Aisthesis ee Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art Jacques Ranciére Translated by Zakir Paul ¥ vERSO London » New York20 Dresden, 1764 the Juno Ludovisi emblematizes the & ecific mode of experience inexpressive back reveals new potes art of tomorrow: potentials that are free to express are revoked, wh: luding and above s also in the inventions of regime of art could tory of the metamorphose 2. The Little Gods of the Street Munich-Berlin, 182821 Munich-Berlin, 1828 ‘These sar in the first book of the Lectures on Aesthetics in this section devoted to elaborating the concept of the beauti~ ful that is the object of artistie production and aesthetic reflection, the professor willingly illustrates his argument with contemporary examples: the latest salon where a new school of painting ends up ‘giving a caricatural aspect 4 connoisseur opposes ideal theories with the exigencies of sensible matter and the technique that transforms it. Here ewo paintings from the Munich Gallery and a painting from the Louvre illustrate the argument. Two Murillos and one Raphael, or at least a painting. attributed to Raphael. In the period when Hegel save i, che portrait of the young dreamer with the velvet beret that posterity alternately attributed to Pasmigianino and to Correggio was stil attributed to Raphacl. The correction of the attribution matters litle here. What eserves attention is the coupling of the two names: Raphael and Murillo, For them to be associated in this way, for one to xecall the othes,an abyss needed to be crosied chy of painters. In the tradition of Vasari, renewed by Bellori and Felibien, Raphael is the master paz excellence, the one who nourished himself in Rome oon the monuments of antique art and knew how to transpose their noble simplicity onto the pictorial surface. In the prize listof painters compiled by Roger de Piles in 1708, he was the undisputed master in the fields of drawing and expression, equalled only by Guerchin and Rubens in composition. Colour alone, of and the ‘Venetians were the recognized masters, constituted his weak point But even this weakness contributed to his supremacy for all those swho considered drawing the directing principle of the art of paint ing, and colour its simple servant. ‘Murillo was very far fiom deserving such homage. Beggar Beys Eating Grapes and Melon probably entered the collection of the Prince Elector of Bavaria as early as the late seventeenth century, xd_n few English travellers brought some of the Sevi ter's works back to their country in the eighteenth century would search in vain for his trace, and that of his compateiots, in the surveys that learned eighteenth-century Europe compiled of its to enter the patrimony of universal p: painters and Schools, as it was practised, excluded ‘patrimony. The distribution of teria of excellence: Florentine drawing and Venetian colour, Italian. modelling and Flemish chizroscuro, and so on. A new national school could only take its place if it seemed to incarnate a specific excellence. And it was admitted that colour, the only praisewor thy element in the Spanish, came to them from the Flemish who had themselves inherited it from the Venetians. For a new ‘national’ painting to become visible, the idea of art as patrimony needed to impose itself art as the property of a people, the expression of its form of life, ut also as 2 common property whose works belonged to this common place now called Art, and im the maseus Surely the seizures of the French armies in the occupied terrto- ries constituted quite 2 peculiar form of ‘common patrimony’, An extreme example can be found in the cynicisin with which Soule lection, Yet the very pillaging of the convents in 8 a new value attributed to their content. And one can rea ies a Spi ‘and the French Romantics (Cambridge, M2