The dispute over the color
The controversy over color ( La Querelle du coloris ) is the name of an aesthetic debate in the last quarter of the 17th century that preoccupied painters in France .
The art theorist Roger de Piles published an essay in 1673 entitled Dialogue sur le coloris . In this work he praised the work of Rubens , whose work is characterized more by color than by drawing. This position convinced the Duc de Richelieu , a nephew of Cardinal Richelieu , to drop his interest in Poussin's work and to create a collection of Rubens pictures.
This debate was preceded by a conflict which, in the Renaissance, separated the supporters of Neoplatonism in Florence (Beauty is only an idea) of Michelangelo and the supporters of Aristotelianism in Venice (Beauty is objective, material) of Titian . However, it was in Paris under the reign of Louis XIV that the debates became more intense. On the one hand, the dispute was purely theoretical; but it was also conducted in a polemical manner, for leaflets ( abuse criticism ) and pamphlets accompanied the dispute with a certain vehemence. The dispute ended in favor of the owners of the color versus those of the pencil and opened the way for painters like Antoine Watteau , François Boucher and Jean-Honoré Fragonard . The same questions arose in the following century, when the classicism of Jacques-Louis David and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres contrasted with the romanticism of Eugène Delacroix and Théodore Géricault .
literature
- Roger de Piles : Dialogue sur le coloris ( French ). Langlois, Paris 1673 (Retrieved May 6, 2013). Online version of the new edition 1699
- Bernard Teyssèdre, Roger de Piles et les débats sur le coloris au siècle de Louis XIV , Bibliothèque des Arts, 1965.
- Thomas Puttfarken, Roger de Piles' theory of art , Yale University Press, 1985, ISBN 0-300-03356-7
- Exhibition catalog: Rubens contre Poussin. La querelle du coloris dans la peinture française à la fin du XVII. siècle , Éditions Ludion, ISBN 90-5544-492-8