Diderot Album

"Album de la Pléiade" collection. 43rd.

"Denis Diderot has established himself as our main contemporary in the 18th century. He is fully a man of his time, between the Regency and the Revolution, through his enthusiasm for knowledge, his hopes for a better future, his libertinism and his love of life. He is our contemporary through his distrust of ready-made certainties and dogmatic systems, his sense of the world's diversity and complexity, and his play with words and genres. He is above all our contemporary through his familiar way of addressing us. He who conceived the Encyclopédie as a dialogue between articles and plates, who invented the salon genre as a rivalry between words and artistic forms, deserved an album that combines images and text, that unites discourse and colors. But how, one might ask, can such a dispersed curiosity, such a polymorphous work, be confined to the restricted space of an album? Diderot himself taught us that we often prefer to guess rather than see, to imagine rather than exhaust with our gaze. The following pages aim to be a simple invitation to the life and work of our friend Denis." Michel Delon.