0086 Persuasion: Nicolas Pineau's Designs on the Social

Abstract

This essay offers a Latourian account of the wood sculptor Nicolas Pineau's design process via a reading of Jean-François Bastide's novella La petite maison. It argues that the conventional form assumed by his drawings or 'inscriptions' – the indications of scale, the delineation of options, the signatures and marginal notes – can be read as traces of seduction that helped 'translate' potential patrons to a taste for Rococo. The essay further suggests that the activation of the taste at the point of commission was kept alive in the designs executed by the bi-modal asymmetry that is characteristic of the goût pittoresque because its exercise was considered a mark of refinement.