By entitling this book Penser l'art, we merely wish to remind readers that our respective knowledge in these two fields would be slim had the latter's two founding artisans, art historian and archaeologist Johan Joachim Winckelmann, and Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, the "Philosopher of Graces and Muses," not managed – by alternative means in the same era in the mid-century of the Enlightenment – to confer a consistent scientific and “modern” status upon a body of knowledge which until then had been sparse and poorly defined. Both of these men thus set up a system of autonomous thought in an attempt to analyze, understand and interpret the artistic creation and production of works that have aroused passions and emotions from their day to our own.