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Week 8 Primary Sources: Jacques-Germain Soufflot and Sir Joshua Reynolds

Soufflot, The Panthéon (Church of Ste-Geneviève), Paris

Read:

Dr. Paul A. Ranogajec, "Soufflot, The Panthéon (Church of Ste-Geneviève), Paris," in Smarthistory, January 8, 2016, accessed May 9, 2020, https://smarthistory.org/soufflot-thepantheon-church-of-ste-genevieve-paris/.

On the Grand Style of the European Tradition in Painting

Sir Joshua Reynolds:

… There are excellences in the art of painting beyond what is commonly called the imitation of nature, and these excellences I wish to point out. The students who, having passed through the initiatory exercises, are more advanced in the art, and who, sure of their hand, have leisure to exert their understanding, must now be told that a mere copyist of nature can never produce anything great, can never raise and enlarge the conceptions, or warm the heart of the spectator.

The wish of the genuine painter must be more extensive; instead of endeavoring to amuse mankind with the minute neatness of his imitations, he must endeavor to improve them by the grandeur of his ideas ; instead of seeking praise by deceiving the superficial sense of the spectator, he must strive for fame by captivating the imagination.

The principle now laid down, that the perfection of this art does not consist in mere imitation, is far from being new or singular. It is, indeed, supported by the general opinion of the enlightened part of mankind. The poets, orators, and rhetoricians of antiquity are continually enforcing this position, — that all the arts receive their perfection from an ideal beauty, superior to what is to be found in individual nature…

… The moderns are not less convinced than the ancients of this superior power existing in the art, nor less sensible of its effects. Every language has adopted terms expressive of this excellence. The gusto grande of the Italians, the beau ideal of the French, and "great style," "genius," and "taste" among the English, are but different appellations of the same thing. It is this intellectual dignity, they say, that ennobles the painter's art, — that lays the line between him and the mere mechanic, and produces those great effects in an instant which eloquence and poetry by slow and repeated efforts are scarcely able to attain…

Source: Sir Joshua Reynolds,  Discourses on Art, Discourse III. Delivered to the Students of the Royal Academy, on the Distribution of the Prizes, December 14, 1770, pp. 82-3, https://ia802307.us.archive.org/31/items/sirjoshuareynold00reynuoft/sirjoshuareynold00reynuoft.pdf