Musing, painting, and writing

walking as an art in Diderot's promenade vernet (salon de 1767)

Juliette Fabre

pp. 15-28

in: Klaus Benesch, François Specq (eds), Walking and the aesthetics of modernity, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016

Abstrakt

This chapter seeks to reconsider the promenade motif in a well-known section of the Salon de 1767 by Diderot, dedicated to the landscape painter Horace Vernet. Indeed, the narrative of a walk corresponds here to the depiction of Vernet's paintings and constitutes a surprising "art of walking," where the limits between nature and art, reality and fiction vanish. This chapter questions the links between art and walking in literature and tries to underline the leading role of the promenade motif, understood not only as a concrete activity but also as a heuristic mode of writing, used to formulate and weave together the philosophical and aesthetic ideas of Diderot.

Cited authors

Diderot Denis