Drawing on Freudian theories of sexuality and Kant's conception of the beautiful, French art historian Hubert Damisch considers artists as diverse as Raphael, Picasso, Watteau, and Manet to demonstrate that beauty has always been connected to ideas of sexual difference and pleasure. Damisch's tale begins with the judgment of Paris, in which Paris awards Venus the golden apple and thus forever links beauty with desire. The casting of this decision as a mistake-in which desire is rewarded over wisdom and strength-is then linked to theories of the unconscious and psychological drives. In his...

The eighteenth-century French philosophe Denis Diderot--the principal intelligence behind the Encyclopedie and the author of idiosyncratic fictional works such as Jacques the Fatalist and Rameau's Nephew--was also the first great art critic. Until now, however, Diderot's treatises on the visual arts have been available only in French. This two-volume edition makes the most important of his art-critical texts available in English for the first time.

Diderot's works are among the most provocative and engaging products of the French Enlightenment. Moreover,...

The editor of the 'Encyclopedie' and author of idiosyncratic works of fiction such as 'Rameau's Nephew', Denis Diderot (1713-84) was also the first great art critic. His most important productions in this genre - the 'Salon of 1765' and the 'Salon of 1767', each occasioned by one of the biennial exhibitions held in the Louvre - are among the most brilliant and captivating texts of the French eighteenth century, and this edition makes them available in English for the first time. Diderot's writings on art, the most important before Baudelaire, are poised between the eras of aesthetic idealism,...

One of today's foremost art historians and critics presents a strikingly original view of architecture and the city through the twin lenses of cultural theory and psychoanalysis. Hubert Damisch--whose work on the history of perspective, the notion of imitation, and the question of representation has emerged as the most important body of critical thought on painting since, perhaps, Meyer Shapiro's collected essays--here engages a subject that has been of continuing interest to him over the last thirty years. In the field of architecture, this book has been awaited for a long time; in the...