the ocular harpsichord of louis-bertrand castel - Gewina

Castel's ocular harpsichord 53
remaining hidden behind a je ne sais quoi. In his article "Beau" in the Encyclopedic
Diderot wrote:
If, thus, nothing more enters in the concept of the beautiful ... than the notions of order,
rapports, proportion, arrangement, symmetry, agreement, and disagreement, then, since these
notions do not stem from any other source than do the notions of existence, number, length,
size, depth, and an infinity of others that are not contested, one can, it seems to me, use the
first set of notions in defining the beautiful without being accused of substituting one term for
another and turning in a vicious circle.'"''
This would not have sounded completely alien to Ca.stel, who had started
defending his colour music on the supposed fact that all pleasure is derived from
harmonic proportion, and who in his later "logique du gout" (or even "sisteme
physico-moral du gout") had called music "a simple agreement", be it one
appreciated by the highest level of the mind, making it a pleasure of the
understanding, the only pleasure humans do not share with animals.'"'
It is, indeed, very interesting to examine the changing grounds for the
appreciation of the idea of colour music as, in the course of the eighteenth
century, the theories of aesthetics changed. The dominating view in the first
decades of the eighteenth century was the ancient idea that all art should imitate
nature; it was the "principle" to which the Batteux reduced art in 1746 in Les
beaux arts redidts a un meme principe. For a long time it was held that the
main change during the later eighteenth century and into the Romantic period
was a replacement of imitation as the main criterion by expression. This was
argued in 1958 by Abrams in his 77ie mirror and the lamp: during the greater
part of the eighteenth century art was supposed to be a mirror which reflected
nature to the audience, whereas in the Romantic conception art would be a
lamp out of which streamed the light of the artist illuminating his audience.
This view has recently been criticized in two books by Ncubauer and by
Barry.'°* Ncubauer in particular shows how the idea of expression as a main
characteristic of art was already defended by many people during the larger part
of the eighteenth century, and both argue that the most important change in
aesthetics at the end of the century was not a change from imitation to expression
but from a representational to a non-representational conception of art.
Cited in Diderot, Oemres estheiiqucs, p. 417: "S'il n'enlre done dans la notion de beau ...
que les notions d'ordre, de rapports, dc proportion, d'arrangcment, de symctrie, de convenance, de
disconvenance; ces notions ne decoulant pas d'une autre source que celles d'exislence, de nombre,
de longueur, largeur, profondeur, el une infinites sur lesquelles on ne contesle point, on peut, ce
me semble, employer les premieres dans une definition du beau, sans etre accuse de substituer
un lerme a la place d'un autre, et de tourner dans un ccrclc vicieux."
Memoires de Trevoux. November 1735, pp. 2342-2359.
Ncubauer, Emancipation; Barry, Language.