SOURCE: Hannoosh, Michèle. “Introduction” and “A Language for Painting: The Dictionnaire des Beaux-Arts.” In Painting and the Journal of Eugene Delacroix, pp. 3-22, 93-105. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995.

[In the following essay, Hannoosh discusses the development of paradoxes and complexities in Delacroix's Journal. The critic also evaluates Delacroix's various articles on the arts as well as his unfinished essay Dictionnaire des Beaux-Arts.]

INTRODUCTION

Tuesday, 3 September 1822—I am carrying out my plan, formulated so many times, of writing a diary. What I want most keenly is not to lose sight of the fact that I am writing it for myself alone; thus I will be truthful, I hope; I will become the better for it. This paper will reproach me for my variations.

(I, 1)

[Mardi 3 septembre 1822—Je mets à exécution le projet formé tant de fois d'écrire un journal. Ce que je désire le plus vivement, c'est de ne pas perdre de vue que je l'écris pour moi seul; je serai donc vrai, je l'espère; j'en deviendrai meilleur. Ce papier me reprochera mes variations.]

For all the clarity of purpose of its opening statement, the Journal of Eugène Delacroix soon betrays some of the paradoxes and complexities that develop over the course of its nine hundred pages. It is a diary but lacks the regularity of day-to-day entries, skipping as it does over days, weeks, months, and even, at one point, twenty-three years.¹ The careful indications of date, place, hour, and situation with which it here begins later give way to a temporal and spatial freedom frequently difficult to follow. In contrast to the steady progression characteristic of the journal form, emphasized by the commercial printed “agendas” that he used for all except the first three years, Delacroix's bears witness to an erratic, wayward temporality, both within each entry and between the different ones: he jumps ahead, looks back, cross-references the entries, jumbles the chronological sequence, rereads earlier notes and inserts his later comments on them. The personal nature of the diary is counterbalanced by Delacroix's stated awareness of the public value of its reflections on art and aesthetics. Indeed the Journal will furnish all the material, and most of the language, of his never-completed treatise on the fine arts, the Dictionnaire des Beaux-Arts. A diary is normally considered the space of private thoughts, jotted down freely in the fire of their first inspiration, but here we encounter a ubiquitous process of selection and choice: Delacroix refers to events deliberately suppressed and information expressly withheld; and he makes clear throughout that the Journal is already a reworking of first impressions, written or sketched in pocket notebooks.² For a reader, a diary promises intimacy, but in Delacroix's we sense an incongruous and intriguing reserve; for the anticipated pleasure of the voyeur it substitutes a vague discomfort, and even disappointment, as though the secret has not been disclosed, the “true” self not fully revealed. Most important, the standard purpose of any diary, set out in the opening entry quoted above—to collect and recollect the self—is here belied by the very language in which it is stated. “Thus I will be truthful, I hope”: perhaps what this wilful self-exhortation acknowledges most clearly is the uncertainty, or lack of control, underlying the effort, a qualification undercutting the ostensible confidence and resolve expressed by the sequence of future tenses. The Journal seems to recognize the ungraspability of the self it allegedly seeks to capture, the mobility of a self it wishes to stabilize, and which escapes at every moment the words that try to contain it. “This paper will reproach me for my variations”: the Journal cannot be a reproach, but only a record, a testimony of those variations, and the effort to rein in the mobility of the imagination equally an act of giving freer rein to it.

Perhaps the most striking paradox of the Journal lies in its relation to the aesthetic ideas it expresses, and which it would seem, by its form, to contradict or undermine.³ The Journal preaches unity, proportion, compositional order, and the importance of the pictorial ensemble, but does so in the freest, least unified, most arbitrarily ordered of autobiographical forms; unlike narrative autobiography, a diary denies any totalizing vue d'ensemble, any overall structure by which to interpret the place and meaning of a single event. Delacroix describes the virtues of finish and of concentration of effect in a form by nature unfinished and meandering. He advances a pictorial aesthetic of instantaneity, the whole grasped all of a piece and all at once, but in a form for which this is an impossibility, a form fragmented and strung out over much of the subject's life. He criticizes the abuse of details in contemporary painting, literature, and photography, but does so in a work which might itself seem to consist of an accumulation of details. The Journal argues for the value of hierarchy, the subordination of some elements of the composition to its central ideas, but represents the total disruption of hierarchy, with seemingly trivial incidents taking precedence over more apparently important ones. It asserts that a work of art should not everywhere betray the presence of its creator, lest it become a mere tour de force, a virtuoso performance interesting us more in the artist than in the art; yet it does so in a form where the author, the je, is always present, at once author, narrator, primary character, and even reader—subject, object, and means. It argues for intelligibility but confounds traditional literary patterns of representation and communicability: succession, transition, and a properly narrative coherence. Details and accessories must, in Delacroix's view, have a pictorial raison d'être, but a diary, unlike autobiography or memoirs, has no inherent structure of causality whatsoever—no logic of necessity, as Roland Barthes put it.⁴ To its stated ideal of compositional order and harmony, the Journal offers the example of a form discontinuous, free-floating, fragmented and lawless, a form by definition unfinished and open-ended, which closes only with death.⁵

This is not just a matter of literary form, but of philosophy. Delacroix was preoccupied with the diary's particular kind of writing, and in this respect he constitutes a very special case. He theorizes its fragmentary, essayistic aesthetic repeatedly, and in practice takes it to the extreme: the later diary in particular, written from 1847 onward, embodies a temporal order in which chronology and narrativity are contravened at every turn. This book will consequently deal primarily with that period; the early years, a mere fraction of the whole, have none of the radically innovative features and none of the philosophical reflection on writing and painting of the later ones. In its original state, especially, the diary is an exceptionally free and composite document.⁶ A given entry will consist of notes from several dates distant in time, reflecting an ongoing process of rereading, rethinking, and recommenting. Passages are recopied from one date to another and reworked according to the new context. Corrections, revisions, and remarks added in different ink or pencil, as well as summary headings scrawled later across the top of the pages to designate the subject of the entry,⁷ testify repeatedly to this activity; the inside covers sometimes indicate contents of the volume, as though for ready reference.⁸ An elaborate and extensive system of cross-references brings together disparate and far-flung entries, and confronts them with one another with no causal or explanatory transition. Clippings from newspapers—articles, advertisements, notices, reviews—are interleaved among the pages, along with recipes, addresses, train schedules, accounts and investments, copies of his letters, notes for his work on the Municipal Council, and other “paraphernalia”: discreet fragments of his life and thought alongside the more explicit reflections of the text proper. Although this elaborate and complex order was abridged and simplified by the editors and much of the textual paraphernalia suppressed altogether, both are crucial to Delacroix's oft-stated conception of his enterprise as non-narrative, non-cumulative, varied and inclusive, capable of accommodating multiple points of view and even outright contradiction. In theory and practice, the diary as a mode of writing thus has important implications for his larger aesthetic concerns. As I shall argue, it responds to Delacroix's search for a “painter's” writing, adequate to a “pictorial” vision of the world. In so doing, it reflects a particular notion of art, and of time, experience, and history too.

It is perhaps Delacroix's awareness of this important relation between the aesthetic of the Journal and his art and thought which made him consider now and again the question of publication. Although he definitely did not want the Journal to be published in its entirety during his lifetime, he was ambivalent about what should become of it after his death. In 1853 he allowed the art critic Théophile Silvestre to copy large portions of it, material which Silvestre quoted at length in his essays on the artist in 1854 and 1864.⁹ If he recoiled at the thought of its trivial, common details appearing in print,¹⁰ he also acknowledged the absorbing, all-consuming interest of the personal, everyday lives of famous people, the great seen en déshabillé, studied “through a magnifying glass” (15 May 1853; II, 49). His own taste for writings of this kind is telling: he read avidly in the memoirs, journals, confessions, biographies and autobiographies of others—from Bossuet, Rousseau, Saint-Simon, and Casanova, to contemporaries like Dumas, Sainte-Beuve, and George Sand. In particular, his special fascination for the personal writings of “illustrious” individuals—Caesar, Marcus Aurelius, Leonardo da Vinci, Montaigne, Voltaire, Napoleon, Byron—reflects on his own activity as a diarist, and his understanding of the almost inevitable “public” value of this most private and personal enterprise.

The problem of the Journal's aesthetic is posed specifically in the context of one of its most recurrent topics, and one of the major challenges of Romantic art theory: the relation between painting and literature. Lessing's famous statement from the Laokoon of 1766, “Succession in time is the province of the poet, coexistence in space is that of the artist,” had fixed the essential distinction and provided the material for arguments on both sides of the debate.¹¹ Painting consists of form and color in space, literature consists of sounds articulated over time; a painting is perceived all at once and at a glance, whereas reading occurs in a temporal sequence; with a painting, the eye has its object always present to it, while in literature the ear loses what it has heard and must recall it through an effort of the memory; the signs of painting are natural, while those of literature are arbitrary.¹²

As the sole painter of the nineteenth century to write at any length on the relation of painting to literature, Delacroix represents a unique and highly interesting case. He had a passion for literature and a powerful literary imagination, as the Journal's record of his voracious reading and the predominance of literary subjects in his oeuvre attest. But here we encounter one of the Journal's greatest and most recurrent contradictions, for Delacroix insists on the differences—and always the differences—between the two arts. He everywhere affirms his preference for the arts silencieux, the visual arts, those not dependent, as are literature, stage drama, or music, on a temporal discourse—a preference stated with almost comical irony through the very medium to which it is opposed, words, and many words at that: the nearly nine hundred pages that comprise the extant Journal. The question is not merely theoretical, however; the relation of painting to literature is also a major issue in his artistic practice. This interpreter of Ariosto, Byron, Goethe, Walter Scott, Shakespeare, Tasso, Dante, Chateaubriand, Cervantes, and Sand, to name only some of the literary sources of his work, this foremost creator of narrative mural paintings of the nineteenth century, in short this most “literary” of painters, as many called him,¹³ insists throughout on the superiority of painting over literature. The Journal's seemingly unequivocal preference for painting encounters everywhere a pictorial oeuvre which belies and even flouts this, an oeuvre rooted in literature and the literary, consisting predominantly of works on literary subjects and of narrative decorative cycles. To explore this paradox is to go to the very heart of Delacroix's aesthetic, the theoretical and practical relations between writing and painting, literary and pictorial, narrative and image; to reconsider and redefine the “literary” aspect of his art and its relation to more purely pictorial qualities of color and form; and to illuminate his idea of pictorial perception and interpretation. It suggests another way in which to consider what Baudelaire called Delacroix's “devilish spirit of rivalry with the written word,” to appreciate that art by which he “translated” the literary word by means of visual images, “wrote his thoughts on a canvas” and “painted” them, in his many writings, on paper.¹⁴

