Le comte de Caylus et la peinture. Pour une théorie de l'inachevé

Adapted from a paper presented at the Caylus Colloquium at Oxford in May 2000. As a theoretician of painting in the 18th century, the Comte de Caylus, because of his faithfulness to the ideas of the theoreticians of the classical age, did not subscribe to the Neoclassical ideas that were taking shape in the 1750s. Elements in his discussion of art were derived from the values of the first half of the 18th century and from a sensitivity to the masterpieces of the Rococo age--though, from 1748 on, he attempted to present these in an academic language. The writer goes on to discuss the coherent yet incomplete ideas Caylus expressed in a number of papers presented to the Academie ("Sur les desseins" (1732), "Vie de Watteau" (1748), and "De l'amateur" (1748)) and in articles published in the Memoires de l'Academie des Inscriptions.