Hippolyte Taine’s The Philosophy of Art gathers the lectures he delivered at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris during the winter of 1864, translated into English by John Durand and issued in a revised version in the early 1870s. The book belongs to nineteenth-century criticism at its most ambitious: Taine sets out to treat art the way a naturalist treats plants, explaining works of painting, sculpture, poetry, architecture, and music by the social conditions, climate, and habits of mind that produced them. Its two real divisions are “On the Nature of the Work of Art” and “On the Production of the Work of Art,” and together they move from a definition of what art is to a law of why one age makes statues and another makes cathedrals.
“We may accordingly regard temperature and physical circumstances as _making a choice_ amongst various species of trees, all owing a certain species to subsist and propagate, to the exclusion, more or less complete, of all others.”
The Core Argument
Taine’s central claim is that a work of art is never an isolated accident of individual genius. It belongs first to the artist’s whole output, then to the school of artists working around him, and finally to the wider society whose tastes and circumstances he shares. Shakespeare belongs with Webster, Ford, Massinger, and Ben Jonson; Rubens with Jordaens, Van Dyck, and Seghers; Phidias with the Athens that employed Ictinus. Art, on this view, appears and disappears with social conditions the way vegetation appears and disappears with climate. Modern aesthetics should therefore be historic rather than dogmatic — verifying and explaining laws, like botany, and extending sympathy to every school instead of prescribing rules.
From there Taine asks what art actually is, and his answer is deliberately anti-literal. Art does not consist in exact imitation. Photography, casting, and stenography reproduce reality more faithfully than any painter or poet, yet they are inferior to a rapid Van Dyck sketch. Sculpture is purposely inexact — one color, no eyeballs — and the colored statues of Naples and Spain repel rather than persuade. What art imitates is the relationship and mutual dependence of parts, and its highest task is to make an essential or salient character predominate: the quality from which the other qualities of a thing derive. Nature only half accomplishes this; art supplements her, suppressing what conceals the essential character, selecting what manifests it, and correcting details that weaken it. Raphael admitted that beautiful women were scarce and that he painted his own conception; the peasant girl who posed for him had work-deformed hands and a contracted expression, and the real figure contributed only parts and suggestions to the finished “Galatea.”
The second half of the book states the law of production: a work of art is determined by an aggregate — the general state of mind and surrounding manners of its time. Taine compares the artwork to a plant. An orange tree needs suitable soil, moisture, warmth, a long summer, and a mild winter; those conditions do not create the seed, but without them it never germinates. Physical temperature works by elimination and selection, and a moral temperature does the same for talents. A prevailing tendency constitutes the spirit of the age; other gifts are repressed. Melancholy, for instance, is not a private mood but a product of centuries of decadence, depopulation, invasion, famine, and misery, and once it saturates a society, cheerful work finds no support and stays mediocre while mournful work finds ready-made collaborators and an appreciative public.
Inside the Book
The Publisher’s Note and the Two Prefaces
The volume opens with a short note from the publishers, who explain that Taine’s name first reached American readers in 1865 through a small imported edition, by then out of print on both sides of the Atlantic. They present this reissue as the forerunner of the later books on the ideal, on Dutch art, and on Greek art, carrying the principles worked out in the author’s first course of lectures. Taine’s own preface to the first edition follows, dated London, November 1865, and it lays out the method plainly: these are lectures delivered in the winter of 1864 at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and they treat art the way the sciences are treated, explaining it through social influences, climate, and surrounding conditions, and resting on historical inductions that end in inferential laws. The advantages claimed are practical ones—students and amateurs are freed from metaphysical and visionary theories, exclusive loyalty to a single school or master or epoch is prevented, criticism becomes less capricious, and charity toward all works is encouraged. A second preface, dated South Orange, New Jersey, January 1873, notes the author’s growing popularity, praises On Intelligence, and describes this edition as a careful, more literal revision amounting to a new translation. The contents then divide the book into two parts: on the nature of the work of art, and on its production.