For Delacroix, a work of literature is indiscreet, importunate, demanding one's undivided attention from first page to last for perhaps only a few outstanding ideas, unable to sustain the same degree of pleasure and interest throughout; a painting is more reserved, even more honest, presenting itself all at once, keeping one's attention through its immediate charm and not through a promise—often unfulfilled—of producing it. The writer's materials, words, are abstract but overwhelm by their abundance and proliferation; painting is more material but leaves more unsaid, and thus reaches further into the mind and soul of the individual viewer. Narrative literature obscures the whole in a mass of detail and thus weakens the effect of the art; more limited in time and space, painting privileges the ensemble, preserves its force, concentrates the effect, and thus ensures the aesthetic emotion that art is meant to provoke. Delacroix compares the act of reading to a visit to a picture gallery (30 December 1853; II, 416):¹⁵ the viewer of such a succession of individual paintings cannot sustain the same level of attention and interest, and perceives only a fraction of the total possible beauty.¹⁶ Delacroix thus counterpoises the duration of narrative and the instantaneity of the image; the temporal succession of words a reader must follow and the all-of-a-piece quality of a picture; the ongoing delay, or deferral, of pleasure and understanding in reading, and the sensation of presence, the reality, the here and now, of viewing; the conventional, limited, linear order of discourse and the infinitely more suggestive, less restrictive possibilities of color.

Behind Delacroix's stated theoretical preference for painting, however, stands the Journal itself, an effort to explore his own impressions and thoughts through the allegedly inferior medium of words. Indeed if the Journal poses the problem of the relations between painting and literature, it also provides by its example a certain solution, bringing together the benefits of the one with those of the other. Delacroix's response, as we shall see, lies in a literary form having minimal temporality, no narrativity, and consisting of units at once discrete and interrelated. The relative brevity and autonomy of a journal entry are qualities traditionally associated with the image. The diary form removes from the metaphorical experience of the picture gallery, to which reading is compared, the inevitable cause of boredom and ennui, i.e., the ineluctable rule of succession. The Journal relies on a more complex pattern of relations among its entries, not subject to a single temporal movement nor dependent on one for their sense. As Delacroix conceives of it in both theory and practice, it accords the reader the freedom of the viewer of images: it may be taken up and put down at will, dipped into at any moment regardless of the intervening entries; the entries may be confronted, compared, and contrasted in innumerable combinations; it leaves one at liberty to choose as many standpoints as one may wish, and indeed imposes this multiple perspective by its numerous cross-references and anachronistic insertions. The only temporal organization is the conventional one of the calendar, bounded by the subject's death—a temporality without narrativity, without causality, and with no restrictions but the end of life itself. The Journal thus allows within the temporal duration of discourse the instantaneity of the visual image, and within the domain of fleeting time the simultaneity otherwise denied to the human mind. It is a painter's writing, outside the discursive tradition, disavowing the prominence of that tradition in painting itself. It is a writing which has the qualities of painting, and, as I shall argue, of Delacroix's painting in particular, thus countering the long critical tradition which makes his writing in every way the inverse of his pictorial art.¹⁷

The Journal does not merely realize a “pictorial” aesthetic in language, however, but represents Delacroix's conception of the pictorial itself. Against the classic notion of the image as static, intended to be seen from a single perspective and according to a single design, the Journal suggests a more variable notion, consistent with what he considered the inherent fullness and freedom of the image: a more complex system linking one scene to another, part to whole, accessory to principal images; and a freer conception of the viewer's perspective. Its rejection of literary narrative as exclusive, unambiguous, limited, and univocal suggests a concept of narrative painting that would avoid these defects. His works may thus be read not as linear, teleological narratives, but as networks of interconnected, ambiguous, and even contradictory relations, thus preserving—or asserting—the variety and complexity of the subject that he expressly considered one of painting's chief benefits. The most interesting writing for him, indeed his acknowledged literary model, was Montaigne's Essais, “the moving picture of a human imagination”¹⁸—a pictorial writing, as the metaphor attests, having the mobility of the Journal's. Thus can the pictorial incorporate the temporal, defined in the irregular, free, and even repetitive manner of the diary. The traditional struggle against time—the effort to preserve a fleeting experience that belongs to the rhetoric of both painting and the diary as a genre—becomes through the Journal and, as I shall argue, his paintings too, an effort to incorporate time within painting, reconcile the temporality of literature with the instantaneity of the visual arts, and thus escape time's worst devastation: not death, but too much time, time without value, ennui.¹⁹

“The terrible enemy,” ennui is the shadow of death within the life of mankind, threatening human existence at every moment.²⁰ The Journal is haunted by it as Delacroix seeks ever to conjure it. “All my life I have found time too long”:²¹ennui is the ongoing menace to life, a languor all too natural which grips us at every moment, and prevents tranquillity, contentment, and happiness. “I have never been able to fill my days as I see so many people do who do not even give themselves the time to eat and breathe. … Although I only do things which I enjoy, they do not manage to occupy all my moments, and ennui often slips into the intervals.”²²Ennui is a kind of illness, a monster, an “indifference” and “torpor.”²³ It is the opposite, or absence, of pleasure and charm, those two effects which it is the business of painting to produce.²⁴ It is also a distinctly modern problem, linked to modernity's obsession with saving time: “we are marching toward that happy time when space will have been abolished but not ennui, considering the ever-increasing necessity of filling up the hours which used to be occupied, at least in part, by coming and going” (27 August 1854; II, 244). Modern inventions all have this purpose: machines which relieve the farmer of work increase the burden of time; the dazzling rapidity of the railway negates the benefit that travel should have, that is, drawing us out of ennui by making us see other places and peoples (6 June 1856; II, 453). The only antidote to it, and thus the sole source of true pleasure, is work, and work defined as “the mind constantly at work” (9 October 1853; II, 82), having ideas and seeking ways to produce them. “The secret of not having ennui, for me at least, is to have ideas. Thus I can never look too hard for ways of giving birth to them” (14 July 1850; I, 385).

All Delacroix's creative activity shares this premise and purpose: “Work is as always my protection against ennui.”²⁵ Without work, the human machine ceases to function;²⁶ when in June of 1863 his illness prevents him from working and abandons him to ennui, death is only two months away.²⁷ For the painter, the self-renewal necessitated by the stifling action of ennui may be had “by taking up one's brushes and canvases again” (10 October 1855; II, 402). And for the painter-diarist, such self-renewal may also be had through writing the diary: “I eagerly seize every occasion to occupy my mind, even by speaking about that ennui which I seek to ward off” (11 August 1854; II, 242).²⁸ Indeed, the Journal represents especially well the ongoing, periodic, ever-renewed activity of the mind that staves off ennui, as the writing, in a sense, staves off the death that lies at its boundary; at the same time it fulfills the precious role of producing ideas, “food for thought,” the most necessary sustenance: “I feed on the memory of my own feelings” (24 March 1855; II, 320). After one session of writing in the diary, he remarks: “The nourishment which [the mind] requires is more necessary to my life than that which my body needs” (14 July 1850; I, 385). The traditional product of idleness and leisure, the diary here becomes the record and example of work in Delacroix's sense, a work like painting, in which the mind is freed from the domination of time, from an anxiety about time, reversing the corrosive action of time by giving it value: “The purpose of work is not only to produce, it is to give value to time” (19 August 1858; III, 212).

Delacroix's open rejection of literary discourse was a personal, but also polemical gesture, for it went against some of the deepest currents of the Western pictorial tradition, and of the philosophical and cultural systems of which they were part.²⁹ The history of art criticism and of the theory of painting from at least the Renaissance onward, formalized especially in the doctrines and curricula of the French Academy, demonstrate everywhere the prominence of the literary: not simply in their constant application of literary criteria from tragedy, epic, and rhetoric, but more important, in their emphasis on narrative as the means of achieving the ends of painting—themselves drawn from literature—to please and instruct.³⁰ Delacroix's treatment of the subject should be seen against this background. From ancient theories of rhetoric (notably Cicero and Quintilian) and treatises on poetry (Horace and, as a later discovery, Aristotle), the humanist writers on painting derived a vocabulary and a system adaptable to a different art. In the great effort of codifying knowledge which characterized the Renaissance, poetry and rhetoric became models for representation in general, which, with allowances made for differences of medium, could apply to the other arts as well, a semiotic system valid for all.³¹ While some theorists maintained the distinctions between writing and painting, the tradition which came to dominate through the Academy sought to appropriate for painting the cultural status of literature: its claims to truth and ideality, and its association with rationality.³²

The keystone of this system was the Aristotelian conception of art as the representation of human action and the primary importance of plot, the working out of the action, in his theory of poetry.³³ Art theory concentrated on overcoming the contradiction of “narrative painting,” simulating succession in an instantaneous art, repressing the full presence of painting to feign the serial character of writing. The painting/literature analogy was used to affirm the values of neoclassical aesthetics within the context of an absolute monarchy which officially sponsored its adherents:³⁴ painting, like poetry, should represent human action by taking the form of narrative history painting, that privileged category in the hierarchy of genres. Such action implied progression and succession, a beginning, middle, and end like an Aristotelian plot, an exposition and a “dénouement,” a temporal sequence to be rendered through pictorial disposition.³⁵ It is the historia of the early theorists, the narrative treatment of the subject; for Alberti it is the chief business of the painter, to be achieved through a pictorial rhetoric which, on the model of Ciceronian rhetoric, would please, persuade, and move the viewer.³⁶ The analogy with rhetoric could also ensure instruction: the educative aims of painting depended on a certain progression of the argument, leading the viewer through a logical and rational series of cumulative steps to a final conclusion. Hence the ascendancy of “narrative” line (likened to plot) over “pictorial” color, particularly by the seventeenth century.³⁷ Color was considered a mere material, lacking expressive power of its own; line was linked with cognition and intelligibility.³⁸ As Le Brun argued, color depended on matter and was less noble than line, which comes from the mind alone.³⁹

