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History of Art, Reason 89a bit by speaking of a more general ‘‘law of taste.’’ 7 But the theoreticalvalue of the exempla remained identical. Where Vasari proposed aunity of the ‘‘three arts of drawing,’’ Batteux enlarged the same systemto encompass music, what he called the ‘‘art of gesture,’’ andabove all poetry, which was in fact the central paradigm of his wholebook. The slogan ut pictura poesis, which Vasari had previously madehis own by painting in his house in Arezzo an allegory of Poetry alongwith others of the figurative arts—the four figures flanking a centralFama, or Renown—this slogan was repeated in reverse by Batteux: itwould be enough for him to develop the theory of poetic imitationover ten chapters and take only three short pages to say that paintingdoes exactly the same thing. 8 Note, finally, that the sovereign positionof poetry in this book did not prevent Batteux from renewing thepreeminence, dear to Vasari, of disegno in the arts: ‘‘What then is thefunction of the arts? It is to transfer the lines* that are in nature, andto present them in objects in which they are nowise natural.’’ 9Such, then, the agreed-upon discourse, the shared and continueddiscourse since Vasari at least. Such, in any case, in our sketch ofdialectic, the moment of thesis. Art imitates, and by imitating producesa visible congruence paralleled by an ideal congruence—a‘‘True’’ aesthetic paralleled by a ‘‘beautiful’’ knowledge of the naturalworld. Doubtless some will say that such principles pertain to a ‘‘theoryof art’’—a theory too often named to the sole end of isolating itwithin an enclosed field, outside the development, supposedly specific,of history as such. Yet again, the discursive division demonstrateshere its arbitrary character: not only were such principles elaboratedand disseminated solely because of their extraordinary capacity of extensionto other modes of discourse; it is also to them, to a certainpoint, that the history of art owes its existence. For it is through themthat the Vasarian and academic discipline managed to constitute itselfby giving itself the authority of principles and ends, therefore of valuesand norms.This movement seems, if not to falter, then at least to invert itselfin the second half of the eighteenth century. With the publication of*traits, which can also mean ‘‘features.’’