Towards the Materiality of the Sign: Aesthetics and Poetics in Nineteenth-century France

Abstract

Although early nineteenth-century French aesthetic theorists, as their study of art would suggest, were deeply interested in form, they were nevertheless in their writings above all concerned to stress the nature of art’s content, a content that was generally perceived by them to be essentially ‘spiritual’ or ‘moral’, that is, intellectual. Their distrust of the object per se, of the unprogrammed image, reflected attitudes deeply entrenched in European aesthetic thinking. For J. -F. Sobry, writing in 1810, the cult of the image was the idolatry of primitive man, one unworthy of civilised peoples: ‘primitive men are always and everywhere naturally idolatrous, natural worshippers of images, especially extraordinary ones’.² In his lectures on art of 1818, Victor Cousin’s overriding concern with content in aesthetics was a reflection of a still prevalent Christian ethos and of a dualist Cartesian philosophy, both of which saw the body as the envelope of the soul: ‘Physical beauty serves as an envelope to intellectual or spiritual beauty’.³ Meanwhile Quatremère de Quincy’s concern with content in his chapter on the origin and subsequent prevalence of the Greek ‘ideal’ style in art, in his Essai sur la nature, le but et les moyens de l’imitation dans les beaux-arts of 1823, was a reflection of Western civilisation’s belief in the sign as ‘a sort of ideal … in mathematical terms […] the most generalised representation of an object’.⁴