For Dolce, whose highly influential dialogue on painting, the Aretino, Delacroix cites, the plan or plot of the composition constituted a pictorial version of literary inventio, both the choice of subject and the order and disposition of figures, which must be joined in a single and logical progression: “As for order, it is necessary that the artist move from one thing to another following the sequence of the narrative [historia] he has undertaken to paint, and with such propriety that the viewers judge that this action could not have happened other than as he depicted it.”⁴⁰ Seventeenth-century French theorists, notably Le Brun, insisted on this preeminence of “linear” plot. Painting had a rational order which a viewer would perceive through proceeding from one figure or group to another in a causal, if not purely “temporal” sequence, substituting for the passage of time as such a narrative and causal relation of images.⁴¹ The order was single and reasonable, unambiguous, stable, and controlled, leading to the main idea. Le Brun compared the painter who did not do this to a historian who does not conduct a narrative from beginning to end, but merely gives the conclusions.⁴² The painter should communicate a progressive action by substituting a plurality of incidents for the succession of words that characterizes poetry and arranging them so as to lead the viewer from one part of the work to another, as though the objects were presented successively in this order.⁴³ The linear progression was meant to correspond both to the single order of discursive language (as opposed to the multi-directedness of the image) and to the rationality and logicality of thought which language (notably French) was thought to represent.⁴⁴ The sequence of images in a painting should strive to be unambiguous and irreversible, like the syntactical progression of the non-declined French language, and the order of reason itself.

This literary conception of the pictorial had been challenged by Roger de Piles, whose emphasis on the visual nature of painting gained prominence in the Academy after 1699,⁴⁵ but it had been revived by the early nineteenth century through the historical, linear, neoclassical emphasis of the Academy and its secrétaire-perpétuel, Quatremère de Quincy; it still held in Delacroix's time.⁴⁶ The Journal's distinctions undermine literary notions of legibility and intelligibility, and in doing so define the purposes of painting differently. No longer patterned on a narrative model in which the viewer follows, to use Delacroix's metaphor, a fixed and single discursive “route,” painting presents, rather, a “panoramic” variety of choices and alternatives. Moreover, this is not simply Lessing's “pregnant moment,” pointing ahead to what will happen: Delacroix takes advantage of what he considers the inclusiveness inherent in the image, to open up the pictorial narrative, suggest its tensions and ambiguities.⁴⁷ This does not mean that he abandons a guiding pictorial syntax: intelligibility and simplicity had positive aesthetic value for him. Rather, he multiples the syntax, calling attention to the different ways in which the subject may, and indeed should, be interpreted, bringing out the complexities and contradictions within the subject itself, or suggesting the dramatic uncertainty of the outcome. Painting thus refuses any desire for uncomplicated meanings and neat explanations, any tendency to blindness and self-delusion, the simplistic vision which he so scathingly criticizes in his comments on politics and society; it highlights the multiple points of view which historical narrative, presenting itself as objective and true, unmarked by contingency or conditionality, theoretically seeks to suppress.⁴⁸ Instead, it imposes a more extensive, expansive vision: different perceptions of one same object, or different conceptions of a given event.⁴⁹ For Delacroix, the purpose of a work of art is not to state a single message but to provoke thought.⁵⁰ It calls into question our understanding of the world, and indeed our mode of understanding itself, offering alternative possibilities to the very message it might seem to convey.

Delacroix was not only a “literary” painter, but an important writer on painting, indeed the only major painter of the nineteenth century to write significantly on the arts. In his notes for a projected treatise on the fine arts, the Dictionnaire des Beaux-Arts, we encounter the same aesthetic that governs the Journal. (The work was never completed, but the material of the diary was recycled into it; for much of 1857, in particular, the Journal is the Dictionnaire.) As with the diary, he was aware of the generic choices available and was deeply concerned with the form his treatise should take. These issues are discussed at length as he drafts the introduction and many of the dictionary's entries. He opts for the form of the dictionary because of its fragmentation, freedom, inclusiveness, and variety, as opposed to a narrative line, methodical organization, consistency, and rigid systematization, precisely the same terms by which he distinguished painting from literature, diary from autobiography. And it shares the diary's purposes: it confers upon the reader a freedom from the constraints of time, and in a few short entries provides the material for a long and fruitful meditation (16 January 1860; III, 252), an abundant stock of armaments against the “terrible enemy,” materials for the “face of steel” to put up to ennui.⁵¹

To some extent the stockpile consists, as in all autobiographical writing, in memory: “I reopen in my memory a book in which many chapters are already closed, and I find delightful moments in it”:⁵² the cliché of memory as a storehouse for the artist's thoughts and experiences, and of the work at hand, too, as a record and repository of those, informs the autobiographical tradition in its various guises from Saint Augustine onward. Delacroix too regards the Journal as an extension of, even a substitute for, his faulty memory, a means of preserving thoughts, sensations, and experiences which his memory would betray, desert, or abandon to the oblivion brought about by time: “It seems to me that these little trifles, written on the wing, are all that I have left of my life, as it goes by. My faulty memory makes them necessary to me” (11 March 1854; II, 147). But if the Journal, as I argue, liberates the reader from the limiting progress of time within the bounds of life, allowing a freer, more variable temporality, an instantaneity and simultaneity, the first reader to benefit is the diarist-reader himself. Indeed Delacroix's notion of time reflects the peculiar temporality of the Journal: the past preserved in it is not a fixed, dead entity, buried in the memory, or in the text, as in a tomb, to be unearthed like some ancient skeleton, in keeping with a certain strain of Romanticism.⁵³ The past, rather, is ever alive, always at hand to enrich and qualify the present: hence he rereads his old diaries, copies bits of one entry into another, inserts pages from a different date, intercalates a comment from a later time, and so on; similarly, the Dictionnaire des Beaux-Arts begins like a retrospective of the Journal, nearly every heading containing at least one reference to a diary entry of some other date. Delacroix approaches his past—the memories recorded in the Journal—as he does any other text, to be read and reread, and thus reactivated: for as the diary attests on page after page, reading is the occasion for relating a work to oneself, making it live again through the life of the reading subject, and conversely, redefining the subject through it. The long passages copied out of countless literary, historical, and philosophical works, and “ephemeral” newspapers and periodicals, reflect the situation of the reader-Delacroix himself in one way or another, are reborn into the present in which he reads them and applies them to his own life; in turn, they qualify that life, the subject's very present. “One should always read with pen in hand. There is not a day that goes by, that I do not find in the most worthless newspaper something interesting to note down” (12 May 1857; III, 97). And the process is ongoing: “Not only can I find in the writings of others the material for new writings interesting to my own point of view, but the very account that I have myself just produced I will do in twenty different ways” (23 August 1850; I, 414). Indeed, the past recorded in the Journal is ever material for renewal and reusage, the memories returned to, reconsidered, and integrated into the now; writing takes on the time of the visual arts, the present.⁵⁴

In the cultural terms of Delacroix's age, the rejection of literary narrative to which his writings and paintings bear witness reflects a refusal of the dominant nineteenth-century notion of time and history, the ideology of progress. His well-known hatred of progress, attested repeatedly in the Journal, may thus be due not only to the effects of industrialization and democratization, as is usually argued, but also to the notion of time that progress assumes. A progressive conception of history presupposes a narrativized time, in which the past is recounted, and indeed defined, in view of a particular end, and as leading causally toward it. Unlike the interconnected, multi-directed patterns of the Journal's entries, such a conception does not allow the past to live in the present but confines it to the tomb. As Leonardo maintained before him, writing depends on death, the extinction of its successive parts.⁵⁵ In the terms of the painting-literature dichotomy, progress allows for no simultaneity and no “panoramic” multiplicity, but has the false teleological quality of narrative, the exclusive linearity of writing, taking humanity not to its apotheosis, as was promised, but to the “intolerable void” of ennui, or, even, as the political events of his time sometimes made him believe, to barbarism. The aesthetic of the Journal is consistent, as we shall see, with Delacroix's philosophy of time, history, and experience as non-progressive, non-teleological, not linked in any causal relation, but rather haphazard and unpredictable, ever subject to reversal or even annihilation. “Mankind always begins everything anew even in his own life. He can mark no progress” (4 April 1849; I, 280): human time is marked not by progress but, for better or worse, by change, as the oft-noted maxim from Job suggests, “nil in eodem statu permanet”.⁵⁶

The consequences of Delacroix's conception of time are worked out in the Journal itself, in the great mobility and fluctuation of the self within the repetitive, periodic movement of the day to day, in the discontinuity of the entries within the rich network of recurring motifs and deliberate cross-references, in the pictorial aesthetic by which a painting or an entry is familiar and yet new each time one views it again, in the effect of simultaneity created within the temporal domain of diachronic discourse. Through its essential difference from painting, writing may have provided a space in which to explore this aesthetic and to elaborate a highly original practice. The experience is not without parallel in Delacroix's career. Just as, in his view, he could best realize the potential of his art by taking as his subjects works from foreign literatures;⁵⁷ just as his conception of light, color, and form would be transformed by his voyage to Morocco; just as he would “cease seeing with the eyes of others” through an experience brutally disruptive to vision itself, photography: so, by its liberating separateness, writing became the space of reflection, and perhaps even transformation, for painting.

