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| Jean Lepautre Title Page Livre d'Académie pour apprendre à bien dessigner ca. 1633-81 etching British Museum |
"No epoch, this is well known, has had so unswerving a faith in clear, mathematically provable rules and in arguments throughout accessible to reason as the golden age of Absolutism, the epoch of Corneille, of Spinoza, of Boileau. One passage at least must be quoted to demonstrate the expression of this faith in the theory of art. Fréart de Chambray in his Idée de la Perfection de la Peinture (1662) calls Sçavants, i.e. real art experts, only those who "examinent et jugent les choses à la manière des Géomètres." In order to facilitate such exact judgments on a work of art, the usual procedure in the academic lectures as well as the contemporary books was to analyse a picture – it was usually one from the royal collections – according to various categories to be discussed one after another. . . . Fréart's categories are invention, proportion, colour, expression and composition. Lebrun analysed Poussin's pictures in his academic lectures according to very similar categories. The final stage of this system is reach by Testelin, the secretary of the academy, in his Tables des Préceptes published in 1680, in which he briefly sums up all the rules laid down by the academy, and by Roger de Piles in his Balance des Peintres of 1708, the notorious book, in which marks from 0 - 80 are given to all famous painters according to the value of their composition, expression, design (drawing), and colour."
– Nikolaus Pevsner, from Academies of Art, Past and Present (Cambridge University Press, 1940)
In a footnote Pevsner supplies a ranked list of point-scores, as awarded by Roger de Piles, which reads as follows –
65 Raphael
Rubens
58 Carracci
56 Domenichino
Lebrun
53 Poussin
51 Titian
50 Rembrandt
49 G. Romano
Tintoretto
Le Sueur
Leonardo
48 Cortona
Holbein
45 Sarto
Teniers
43 Correggio
42 Guercino
41 Palma Giovane
39 Giorgione
37 Michelangelo
Parmigianino
36 Dürer
31 Bassano
30 Perugino
27 Palma Vecchio
24 Giovanni Bellini