ll!"[51]

[51] x. 115.

The picture of Saint Benedict by Deshays--whom at one moment Diderot
pronounces to be the first painter in the nation--stirs the same spirit
of emendation. Diderot thinks that in spite of the pallor of the dying
saint's visage, one would be inclined to give him some years yet to
live.

"I ask whether it would not have been better that his legs should
have sunk under him; that he should have been supported by two or
three monks; that he should have had the arms extended, the head
thrown back, with death on his lips and ecstasy on his brow. If the
painter had given this strong expression to his Saint Benedict,
consider, my friend, how it would have reflected itself on all the
rest of the picture. That slight change in the principal figure
would have influenced all the others. The celebrant, instead of
being upright, would in his compassion have leaned more forward;
distress and anguish would have been more strongly depicted in all
the bystanders. There is a piece from which you could teach young
students that, by altering one single circumstance, you alter all
others, or else the truth disappears. You could make out of it an
excellent chapter on the _force of unity_: you would have to
preserve the same arrangement, the same figures, and to invite them
to execute the picture according to the different changes that were
made in the figure of the communicant."[52]

[52] x. 125.

The admirable Salons were not Diderot's only contributions to aesthetic
criticism. He could not content himself with reproductions, in eloquent
language upon paper, of the combinations of colour and form upon canvas.
No one was further removed from vague or indolent expansion. He returns
again and again to examine with keenness and severity the principles,
the methods, the distinctions of the fine arts, and though he is often a
sentimentalist and a declaimer, he can also, when the time comes,
transform himself into an accurate scrutiniser of ideas and phrases, a
seeker after causes and differences, a discoverer of kinds and classes
in art, and of the conditions proper to success in each of them. In
short, the fact of being an eloquent and enthusiastic critic of
pictures, did not prevent him from being a truly philosophical thinker
about the abstract laws of art, with the thinker's genius for analysis,
comparison, classification.