Denis Diderot

Schriften zur Kunst (Writings on Art)
VOLUME 157

The Founder of Modern Art Criticism

The Salon reports that Denis Diderot (b. 1713 in Langres, France; d. 1784 in Paris) started writing in 1759 birthed the genre of art criticism. His gift for making images speak proved to be pioneering. Here, his engagement with painting was intimately linked to the problem of perception. Diderot saw himself as a mediator of a new bourgeois idea of art based on the conception of sensitivity. By linking the old theorem of art as an imitation of nature with the problem of perception, he gave rise to a vexing problem: if one wants to imitate nature, one has to be able to perceive it and must thus reflect on the nature of perception itself. Diderot’s visual experiments with optical media like opera glasses are perhaps only now being fully understood.

Selected and with an epilogue by the editor, art and media scholar Peter Bexte (b. 1954).