64

In his Entretiens, Félibien says that Annibale Carracci restored painting after a phase of decline by recollecting the most excellent “parts” in the great masters of the past. This obviously presupposes a continuity between the ancient models and Carracci in respect to such fundamental notions as are “drawing”, “colour”, “expression” and so on. If on the contrary Woelfflins “fundamental concepts”, by which he distinguished in a quite radical way the styles of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, have any sense at all, this continuity must anew be put into question. The detailed examination of the concept of “drawing” ( “disegno”, “dessein”) shows that it corresponds to quite different technical realities in Raffael and Le Brun for example and that this change, theorists like Félibien are unaware of, contributes to the production of an “academical” art theory essentially based on a misconstruction, dominating for instance the “dispute of colour”. This kind of misconstruction appears at the very moment of a new progress of art theory as a discipline in its own right, Félibien himself being the most important example of the corresponding new kind of a professional amateur theorist in France.