Begun in 1759 and spanning some twenty-two years, Diderot's reviews of the biennial exhibitions organized by the Royal Academy of Painting appeared during a time of marked transformation in the fine arts in France. As the principle of a classical, courtly style gradually lost its regulative force, painters enlarged the domain of the real that was judged presentable in art. The appeal of flamboyant rococo artifice steadily waned, displaced by the desire for scenes expressing classical high seriousness and exemplary morality. Around mid-century a mixed, hybrid style emerged, as artists experimented with ways to make visible new spaces and times, and to articulate esthetic and ethical values that would provide them with meaning.

Art historians have amply described the stylistic and thematic differences between eighteenth-century painting and that of the Grand Siècle. Description alone though cannot account for what causes these artistic experimentations, their purpose or their effects. If the descriptive idiom is monotonous, parasitic, and uncritical, as Diderot will realize, it is because description idealizes and essentializes the artwork, treating it as if its significance were immanent to form. Moreover, the formalism of descriptive discourse rests on the assumption that esthetic issues can be treated independently of supposedly nonesthetic ones, a decision that brackets, if not denies, whatever exists “outside” the work of art, located on “this side” of a supposedly essentially esthetic space.