The following pages will examine this aesthetic and its implications in Delacroix's diary, painting, and writing on art, so as to focus attention on what was for him a central, almost obsessive, and certainly lifelong, concern: the relation of pictorial to literary as forms of expression and modes of thought. To do so is to suggest as well this painter's confrontation with a major aspect of his era, his challenge to the dominance of narrative in institutions of the nineteenth century—its conceptions of history, its social philosophies, and its primary art form, the novel. From among his paintings, I have chosen to concentrate primarily on his decorative cycles or series, for they are the most explicitly “narrative” of his works, and thus represent the most striking cases of his innovative approach, consistent with the aesthetic of the Journal.⁵⁸ Moreover, as public decorations they suggest the wider dimensions of this aesthetic. It is indeed in monumental painting that the great narratives of the nineteenth century—the evolution of history and humanity—were interpreted: in Chenavard's Panthéon, Ziegler's Madeleine, Henri Lehmann's Galerie des Fêtes (now destroyed) in the Hôtel de Ville.⁵⁹ Delacroix believed that monumental painting should reflect the highest ideals of the nation, not by repeating and confirming those most current, but by recalling its viewers to a more comprehensive view, a self-critical consideration of their values, assumptions, and place within history. In a passage which he quoted from Ludovic Vitet and underlined in the diary, he acknowledges explicitly the function of art to jolt us out of customary habits of thought, “confound our judgment,” thwart our traditions, throw the anticipated narrative off course: “The property of true masterpieces is to cause these kinds of surprises. They catch us unawares, disturb us in our routine admirations; … thus they make us see in a new way, and reduce to a lower level, everything which reigned supreme before them” (3 February 1860; III, 262).⁶⁰

The crisis in the relations between text and image provoked by Romantic theory—the complete division and irreconcilability of the two—was not so much resolved by Delacroix as pushed to its limits; the result was a text that proposed, in its very form, a particular concept of the pictorial as it incorporated the qualities of the pictorial itself. The Journal works out a pictorial language in the literal, and not merely metaphorical, sense, a language consistent with many of the features of Delacroix's art. It represents a kind of writing and reading equivalent to a kind of painting and viewing, and to a kind of reflection on painting (the Dictionnaire des Beaux-Arts) as well. And in so doing, it identifies and formulates a major current of nineteenth-century art and thought, running through some of the most innovative works of the century.

“Where have I seen that there are animals … which, cut up into pieces, make as many separate creatures, each having its own existence, as there are fragments?” (5 August 1854; II, 227). Delacroix's observation on nature confirms the wholeness and autonomy of not only the partie, but also the pensée, détachée, the “dismembered” writing of the Journal. The next work of any significance to do likewise, and in strikingly similar terms, describing both a new concept of art and a new method of reading, appeared in 1862:

My dear friend, I send you a little work of which it cannot be said, without being unfair, that it has neither head nor tail, since everything in it, on the contrary, is at once head and tail, alternately and reciprocally. … We can cut wherever we like, I my reverie, you the manuscript, the reader his reading; for I do not hang the reader's restive will on the interminable thread of some superfluous plot. Remove one vertebra, and the two pieces of this tortuous fantasy will join up effortlessly. Chop it up into numerous fragments, and you will see that each portion can exist separately. In the hope that some of these pieces will be lively enough to please and amuse you, I dare to dedicate to you the entire serpent.⁶¹

This variable, protean work, as its prologue tells us, “with neither head nor tail,” dismembered like Delacroix's ideal writing; able to be read in any order, not forcing the reader to follow the “interminable thread” of a plot, and in which the whole may be carved up and reshaped at will; this truncated serpent, like his truncated animals, in which each part is a whole in itself, is not a diary, nor a dictionary, nor a cycle of paintings, but a collection of prose poems, a landmark in the history of modernity, Baudelaire's Le Spleen de Paris.

.....

A LANGUAGE FOR PAINTING: THE DICTIONNAIRE DES BEAUX-ARTS

In his 1863 essay on Delacroix, Baudelaire defined the peculiar contradiction between the classicism, prudence, and “moderation” of this painter's style of writing, and the suddenness, turbulence, and violence of his art—a distinction noted frequently at the time, and which has persisted to this day.⁶² Baudelaire's examples included the various articles which Delacroix had published over the course of his career, from early essays on Lawrence, Raphael, and Michelangelo (1829-30) to the late one on Charlet (1862).⁶³ But concurrently with these, Delacroix conceived of a more ambitious and innovative critical project, a treatise on the fine arts, which he never completed but which he drafted substantially in the later Journal, especially from 1857 onward.⁶⁴ This, the Dictionnaire des Beaux-Arts, represented a highly experimental and original kind of writing about art, a criticism reflecting the concerns and techniques which, as I have argued, inform both the diary and the conception of painting related to it.⁶⁵ The conventional art-critical problem of verbalizing the visual, accounting for the workings and effects of one medium through another and, in Delacroix's view, radically different one,⁶⁶ is treated in a way unique in the history of nineteenth-century art writing. Delacroix was well suited to the task: not since Joshua Reynolds had a painter of such stature produced such a serious body of writings on art, and not until much later would painters like Matisse, Signac, Denis and others begin to write publicly; in the French tradition, there was no comparable precedent at all. As with the Journal, Delacroix theorizes and puts into practice a writing which incorporates the benefits of the image within the domain of time—a writing about the image, not based on the superiority of writing over the image which discursive criticism implies,⁶⁷ but rather proper to painting itself.

In this, his most extensive literary project, Delacroix might have used as a half-serious, half-comical epigraph the line quoted and underlined (without comment) from David Copperfield in July 1857: “I never thought, when I used to read books, what work it was to write them” (24 July; III, 111). Indeed, in the myriad reflections on the composition of the Dictionnaire which fill the pages of the Journal, one encounters all the major issues of the painting-writing debate as Delacroix conceived of it. He specifically sought a form which would avoid the progression, singleness, and false consistency of narrative, its successive “chain” or thread (13 January 1857; III, 26), and would instead approach the essayistic freedom, flexibility, and looseness, the “fits and starts” of his model, Montaigne.

After the work that the author put in to follow the thread of the idea, incubate it, develop it in all its parts, there is also the work of the reader who, having opened a book to relax, finds himself unwittingly caught up, almost as a matter of honor, in deciphering, understanding, and retaining what he would be only too happy to forget, so that at the end of his enterprise he might have followed with profit all the routes that it pleased the author to make him follow.

(7 May 1850; I, 363)⁶⁸

Accordingly, he considered using the title Essais (11 January 1857; III, 9). Such a work would proceed without transitions, hierarchy, or semantic order, an approach motivated specifically, as he suggests, by the painterly vision of the author:

One sees a picture all at once, at least in its ensemble and its principal parts. For a painter accustomed to this kind of impression, so favorable to the comprehension of a work, a book is like an edifice … in which, once inside, he must give equal attention in succession to the different rooms of which the monument he is visiting is composed, without forgetting those he left behind, and not without seeking in advance, in what he already knows, what his impression will be at the end of the tour.

(13 January 1857; III, 26)

A conventional treatise—methodical, systematizing, and categorical—is for him both false and useless, unfaithful to the changing point of view and the varying opinions of any single intelligence:

To write treatises on the arts as an expert, to divide up, treat methodically, summarize, make systems to instruct categorically: all that is a mistake, wasted time, an idea false and useless. The most capable man can only do for others what he does for himself, that is, to note and observe as nature offers him objects of interest. With such a man, the points of view change at each moment; his opinions are necessarily modified; one never knows a master sufficiently to speak of him in absolute and definitive terms.

(1 November 1852; I, 496)

Delacroix aims, rather, for a more spontaneous, if less orderly, writing, tentative and profuse, rich in suggestion, containing multiple and even contradictory perspectives: “Let a talented man, who wishes to set down his thoughts on the arts, pour them out as they come to him; let him not be afraid of contradicting himself; there will be more fruit to be had amid the profusion of his ideas, even if contradictory, than in the thread—combed, tightened, and cut—of a work in which the form will have preoccupied him” (1 November 1852; I, 496).⁶⁹

For this purpose, he considers writing a dialogue or a correspondence, to allow for maximum variety, contrast, and contradiction, “the two sides of life”: “Dialogues would allow great freedom, language in the first person, easy transitions, contradictions, etc.” (25 January 1857; III, 43). Elsewhere he conceived of some dialogues on painting in similar terms: “This form, although old, is perhaps the best to avoid monotony and give piquancy. Also permits suspensions, reflections of all kinds, descriptions, allusions to the most varied things; it can also serve by the contrast of the characters of the interlocutors” (Supplement; III, 430).⁷⁰ A series of letters would do likewise, permitting a more disrupted progression of topics, and a freedom approaching idiosyncracy in the treatment of them: “The form of letters would be the best. One passes from one subject to another without transition; one is not forced into developments. A letter can be as short and as long as one likes” (9 December 1853; II, 129).⁷¹ He notes specifically the epistolary form of Senancour's Obermann, one of his favorite readings, cited extensively in 1857: “The manner of Obermann.—Letters on all kinds of subjects” (25 January 1857; III, 43). Indeed Senancour insists in his Preface on the non-narrative, irregular character of his work: “These letters are not a novel. There is no dramatic movement, no plot prepared and carried through, no dénouement.”⁷² The protagonist himself reaffirms the importance of what he calls an “epistolary freedom” within the novel: “If you absolutely wish that I come back to my first point by a transition within the rules, you will put me in great difficulty.”⁷³ Like Delacroix, Senancour defends the repetitions occasioned by the epistolary form (“but if the things are good, why carefully avoid coming back to them?”),⁷⁴ as well as its contradictions: “But why would one be shocked to see, in matters of uncertainty, the for and against said by the same man … The sincere man says to you: ‘I felt like this, I felt like that.”⁷⁵Obermann places itself in the lineage of Montaigne, as being not a belabored, well-wrought work, but rather “the free and incorrect sensations, opinions, and dreams of a man often isolated, who writes in private, and not for his bookseller.”⁷⁶ This ideal of a small fragment of thought drawn from his mind at will dominates in all Delacroix's reflections on writing about art, for which Addison's Spectator provided yet another model: “All I do is dream about a work in the manner of the Spectator: a short article of three or four pages, and fewer still, on the first subject that comes along” (8 May 1853; II, 39).

