Introduction La description et le descriptif entre l'écriture romanesque et l'histoire de l'art

The fact that description constitutes the principal verbal mode of approaching artworks justifies the comparison between the descriptive regimes of novelistic writing and the discourse of art history at the moment of the discipline’s institutionalisation. While literary description, like any form of description, mobilises knowledge, the autonomisation of art history simply renders manifest the documentary sources which writers used until then.