Diderot on Art, 2 vols.

At a certain moment in Diderot's masterpiece, Le neveu de Rameau (Rameau's nephew, 1762) - dialogue on genius, talent failure, art, and morality-the eponymous hero, part scoundrel and part lunatic, breaks into an extraordinary operatic improvisation. He jumbled together thirty differ ent airs, French, Italian, comic, tragic - in every style," Diderot writes,

imitating all the while the stance, walk, and gestures of the several characters, being in succession furious, mollified, lordly, sneering.... With swollen cheeks and a somber throaty sound, he would give us the horns and bassoons. For the oboes he assumed a shrill yet nasal voice, then speeded up the emission of sound to an incredible degree for the strings.... He whistled piccolos and warbled transverse flutes, singing, shouting, waving about like a madman, being in himself dancer and ballerina, singer and prima donna, all of them together and the whole orchestra, the whole theater; then redividing himself into twenty separate roles, running, stopping, glowing at the eyes like one possessed, frothing at the mouth.

It is one of the great passages in literature, to my mind comparable alone to the tremendous moment in the Bhagavad Gita when the charioteer Krishna reveals his identity as god and the world at once.

Diderot's salons of 1965 and 1767 are literary performances displaying some of the wild polymorphic inventiveness of the nephew's mad but inspired impromptu. These are extended reviews of two of the exhibitions that were mounted biennially in Paris beginning in 1737 by the Academie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, and called salons after their site, the Louvre's Salon Carre, though they also spilled over into the Galerie Apollon and up and down adjoining staircases. These exhibitions were cultural events of singular interest to Parisian audiences, quite as the Whitney Biennial and the Venice Biennale are to art-going audiences today. The salon as a literary genre-typically a pamphlet describing and commenting on the works displayed in the salon proper-was an obvious way of responding to general curiosity and constitutes, according to Thomas Crow (who contributes a valuable introduction to these volumes), the beginning of art criticism as a practice.

I am afraid, however, that there is no writing today that stands to the reviews in our contemporary art journals in any thing like the relationship of Diderot's salons the covered the exhibitions regularly from 1759 through 1981) to the catchpenny publications of the Parisian critics of the 18th century. Or, if there exist reviews that are fully paralel to Diderot's, they are almost certainly u known to most of us, for Diderot's salons were composed for the exceeding select readership of the Correspondance litteraire (in effect, a Letter from Paris, describing everything of cultural interest taking place there-never more than 15, most of them crowned heads who received their handwritten copies via diplomatic pouches. Since none of the artists Diderot wrote on would know what he said about them-here were no subscribers in France - he could trash with impunity. "Orpheus was not worse treated by the bacchantes," he confided to his editor, Friedrich Melchior Grimm, "than I would be by our painters., Even his friends did not escape: of Michel van Loo's portrait of him, Diderot writes, "I am fond of Michel, but I am fonder still of truth.... My children, I warn you that this is not me.... I was never such as you see me here." Perhaps getting wind of the fact that Diderot was writing clandestine art criticism, and thinking a small offering could not hurt Van Loo made the author a gift of the portrait; it hangs in the Louvre today. Little did he know!

In compensation for the secrecy, Diderot did more than combine ekphrastic description with criticism or praise grounded in astute compositional analysis. Everything was an occasion for literary flight and philosophical digression. His salons are extravaganzas in literary multimedia - fantasies, speculations, edifications, histories, surveys, anecdotes, sly and salacious observations, double entendres, digs in the ribs, manuals of artistic technique, encapsulated dialogues. Discourses on morality and metaphysics, on modern and ancient art, are brightened and made memorable with wit, gossip, confessions, and whispers of gleeful complicity. They are also ornamented with poetry, in Latin, Greek, and Italian, together with a wealth of art-historical allusion - all this with a variety and virtuosity worthy of Rameau,s nephew at his moment of epiphany. Diderot wrote at a length that drove Grimm to the mock complaint that the copyist fees on these manuscripts would put him in bankruptcy. The salon of 1767, after all a review of a mere exhibition, has something of the scope and ambition of Diderot,s Encyclopedie, but orgnized by the numbering system of the catalogue rather than by the alphabet. It was meant to be useful and entertaining at once, though readers would rarely if ever see the exhibitions being written about. I suspect that Diderot,s criticism has more typically been consulted than read as literature, at any rate outside France; in fact, John Goodman's is the first full-length translation in English of any of the salons. Before coming upon the present volumes I had never sat down to read one of his salons through, but I had looked into the French texts from time to time when I was writing exhibition reviews, to see how he dealt with Jean-Honore Fragonard or Frangois Boucher. The discussion of Fragonard's Le grand-pretre Coresus s'immole pour sauver Callirboi ihigh Priest Cordsus sacrificing himself to save Callirhoe), the artist's presentation piece in 1765 for example, is a stunner. Diderot pretends that he has been unable to see the painting itself, but he reports a curious dream, the content of which is indeed the scene depicted by Fragonard. It is a dazzling way of saying that Fragonard,s painting has the quality of a vision rather than of a historical event pictorially narrated. Much as I admired Diderot,s writing, though, I found it difficult to share his rapture with this particular painting, the like of which Fragonard never again attempted. By 1767, he had resolutely turned his back on historical painting and the conventions of the Academie, and Diderot put him down for it@ Overall, Fragonard has what it takes to be a capable man, but he isn't one; he's impetuous, inaccurate, and his color is volatile; he's just as likely to decline as to improve." Likewise, Diderot's animus against Boucher's nude "red bottoms" is based on considerations that would not be alien to Senator Helms tow day. So I felt no great impulse to press further, adoring Boucher and everything of Fragonard except the masterpiece, that so moved Diderot.

I was wrong: the salons are marvelous, even if Diderot's taste is not ours though he was precocious in his admiration for Jean-Baptiste-Simeon Chardin). Goodman's vivid and luminous translation brings these texts out of the archives and into life. It is a mistake to regard them as anthologies of set pieces, or to treat them as a mere resource, that would be like disregarding the cataracts and scenic vistas of a great river, and thinking of it merely as something to get water from.

Moreover, Diderot makes palpable the art world of the 1970s. He was a gregarious, nosy man, and a natural journalist: "I collected the verdicts of old men and the thought of children, the judgments of men of letters, the opinions of sophisticates, and the views of the people; and if it sometimes happens that I wound artists,very often i s with weapons they themselves have sharpened for me, I've questioned them and come to understand fine draughtsmanship and truth to nature, I've grasped the magic of light and shadow, become familiar with color, and developed a feeling for flesh." Diderot clearly tried hard to see paintings as painters themselves saw them, and his form of criticism is characteristically to paint in words a better solution to the artist's problem; so we see through his eyes both the actual show and an ideal alternative.

He was profoundly alive to the difficulties of painting. The '65 salon opens with a wonderful conversation with Chardin (who hung the show), telling him to go easy: "Find the worst painting that's here, and bear in mind that two thousand wretches have broken their brushes between their teeth in despair of ever producing anything as good." Whether he was generous or not to the mostly forgotten artists, Diderot was more than generous to his readers, and it is a joy to join the crowned heads for whom he wrote, and to relish a great writer going on about work we shall mainly never see.

Arthur C. Danto is professor of philosophy at Columbia University and art critic for Tb, Nation. His most recent collection of essays is Embodied Meanings: Critical Essays and Aesthetic Meditations (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).