The
Balance of Painters of Roger de Piles
Some persons, curious to know the degree of merit of every painter of established reputation, have desired me to make a kind of balance, where I might set down, on one side, the painter’ s name … and, on the other side, their proper weight of merit; so as, by collecting all the parts, as they appear in each painter’ s works, one might be able to judge how much the whole weighs.
- Roger de Piles
Artists and art lovers alike can be baffled, if not incensed, over judges’ verdicts in art competitions. Without clearly defined criteria of evaluation, the results can appear as little more than whimsy on the part of jurors. Some traditionalists believe that only another highly skilled artist is competent to judge the quality of artworks, or that it’ s all a matter of intuition, which only a few people possess. Given the mystique of the whole process, it piqued my interest to come upon The Balance of Painters by Roger de Piles( 1635-1709), where he proposes a points system to measure the merits of paintings based on four ostensibly objective criteria that comprise the art of painting: COMPOSITION, DESIGN, COLOR, and EXPRESSION.
This Balance of Painters appears as a short addendum to his 493-page book, The Principles of Painting( 1708), an extensive treatise on the theory and practical principles of classical representational painting in the Renaissance tradition. To each of the four components of painting de Piles assigns a scale of twenty points, with 20 standing for( unattainable)“ sovereign perfection.” A table at the end of the book lists 57 of“ the best known painters,” ranking them for each of the above criteria. The artists on the list all come from the late 15th through the mid-17th centuries. Included are many famous names, along with quite a few who are scarcely remembered today.( Who’ s ever heard of Otto van Veen or Frans Pourbus
Page from the original the Younger?) The highest score out of a possible 80 is 65, attained 1708 table of The Balance of Painters with scores for: only by and Peter Paul Rubens. The lowest score of 23 belonged to one Gianfrancesco Penni, with zeros for both COMPOSITION
Poussin and EXPRESSION( nobody hears of him anymore, either). The average score on the list is 42. Only 11 artists scored 50 or more.
Primaticcio Raphael Rembrandt Rubens Francesco Salviati Eustache Le Sueur
David Teniers the Younger
Pietro Testa Tintoretto Titian Otto van Veen Van Dyck
The 20-point scale permits a considerable degree of nuance but how objective or useful is it? A 2012 paper entitled“ The Extraordinary Art Critic Roger de Piles,”* compares the numbers for the artists in the Balance with their art market values from 1740- 2010 by means of statistical analysis, leading to the conclusion that the de Piles numerical ratings have held up quite well in terms of sales records, compared with the ratings of other critics. But the Balance was not created with commerce in mind; it is a measure of intrinsic artistic quality. An interesting question arises: would we, by comparing those ratings of the four essential parts of painting with examples of some of the artists’ works, be able to come to the same conclusions?
Though his Lives of the Painters( 1699) contains“ Reflections on the Works of the Most Celebrated Painters,” the comments are
42 ART CHOWDER MAGAZINE