ABSTRACT
This essay concentrates on Roger de Piles’ contribution to eighteenth-century philosophical debates about the role of ingenious individuals in the progress of any given society from the past. It discusses the historiographical and political consequences of De Piles’ novel privileging of artistic style and taste—of schools and of nations—in art historical writing. Historiographically, De Piles foregrounded the historical model of the ‘tableau’ to describe the distinguished state of civilisation in his analysis of Raphael’s School of Athens—based on Giovan Pietro Bellori—as the visual centrepiece of the Renaissance. Politically, he encouraged the conviction that the development of the arts in a nation was not explained by a prince’s patronage but by extraordinary artistic talent, later exemplified by Evrard Titon du Tillet’s (1677–1762) public monument of the Parnasse français.
