Editing Denis Diderot (section)

==Visual arts==
Diderot's most intimate friend was the [[philologist]] [[Friedrich Melchior, Baron von Grimm|Friedrich Melchior Grimm]].<ref name=AoV />{{rp|677}} They were brought together by their common friend at that time, [[Jean-Jacques Rousseau]].<ref name=AoV />{{rp|632}} In 1753, Grimm began writing a newsletter, the ''La Correspondance littéraire, philosophique et critique'', which he would send to various high personages in Europe.<ref name="Jacobs">{{cite web|url=http://text-patterns.thenewatlantis.com/2014/02/grimm-heirs.html|title=Grimm's Heirs|date=11 February 2014|work=The New Atlantis: A Journal of Technology and Society|first=Alan|last=Jacobs|access-date=16 August 2015|archive-date=16 April 2014|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140416182421/http://text-patterns.thenewatlantis.com/2014/02/grimm-heirs.html|url-status=dead}}</ref>

In 1759, Grimm asked Diderot to report on the biennial art exhibitions in the [[Louvre]] for the ''Correspondance''. Diderot reported on the [[Salon (Paris)|Salons]] between 1759 and 1771 and again in 1775 and 1781.<ref name=AoV />{{rp|666–687}} Diderot's reports would become "the most celebrated contributions to La Correspondance."<ref name="Jacobs"/>

According to [[Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve]], Diderot's reports initiated the French into a new way of laughing, and introduced people to the mystery and purport of colour by ideas. "Before Diderot", [[Germaine de Staël|Anne Louise Germaine de Staël]] wrote, "I had never seen anything in pictures except dull and lifeless colours; it was his imagination that gave them relief and life, and it is almost a new sense for which I am indebted to his genius".<ref name="EB1911"/>

Diderot had appended an ''Essai sur la peinture'' to his report on the 1765 Salon in which he expressed his views on artistic beauty. [[Johann Wolfgang von Goethe|Goethe]] described the ''Essai sur la peinture'' as "a magnificent work; it speaks even more usefully to the poet than to the painter, though for the painter too it is a torch of blazing illumination".<ref name=AoV />{{rp|668}}

[[Jean-Baptiste Greuze]] (1725–1805) was Diderot's favorite contemporary artist.<ref>[[Edmond de Goncourt|Edmond]] and [[Jules de Goncourt]], ''French Eighteenth-Century Painters''. Cornell Paperbacks, 1981, pp. 222–225. {{ISBN|0801492181}}</ref> Diderot appreciated Greuze's sentimentality, and more particularly Greuze's portrayals of his wife who had once been Diderot's mistress.<ref name=AoV />{{rp|668}}