In his “Idée de la perfection de la peinture”, published in 1662, the French art theorist Roland Fréart de Chambray condemned the growing interest connoisseurs of his time started to show for the artwork’s material and formal properties. He critically described the “beautez nouvelles, et à la mode du temps qui court (novel beauties, very fashionable today)” uncovered by his contemporaries, that even led them to invent a jargon including expressions such as “Franchise du pinceau, […] Touches hardies, […] Couleurs bien empastées et bien nourries, […] Detachement des Masses (Freedom of brush, […] bold Touches, […] Colors thickly impasted and well nourished)”. If Fréart de Chambray’s remarks interestingly testify to a new way of looking at paintings that seems to appear around the middle of the 17th century, they also consequently raise the question of the incidence of this freshly found approach on the art theory of the period. How was it translated into art-historical publications of the time, and which tools were deployed to make it intelligible?

This paper seeks to demonstrate that part of these strategies relied on the increasing role given to reproduction engravings, and particularly to their accuracy. Thorough illustrations became over that period a key instrument for the exchange of knowledge and offered a common ground for discussion and judgment, allowing among others to root the theory on the comparison and interpretation of the artwork’s formal characteristics.