The Work of Art Belongs to a Whole
Taine begins his opening lecture by asking for attention and indulgence, then announces his subject: the history of art, principally Italian painting. His first move is to deny that a work of art stands alone. It belongs, first, to the artist’s entire output; then to a school—Shakespeare to Webster, Ford, Massinger, Marlowe, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher; Rubens to Crayer, Seghers, Van Oost, Everdingen, Van Thulden, Quellin, Hondthorst, Jordaens, Van Dyck; and then to the surrounding society, as Phidias belongs with Ictinus, and as Spain’s Velasquez, Murillo, and Zurbaran belong with Lope de Vega, Calderon, Cervantes, and Tirso de Molina. Greek tragedy, Gothic architecture, Dutch painting, and French tragedy all appear and disappear with their social conditions, and Taine compares the moral climate to physical temperature. Modern æsthetics, he concludes, is historic rather than dogmatic—it verifies and explains laws, like botany, and looks with sympathy on every school. He then asks what art actually is, setting architecture and music aside for the moment to consider poetry, sculpture, and painting as the imitative arts.
Exact Imitation Is Not the End of Art
Art, Taine argues, does not consist in exact imitation but in the deliberate manifestation of an essential character. Everyday experience proves it: an artist’s life usually divides into a first period of natural feeling and scrupulous study of the living model, and a second period of mannerism and decline, when the model is abandoned for prescribed rules. Michael Angelo’s first period lasted nearly sixty years and produced the force and heroic grandeur of the Sistine chapel; his later Pauline chapel frescoes—the Conversion of St. Paul, the Crucifixion of St. Peter, and the Last Judgment, painted in his seventy-seventh year—show conventional forms, multiplied attitudes, and contrived foreshortenings. Corneille, the French Michael Angelo, created Chimène, the Cid, Polyeucte, and les Horaces from living models, then declined into Pertharite and Attila. Whole schools degenerate the same way—painting after Michael Angelo, the Venetians, the French eighteenth century, Latin decadence, English drama, Italian decline. Taine contrasts Pompeii’s first-century art with Ravenna’s sixth-century mosaics under Justinian: as pagan manners and the nude disappeared, artists copied copies, and art expired. Yet exact imitation is not the goal either. Casting, photography, stenography, and Denner’s microscopic portrait in the Louvre are inferior to a Van Dyck sketch. Sculpture is purposely inexact—one color, no eyeballs—while colored Neapolitan and Spanish statues repel. Dramatic poets turn speech into verse, as Goethe’s Iphigenia shows when rewritten from prose to verse. Art should imitate the relationships and mutual dependence of parts—proportions, forms, the logic of a body or a character. But the greatest schools modify even actual relationships: Michael Angelo’s Medici tomb statues and Rubens’ Kermesse express an essential character, the quality from which other qualities derive, like the lion’s carnivorous nature or the alluvial formation of the Low Countries. Nature only half accomplishes this; art supplements her.
The Essential Character Made Predominant
Raphael, painting his “Galatea,” said beautiful women were scarce and followed his own conception; the peasant girl who posed had work-deformed hands, spoiled feet, and disordered eyes. His “Fornarina” has drooping shoulders, a meagre upper arm, and a hard, contracted expression; painted again in the Farnesini Palace, she was transformed, the real figure contributing only parts and suggestions. Art suppresses what conceals the essential character, selects what manifests it, corrects enfeebling details, and recasts neutralized ones. Turning from works to artists, Taine holds that original sensation is indispensable; without it artists are copyists and mechanics. Talent means delicate, quick perceptions that seize relationships and shades—heroic or plaintive sound, listless or stately attitude, rich or sober colors. This sensation affects the whole nervous and thinking machinery; the body becomes mimetic, the voice imitative, the style figurative and inventive, recasting the object to ennoble or distort it. This inward process, seen in sketches, diaries, and correspondence, is genius or inspiration. Reviewing the road: art first seemed to imitate sensible appearances, then to reproduce relationships of parts, and finally to make an essential character predominant. The combined definition follows: art manifests an essential or salient character, hence an important idea, more clearly than real objects, by a group of connected parts whose relationships it systematically modifies. The first part is essential, the second accessory. Architecture and music, imitating nothing, combine mathematical relationships—architecture using visible magnitudes to display serenity, simplicity, strength, elegance, or Gothic strangeness; music using velocities of sonorous vibrations, scales, melody, and harmony, sound being also analogous to the cry that expresses emotion, as in Gluck and the Germans against Rossini and the Italians. Art matters because man is first an animal providing food, clothing, shelter, family, state, laws, and armies, and only then does a superior life of contemplation dawn. Science expresses causes abstractly; art manifests them sensibly to reason, heart, and senses, being both noble and popular.
