Diderot believed that there is a fundamental difference between the classical notion of beauty and the feeling brought on by something that is so morally or physically immense that it defies our ability to rationally process what we are experiencing. Such overwhelming moments of aesthetic shock, in his opinion, were a perfect antidote to the boredom of eighteenth-century rococo pastorals. A great painting, as he put it in his Notes on Painting, sometimes required a subject that was “savage, crude, striking, enormous.”
