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"The crew of her soul rushed up to the deck of her body."
--Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
"Ah! Monsieur, combien notre entendement est modifié par les signes."
-- Diderot, Lettre sur les sourds et muets
"Votre âme est un paysage choisi ...."
--Verlaine, Clair de lune
The shield of Achilles has always stopped the show. Interrupting the narrative of the siege of Troy, Homer looks away from the battle to give us more than a passing glance at the warrior's new armor. This description of Hephaistos's masterpiece in Book XVIII of the Iliadis one of the first instances of ekphrasis, the literary description of a work of art, in the Western tradition. Centuries later Parisian gazetteers distributed pamphlets describing new paintings by Boucher, Chardin, Greuze, Van Loo and other official members of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, and so enjoined prospective beholders to come see these works exhibited at the biennial Salon. Writing on art--whether it be ekphrastic, art historical, occasional, or critical--has served varying agendas throughout time. It may even be construed as a metaphor for other rhetorical enterprises.
My reading of the Vernet promenade in Diderot's Salon de 1767 suggests that here the text on art may also be read symbolically as an animated representation of the mind involved in the act of esthetic judgment. I intend to demonstrate how the pictorial and poetic notion of the hieroglyph in Diderot's philosophical letter on deaf mutes, La Lettre sur les sourds et muets, motivates his text on the suite of landscape paintings by Joseph Vernet he saw at the Salon of 1767, as an abstract correlative of thought. This meta-phorical transference of pictorial discourse into discursive hieroglyphs enables us to read Diderot's bucolic text on two very different planes: as the narrative of a fictional randonnée across the French countryside, and as an allegory of the dialectics of the mind caught up in beholding a work of art. With its acute sensitivity to the rich relationship between word, image and the production of meaning, Diderot's multi-representational project hereevokes art as both a material and an imaginary presence, in the absence of sound, through the intermediacy of writing. Moving beyond the finitude of ekphrasis, the "father of art criticism" theorizes...