Christopher Braider attends to a 1667 talk delivered by Charles Le Brun at the most neoclassical of art institutions, the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture. Aesthetics, observes Braider, implies a distinctive matter of art: some single feature set apart from all of the many non- or sub-aesthetic things one can see in works of art. Part of this is accounted for by the prior emergence of the modern notion of art itself. Another part springs from the invention of taste, which gave access to forms of beauty and sublimity beyond the reach of the masses. But a key factor remained the notion that there is some underlying thing, added both to the material substrate of any given work of art and to the uses to which the work is put, without which it could not qualify as a “true” work of art at all. The result was the identification of a work’s aesthetic character as an autonomous object of reflection. Le Brun’s lecture on Raphael’s St Michel terrassant le Dragon, Braider shows, aimed to train both painters and art lovers in a “right” appreciation of the nature of pictorial art via the identification of the aesthetic je ne sais quoi.

Laure Katsaros will focus on Étienne-Louis Boullée’s (1728-1799) ambiguous status in the architectural canon to explore the non-linearity of “neoclassicism” and its (anachronistic) relation to Modernism. Bouclée, who is mostly remembered for his drawings of imaginary monuments on an enormous scale, is invariably referred to as a “neoclassical” architect. On the other hand, Katsaros argues, Boullée is also characterized as a “visionary” architect, whose grandiose plans seem to uncannily prefigure Modernist buildings, with their pared-down structure, lack of decoration, and obsession with elemental geometrical shapes. Both a “neoclassicist” and a “proto-modern” visionary, Boullée occupies an ambivalent place in architectural history, both looking toward the classical past and absorbed into the Modernist canon. His work can also help us examine critically questions of scale, visual repetition, and the role of the emotions in neo-classical and Modernist aesthetics.

The human body, with its head commanding the “lesser” organs and appendages, has from classical times been a go-to metaphor for the hierarchically ordered polis. Jade Liu interrogates a curious feature of the Labyrinth’s decorations—two fountains that focus on representations of the anatomical head: Le Loup & la Teste and Le Serpent à plusieurs testes. The discourse surrounding these fountains and the composition of the fountains themselves call to the head as not only a body part, but also as a sum of its executive functions and more importantly, as an unequivocal leader. Liu argues that by representing the head as possibly lacking a brain, the Labyrinth suggest that the palace of Versailles contains within it a principle of a less hierarchical type of art.

Sylvaine Guyot explores the conflicting conceptions of the sublime that cohabitated during the long seventeenth century. In an early modernity marked by an interplay between religious and secular spheres, there was a strong culture of the sublime, steeped in Renaissance Neo-Platonism, Augustinian theology, reflections from classical antiquity, and the centuries-old magical conception of royal charisma. In this period of aesthetic debate, the social, political, religious, and artistic fields were reconfigured by the unprecedented focus on a sublime of delicacy, associated with the sphere of the feminine. What is sublime became distinguished from the striking energy of the raptus and defined rather by the progressive temporality of a subtle feeling and by reactions which can be differentiated, opening the path to the modern idea of aesthetic pleasure and the development of a new sensibility.