Cupid and Psyche

~In Marie-Denise Villers’s portrait of Charlotte du Val d’Ognes (fig. 56), the young artist sits at work in front of a cracked window.Higgonet 2016 demonstrates that the setting is a studio in the Louvre, making this an assertive and confident...

A new understanding of the distinction between painting and sculpture began to emerge in the second half of the eighteenth century. The real issue here is not the distinction as such. Sculpture had always been thought of as different, if only because its execution required different skills, it was made of different materials and existed as solid thing rather than painted surface. In art theory, where painting and sculpture were seen to be grounded in a common mastery of drawing or dessin or …