Painting is but child's play, but music is an art (Musical criticism)

In the course of the 18(th) century, the polemical discussion connected with the appearance of Rameau's writings and the Encyclopedie; the development of instrumental music; the installation of the companies of opera bouffon; and even the arrival of Gluck in Paris, contributed to the unprecedented increase in popularity of musical criticism. At the very heart of these debates, several critics and theoreticians, such as J.-J. Rousseau, Denis Diderot, Andre Morellet, Francois-Jean de Chastellux, Adam Smith and Louis-Sebastien Mercier questioned the phenomenon of music beyond the simply musicological perspective. In their commentaries, the art of sound was, above all, appreciated and thought of as part of a system of Fine Arts. The specificity of its language can however not be doubted, and it even offers the argument, the vocabulary and the model, as a starting point for questioning the principal of imitation, appreciating the statue of the visual arts, and discussing the system and the hierarchy of the arts. The meditations on music of the Enlightenment, therefore, were not only aimed at a renovation of an art, but also engaged a wider esthetic by questioning the principles that are common to the visual arts : their capacity for illusion, the necessity of resemblance and exactitude. These were often placed in competition with another model, -immaterial and subjective - that of music.