On the contemporaneousness of Roger de Piles’ Balance des Peintres

Roger de Piles (1635-1709), the French art theorist and critic, without being “revolutionary,” (Rosenberg, 1967) does not share the views of the French artistic establishment of his time. He advocates the importance of color, going as far as writing that “there is no painting if color does not go with drawing,” or that “color is the soul of painting,”while theAcadémieRoyale de la Peinture et de la Sculpture created in 1648 by the French Court, considers drawing to be the most important element. This is not new, but merely pursues a debate that had already started during the sixteenth century in Italy.1 While Vasari complained that Titian should have been more careful in drawing, Dolce considered color as being as important as drawing. The official French doctrine pursued by the Academy is Poussinisme, after Poussin, who had written that “colors in painting are blandishments to lure the eyes.” Le Brun, Louis XIV’s official painter “associate[s] true value in art with drawing, which exemplifies ‘reason’, with color being of lower account because it is concerned with the senses.”2 These views are supported by André Félibien (1619-1695), the official art historian of the Académie Royale. His Entretiens (1686) published between 1666 et 1686, celebrates classicism, glorifying Poussin and Raphael.