Designed Objects

Abstract The role and nature of the aesthetic in Montaigne’s writings is the concern of Chapter 4. It starts by considering Montaigne’s relationship to the plastic arts, identifying and deconstructing the assumptions behind the critical commonplace that Montaigne was uninterested in or actively adverse to visual art. The chapter distinguishes Montaigne’s approach to such artefacts from those of his contemporaries through a comparison between the Journal and the diary of the young sixteenth-century traveller Nicolas Audebert, arguing that the nature of Montaigne’s aesthetic experience is characterised by a radically embodied, personal approach to objects. It then locates the foundations of a Montaignian aesthetic in the author’s descriptions of bodily encounters with what it argues are designed (and not just ‘technical’) artefacts. It ends on an extended discussion of Montaigne’s encounters with three examples of such designed objects, which it argues are emblematic of Montaigne’s aesthetic posture.