DIDEROT Denis [Langres, 1713 - Paris, 1784], French writer. Autograph manuscript. [1765]; 4 pages in-4°. Important manuscript of the last part of his Essais sur la peinture to follow up on the 1765 salon. Fading and creases in the corners. "It is said of Saint Peter's in Rome that the proportions are so perfectly kept that the building loses at first glance all the effect of its size and extent, so that one can say, Magnus esse, sentiri parvus. Here is how we reason. To what did all these admirable proportions serve? To make small and common, a great thing? It seems that it would have been better to deviate from this, and that it would have been more skilful to produce the opposite effect, and to give grandeur to an ordinary and common thing. It is answered that in truth the building would have appeared greater at first sight, if one had sacrificed with art the proportions; but one asks which was preferable, or to produce a great and sudden admiration, or to create one which started weak, increased little by little and became finally great and permanent by a reflected and detailed examination. It is granted that, everything being equal, a thin and slender man will appear taller than a well-proportioned one; but it is still asked which of these two men will be admired more; and if the first one would not consent to be reduced to the most rigorous proportions of the antique, at the risk of losing something of his apparent grandeur. It is added that the narrow building that art has enlarged ends up being conceived as it is; instead of the great building that art and its proportions have reduced to an ordinary and common appearance, ends up being conceived great, the unfavorable prestige of the proportions disappearing by the necessary comparison of the spectator with some of the parts of the building"...