Peinture et savoirs scientifiques. Le cas des Observations sur la peinture (1753) de Jacques Gautier d'Agoty

Elisabeth Lavezzi : Painting and scientific knowledge. The case of Jacques Gautier d'Agoty's Observations sur la peinture (1753). Jacques Gautier d'Agoty (1710-1785), who was both a painter and engraver and the author of scientific works, combined these two preoccupations in his Observations sur la peinture et les tableaux anciens et modernes, published in 1753. His transfer of a scientific model to the field of aesthetics had three aims : to revive anatomy in painting, to explain the optical reality that perspective reproduces, and to appreciate paintings in terms of the physiology of the eye. The scientific art criticism that he was trying to establish was based on experiments made thanks to the camera obscura, an artificial eye. Apart from its paradoxical aspects, this procedure led him to question notions of nature and genre. In addition, as perspective, anatomy and restoration implied cutting and pruning by a sadistical hand, to escape from it, he imagined painting without a hand.