Blueprint: A Study of Diderot and the Encyclopedie Plates

170 Pages·1993·6.217 MB·English

by  Stephen Werner

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blueprint
A Study of Diderot and the Encyclopedic Plates
Stephen Werner
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SljM Birming^^^ONS, INC.
1993 labama
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Copyright 1993
Summa Publications, Inc.
ISBN 0-917786-96-3
Library of Congress Catalog Number 93-83303
Printed in the United States of America
All rights reserved.
Frontispiece plate by courtesy of UCLA Special Collections;
other plates (“Batteur d’or," “Machines de Theatre,” “Pav6 des Gcants,"
“Metier a faire des Bas,” “Bouchonnier,” and “Architecture,” pp. 123-28)
by courtesy of the Huntington Library, San Marino.
-
For my mother
in memory
r
a.
Contents
Acknowledgments ix
I. Obstetrix Animorum 1
II. The Order of the Plates 13
III. Tant urn de medio sumptis accedit honoris! 35
IV. A Picture Book of Paris 63
V. Blueprint 87
VI. From the Illustrated to the Pictorial 113
Plates 121
Notes 129
Bibliography 149
I
I
J^lcknovoled^ments
This book had its origins in a symposium on the Encyclopedie
planned at the Clark Library in 1986 with Robert Shackleton but which,
because of the untimely death of Professor Shackleton, never took place. I
am grateful, nevertheless, to Robert Vosper for having arranged this event.
My work on Diderot was further stimulated by Annie Becq, whose 1987
conference on L’ Encyclopedisme in Caen I had the good fortune to take part
in. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Helen Hye-Leen Chang for her
unfailingly generous labors as my Research Assistant and her personal
commitment to the project from its inception. William Moffett and Cathy
Cherbosque of the Huntington Library and David Zeidberg of UCLA
Special Collections kindly allowed me to make photographic reproductions
of the Encyclopedie plates used as illustrations for this book.
I
!
I
Obstetrix S^nimorum
“11 nous a fallu exercer avec
eux la fonction dont se glorifiait
Socrate, la fonction penible & deli­
cate de faire accoucher les esprits,
obstetrix animorum."
Diderot, Prospectus}
JTlmong the holdings of the Royal library in Madrid is a first edition
of Diderot’s Encyclopedic (1751-72). Each one of the seventeen folio
volumes of text contains the following warning on its inside cover written in
bold India ink: “All volumes prohibited, except those containing plates.”
The eleven volumes of plates, or planches as they were called, bear no such
restriction.2
The phrase draws attention to the suspicion in which French ideas
were held in a country which did not experience the ferment of the
philosophe movement and which only began to authorize partial translations
of the Encyclopedic until well into the twentieth century.3 Yet “Prohibido
todos los libros menos los de las laminas” can also be thought of as having
another meaning. It dramatizes the low regard in which the plates were held
not only on the Iberian Peninsula but in Diderot’s native France as well.
Encyclopedic engravings were considered to be decorations or anecdotal
supplements to the main body of philosophical text. As the “least contro­
versial” part of Diderot’s work they could be looked at, even studied at
length, with little consequence.
None of the major articles of the Encyclopedic, for example, such as
de Prade’s “Certitude,” Rousseau’s “Economic politique,” Diderot’s “Ency­
clopedic” or contributions on literary themes by Voltaire and Montesquieu,
had plates. These contributions were essayistic in nature. They were