The Philosophy of Art

What is this book about?

Taine was a French historian and critic, and this book was assembled from his lectures at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He asks, in the positivist spirit, why a given age produces a given art. His answer centres on three factors — race, environment, and moment: art is not the isolated product of genius but the crystallisation of a particular soil and the spirit of an age. The book works through Italian painting, Netherlandish painting, and Greek sculpture.

Why read it?

It is a founding work of art history and criticism, the first to treat "why is art the way it is" as a question that evidence can answer. Its value is less in agreeing with the three factors than in learning a way of asking: place a work back into the people, climate, society, and age it came from, rather than merely admiring genius. Later criticism grows from exactly this point.

Core Ideas

• The essence of art is the imitation of reality — the basic starting point of Taine's account.
• A work's style is determined by three factors together: race, environment, and moment.
• Art is not the isolated product of genius but the crystallisation of a particular soil and the spirit of an age.
• Art should be studied from facts toward laws, using positivist method to find the inner rules of artistic development.

What questions does this book try to answer?

• Why do works of art take on the style of a particular age and people?
• To what extent do a period's climate, society, and institutions actually determine the look of its art?

Who should read it?

For art-history students, connoisseurs, and cultural researchers, and for anyone who enjoys museums and wants to understand why a painting looks the way it does. It works through many concrete examples, but the theory is dense, so a little background in Western art history makes it far easier.

How to Read It

The book was assembled from Taine's lectures at the École des Beaux-Arts and published in 1865. Two things to watch: first, it belongs to nineteenth-century positivism, explaining art through the three factors of race, environment, and moment and treating people and period as almost necessary determinants — a determinist reading that has drawn much later criticism; second, its method of studying art within its society and age is still in use. The standard Chinese version is Fu Lei's translation, notable for its elegant prose.