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Diderot's Thoughts on Art and Style, With Some of His Shorter Essays; Selected and Tr
Diderot's Thoughts on Art and Style With Some of His Shorter Essays Selected and Tr Author:Denis Diderot General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1893 Original Publisher: Remington Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can selec... more »t from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: DIDEROT'S THOUGHTS ON ART AND STYLE, ON COMPOSITION, (From the "Encyclopedia.") A Picture to be well composed should be jrwbole-regarded from a single point of view ; each part should contribute its share to the principal effect, and be related to the parts as the members of a living body are related to each other so as to form a . whole ; and we may say of a picture, where a great number of figures are dashed on to the canvas without thought or consideration of their relation to each other, that it is no more a true composition than scattered studies of legs, eyes, and noses on one sheet of paper would deserve the name of a portrait, or even of a human figure. Hence it follows that the painter is subject to the sameja. ws as the poet in his composition, and that the three unities of action place,. and time must be observed as jlriclly in historical painting as in dramatic poetry. But as the laws of composition are less fixed in paintings which are not historical we shall confine ourselves chiefly to treating of the latter, yet giving incidentally in the course of this article the laws which are to be observed in representing all subjects, whether historical, natural, or poetical. Of Unity o/Time in Painting. -- This law is much more stringent for the painter than for the poet. The latter is granted twenty-four hours, that is to say, that he is allowed to put the events which might naturally happen in twenty-four hours into the space of three hours, which is the usual duration of a piece, and he will not be held to have transgressed the laws of probability. But the pa...« less