Perhaps the decisive justification for the Dictionnaire's form, however, came from this remark of Montesquieu's, noted and underlined in 1855: “A man who writes well does not write as one writes, but as he writes, that is, as he thinks” (17 July 1855; II, 359). Indeed the Journal itself, Delacroix's own pensées détachées, would provide the model for his writing on art. Through the separateness and discontinuity of its articles, the dictionary approximates most closely the form of the diary, and allows for the variety, freedom, and mobility of the mind in its relation to objects of thought: “Do a Dictionary of the arts and of painting: convenient theme. Separate effort for each article” (10 October 1853; II, 83). In contrast to a “real” book, which “links together, deduces the principles, develops, sums up,” a dictionary consists of distinct entries joined by no narrative chain and no transition from one to the next;⁷⁷ like the diary, “it does not oblige the panting reader to follow it in its course and its developments” (16 January 1860; III, 251-52). The medium most “opposed to rhetoric,” it follows a purely conventional order, that of the alphabet, as the diary follows, for convenience, the calendar, unlike the hierarchical “monument” or “edifice” that is a conventional treatise.⁷⁸ It constitutes a tissue of interconnected and cross-referenced themes and ideas;⁷⁹ it allows for the full complexity of the subject and does not attempt to suppress whatever repetition or contradiction may arise from this. Its entries may be compared and contrasted at will, reordered and reshuffled like a deck of cards, for as many points of view.⁸⁰ It has the liveliness of immediate impressions, the concentration of effect characteristic of the visual image. It releases the author from the necessity of consistency and removes the taboo of contradiction, allowing instead the variation proper to the imagination. The repetition it occasions is a form of creation, the subject provoking new thoughts and new sensations at each recurrence, as a painting inspires new ideas and pleasures each time one returns to it: “This form must bring about repetitions, etc. So much the better! the same things said over again in another way often have … etc.” (13 January 1857; III, 28). It is meant not to fix meanings, but to explore them, thus providing the endless source of thought that was for Delacroix the purpose of art itself: “One picks it up or puts it down; one opens it at random, and it is not impossible to find in it, through reading just a few fragments, the occasion for a long and fruitful meditation” (16 January 1860; III, 252).

But this is not the encyclopedic ideal dictionary of the nineteenth century, encompassing the whole of human knowledge within its covers. On the contrary, for Delacroix, the ideal of completeness is impossible; the dictionary as he conceives it carries everywhere the mark of contingency, subjectivity, and suppression (16 January 1860; III, 251-52), its material determined almost haphazardly, even lackadaisically, “at the inclination of the author's disposition, sometimes of his laziness” (13 January 1857; III, 26). He acknowledges the incongruity between the totalizing connotations of the title, and the incompleteness and relativism of the work: “This title would really be appropriate only to a book as complete as possible. … Would it be possible for one man alone to be endowed with the learning indispensable to such a task? Undoubtedly not” (13 January 1857; III, 25). The notes and drafts for the Preface emphasize this subjectivity and limitation:

The title of “dictionary” is very ambitious for a work sprung from the head of a single person and including only as much knowledge as it is possible for one man to encompass. If one adds to that the fact that his knowledge is far from being complete and is even very insufficient …

The drawback to such a work done by a single person is in the necessary limitations of the mind and knowledge of that person; it is in that drawback that a work like this one would deviate from the true principle of a dictionary, which is to give all the information it is possible to have on a given matter, at the moment the work is published. Certainly, no man can embrace the whole of art; it is thus possible, indeed it is almost certain, that his ideas do not maintain, in matters of this kind, a stability which is not a feature of the intelligence of a single person.⁸¹

Thus he everywhere insists on the dictionary as a personal account, the product of a single mind, and of the restricted knowledge and experience of an individual:

Therefore one can contest the title of “dictionary” … One will call it … the collection of ideas that one man alone could have on an art, or on the arts in general, during a fairly long career. …

This little collection is the work of one person alone, who has spent his whole life involved with painting. He can therefore only claim to shed on each object the little bit of light that he has been able to acquire, and still he will only be giving information that is wholly personal to him. … The most universal man is still very limited, if not in ability, at least in knowledge.⁸²

But if such a dictionary does not fulfill the requirements of a “true” one, it also avoids the flaws of this, notably its tendency to become a compilation of mediocrities, banalities, and commonplaces, “a collection of the theories and practices in circulation,” a summary of “everybody's ideas on the subject,”⁸³ a Flaubertian Dictionnaire des idées reçues, “avant la lettre,” lacking the spontaneity and freshness which have the power to interest and persuade.⁸⁴ The evolution of the encyclopedic dictionary from the firm ideological stances taken by Diderot's and d'Alembert's, to the pretension to impartiality claimed by nineteenth-century examples, confirms Delacroix's point. For him, originality is the fruit of a single intelligence, “having ideas of its own.”⁸⁵ Only a collection of separate, competing dictionaries, in disagreement with one another, unharmonized and unhomogenized, could begin to approach the scope of the ideal of this genre:

Men of genius doing a dictionary would not agree among themselves: on the other hand, if you had from each of them a collection of their particular observations, what a dictionary one could compose with such material.

(13 January 1857; III, 28)

A dictionary of this kind … would be the best possible if it were the work of several men of talent, but on condition that each of them dealt with his subject without the participation of his colleagues. Done in common, it would fall into banality … Each article, amended by each of the collaborators, would lose its originality, to take on … a banal unity.

(16 January 1860; III, 249)

To a certain extent, the model for such a critical project as Delacroix envisaged came from the past. In considering the idea of a dialogue, he notes the antiquity of the form, of which the history of art criticism indeed contains numerous illustrious examples.⁸⁶ He read Dolce's Aretino, for example, and quotes it in the Journal,⁸⁷ notably its discussion of Titian and its affirmation of the superior power of painting to attract interest. This dialogue in fact provides a notable example of the possibilities of the genre that Delacroix mentions, for it is less exclusively expository than it may at first seem: despite the apparent dominance of Aretino, the contrasting views of his interlocutor, Fabrini, are stated repeatedly; and even when Fabrini's position is refuted, Aretino's does not take priority, despite his claim that it will “conclusively” do so, but a balance is reached instead. For instance, Aretino argues throughout for the superiority of Titian over Raphael and Fabrini's favorite, Michelangelo; but the conclusion is that “three obtain pride of place—namely, Michelangelo, Raphael, and Titian.”⁸⁸ Perhaps more important, the dialogue affirms its incompleteness and provisionality by occasionally raising issues which are not discussed, thus indicating the gaps and holes in its own argument. In a discussion of the care that painters of antiquity took with color, Aretino tells the famous story of Protogenes, who, frustrated at his inability to represent the foam at the mouth of a panting horse, throws at his picture the sponge on which he had wiped his brushes, and inadvertently creates the effect perfectly. Fabrini justifiably remarks, however, that it is chance, rather than the painter's skill or care, which deserves praise. But Aretino passes over this potentially damaging point without comment.⁸⁹ The dialogue thus reveals what his theory does not take into account.

The precedents from Delacroix's cherished eighteenth century were even more important. Diderot's Pensées détachées sur la peinture of 1776-77 have the same fragmentary character that Delacroix sought for his own work, including maxim-like extracts and bits of dialogue.⁹⁰ (Delacroix frequently alluded to his critical ideal as “pensées détachées.”)⁹¹ Moreover the stupendous prominence of the encyclopedic dictionary—a veritable mania, as the Preface to the Encyclopédie itself laments—provided Delacroix with numerous examples of a critical, formal, and epistemological approach in keeping with his own aims. He mentions specifically the Dictionnaire historique of Pierre Bayle (1697), consisting of commentary and philosophical digression in addition to the text “proper”: “He would be an ill-inspired man who saw in the dictionary of Bayle, for example, nothing more than compilations. It relieves the mind which has so much trouble engaging itself in long developments, following them with suitable attention or classifying and dividing up the material” (16 January 1860; III, 252).⁹² Like Delacroix, Bayle notes explicitly the unpolished style of his work, and his conception of it as a collection of useful materials to which others can give form, in which each reader may find something of particular interest.⁹³ Delacroix's emphasis on the advantages of discontinuity and the suggestive potential of the dictionary is also echoed in Voltaire's Dictionnaire philosophique, which he cites repeatedly. As Voltaire states in the Preface:

This book does not require a sustained reading; rather, at whatever place it is opened, one finds matter for reflection. The most useful books are those whose readers themselves do half the work; they extend the thoughts which are presented to them in bud; they correct what seems to them faulty, they strengthen by their reflections whatever appears weak.⁹⁴

This ideal is inherent in the dictionary as a form, a result of the non-narrative, and specifically alphabetical, order; even the Encyclopédie bears witness to it. Indeed, into the grand conceptual design of the genealogical “tree” inspired by Bacon, which established the relative place of each art or science and traced its derivation from the main branches of history, philosophy, and poetry, the alphabetical arrangement of articles injected a radically destabilizing element.⁹⁵ Adopted ostensibly for the convenience and ease of the reader, and to avoid repetition,⁹⁶ it in fact disrupted the systematic, organic order of the conception. This problem was acknowledged by Diderot himself: “If one objects to us that the alphabetical order will destroy the unity of our system of human knowledge, we will respond that, this unity consisting less in the arrangement of the material than in the relations within the material, nothing can annihilate it.”⁹⁷ Indeed, as Sylvain Auroux has argued, the alphabetical arrangement of articles exploded the unity of the more traditional thematic classification, broke the alleged relationship between the hierarchized organization of the world and the organization of knowledge.⁹⁸ Diderot's uneasiness with the very concept of an encyclopedic system has been studied by Jacques Proust.⁹⁹ In both the Prospectus and the article “Encyclopédie” written five years later, Diderot emphasized the arbitrary and incomplete nature of the “system,” and insisted on its necessary openness: “One will find us always disposed to acknowledge our inadequacy, and to take advantage of the enlightenment which is offered us. We will receive it with gratitude … ; so convinced are we that the final perfecting of an encyclopedia is the work of centuries.”¹⁰⁰

