ABSTRACT
Throughout much of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, art and science were widely viewed as complementary activities. "The arts have this in common with the sciences, wrote Le Bossu in 1675, "that like the latter they are founded on reason." 14 And in France during its classical seventeenth century and early in the eighteenth century, the faith in reason prompted by the scientific revolution did indeed become a major support for art and poetry as well as for science and philosophy, promoting in both a quest for universal laws and fostering among artists the notion of a normative aesthetic—the idea that all artists can and should achieve a universal ideal through imitation or idealization.