The Law of Production: Moral Temperature
The second part opens with the law of production: a work of art is determined by an aggregate that is the general state of mind and surrounding circumstances. Taine proves this by experience and reason, comparing plant and artwork. The orange needs suitable soil, moisture, warmth, a long summer, a mild winter, and freedom from stifling vegetation; near Sorrento and Amain these produce orange groves. Circumstances do not produce the seed but are necessary. Opposite conditions—mountain, thin soil, cold, short summer, snow—favor fir and pine, as in the Vosges, Scotland, and Norway. Physical temperature acts by elimination, suppression, natural selection. A moral temperature similarly selects talents: nature sows approximately equal quantities, but only some germinate. The prevailing tendency constitutes the spirit of the age; other talents are repressed. Detailing melancholy: five or six centuries of decadence, depopulation, invasion, famine, and pests produce it—Asia in the sixth century before Christ, Europe in the first ten centuries. Artists share public misfortune, so the gay become less gay and the melancholy more melancholy. Religion, philosophy, conversation, and daily observation reinforce gloom. Artistic feeling intensifies it; artists see the whole and spirit, amplify, and paint darker colors. Other minds supply only melancholy suggestions; cheerful work finds no support and is mediocre, while melancholy work finds ready-made art, co-laborers, and public appreciation. Men comprehend only analogous sentiments: Pellico or Andryane, imprisoned twenty years, would reject cheerful music, Rabelais, and Rubens’s merry brutes, preferring Rembrandt, Chopin, Lamartine, or Heine. Public taste depends on situation; artists seek applause, so obstacles close every passage for joyous works. The opposite case, cheerfulness, occurs in renaissance epochs of order, wealth, population, comfort, prosperity, and discoveries; reversing the terms proves joyous art. Intermediary mixed cases produce corresponding combinations. Thus the social medium determines the species of art, suffering only harmonious works and suppressing others through renewed obstacles.
Four Great Cycles: Greece and Rome
Taine proposes to verify this law by examining four great cycles of European civilization: Greek and Roman antiquity; the feudal and Christian Middle Ages; the aristocratic monarchies of the seventeenth century; and the industrial democracies of the present, each with its own art. He treats the first two. In Greece, about three thousand years ago, a handsome, intelligent race appeared on the shores and islands of the Ægean, viewing life anew—not absorbed by religion like the Hindoos and Egyptians, nor by social organization like the Assyrians and Persians, nor by commerce like the Phoenicians and Carthaginians, but inventing the city. Miletus produced three hundred towns and colonized the Black Sea coast; cities encircled the Mediterranean from Cyrene to Marseilles. The citizen did little manual labor, was supported by tributaries and served by slaves; Athens counted four slaves per citizen, Ægina and Corinth four to five hundred thousand. He was abstemious, simply clothed and housed, living outdoors. Free and sovereign, he elected magistrates, judged political cases, decided state affairs, and devoted himself to politics and war—necessary because cities faced barbarians and each other, with atrocious war rights. Sparta, about the eighth century, set the military example: a camp without walls, exposing deformed children, regulating marriage and breeding, drilling youth in common, and exercising girls. This produced the Greek ideal: not the man of thought but the naked, well-proportioned athlete. Hence nudity without shame, the Olympian, Pythian, and Nemean games, Pindar singing chariot races, Milo of Crotona, and Diagoras dying in his sons’ arms. They exposed the body before the gods—Sophocles at Salamis, Alexander at Achilles’ tomb—worshipped beauty as divinity, and in Homer gave the gods human bodies. Thus statuary was born: athletes earned statues, gods were represented as perfect human forms. Sculptors studied naked bodies in baths, gymnasia, dances, and games for centuries, discovering the ideal type later recovered by Nicholas of Pisa. Statuary is Greece’
Flamboyant Gothic and the Medieval Crisis of Feeling
Taine turns to the flamboyant Gothic of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and what he finds there is architecture turning against itself. At Strasburg, Milan, York, Nuremburg, and the Church of Brou, solidity gives way to ornament; walls are hollowed into windows, and buttresses and iron props hold up a structure that seems to want to dissolve. Masons work constantly just to keep the decay at bay. Interiors become the work of jewellers — variegated glass, filigree, festive decoration — and Taine likens the whole style to a nervous, over-excited woman, or to the extravagant costumes of an age of knights and monks. For four centuries it spreads from Scotland to Sicily, across civil, religious, public, and private monuments alike. What it attests is a morbid yet sublime moral crisis at the heart of the Middle Ages.
