An academician in the underground : Charles-Nicolas Cochin and art criticism in eighteenth-century France

Argues that Cochin's opposition to anonymous, anti-academic criticism published largely in pamphlets during the 1770s and 1780s in fact contributed to the growth of the critical metier. Cochin, also writing anonymously, published counter-critical tracts in the public press, thus elevating the issues addressed in art criticism, and introducing the genre to a wider reading audience. Further, in his subsequent attacks on critics, carried on over a period of more than 10 years, he offered art criticism its strongest rhetorical strategy against the art of the academy: satire.