Even in putting forward the notion of the “tree of knowledge,” he had called attention to its arbitrariness:

This tree of human knowledge could be formed in several ways … But the difficulty was all the greater in that there was more of the arbitrary. And how should there not be? Nature only offers us particular things, infinite and with no fixed or determined division … And on this sea of objects which surrounds us, if there appear some which, like tips of rocks, seem to pierce the surface and dominate the others, they owe this advantage only to particular systems, to vague conventions, and to certain events foreign both to the physical arrangement of beings and to the true institutions of philosophy.¹⁰¹

In fact, only the alphabetical order—non-hierarchical and non-signifying—could take account of Diderot's increasing epistemological doubt about the whole enterprise, as Proust has traced it: a sense of the impossibility of ordering knowledge in a fixed way, notably a linguistic one.¹⁰² Diderot became convinced of the interdependence and interrelatedness of things, and thus of the necessity of a more flexible system in which they hold varying “places” and are considered from different perspectives. In the article “Encyclopédie,” he wrote explicitly that the work's form corresponded to a new conception of knowledge, one which considered the world through an infinity of points of view and recognized equally the infinite number of systems by which it might be approached.¹⁰³ The cross references were meant to affirm an encyclopedic cohesion among the different articles, which the alphabetical order had ostensibly shattered;¹⁰⁴ but such a cohesion was multiform, rather than the hierarchical order of a thematic arrangement. Indeed, in the article “Encyclopédie”, the renvois acquire a more disruptive role of opposition, contrast, and confrontation, exposing the falsity of another idea: “They will attack, shake, overturn secretly some ridiculous opinions which one would not dare to insult openly … they will always have the dual function of confirming and refuting, unsettling and conciliating.”¹⁰⁵ They can even have a creative dimension, making connections which “would lead to new speculative truths, or to the perfecting of the known arts, or to the invention of new arts, or to the restoration of lost ancient arts.”¹⁰⁶

The connection between Diderot's more flexible system and the famous “Promenade Vernet” section of the Salon de 1767, analyzed by Jacques Proust, is of capital importance: like Delacroix's Dictionnaire, Diderot's conception of the encyclopedia is related to a particular kind of pictorial art, and to a way of viewing that art. The ideal “system” (if one may call it such) follows the model of a Vernet landscape painting which, as his conceit of visiting the depicted site implies, is approached from within and from various directions, traversed to and fro, and observed from different angles. (Similarly, the cross references of the Encyclopédie had been described as “itineraries.”¹⁰⁷) This reflects his conception of pictorial unity: the eye “proceeds, goes deeply in, retraces its steps. Everything is connected, everything holds together.”¹⁰⁸ An object of knowledge becomes, as Proust puts it, an intricate “web of relations, within a complex and changing network from which even the observer is not separate,”¹⁰⁹ a complex built up through encyclopedic cross-referencing and, in Delacroix's case, an emphasis on the possible contradictions and inconsistencies that may result. The kind of pictorial narrative which the Salon introduces, and the interpretative approach which that narrative demands, reflect the multiple network of the Encyclopédie's cross-references and interrelations in ways very similar to the connection between Delacroix's pictorial narrative and the Dictionnaire des Beaux-Arts. Both imply the conception of a more varied and multiple understanding, be it epistemological or hermeneutic, and a greater sense of the role of the subject in the changing nature of the object itself. …

Notes

1. The early diary runs from 1822 to 1824, the later one from 1847 until his death in 1863.

2. There are too many instances to list here, but as a sampling see 16 September 1849 (I, 308), 14 May 1850 (I, 366), 7 July 1850 (I, 376-7), 14 July 1850 (I, 385), 6 August 1850 (I, 400), 9 May 1853 (II, 40-43), 5 August 1854 (II, 227-28), 12 April 1860 (III, 289). The entry for Sunday, 16 September 1849, provides an interesting example. Noting that he took a delightful walk in the forest, he remarks simply: “I saw the ant hill about which I amused myself writing in my notebook” (I, 308). Subsequently, in the entry for 5 August 1854 (II, 227-28), he copies out the notebook's passage in its entirety: that single, terse sentence had replaced nearly two pages of text, on the repetition of forms in radically different phenomena in nature.

3. While the Journal's ideas have been freely and unproblematically applied to Delacroix's work, little attention has been paid to what is happening in the diary proper, and the concept of self and time it embodies. Jean-Pierre Guillerm's interesting essay deals with the Journal in its own right, but takes a broadly psychoanalytical approach and argues for the fundamental difference of its aesthetic from that of the paintings (Couleurs du noir. Le Journal de Delacroix). Alain Girard devotes a chapter to Delacroix's diary in Le Journal intime, 397-423. See also Anne Larue, “Byron et le crépuscule du “sujet” en peinture. Une Folie littéraire du jeune Delacroix,” in which the Journal is seen as intermediary between literature and painting (29).

4. “Délibération,” 16.

5. Cocheyras, “La Place du journal intime dans une typologie linguistique des formes littéraires,” 232.

6. This is not as evident from the available printed versions, which have omitted much material and reorganized numerous entries. My new edition restores the temporal and structural complexities of the original.

7. For example, “Le monde n'a pas été fait pour l'homme” (21 September 1854); “Sur Shakespeare” (25 March 1855); “Sur le beau et le vague. Obermann” (20 March 1857); “Jacob” (25 April 1857).

8. For example, a note on the title page of the 1855 diary indicates a discussion of the English school and the artist Janmot, to be found under 18 June; on the inside cover for 1860, he writes: “For Charlet see under 26 January.”

9. Histoire des artistes vivants français et étrangers; Eugène Delacroix: Documents nouveaux.

10. “Il y a nécessairement dans des notes de ce genre, écrites en courant, beaucoup de choses qu'on aimerait plus tard à n'y pas retrouver. Les détails vulgaires ne se laissent pas exprimer facilement, et il est naturel de craindre l'usage que l'on pourrait faire, dans un temps éloigné, de beaucoup de choses sans intérêt et écrites sans soin” (3 April 1858; III, 182).

11. Laokoon, 129. Delacroix read Lessing (pace Mras, Eugène Delacroix's Theory of Art, 28 n. 60) in the Vanderbourg translation of 1802, as a jotting in a notebook dating from around 1821 attests (Louvre, 1741, f. 43 verso). Another manuscript records the French title of Lessing's work: “Laokoon, ou bornes de la peinture et de la poésie, par Lessing” (photograph in B. N. Est., R111227). Lessing aimed to undermine the pictorial (or sculptural) literary ideal promulgated by Winckelmann and to reclaim for poetry its own sphere; but his distinctions also set the terms for the extraordinary interartistic practice that characterized Romantic aesthetics in France, as poets sought to appropriate within a temporal art the instantaneous, static, material qualities of the visual image. See David Scott, Pictorialist Poetics: Painting and the Visual Arts in Nineteenth-Century France. Cf. Anne-Marie Christin, “L'Ecrit et le visible: le dix-neuvième siècle français,” and “L'Espace et la lettre”; Martin Meisel, Representations: Narrative, Pictorial, and Theatrical Arts in Nineteenth-Century England; Elizabeth Abel, “Redefining the Sister Arts: Baudelaire's Response to the Art of Delacroix.” Roy Park, however, traces a hostility to pictorialism in some Romantic literary criticism, and calls attention to a transformation in the ut pictura poesis analogy (“Ut pictura poesis: The Nineteenth-Century Aftermath”).

12. Laokoon, 114; 129; 123; 59, 122. On Lessing's distinctions, see David Wellbery, Lessing's Laocoon: Semiotics and Aesthetics in the Age of Reason, 103.

13. E.g. Baudelaire, Exposition universelle de 1855, Oeuvres complètes II, 596. Cf. E. Véron, Les Artistes célèbres: Eugène Delacroix, 104; Théophile Gautier, “Eugène Delacroix,” in Histoire du romantisme, 205f.; and more recently, Philippe Berthier, who describes him as a painter “in perpetual dialogue with the world of writing” (“Des Images sur les mots, des mots sur les images: A propos de Baudelaire et Delacroix,” 905).

14. “L'Oeuvre et la vie d'Eugène Delacroix” (Oeuvres complètes II, 743, 746, 754).

15. The note was composed on 11 December 1855 but written into the entry of 30 December 1853, as pertinent to the issue of pictorial unity there discussed—the property of painting to be seen “all at once.” Cf. the note on the length of operas at 16 May 1857 (III, 101).

16. The analogy is traditional. Cf. Diderot, who sees the succession of moments in poetic description as comparable to a “longue galerie de peinture” (Pensées détachées sur la peinture, 774); also Lessing, Laokoon, 107, … For Watelet and Levesque, too many figures in a picture produce a fatigue like that of visiting a picture gallery: we want to see each and every one; we would like to stop at some but are attracted by others (Dictionnaire des arts de peinture, sculpture et gravure, article “Peinture,” IV, 140).

17. See … note [62].

18. “Le tableau mouvant d'une imagination humaine” (III, 447).

19. The problem was of central importance to Romanticism. Cf. Senancour's Obermann, one of Delacroix's favorite readings, cited frequently in the 1857 diary: “Quand la tête a été dérangée par l'imagination, l'observation, l'étude, par les dégoûts et les passions, par les habitudes, par la raison peut-être, croyez-vous que ce soit une chose facile d'avoir assez de temps, et surtout de n'en avoir jamais trop?” (Obermann II, 217, letter 88, my emphasis).

20. 11 August 1854 (II, 242, printed under the 25th; see following note), and 10 October 1855 (II, 402).

21. Composed on 25 August 1854, but written by Delacroix into the entry of 11 August, as relevant to the discussion of ennui there.

22. Letter copied in the Journal but omitted from earlier editions (6 December 1856), and printed, with some variants, in Corr. III, 346ff.

