Querelle des Anciens et Modernes

In an article from the 1950s, Paul Kristeller traced the development of the system of the fine arts that everyone since at least Kant has taken for granted. He notes that this system, which considers some specific endeavours as “fine arts” separated from mere “crafts” or “artisanship,” was given a strong impetus by the quarrel of ancients and moderns launched in response to Charles Perrault’s poem Le Siecle de Louis le Grand .

What was at issue was the problem of progress: Clearly, remarkable progress had been made in a number of technical areas; but that raised the question of whether the seventeenth century had seen similar progress in other areas. As the controversy developed, ancient/modern overlapped with static/progressive. In some areas, soon identified as the arts, the ancients remained standards; in other areas, the sciences, they did not.

Perrault made another important contribution to the development of modern conceptions of art in his 1690 Cabinet des Beaux Arts . Kristeller summarizes: “This is a description and explanation of eight allegorical paintings found in the studio of a French gentleman to whom the work is dedicated. In the preface, Perrault opposes the concept Beaux Arts to the traditional Arts Liberaux, which he rejects, and then lists and describes the eight ‘Fine Arts’ which the gentleman had represented to suit his taste and interests: Eloquence, Poesie, Musique, Architecture, Peinture, Sculpture, Optique, Mechanique.166 Thus on the threshold of the eighteenth century we are very close to the modern system of the Fine Arts, but we have not yet quite reached it, as the inclusion of Optics and Mechanics clearly shows. The fluctuations of the scheme show how slowly emerged the notion which to us seems so thoroughly obvious.”

CP Snow was a few centuries late.