The Making and Unmaking of Institutions
Human institutions, Taine argues, behave like living bodies: they are made and unmade by their own forces. The feudal chiefs were gradually subordinated by one stronger, more politic ruler who became king. By the fifteenth century the barons were officers; by the seventeenth, mere courtiers. Yet a courtier is no valet. His ancestry was the king’s equal, so he belongs to the privileged nobility, serves through honor, and is treated with consideration — Louis XIV threw his cane out the window rather than strike Lauzun. Court life arose in Italy and Spain, then France, then England, Germany, and northern Europe. France was its centre, and Louis XIV gave it éclat.
The King’s Salon and the Art of the Courtier
The king’s salon shapes minds. The model nobleman is generous, sensitive on honor, ready to duel — four thousand nobles were killed under Louis XIII — ready to fight at Neerwinden, ready to die for the king on the 10th of August. He is also polished, diplomatic, self-mastered, and flattering. Such people chose noble, correct pleasures, and out of those choices came seventeenth-century art: Poussin and Lesueur, Mansart and Perrault, LeNotre’s gardens, Versailles, and the engravings of Perelle, Sebastian Leclerc, Rigaud, and Nanteuil. Literature reached perfection with Bossuet, Pascal, La Fontaine, Molière, Corneille, Racine, La Rochefoucauld, Madame de Sévigné, Boileau, La Bruyère, and Bourdaloue; Courier said a chambermaid knew more style than a modern academy.
Tragedy as the Mirror of the Court
Tragedy especially suited courtiers. No murders on stage, regular plots, polished versification, heroes in French court dress. Its personages are kings, queens, princes, ambassadors, ministers, menins, confidants — not Greek slaves and nurses. Iphigenia obeys without tears; Achilles becomes a Prince of Condé; Oreste, Pyrrhus, Acomat, Ulysse, Hippolyte, Britannicus, Xipharès, Hermione, Andromaque, Roxane, Bérénice, Mithridate, Phèdre, and Athalie all preserve aristocratic decorum. This drama, like Gothic architecture, became universal, imported into every European court. France was Europe’s educator in elegance, style, and social intercourse.
Revolution, Democracy, and the Malady of the Age
This society dissolved through its own development. Absolute government became negligent and tyrannical, favoring only intimate nobles, while the growing bourgeoisie and the people made the French Revolution. After ten years they established democracy and equality, spreading across Europe through imperial wars and example. Industrial machinery and softened manners changed man: careers opened, comforts increased, authority mitigated. But ambition and cupidity spread; people regarded happiness as due, became exacting, and liberated thought abandoned tradition, producing conflicting systems and sects. The representative man became the melancholy, ambitious dreamer — René, Faust, Werther, Manfred — over-sensitive, comfort-accustomed, skeptical, and incurably miserable, the “great malady of the age.”
The Arts of the Modern Soul
Its effects appear in lyrical, sentimental, philosophical poetry; in language and new literary characters; in Chateaubriand, Balzac, Goethe, Heine, Cowper, Byron, Alfieri, and Leopardi; in design’s feverish, archeological style; and in landscape art. Music suddenly developed extraordinarily. Born in Italy and Germany, gestating from Palestrina to Pergolese, it burst forth with Scarlatti, Marcello, and Handel; Germany expressed religious severity in Sebastian Bach; Austria, half-Germanic and half-Italian, produced Haydn, Gluck, and Mozart. Music became cosmopolite before the French Revolution, corresponding to the new morbid, restless genius addressed by Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Weber, Meyerbeer, Berlioz, and Verdi. Music suits excessive sensibility because it imitates a cry arousing involuntary sympathy, yet, founded on sound relationships without living form, it expresses floating thoughts, formless dreams, and limitless desires. Thus it spread across Europe, even to France, whose national music was reduced to song and Vaudeville melodies.
The Law of Art’s Character and Creation
Taine concludes that these illustrations establish the law governing art’s character and creation: the work of art is determined by an aggregate — the general state of mind and surrounding manners. The chain runs: a general situation (the Greek free martial city with slaves; medieval feudal oppression and exalted Christianity; seventeenth-century court life; nineteenth-century industrial democracy guided by the sciences) develops needs, aptitudes, and sentiments; these, concentrated in one person, constitute the representative man (the Greek naked youth; the medieval ecstatic monk and amorous knight; the seventeenth-century perfect courtier; the modern Faust or Werther); artists present or address this character through imitative arts (painting, sculpture, drama, romance, epic) or non-incarnating arts (architecture, music). Thus four terms: situation, tendencies, representative man, and sensuous form or language. Each carries the next; variation in one produces variation in the rest.
