For example, Michel Delon’s study of Diderot’s attachment to paintings that attempted to render the subtlety of ‘la chute du jour’, which appears in the second section, is closely related in its concerns to Stéphane Loubère’s analysis of the critic’s sensualist aesthetic, which is dealt with in the first. The remaining eight articles are divided into two parts, under the headings ‘Esquisses théoriques’ and ‘Poésie critique’, although it is difficult, at times, to see the purpose of this division. A second introductory article by Barthélemy Jobert gives a useful background to the history of the Salon and how it functioned, which leaves the reader with a richer understanding of the interaction between the critic and the subjects of his criticism. The editors’ introduction suggests the complex nature of ‘la théorie de l’art’ - a seventeenth-century didactic concept relating to technical and practical knowledge - in Diderot’s art criticism, which, they suggest, in its dynamism and its philosophical and aesthetic concerns actually constitutes the modern concept of ‘la théorie de l’art’. This collection of articles devoted to Diderot’s art criticism provides a good overview of the range of reflection on his writings on the topic, while still maintaining a certain coherence in its approach. Diderot’s writings on the Salons of the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture, which he provided for Grimm for publication in the Correspondance littéraire, have received recent attention in monographs by both Aurélia Gaillard and Stéphane Lojkine (who also contributes to the work in question here).
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