23. Ibid.; Corr. IV, 205, 327, 159; Journal 6 June 1856 (II, 453).

24. On the importance of charm, one of the most recurrent words in Delacroix's aesthetic vocabulary, see 1 October 1855 (II, 396). The emphasis on pleasure and charm as the purpose of painting is made by Dolce in his Aretino dialogue, which Delacroix knew well (Dolce's “Aretino” and Venetian Art Theory of the Cinquecento, ed. Mark Roskill, 149, 174); he copied out a passage from the work on the power of painting to attract and please the eye (25 August 1850; I, 414-15). He cites approvingly Poussin's definition of beauty as “delectation,” and also Voltaire's: beauty is that which causes pleasure and admiration to the soul and the senses (1 January 1857; III, 1-2).

25. Corr. IV, 359.

26. Corr. IV, 214. Cf. Further Corr., 54 (29 October 1860): “l'absence de travail est pour moi une espèce de maladie.”

27. Corr. IV, 377.

28. Regarding the dating of this note, see above, n. 21.

29. On the ramifications of this in an earlier age, see Jacqueline Lichtenstein, La Couleur éloquente. Rhétorique et peinture à l'âge classique.

30. See Michael Baxandall, Giotto and the Orators, esp. 35ff., 131ff.; Rensselaer Lee, Ut pictura poesis: The Humanistic Theory of Painting; Thomas Puttfarken, Roger de Piles' Theory of Art; David Rosand, “Ekphrasis and the Renaissance of Painting”; John Spencer, “Ut rhetorica pictura: A Study in Quattrocento Theory of Painting”; Louis Marin, “Towards a Theory of Reading in the Visual Arts”; David Summers, Michelangelo and the Language of Art, 42ff.; J. Lichtenstein, La Couleur éloquente. Lichtenstein, however, distinguishes between ut pictura poesis and ut pictura rhetorica: while the former was based on the primacy of the discursive, the latter recognized the crucial role of nondiscursive elements such as gesture, action, and silence (220ff.).

31. See Baxandall, Giotto and the Orators, part 3. The systematizing effort continued well into the eighteenth century. See Charles Batteux, Les Beaux-Arts réduits à un même principe (1747), which sought to find the fundamental laws governing all the arts. Painting was so analogous to poetry that their rules were interchangeable: “Les deux arts ont entr'eux une si grande conformité, qu'il ne s'agit, pour les avoir traités tous deux à la fois, que de changer les noms, et de mettre Peinture, Desseing, Coloris, à la place de Poësie, de Fable, de Versification” (256).

32. Puttfarken (Roger de Piles' Theory of Art, x and 3) discusses the literary theorizing of the Academy under Le Brun and its official historiographer, Félibien, as an attempt to raise itself to the level of the Académie Française. Cf. Summers, Michelangelo and the Language of Art, 468 n. 22; and J. Lichtenstein, La Couleur éloquente, 154ff.

33. As J. Lichtenstein argues, it is ironic that Aristotelian theory was used in this way, for by introducing pleasure into the concept of mimesis, Aristotle in fact provided the means by which painting could be defended against the accusations of Plato and the metaphysical tradition. See La Couleur éloquente, 68ff.

34. Ibid., 162f.

35. E.g. Fréart de Chambray on Raphael's Judgment of Paris: “[le peintre] nous a montré tout à la fois une suite de tant de choses diverses” (Idée de la perfection de la peinture, 30); Watelet and Levesque, Dictionnaire des arts de peinture, sculpture et gravure, III, 648, article ordonnance: “une belle composition doit être enchaînée”; Félibien, “Preface,” Conférences, V, 313 (quoted in Puttfarken, Roger de Piles' Theory of Art, 5f.): “comme dans les pièces de théâtre la fable n'est pas dans sa perfection, si elle n'a un commencement, un milieu et une fin pour faire comprendre tout le sujet de la pièce; l'on peut aussi dans de grands ouvrages de peinture pour instruire mieux ceux qui les verront, en disposer les figures et toute l'ordonnance, de telle sorte qu'on puisse juger de ce qui aura même précédé l'action que l'on représente.” On Aristotle's conception of plot, see Poetics 1450b, 1451a, 1459a.

36. De pictura 40. See Rosand, “Ekphrasis and the Renaissance of Painting”, 148; Spencer, “Ut rhetorica pictura”, 38; Baxandall, Giotto and the Orators, 130ff.; Lichtenstein, La Couleur éloquente (174ff.)

37. Aristotle had compared plot to an image sketched in black and white, and character to shapeless daubs of color (Poetics, 1450b1).

38. These analogies remained remarkably stable even when the values were reversed: thus Diderot likens line to logic and, at best, oratory, color to poetry (Essais sur la peinture, 674); Baudelaire associates line with philosophical abstraction, color with epic poetry (Salon de 1846, Oeuvres complètes II, 426).

39. “Sentiment sur le discours du mérite de la couleur par M. Blanchard,” 6 January 1672, in Conférences inédites, ed. Fontaine, 36 (quoted in J. Lichtenstein, La Couleur éloquente, 169).

40. The rule is attributed to Aristotle in the Poetics. See Roskill, Dolce's “Aretino” and Venetian Art Theory of the Cinquecento, 120f. and note p. 268ff. The English translator of the dialogue in 1770 was even less restrained: “Invention is to the painter, what the plot is to the writer” (Aretin: A Dialogue on Painting, 81). The dialogue first appeared in 1557. Delacroix read the French translation of 1735.

41. See Le Brun's famous lecture on Poussin's Gathering of the Manna, in which the order proceeds from left foreground, to right foreground, to center, and finally to the background (Jouin, Conférences de l'Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, 51; discussed in Puttfarken, Roger de Piles' Theory of Art, 9f.).

42. “Il est quelquefois nécessaire qu'il joigne ensemble beaucoup d'incidents qui aient précédé, afin de faire comprendre le sujet qu'il expose, sans quoi ceux qui verroient son ouvrage ne seroient pas mieux instruits que si cet historien au lieu de raconter tout le sujet de son histoire se contentoit d'en dire seulement la fin” (Jouin, Conférences de l'Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, 62f., cf. Puttfarken, Roger de Piles' Theory of Art, 8f). Poussin's painting is described in the Aristotelian terms used for drama or narrative, complete with unity of action, episodes, and peripeteia: “Ce savant peintre a montré qu'il était un véritable poète, ayant composé son ouvrage dans les règles que l'art de la poésie veut qu'on observe aux pièces de théâtre … l'on voit que ces groupes de figures, qui font diverses actions, sont comme autant d'épisodes qui servent à ce que l'on nomme péripéties, et de moyens pour faire connaître le changement arrivé aux Israélites quand ils sortent d'une extrême misère, et qu'ils rentrent dans un état plus heureux” (Jouin, Conférences de l'Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, 64). Artistic practice was less rigid than academic theory: on Poussin's presentation of different narratives within a single image, see David Carrier, “Blindness and the Representation of Desire in Poussin's Paintings.”

43. Cf., later, Samuel F. B. Morse (Lectures on the Affinity of Painting with the Other Arts, 62f.), who conceived of this succession of images almost cinematically, as “passing in review before the imagination.” See also Louis Marin, Etudes sémiologiques. Ecritures, peintures, 20.

44. See Puttfarken, Roger de Piles' Theory of Art, 13ff.

45. Ibid., xii, 125ff.; J. Lichtenstein, La Couleur éloquente, chapter 6.

46. See Albert Boime, The Academy and French Painting in the Nineteenth Century, 18ff.

47. Uve Fischer (“Das literarische Bild im Werk Eugène Delacroix,” 203ff.) sees Delacroix's narrative painting as profoundly different from Poussin's: the action compressed into an instant, without the traditional dramatic pattern of development and climax.

48. See Benveniste's theory of the historical mode (récit), in which events seem to “narrate themselves” (Problèmes de linguistique générale, chapter 19); Louis Marin, “Towards a Theory of Reading in the Visual Arts,” 67.

49. Cf. R. R. Bernier's discussion of this in late-nineteenth-century painting, in “The Subject and Painting: Monet's ‘Language of the Sketch,’” 318.

50. See Journal, Supplement (III, 447).

51. Note dating from 25 August 1854 (II, 241), but written under the 11th.

52. Letter of 6 December 1856 (see above, n. 22).

53. Cf. Obermann I, 213: “Mes jours perdus s'entassent derrière moi; ils remplissent l'espace vague de leurs ombres sans couleur; ils amoncèlent leurs squelettes atténués; c'est le ténébreux simulacre d'un monument funèbre.” Delacroix expressed impatience with a Romantic morbidity which he considered untrue to real life: “Le romantisme chez Lamartine et en général chez les modernes est une livrée qu'ils endossent semblable à ces manteaux de deuil et à ces pleureuses dont on s'affuble aux enterrements” (unpublished note, 18 March 1853). Cf. 14 February 1850 (I, 340).

54. For a discussion of the time of the arts, see J. Lotman, Semiotics of Cinema, 77. E. Marty makes the important distinction between diary-writing, which “makes present,” and reminiscing, which is oriented toward the past (L'Ecriture du jour, 12).

55. “Can you not see that in your science … each part is born successively after the other, and the succeeding one is not born if the previous one has not died?” (Leonardo on Painting, 26).

56. 23 April 1849 (I, 290); Supplement (III, 369); see also “Des Variations du beau” (O. L. [Oeuvres Littéraires] I, 43).

57. “Il est des artistes qui ne peuvent choisir leurs sujets que dans des ouvrages étrangers qui prêtent au vague. Nos auteurs sont trop parfaits pour nous … Peut-être que les Anglais sont plus à l'aise en prenant leurs sujets dans Racine et dans Molière que dans Shakespeare et Lord Byron” (30 January 1860; III, 257).

58. Although the works were commissioned by the state, Delacroix benefited from great freedom in the choice and treatment of the subjects. State commissions during the July Monarchy, at least, involved little intervention by the authorities, except over the schedule of completion. Delacroix's finished product was always markedly different from the drawings originally submitted for approval by the Inspector of Fine Arts. See Bruno Foucart, Le Renouveau de la peinture religieuse en France, 81.

59. See ibid., 215f., 267; Marius Vachon, L'Ancien Hôtel de Ville de Paris, 62ff.; Jean Borreil, “Légende et apothéose de l'humanité.”

