Word: diderot
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Almost Great. "There was an ar dor in Boucher's imagination, but not much veracity and still less elevation," wrote a stuffy diarist named Marmontel. "His encounters with the Graces had never had a respectable setting." It is not far from that to the later outraged philippics of Diderot, who treated Boucher's hedonism as a moral menace - "simperings, affectation, nothing but beauty spots, rouge, gewgaws...
...Diderot sounds unjust, it is not simply because the tone of our culture has swung back to a less civilized amorality in which our pornography is brutish. It is because, when the routine conventions of his work are subtracted, Boucher remains a startling and almost great painter. The sensuousness, the lively plasticity of drawing, the marvelous sensitivity to color and texture, the ironic grasp of elaborate mythologies and allegories still remind us of Talleyrand's wistful epitaph on the ancien régime - that no one who did not live before the Revolution can know the sweetness of life...
...early as the eighteenth century, an undercurrent of thought challenged the notion of the whole self in healthy, happy, honest relation to society. Diderot and Hegel alike accused society of encouraging flattery, dissimulation, and schizoid from one's own true self. A darker search arose for the "authentic" self, a search which implicitly denounced the coercion of society and disbelieved the wholeness of self. While the arts took new inspiration from this quest, they too came under suspicious scrutiny, Emma Bovary and Nietache's "Culture-Philistine" are both testimony to the seductive inauthenticity of a life modeled on the directives...
...career used to send obscene letters to relatives; in 18th century London, privies were called Jerichos; Boswell went to bed with Rousseau's wife precisely 13 times. The Durants can scarcely resist an anecdote or an aphorism. The borrowed ones are usually the best, as for instance Diderot's Encyclopédie distinction between the words bind and attach: "One is bound to one's wife, attached to one's mistress." But the authors also do reasonably well on their own, as when they say of Louis XV that he "lacked the art of dying...
...come about that a man born poor, losing his mother at birth and soon deserted by his father, afflicted with a painful and humiliating disease, left to wander for twelve years among alien cities and conflicting faiths, repudiated by society and civilization, repudiating Voltaire, Diderot, the Encyclopédi and the Age of Reason, driven from place to place as a dangerous rebel, suspected of crime and insanity, and seeing, in his last months, the apotheosis of his greatest enemy-how did it come about that this man, after his death, triumphed over Voltaire, revived religion, transformed education, elevated...