Painting

This chapter focuses on history painting, which the third Earl of Shaftesbury believes represents morally significant conduct. History paintings were larger-than-life representations of stories from mythology, the Bible, and the ancient world. They were not intended to be historical records. Their purpose was to convey the message or moral of the stories. According to Shaftesbury, to be successful at conveying the moral of a story, a history painting may need to alter some of the details of the source text. His fullest treatment of history painting is A Notion of the Tablature, or Judgment of Hercules. This “notion,” or essay, was a painstakingly detailed description of a painting Shaftesbury himself conceived and commissioned the Italian painter Paolo de Matteis to execute. In his account of how to complete the painting, Shaftesbury expressed clearly his two criteria of artistic beauty: the criterion of formal unity that is essential to all beautiful things, and the criterion of truthful representation of virtue and vice that must be met by morally representational works of art. The chapter then considers moviemaking, the contemporary art form that comes closest to conveying Shaftesbury's conception of history painting.