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Roger de Piles (7 October 1635 – 5 April 1709) was a French painter, engraver, art critic and diplomat.
Life
Born in
Clamecy, Roger de Piles studied philosophy and theology, and devoted himself to painting.
In 1662 he became tutor to
Michel Amelot de Gournay, whom he was to follow throughout his life, acting as secretary to his various missions as French ambassador to Venice, Portugal, Spain.
In
Venice
Venice ( ; it, Venezia ; vec, Venesia or ) is a city in northeastern Italy and the capital of the Veneto Regions of Italy, region. It is built on a group of 118 small islands that are separated by canals and linked by over 400 ...
(1682–1685) he started a famous collection of prints, drawings and paintings of
Giorgione
Giorgione (, , ; born Giorgio Barbarelli da Castelfranco; 1477–78 or 1473–74 – 17 September 1510) was an Italian painter of the Venetian school during the High Renaissance, who died in his thirties. He is known for the elusive poetic qualit ...
,
Correggio
Antonio Allegri da Correggio (August 1489 – 5 March 1534), usually known as just Correggio (, also , , ), was the foremost painter of the Parma school of the High Italian Renaissance, who was responsible for some of the most vigorous and sens ...
,
Rembrandt
Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn (, ; 15 July 1606 – 4 October 1669), usually simply known as Rembrandt, was a Dutch Golden Age painter, printmaker and draughtsman. An innovative and prolific master in three media, he is generally consid ...
,
Claude Lorrain
Claude Lorrain (; born Claude Gellée , called ''le Lorrain'' in French; traditionally just Claude in English; c. 1600 – 23 November 1682) was a French painter, draughtsman and etcher of the Baroque era. He spent most of his life in It ...
,
Rubens,
Antoine Coypel
Antoine Coypel (11 April 16617 January 1722) was a French painter, pastellist, engraver, decorative designer and draughtsman.[Jean-Baptiste Forest
Jean-Baptiste Forest (1636 in Paris – 1712 in Paris) was a French landscape painter.
Biography
He was instructed in the first rudiments of art by his father, Pierre Forest, an artist little known. He went afterwards to Italy, and at Rome becam ...]
.
He also acquired a taste for political intrigue using his travels ostensibly undertaken to study the European collections, as a buyer for
Louis XIV
, house = Bourbon
, father = Louis XIII
, mother = Anne of Austria
, birth_date =
, birth_place = Château de Saint-Germain-en-Laye, Saint-Germain-en-Laye, France
, death_date =
, death_place = Palace of Vers ...
, as cover for confidential missions - for example in Germany and Austria (1685) on behalf of Louis' minister, the
marquis de Louvois
A marquess (; french: marquis ), es, marqués, pt, marquês. is a nobleman of high hereditary rank in various European peerages and in those of some of their former colonies. The German language equivalent is Markgraf (margrave). A woman w ...
.
He was not always fortunate as a spy. In 1692, during the
War of the League of Augsburg
The Nine Years' War (1688–1697), often called the War of the Grand Alliance or the War of the League of Augsburg, was a conflict between Kingdom of France, France and a European coalition which mainly included the Holy Roman Empire (led by t ...
, he was arrested in
the Hague
The Hague ( ; nl, Den Haag or ) is a city and municipality of the Netherlands, situated on the west coast facing the North Sea. The Hague is the country's administrative centre and its seat of government, and while the official capital of ...
carrying a false passport and imprisoned for the next five years. He spent his time writing ''L'Abrégé de la vie des peintres ...avec un traité du peintre parfait''. published in 1699 following his appointment as Conseiller Honoraire to the
Académie de peinture et de sculpture
An academy ( Attic Greek: Ἀκαδήμεια; Koine Greek Ἀκαδημία) is an institution of secondary or tertiary higher learning (and generally also research or honorary membership). The name traces back to Plato's school of philosophy ...
.
In 1705 he followed Amelot de Gournay to Spain but illness forced him to return to Paris, where he died in 1709.
