With his Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et sur la peinture, Abbe Jean Baptiste DuBos—diplomat, man of letters, member of the Académie française—had an essential influence on the aesthetic thought of the Enlightenment.

Réflexions critiques, published for the first time in 1719 and re-edited several times, is one of the founding texts of the new "aesthetics" that came into its own in the eighteenth century. DuBos defends a sense-based theory of aesthetic feeling that is set in motion by poetry, painting, and music. In his Réflexions, DuBos's successors saw, on the one hand, an aesthetic that stressed the effects of artworks on spectators and that favored the highly emotional or moving dimension of the aesthetic response to art, and, on the other hand, an attempt to base aesthetic judgment on nonrational bases—what...