La découverte de la spécificité des arts. De Du Bos à Lessing

Abstract

It is the Renaissance that equated painting and poetry, following Horace’s: ut pictura poesis, this equality being grounded in a mimetic principle. While this position had been defended by Batteux, it was Abbé du Bos who, following an aesthetic theory based on effects, compared the specific medium of each art, with a reflection on the character of their different signs. Diderot went even further, when defining beauty as creation of an illusion, though the means to achieve this creation were radically different. Like Diderot, Lessing defends the thesis of the superiority of literature, since it is capable of transmitting atemporality while the visual arts, in as much as they are spatial, immobilize  a specific moment.