Art critic
His important contribution to
aesthetic theory rests on his ''Dialogue sur le coloris'' ("Dialogue on colours"), in which he initiated his famous defence of
Rubens in the argument started in 1671 by
Philippe de Champaigne
Philippe de Champaigne (; 26 May 1602 – 12 August 1674) was a Brabançon-born French Baroque era painter, a major exponent of the French school. He was a founding member of the Académie de peinture et de sculpture in Paris, the premier art ...
on the relative merits of
drawing
Drawing is a form of visual art in which an artist uses instruments to mark paper or other two-dimensional surface. Drawing instruments include graphite pencils, pen and ink, various kinds of paints, inked brushes, colored pencils, crayons, ...
and
color
Color (American English) or colour (British English) is the visual perceptual property deriving from the spectrum of light interacting with the photoreceptor cells of the eyes. Color categories and physical specifications of color are associ ...
in the work of
Titian
Tiziano Vecelli or Vecellio (; 27 August 1576), known in English as Titian ( ), was an Italians, Italian (Republic of Venice, Venetian) painter of the Renaissance, considered the most important member of the 16th-century Venetian school (art), ...
(in a lecture to the
Académie de peinture et de sculpture
An academy ( Attic Greek: Ἀκαδήμεια; Koine Greek Ἀκαδημία) is an institution of secondary or tertiary higher learning (and generally also research or honorary membership). The name traces back to Plato's school of philosophy ...
on Titian's ''Virgin and Child with St John''.)
The argument is most fascinating as an early debate on classic vs modern in painting; in essence on the mathematics of
proportion
Proportionality, proportion or proportional may refer to:
Mathematics
* Proportionality (mathematics), the property of two variables being in a multiplicative relation to a constant
* Ratio, of one quantity to another, especially of a part compare ...
and
perspective in
drawing
Drawing is a form of visual art in which an artist uses instruments to mark paper or other two-dimensional surface. Drawing instruments include graphite pencils, pen and ink, various kinds of paints, inked brushes, colored pencils, crayons, ...
—the classic approach— as opposed to the colored
brush
A brush is a common tool with bristles, wire or other filaments. It generally consists of a handle or block to which filaments are affixed in either a parallel or perpendicular orientation, depending on the way the brush is to be gripped durin ...
stroke—the approach of the moderns. In his detailed study of the argument, ''Roger de Piles et les débats sur le coloris au siècle de Louis XIV'' (1965), B. Teyssèdre gives a touching account of the ''bohème'' of the "modern" ''réfusés'' in seventeenth century Paris, a history that was to repeat itself with the
Impressionists
Impressionism was a 19th-century art movement characterized by relatively small, thin, yet visible brush strokes, open Composition (visual arts), composition, emphasis on accurate depiction of light in its changing qualities (often accentuating ...
.
In the course of the argument Roger de Piles introduced the term "''clair-obscur''" (
Chiaroscuro
Chiaroscuro ( , ; ), in art, is the use of strong contrasts between light and dark, usually bold contrasts affecting a whole composition. It is also a technical term used by artists and art historians for the use of contrasts of light to achi ...
) to highlight the effect of color in accentuating the tension between light and dark in a painting.
The way Roger de Piles documented his argument with Venetian and northern European examples was of influence to
Antoine Coypel
Antoine Coypel (11 April 16617 January 1722) was a French painter, pastellist, engraver, decorative designer and draughtsman.[Hyacinthe Rigaud
Jacint Rigau-Ros i Serra (; 18 July 1659 – 29 December 1743), known in French as Hyacinthe Rigaud (), was a Catalan-French baroque painter most famous for his portraits of Louis XIV and other members of the French nobility.
Biography
Rigaud ...]
,
Nicolas de Largillière
Nicolas de Largillière (; 10 October 1656 – 20 March 1746) was a French portrait painter, born in Paris.
