“The Judgment of Hercules”. Shaftesbury at the Crossroads of Art Theory

Abstract

In the early 18th century, British art theory was an almost virgin field, open to inevitable influences from the continent. Anthony Ashley Cooper, the Third Lord of Shaftesbury, who devoted the last years of his life to various problems of art, made an attempt to create the first serious theory of art in England. In this article, I try to show that Shaftesbury was faced with the need to choose between two competing approaches to art widespread in France at the turn of the century: the traditional approach, based on the poetic understanding of painting, the essence of which was history and its moral meaning, and the new one, proposed by Roger de Piles, based on the action of color and light and shade, which create a comprehensive visual effect independent of the story presented in the picture. Shaftesbury took a traditional approach, driven by moral fears and rather reluctant to make sensual pleasure the goal of art. At the same time, he appropriated the key concepts of Roger de Piles: the pictorial unity and the whole picture, ignoring the ideas associated with them. This should be understood as a half-measure that allowed him to modernize the language of art without the danger of compromising the moral importance of painting.