Key Ideas
Several named concepts carry the argument. The first is the three-part definition of art that Taine builds by stages: art begins by seeming to imitate sensible appearances, then appears to reproduce the relationships of parts, and finally proves to make an essential character predominant. The full formula holds that art manifests an essential or salient character — hence an important idea — more clearly than real objects can, by a group of connected parts whose relationships it systematically modifies. The first clause is essential; the second is accessory.
The second is the law of production, expressed as a chain of four terms: a general situation, the tendencies it develops, the representative man in whom those tendencies are concentrated, and the sensuous form or language through which artists address him. A Greek free martial city supported by slaves yields the naked young athlete; medieval feudal oppression and exalted Christianity yield the ecstatic monk and the amorous knight; seventeenth-century court life yields the perfect courtier; nineteenth-century industrial democracy guided by the sciences yields Faust or Werther. Each term carries the next.
The third is the distinction between imitative and non-imitating arts. Sculpture, painting, and poetry correspond to real objects. Architecture and music imitate nothing; they combine mathematical relationships — visible magnitudes and geometrical forms in one case, velocities of sonorous vibration, scales, melody, and harmony in the other. Yet music still touches the cry and the emotion behind it, which is why it suits an age of excessive sensibility.
Themes
Running beneath the argument is a meditation on decline. Taine returns repeatedly to the pattern of an artist’s life: a first period of minute study of the living model and scrupulous fidelity, followed by a second period of mannerism when the model is abandoned for prescribed rules. Michael Angelo’s first period lasted nearly sixty years and produced the Sistine ceiling; the Pauline chapel frescoes, painted in his seventy-seventh year, show conventional forms and contrived foreshortenings. Corneille, “the French Michael Angelo,” created Chimène and Polyeucte from living models and then declined into Pertharite and Attila. Whole schools degenerate the same way — painting after Michael Angelo, the Venetians, the French eighteenth century, Latin decadence, English drama, Italian decline. Taine contrasts the art of first-century Pompeii with the sixth-century mosaics of Ravenna under Justinian: as pagan manners and the nude disappeared, artists copied copies, and art expired.
A second theme is the interdependence of art and the society that sustains it, worked out across four great cycles of European civilization. In Greece, a handsome and intelligent race invented the city rather than submitting to priest or despot; the citizen lived outdoors, abstemious and sovereign, and war and politics made the well-proportioned naked body the highest ideal. Statuary was born from that ideal, and Rome later held nearly as many statues as inhabitants. In the Middle Ages, famine, leprosy, and endless feudal war produced despair and nervous exaltation, chivalric mystic love, and Gothic architecture — vast edifices for a universal religion, mournful interiors lit through stained glass, ogive arches and filigree ornament that grew ever more paradoxical until solidity was abandoned for decoration and masons labored constantly to repair the fragile structure. In the seventeenth century, the king’s salon shaped the model nobleman — generous, sensitive on honor, polished, self-mastered — and produced a drama of kings, queens, and ambassadors in French court dress, a tragedy so suited to courtiers that it was imported into every European court. Then that society dissolved through its own development, and industrial democracy produced the melancholy, ambitious dreamer, over-sensitive and skeptical, the “great malady of the age,” whose art is lyrical, sentimental, philosophical, and above all musical.
Why It Matters
Taine’s book matters because it made a method out of an intuition that later criticism could never quite discard: that to understand a painting or a poem you must understand the world that wanted it. His insistence that criticism be historic rather than dogmatic, that it verify and explain rather than pronounce, and that it extend charity toward all works, is a genuine intellectual advance over the rule-bound criticism of his day. The famous chain of situation, tendencies, representative man, and sensuous form gave nineteenth-century thought a vocabulary for connecting art to climate, institution, and mood, and the four cycles he traces — antiquity, the Middle Ages, the aristocratic monarchy, the industrial democracy — remain a vivid sketch of European civilization seen through its artifacts. His taste for the plant and the moral temperature, for the orange grove and the fir tree, can look deterministic now, and the reader may resist the notion that a painter is simply what his society grows. But the book’s real force lies in its sympathy and its range: it moves from the Sistine chapel to Ravenna’s mosaics, from Versailles gardens to Beethoven, and it ends by placing art among the highest things a civilization does — science expressing causes abstractly, art manifesting them to reason, heart, and senses at once, being both noble and popular.