60. Cf. Delacroix's article of 1857, “Des Variations du beau”: “ne peut-on, sans paradoxe, affirmer … que cette face nouvelle des choses révélées par [un grand artiste] nous étonne autant qu'elle nous charme?” (O. L. I, 54).

61. “Mon cher ami, je vous envoie un petit ouvrage dont on ne pourrait pas dire, sans injustice, qu'il n'a ni queue ni tête, puisque tout, au contraire, y est à la fois tête et queue, alternativement et réciproquement. … Nous pouvons couper où nous voulons, moi ma rêverie, vous le manuscrit, le lecteur sa lecture; car je ne suspends pas la volonté rétive de celui-ci au fil interminable d'une intrigue superflue. Enlevez une vertèbre, et les deux morceaux de cette tortueuse fantaisie se rejoindront sans peine. Hachez-la en nombreux fragments, et vous verrez que chacun peut exister à part. Dans l'espérance que quelquesuns de ces tronçons seront assez vivants pour vous plaire et vous amuser, j'ose vous dédier le serpent tout entier.”

62. L'Oeuvre et la vie d'Eugène Delacroix, Oeuvres complètes II, 753f. Vapereau's Dictionnaire des contemporains (1858) notes the contrast between the elegance and “mesure” of Delacroix's articles and the “fougue” and “hardiesse” of his painting. E. Véron opposes Delacroix's innovative paintings to his Academic writings, but makes an exception for his notebooks (Les Artistes célèbres: Eugène Delacroix, 6ff., 82); cf. Silvestre, Histoire des artistes vivants, 70; Phoebe Pool, Delacroix, 19f.

63. Delacroix's published art criticism included the following articles: “Des critiques en matière d'arts” (Revue de Paris 2, 1829); “Thomas Lawrence: Portrait de Pie VII” (ibid. 4, 1829);”Raphael” (ibid. 11, 1830); “Michel-Ange” (ibid. 15, 1830); “Sur le Jugement dernier” (Revue des deux mondes 11, 1 August 1837); “Puget” (Plutarque français, 1845); “Prudhon” (Revue des deux mondes 16, 1 November 1846); “Gros” (ibid. 23, 1 September 1848); “De l'enseignement du dessin” (ibid., new per., 1st ser., 7, 15 September 1850); “Le Poussin” (Moniteur universel, 26, 29, 30 June 1853); “Questions sur le beau” (Revue des deux mondes, new per. 2nd ser., 7, 15 July 1854); “Des Variations du beau” (ibid., 2nd per., 9, 15 June 1857); “Charlet” (ibid. 37, 1 January 1862). The latter two are incorrectly dated as July 1857 and July 1862, respectively, in most of the Delacroix literature.

64. See Christine Sieber-Meier, Untersuchungen zum “Oeuvre littéraire” von Eugène Delacroix.

65. See Anne Larue, “Fragments ou pensées détachées? Etude de quelques romantiques,” 246f., and Guillerm, Couleurs du noir, 43-49.

66. The bibliography on this problem is immense. For some theoretical points of departure, see J.-P. Bouillon, “Mise au point théorique et méthodologique,” 880-900; Romantisme 71 (1991), issue on “Critique et art,” especially the articles by Dario Gamboni (“Pour une étude de la critique d'art au XIXè siècle,” 9-17), and Jean-Pierre Leduc-Adine (“Des règles d'un genre: la critique d'art,” 93-100); A.-M. Christin, L'Espace et la lettre; D. Scott, Pictorialist Poetics; M. Baxandall, Patterns of Intention: On the Historical Explanation of Pictures; Salim Kemal and Ivan Gaskell, eds., The Language of Art History. For the example of Baudelaire, see Timothy Raser, A Poetics of Art Criticism: The Case of Baudelaire, chapter 2.

67. Cf. J. Lichtenstein, La Couleur éloquente, 163.

68. As noted earlier, Delacroix cross-references and partially recopies this passage in 1857 when he begins to draft the Preface to the Dictionnaire (13 January; III, 28).

69. Once again, Delacroix later cross-references this and the preceding quotation for the Preface to the Dictionnaire (13 January 1857; III, 15).

70. Undated note, probably from the early 1850s.

71. In 1857 he returns to this idea of writing a dialogue or a correspondence, as a complement to the Dictionnaire (25 January 1857; III, 43).

72. Etienne Pivert de Senancour, Obermann, ii. It is noteworthy that it was precisely this Preface which, many years earlier, had motivated Delacroix's critique of George Sand's far more “rhetorical” and “literary” Introduction to the 1844 edition of Obermann, and the limitations of such writing as hers in contrast to painting. Perhaps Senancour's Preface provided a first suggestion of an alternative kind of writing.

73. Ibid., II, 32, letter L.

74. Ibid., iii.

75. Ibid., iii-iv.

76. Ibid., v.

77. O. L. I, 88: “point de transitions nécessaires.”

78. 13 January 1857 (III, 26-27); 16 January 1860 (III, 251).

79. For example, the article “touche” has cross references to “finir,” “contour,” “raccourcis,” and “fresque” (13 January 1857; III, 17ff.).

80. Cf. his metaphor of a card game (12 May 1853; II, 45).

81. O. L. I, 84ff. Similar ideas are stated in the Journal, 1 November 1852 (I, 496) and 13 January 1857 (III, 15).

82. O. L. I, 86, 87, 90.

83. Ibid., 86.

84. Ibid., 89.

85. Ibid., 86.

86. Supplement (III, 430). Roskill (Dolce's “Aretino” and Venetian Art Theory of the Cinquecento) discusses the prevalence of the dialogue form in the sixteenth century, citing Paolo Pino, Dialogo della pittura (1548) and the lost dialogues of Vasari on Michelangelo from mid-century (9f., 61 n. 22). See also the many examples in Baxandall, Giotto and the Orators, esp. part 2.

87. 15 August 1850 (I, 414-15); 5 January 1857 (III, 5).

88. Roskill, Dolce's “Aretino” and Venetian Art Theory of the Cinquecento, 195. Delacroix quotes this passage in the Journal (5 January 1857; III, 5). The dialogue also makes clear its difference from an expository treatise by pointing to the artificiality of the situation it presents as real, or at least as verisimilar: “There is no one listening in on us, in any event,” declares Fabrini, as the reader does precisely that (Roskill, 99).

89. Ibid., 153.

90. On Delacroix's familiarity with Diderot's art criticism, see Mras, Eugène Delacroix's Theory of Art, 15 and n. 14.

91. E. g., 7 May 1850 (I, 363); 12 May 1853 (II, 44).

92. See Bayle's Preface to the first edition: “J'ai divisé ma composition en deux parties: l'une est purement historique, un narré succinct des faits: l'autre est un grand commentaire, un mélange de preuves et de discussions, où je fais entrer la censure de plusieurs fautes et quelquefois même une tirade de réflexions philosophiques; en un mot, assez de variété pour pouvoir croire que par un endroit ou par un autre chaque espèce de lecteur trouvera ce qui l'accommode” (Dictionnaire historique XVI, 2).

93. Ibid., 5f.: “Rien de ce que je dis de mon chef ne sent un auteur qui retouche son travail, et qui châtie la licence de ses premières pensées et du premier arrangement de ses paroles”; and 10: “J'cusse voulu que d'autres prissent la peine de donner la forme aux matériaux, d'y ajouter et d'y retrancher.”

94. Voltaire, Preface to the Dictionnaire philosophique, xxxii: “Ce livre n'exige pas une lecture suivie; mais, à quelque endroit qu'on l'ouvre, on trouve de quoi réfléchir. Les livres les plus utiles sont ceux dont les lecteurs font eux-mêmes la moitié; ils étendent les pensées dont on leur présente le germe; ils corrigent ce qui leur semble défectueux, ils fortifient par leurs réflexions ce qui leur paraît faible.”

95. The metaphor of the “arbre généalogique” dominates Diderot's Prospectus of 1750, which became, with some alterations, the Discours préliminaire of the Encyclopédie as a whole. The main branches—history, philosophy, and poetry—corresponded to the three faculties of memory, reason, and imagination; the common “trunk” was human understanding. See Diderot, Oeuvres complètes V, 90.

96. Diderot, Oeuvres complètes V, 93n.

97. Ibid., 118.

98. La Sémiotique des encyclopédistes. Essai d'épistémologie historique des sciences du langage, 319.

99. “Diderot et le système des connaissances humaines.”

100. Prospectus, Oeuvres complètes V, 103.

101. Ibid., 90f.: “Cet arbre de la connaissance humaine pouvait être formé de plusieurs manières … Mais l'embarras était d'autant plus grand, qu'il y avait plus d'arbitraire. Et combien ne devait-il pas y en avoir? La nature ne nous offre que des choses particulières, infinies et sans aucune division fixe et déterminée … Et sur cette mer d'objets qui nous environne, s'il en paraît quelques-uns, comme des pointes de rochers, qui semblent percer la surface et dominer les autres, ils ne doivent cet avantage qu'à des systèmes particuliers, qu'à des conventions vagues, et qu'à certains événements étrangers à l'arrangement physique des êtres et aux vraies institutions de la philosophie.” Cf. article “Encyclopédie,” Oeuvres complètes VII, 210f.

102. “Diderot et le système des connaissances humaines,” 122.

103. “L'univers soit réel soit intelligible a une infinité de points de vue sous lesquels il peut être représenté, et le nombre des systèmes possibles de la connaissance humaine est aussi grand que celui de ces points de vue” (Oeuvres complètes VII, 211).

104. Preface to the Encyclopédie, xviii.

105. Diderot, Oeuvres complètes VII, 221. The political implications of this are of course profound. Diderot continues: “Toutes les fois, par exemple, qu'un préjugé national mériterait du respect, il faudrait à son article particulier l'exposer respectueusement … ; mais renverser l'édifice de fange … en renvoyant aux articles où des principes solides servent de base aux vérités opposées” (ibid., 222).

106. Ibid., 223.

107. Ibid., 216.

108. Essais sur la peinture, 687.

109. “Diderot et le système des connaissances humaines,” 126.

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