Biography
Early life
Largillière's father, a merchant, took him to Antwerp at the age of three. As a boy, he spent nearly two years i ...
and
François de Troy
François de Troy ( 28 February 1645 – 1 May 1730) was a French painter and engraver who became principal painter to King James II in exile at Saint-Germain-en-Laye and Director of the Académie Royale de peinture et de sculpture.
Early li ...
.
Balance of painters
To his last published work: ''Cours de peinture par principes avec un balance de peintres'' (1708) de Piles appended a list of fifty-six major painters with whose work he had acquainted himself as a connoisseur during his travels.
To each painter in the list he gave marks from 0 to 18 for composition, drawing, color and expression. This gave an overview of aesthetic appreciation hinging on the balance between color and design. The highest marks went to
Raffaello Sanzio and
Rubens, with a slight bias on color for Rubens, a slight bias on drawing for Raphaël. Painters who scored very badly in anything but color were
Giovanni Bellini
Giovanni Bellini (; c. 1430 – 26 November 1516) was an Italian Renaissance painter, probably the best known of the Bellini family of Venetian painters. He was raised in the household of Jacopo Bellini, formerly thought to have been his father ...
,
Giorgione
Giorgione (, , ; born Giorgio Barbarelli da Castelfranco; 1477–78 or 1473–74 – 17 September 1510) was an Italian painter of the Venetian school during the High Renaissance, who died in his thirties. He is known for the elusive poetic qualit ...
and remarkably
Michelangelo Caravaggio with 16 on color and 0 (zero) on expression. Painters who fell far behind Rubens and Raphaël but whose balance between color and design was perfect were
Lucas van Leyden,
Sebastian Bourdon,
Albrecht Dürer
Albrecht Dürer (; ; hu, Ajtósi Adalbert; 21 May 1471 – 6 April 1528),Müller, Peter O. (1993) ''Substantiv-Derivation in Den Schriften Albrecht Dürers'', Walter de Gruyter. . sometimes spelled in English as Durer (without an umlaut) or Due ...
.
List
The complete list is transcribed here from Manlio Brusatin:''Histoire des couleurs'' (Paris: Flammarion, 1986, pp. 103–104), reproduced in Elisabeth G. Holt ''Literary Sources of Art History'', (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947), pp. 415–416
Writings
*''De Arte Graphica'' (1668) (Translation from Latin to French of
Charles Alphonse Du Fresnoy's work - with supplementary comments by Roger de Piles).
*''Dialogue sur le coloris'' ( ''Dialogue upon Colour'', 1673)
*''Le Cabinet de Monseigneur le Duc de
Richelieu'' (1676)
*''Lettre d'un français à un gentilhomme flamand'' (1676)
*''La Vie de Rubens'' (1681)
*''L'Abrégé de la vie des peintres'' (1699),
English translation in 1707
''The Art of Painting and the Lives of the Painters'' on Google books
Google Books (previously known as Google Book Search, Google Print, and by its code-name Project Ocean) is a service from Google Inc. that searches the full text of books and magazines that Google has scanned, converted to text using optical c ...
a seven-volume book of painter biographies:
**The list of painters in Part 5: Roger de Piles' artists from Lombardy
**The list of painters in Part 6: Roger de Piles' artists from Germany and the Low Countries
**The list of painters in Part 7: Roger de Piles' artists from France
*''Cours de peinture par principes avec un balance de peintres'' ( ''The Principles of Painting'', 1708), see: formal analysis
In art history, formalism is the study of art by analyzing and comparing form and style. Its discussion also includes the way objects are made and their purely visual or material aspects. In painting, formalism emphasizes compositional elements ...
Notes
References
*
*
External links
de Piles on drawing technique (English translation)
Roger de Piles at arthistoricum.net
(German)
{{DEFAULTSORT:Piles, Roger De
1635 births
1709 deaths
People from Nièvre
17th-century French painters
French male painters
18th-century French painters
Philosophers of art
Painters from Paris
Artist authors
18th-century French male artists