–1781), to the need for pathétique
(pathosarousing) effects in art, as he became a vehement advocate of the moral, social and cultural
advantages of possessing a keen emotional sensibility. From the 1760s, such beliefs also infused
responses to literature, the fashionable, tearinducing novels of Samuel Richardson (1689–1761)
providing a vivid example. Diderot was among other critics such as Du Bos and the Abbé MarcAntoine
Laugier (1713–1769), who expected similarly literary, emotive effects in art (Berger, 1999, 141–148).
This led him to a warm appreciation of the genre paintings of Greuze until the artist tried to outreach his
talent by tackling very unsuccessfully the genre of history. In response to Greuze’s The Paralytic (La
Piété Filiale), a moving representation of a family tending to a suffering elderly man, exhibited at the
Salon of 1763, Diderot stated:
When I saw this eloquent old man, full of pathos, I felt ... my soul become tender and tears ready to
fall from my eyes.
(Diderot, 1984, 353; my translation)Diderot also expected plausible characters, actors, compositions and expressions in history paintings, so
that these would rouse the imagination and emotions of the beholder. Most kinds of emotional stimulation
were welcomed: horror, melancholy, love and fear among them. Diderot’s critical approach was not,
however, a simple submission to subjectivism in matters of taste. Many of his emotional reactions to