Editor-in-Chief Lecture
Author
Professor, Department of Advanced Art Studies, Faculty of Visual Arts, College of Fine Arts, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran.
10.22059/jfava.2026.107370
Abstract
Charles Batteux (1713–1780), an important philosopher and aesthetician, played a significant role in shaping the concepts of modern art, especially during the Enlightenment. His influential book, published in 1746, The Fine Arts Reduced to a Single Principle, is considered the first work that formally used the term “fine arts.” This title later became central to discussions about the nature and concept of art, particularly after Immanuel Kant, and it has remained influential up to the present day.
The “single principle” proposed in Batteux’s book, which formed the foundation of his philosophy of art, was the imitation of nature. This idea has a long history in Western culture, stretching from ancient Greek thought to the Enlightenment. It refers to the well‑known concept of mimesis—what we might call imitation or representation.
However, the focus of this editorial at the beginning of the second issue of the thirty‑first volume of the journal Fine Arts (Visual Arts) is not Batteux’s interpretation of imitation itself. Rather, it aims to explain how a new classification of the arts emerged, especially as a result of a major intellectual transformation during the Renaissance and the appearance of a new concept called the “fine arts”—which is also the title of our journal.
Great figures such as Leon Battista Alberti, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Raphael laid the foundations of this new understanding of art. In their work, taste, genius, and creativity became central. Michelangelo once wrote in a letter to the Pope: “I paint with my brain, not with my hands.” This statement reflects a profound shift: art was elevated from a mere technical skill to a creative act, and from craftsmanship to true artistry.
This transformation happened alongside major philosophical changes in Western thought. With Descartes’ famous statement “I think, therefore I am,” and Kant’s critical philosophy, the focus of philosophy shifted from the object of knowledge to the knowing subject. This subject‑centered view helped create a new intellectual world that inevitably influenced art as well. Human beings became the center of this transformation. As a result, artworks were valued for their ability to stimulate human taste and to present beauty as the ultimate aim of aesthetic reflection.
One of the most important outcomes of this artistic revolution was the gradual decline of the Greek concept of techne—which had long defined art mainly as a form of skilled craft aimed at practical effectiveness—and the rise of the modern idea of art, centered on genius, creativity, and beauty. In Kant’s philosophy, taste, beauty, and the disinterested nature of aesthetic judgment became key elements in the formation of the modern concept of the fine arts.
Yet, as mentioned earlier, Batteux used the term “fine arts” before Kant. Kant wrote his Critique of Judgment in 1790, forty‑four years after Batteux’s book. According to Ernst Cassirer, Batteux’s work stimulated the intellectual spirit of its time more than many other works. Batteux essentially sought to establish a philosophy of taste based on the feelings of pleasure and pain. (I have discussed the comparison between Kant and Imam Muhammad al‑Ghazali on the faculty of taste in my book Imagination, Taste, and Beauty in the Thought of Imam Muhammad al‑Ghazali, published by the Iranian Academy of Arts.)
Batteux’s insight—shaped by a deep understanding of the transformations that art underwent after the Renaissance—led him to propose a new classification of the arts. Arnold Hauser explains these developments in detail in his important book The Social History of Art. Batteux argued that with the emergence of a new aesthetic taste, which considered beauty as the ultimate goal of art and even examined its distinction from the sublime (as David Hume did in his 1757 essay Of the Standard of Taste), the arts could be divided into three categories: useful arts, pleasant arts, and fine arts.
He defined art as a set of rules that guide the proper creat
ion of artistic works, based on general principles derived from particular observations. According to him, the arts fall into three groups:
First, the mechanical or useful arts, through which humans satisfy their practical needs. As Aristotle also noted in the Poetics, such arts serve as tools to complete or assist nature.
Second, the arts whose purpose is to create pleasure. These include music, poetry, painting, and sculpture, which Batteux regarded as the pure or complete fine arts.
Third, the arts whose purpose is usefulness, yet which are created with taste, beauty, and refinement. Examples include architecture, rhetoric, and oratory.
In this way, Batteux described music, poetry, painting, and sculpture as the fine arts—arts that do not directly use nature but imitate it in their own ways. Later, scholars added architecture to his list, and the term “fine arts” gradually came to refer to works created primarily to produce aesthetic pleasure and to place beauty at the center of artistic creation.
Was Kant influenced by this idea in the Critique of Judgment? This short editorial is not intended to compare Batteux’s views with Kant’s or to analyze his influence on Kant. Rather, it simply points out that in the development of Western philosophy of art—especially after the intellectual revolutions of the Renaissance—new perspectives emerged that viewed art not primarily in terms of skill, craft, or practical function, but in terms of creativity and aesthetic value.
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